Today is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Feels like 100 at most.

Sesquicentennial much brah?

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I've been there.

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I went as a youngster on a family trip. We stayed at a nearby hotel that was obviously gifted to the local Indian tribe by the government. It was new enough that it still looked sort of nice but a lot of stuff like ice machines didn’t work.

The battlefield was pretty incredible.

The things they did to the cavalry soldiers were brutal.

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The things they did to the cavalry soldiers were brutal.

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That was just payback for all the women and children soldiers killed in many of the raids they did on Indian villages.

Most of the guys were immigrants but they did not sneak in.

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I've been there. Spooky place. I'm not much on woo woo stuff, but I felt something there.

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Same here, there's definitely something eerie about that place. I remember having sections of the battlefield essentially to myself when I was there, and just standing still with no sound other than the wind whispering through the tall grass. Do you know how people describe how their vision can narrow? I felt that, but with my hearing. The ONLY thing I could hear standing on the ridgeline was that grass just swishing all around me. It makes you wonder, was this same sound that Custer and his men heard as the life drained out of them on top of that hill? I honestly don't know how to describe it because I've never experienced anything like it, not even at Gettysburg. There was a palpable energy to the place. It felt...restless. Just thinking about it now makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

All those markers where a soldier died is sobering. It must have been horrifying for those men.

A little nugget of information I read in the biography of U.S. Grant by Ron Chernow. For those that like sourcing references, this can be found on the bottom of p.834, of the hardcover version of the book:

"As the nation got ready to solemnize its centennial on July 4, reports filtered back that Custer and 263 of his men in the Seventh Calvary had been annihilated by the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors along the Little Big Horn River in southern Montana, their mutilated bodies strewn among the hills. Custer was found naked, a bullet hole in his head, a gash in his thigh, an arrow piercing his penis."