Usually the winners write the history. But at the battle of the Little Bighorn, the losers wrote it; the losers, that is, the whites. At Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, corrections are made. For one thing, it’s no longer called Custer Battlefield National Monument. In addition to identifying where the cavalry soldiers fell, some of the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who fell are identified. The park service provided a website with audio for the various stops in the park. Without this interpretation it would be difficult to understand what happened here.
Broken treaties and the failure of the US government to stop encroachment on reservations by whites looking for gold triggered this battle and those preceding and following. Custer died, but the fault was not the Indians’. As is often the case, I bought a book in the gift shop to understand more. It’s in my pile of books to be read. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has an extensive article.
I took some pictures, but they are not meaningful. The battlefield should be a somber reminder of the results of broken promises.