The one place on the History of the American West that I took photographs that look like tombstones, they technically weren’t…at least they aren’t supposed to be anymore. We went Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, sometimes referred to as Custer’s Last Stand, where Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors overwhelmed and killed General George Armstrong Custer and an estimated 267 soldiers in the 7th Cavalry. All the soldiers that were directly under Custer’s command during the battle were killed on June 25, 1876. The Native Americans won this particular battle, but they, in a manner of speaking, lost the war, so there was a distinct slant towards the white USA-ian view of the battle at the time we visited. It was something the National Park Service was working on, as evidenced by the name of the park (changed from Custer Battlefield National Park to its current name in 1991), but the monuments on site were largely to the 7th Cavalry. Reading about the National Park, there is now an Indian Memorial and markers have been placed for some of the fallen Native American warriors.
The markers make the park look very much like a cemetery, albeit a haphazard one. And what interesting little monuments they were – after the battle, the soldiers were first hastily buried in relatively shallow graves with identifying information and relative location of body recorded. (It was, after all, June.) A year later, a number of the officers’ bodies were shipped home for burial. Over the next few years, there were numerous attempts to bury the enlisted men in permanent graves, made more difficult by the conditions on the battlefield. In 1881, the 7th Cavalry monument was created on Custer Hill, where all the soldiers are supposed to be buried.
Marble markers placed in 1890 show where bodies were found. Of course, archaeological work has indicated that not all bones were successfully reinterred, so for some soldiers, that marker indicating where they fell may still indicate where some part of them lies.
<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/elizabethe/2273493432/” title=”Little Bighorn Monument by nuclearmse, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2311/2273493432_fdba97e26c.jpg” width=”500″ height=”349″ alt=”Little Bighorn Monument” /></a>
A Grave Concern 
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