Big Hole and Little Bighorn battlefields: Thoughts on Cultural Tolerance and Understanding

I recently visited the sites of two well-known massacres and believe their stories offer a path for better cultural understanding and hope for the future.

People respond to unfamiliar cultures with a range of emotions, from curiosity to condemnation. It was curiosity (and a couple more stamps in our National Park Service passports) that recently took me and my girlfriend Craig to Big Hole National Battlefield and Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana. It was condemnation by the U.S. government of both the Nez Perce and Sioux ways of life that precipitated the tragedies remembered at these two sites. 

In the 19^th Century, the U.S. Government clearly didn’t understand or appreciate the people who first inhabited North America.  Official government policy was to remove people from their ancestral lands and move them onto reservations where all remnants of their former ways of life were condemned and stamped out.  The goal was to make Native Americans into European Americans and give their ancestral lands to white settlers.

These two battlefields memorialize attacks by the U.S. Army on people who rejected this policy and simply wanted to be left alone to live in their ancestors’ homelands and raise their families in peace.   Thankfully, at both sites, the Park Service engagingly tells the stories of the Nez Perce and the Sioux in the hopes that we can learn from history’s mistakes. 

The Nez Perce of the Pacific Northwest were one of the largest tribes in North America, living in what is now northeastern Oregon, southeastern Washington and central Idaho. A treaty with the U.S. government in 1863 greatly reduced the Nez Perce lands to only 10 percent of their ancestral area. A faction of the Nez Perce Nation chose not to agree to such a drastic reduction and refused to sign the treaty. Other Nez Perce did sign and moved to a reservation in what is now central Idaho. 

Tensions with those Nez Perce who refused to sign came to a head in May 1877 when U.S. Army General Oliver Otis Howard issued an ultimatum ordering them onto the reservation within 30 days.  Instead of complying with this order, Chief Joseph and his small band of about 750 Nez Perce ran for Canada. This began a four-month moving conflict with the U.S. Army that covered over 1,000 miles across Idaho and Montana, including the Big Hole Battlefield. 

The Nez Perce were excellent horsemen and knew from previous buffalo hunting excursions to eastern Montana that the lush grasslands at the headwaters of the Big Hole River were perfect for grazing, and the neighboring lodgepole pine forest provided poles for tipis. It was a good place to camp.

Early in the morning of August 9, 1877, army soldiers launched an attack on the men, women and children, including elders, camped at Big Hole. Fighting was intense, with heavy casualties on both sides. By August 11, the Nez Perce had fought the soldiers to a standstill, and with a few snipers keeping the soldiers pinned down, the remaining Nez Perce were able to escape. They were ultimately captured in early October near the Canadian border.

Craig and I were driving from Missoula to visit friends in Dillon, and we spent half a day at Big Hole Battlefield along the way. That was enough time to experience the Battlefield Visitor Center, view its 26-minute movie telling the Nez Perce story, and do several hikes on the battlefield itself to see first-hand where the conflict occurred. The park guide to the battlefield trails is loaded with information.  We were pulling our Alto travel trailer and there was ample RV parking at both the visitor center and the trailhead.

We started with the Nez Perce camp trail, a 1.2-mile round trip hike to the Nez Perce encampment, commemorated with weathered tipi poles raised in the location of the 89 tipis that were attacked. Some are labeled with the names of the inhabitants. If you only have time for one hike, this is the one. The skeleton-like poles rising from the grass prairie took our breath away. This is where between 60 and 90 Nez Perce lost their lives. 

Our second hike was the one-mile round-trip Siege Area Trail, which takes you behind the Army skirmish line to see how the soldiers lined up for the attack. This trail also takes you to the site where Nez Perce snipers kept the retreating soldiers pinned down while the rest of the tribe members made their getaway. You can still see the shallow pits soldiers dug into the ground that provided minimal cover during this part of the battle. I wondered how anyone made it out alive. A side excursion goes up a hill where the Army placed a 12-pound howitzer (that the Nez Perce later captured), offering a great overview of the entire battlefield.

The entire Nez Perce story is well-documented in multiple sites across five western states as the Nez Perce National Historical Park, which includes four other battlefields and a visitor center near Spalding, Idaho. There are great driving tour maps available at the park.

We moved on from Dillon, driving through Bozeman, Yellowstone and Billings before arriving for several nights at the Grandview Campground in Hardin, Montana, the closest campground to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.  Our little Alto trailer was dwarfed by the bigger rigs we were camping with, but the lack of available campgrounds in this part of Montana put us all in the same place.

Most of us learned in school about General George Armstrong Custer and his ego-driven battle that led to the massacre of 260 soldiers of his 7^th Calvary. This 1876 conflict started with a treaty signed with the Lakota, Cheyenne and other Great Plains tribes establishing a large reservation in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Unfortunately for those living there, gold was soon discovered on these same lands, and thousands of gold seekers and settlers swarmed into the area. 

The U.S. government initially tried to limit this invasion of Indian land, but was unsuccessful. That left Lakota and Cheyenne warriors to defend their land, including attacks on settlers outside the reservation. When these warriors did not respond to an ultimatum issued in January 1876 to return to the reservation, the Army intervened. Many warriors and families were camping in remote settlements and either did not get the ultimatum at all or were unable to travel in the dead of winter.  When the deadline for returning to the reservation passed, the Army turned up the heat which culminated at Little Bighorn.

By June of 1876, over 7,000 Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho, including almost 2,000 warriors, were camped along the Little Bighorn River. Custer led about 600 men of the 7^th Cavalry to the Little Bighorn with plans to attack. Either greatly underestimating the Lakota and Cheyenne or so full of self-confidence that the odds didn’t matter to him, Custer divided his command into three units and prepared to attack. And the rest, as they say, is history.

After viewing the film in the visitor center and getting the lay of the land, we took the one-hour Crow-led bus tour of the battlefield (the Crow fought with Custer), which helped frame the battle’s ebb and flow. We subsequently took the auto tour on our own and spent more time walking the trails and envisioning the flow of the battle.

The Park Service created two battlefield trails to give a first-hand understanding of Little Bighorn. There are trail guides for both the Deep Ravine Trail near where Custer fell and the Reno-Benteen Entrenchment Trail where some of the Army’s survivors fought. Both trails are accessible from the auto tour, which pretty much covers the entirety of the battlefield.

According to park staff, Little Bighorn is by far the best-interpreted battlefield in America. There are individual stone markers showing where each soldier and many warriors died. This graphic placement illustrates the flow of the battle, which was really a series of skirmishes that ultimately led to Custer and 260 of his soldiers dying. 

You can easily spend most of the day at Little Bighorn. Ranger-led talks are available, and we listened to one while eating our lunch at a nice covered patio next to the visitor center. We ended our visit at the memorial to Sioux and Cheyenne warriors whose actions at Little Bighorn are summed up by Wooden Leg, a Cheyenne warrior: “We had killed soldiers that had come to kill us.” 

Unfortunately, cultural intolerance and misunderstandings continue to all over the world today. And while many of the differences in our identities and beliefs are enormous, visiting historic sites and battlefields encourages conversation and reflection on cultural tolerance and acceptance, something I believe we sorely need today.