As we crossed North Dakota, we found ourselves following along the path of a previous, more famous (or infamous) traveler: George Custer. From Fargo we headed west to our next stop, near Bismarck, the capitol of North Dakota and home to the most boring capitol building in the US. Near Bismarck is Fort Abraham Lincoln, which was home to the 7th Cavalry Regiment and is now a state park. Before becoming a state park, the fort had been abandoned by the army, and local people had come through and dismantled most of the buildings for their materials. Custer's home has been painstakingly recreated, using drawings and photographs from the period. The most famous picture of him hangs on the wall.

This was the home from which Custer left (along with two brothers, a nephew, and a brother-in-law), in pursuit of the Lakota, Arapahoe, and Northern Cheyenne tribes, who had refused to go to their designated reservations. (They were on a reservation at the time, but it was not the reservation that the US government wanted them on.) There were many reasons for this, but a large factor had to be the violations of their existing treaty by the US government, which had allowed prospectors to overrun the Black Hills territory granted to the Lakota tribe. Gold had been found in the Black Hills, and after George Custer's earlier mission there confirmed it, the army did not stop prospectors from entering these lands.

Custer, with around 700 men of the 7th Regiment, pursued these renegade tribes and found their camp in the area of the Little Bighorn River, in what is now Montana. It's said that there are more books written about the Battle of the Little Bighorn than any other battle, so I won't try to retell the story of the battle. There's a reasonable summary on Wikipedia that you can read here. Custer thought he was going up against a much smaller force than he was. After dividing his force into 3 units, he really had only a few hundred men who now found themselves trying to fight a few thousand Native warriors. Things did not go well, and all 268 cavalry members were killed.

The story of the Little Bighorn battle, now memorialized at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, has long been told from the perspective of the white man. The victors get to write the history books, after all. The monument was originally named Custer Battlefield National Monument, and for years the only markers on the hillsides were the white stone markers indicating where  US Army soldiers had died. In recent years, there has been an acknowledgement that Native people fought and died here also, and there are now some red markers where they died, and the addition of an Indian Memorial. 

In addition to the white stone markers for each soldier killed, there are markers for the horses, many of which were killed by the soldiers so they could hide behind them. The horses were memorialized well before the non-white humans were.

Newer markers on the site indicate where Native warriors died. There are no accurate counts or estimates of Native American deaths, and as they removed their dead from the battlefield immediately, the locations for most are not known. But there are now a few.

A stone marker at the top of last stand hill contains the names of all the fallen Cavalry soldiers.