Monumental Battles

For those unfamiliar with “Custer’s Last Stand”, the simple story is that in 1876 a troop of 7th US Cavalry, led by George Armstrong Custer, were wiped out by the “Indians.”  The truth is of course a little more complex, and more ambiguous, than the popular narrative suggests  (see Wikipedia for a comprehensive overview; Smithsonian Magazine for the Indigenous account; Eyewitness to History for a US Cavalry soldier’s account).   

The battle took place in the late afternoon of June 25, 1876, and it lasted less than an hour (America’s Story). The battle was prompted by the US Government wanting the Sioux (Lakota) to return to their reservations.  However, the Sioux had left the reservation as a result of treaty violations with settlers invading their territory.  “A treaty had given the Sioux exclusive rights to the Black Hills, but when gold was later discovered in the area, white miners flocked to the territory. Despite the treaty, the US government ordered the Indians away from the invading settlers and back to their reservations” (America’s Story).

To add another layer to the story, the Sioux were themselves invaders, having moved into the territories of the Crow and Arikaras.  As a result these latter two peoples had requested the US Government to return the Sioux to their territory and allied with them in that effort. 

The Myth

It was the 1941 American film They Died with Their Boots On that framed my perception of the story of a gallant, swash-buckling hero, General George Armstrong Custer (played by Errol Flynn), the last man killed in battle.  While it is usual that such films — and myths — focus on victories, this one is about defeat.  “’Custer’s Last Stand’ remains one of the most iconic events in American history and culture. Had Custer prevailed at the Little Bighorn, the victory would have been momentarily notable, worthy of a few newspaper headlines. In defeat, however tactically inconsequential in in the larger Plains Indians Wars, he became mythic” (Bare).

The myth was embellished by contemporaneous reports detailing the battlefield and the finding of the body of Custer himself: “Not until two days later did the surviving members of the regiment find them: more than two hundred dead bodies, many of them hacked to pieces and bristling with arrows, putrefying in the summer sun. Amid this ‘scene of sickening, ghastly horror,’ they found Custer lying faceup across two of his men with, Private Thomas Coleman wrote, ‘a smile on his face’” (Wood).

The story of Custer is just one of many that form a broader mosaic of the American Frontier mythology and the taming of the West.   “Custer is about the ‘myth of the frontier’, one that still informs US ‘political rhetoric of pioneering progress, world mission, and eternal strife with the [perceived] forces of darkness and barbarism’“ (Wood). So what we see is the elevation of the narrative from a struggle between individuals to one between cultures. In this case, a societal struggle that a people faced, overcame and now forms a part of their history and identity.

What is the function of a monument?

Soon after the battle, on July 9, 1876,  the New York Herald called for “a national monument be erected to commemorate the heroism of General Custer and his kinsmen who fell with him” (Seefeldt) and again on December 20, 1877: “There should be reared an obelisk appropriate to the fame of those who ought ever to sleep under the sod which they consecrated with the libation of their blood”(Seefeldt). However, it wasn’t until April 1879 that orders to erect a monument were issued, but as there were insufficient stones, cordwood was used instead (Seefeldt).

The function of the monument, as McGeough puts it “… can be understood as an attempt to stabilize memory, to issue a particular and authoritative narrative of the history of a space, and to explain what this history means” (McGeough, 233). But not only does a monument stabilize, it serves to make the memory, and the myth, “seem timeless and therefore inevitable” (Silberman, 9).  This is important to not only myth creation but for its acceptance.  

Another function, often only reached after the distance of many years from the event, is for reflection and atonement.  “Around the world, people instinctively turn to places of memory to come to terms with the past and chart a course for the future. From makeshift roadside memorials to official commemorations, millions of people around the world gather at places of memory looking for healing, reconciliation and insight on how to move forward” (Zimmerman, 144). We see this in many modern monuments, such as those that recall the Holocaust, slavery, among others, that hope, by making visible the darker side of events, that we can prevent them from happening again.  “It’s here, through the process of preserving the past, that evidence of human rights violations is maintained and made public, issues this evidence raises are debated and tactics for preventing it from happening again are developed” (Zimmerman, 144)” or, more cynically, as Zimmerman goes on to ask “are they built to salve the conscience of the society that committed them” (Zimmerman, 156)? 

Why do monuments run into trouble?

In recent years several monuments, often of historical figures, have run into trouble.  Frequently, the problem lies in the effort to memorialize a one-sided or incomplete narrative leaving any number of questions answered.  In the case of Custer, the narrative was defined by the white settlers, not the indigenous people.  “In the aftermath of the battle, the US Army appropriated both the story and the battlefield” (Busatta, 95). So while the event was certainly a military defeat, that facts were spun to develop a myth of bravery, liberation and the fight against lawlessness, or as Busatta observes “historical truth is irrelevant.”  The original myth stated there were no survivors, when in fact more than 1,500 indigenous people did survive (McGeough, 231).  This omission points to why this particular monument is contested: the indigenous point of view was unrepresented. The lack of representation suggests that the monument-makers have made decisions around “who is worthy of mourning, honor [SIC], and remembrance” (McGeough, 231).  This statement of they don’t matter is the issue.  

So when a monument does not reflect all stakeholder points of view, those ignored contest: “when monuments claim that only some lives count as human and, hence, deserve to be mourned, sacred ground becomes a site of contestation” (McGeough, 251).  As we have seen in North America, over time, the ethnic makeup has diversified, along with social norms and values, resulting in shifts in political power, and attitudes, which in turn has enabled an openness to reassessing certain contentious monuments and their narratives.  “The monuments themselves endure, but their arguments often are controversial and judgments of worthiness have proven far less permanent” (McGeough, 231).

How does one deal with contestation?

If “… the objective of refutation is to answer the previous memorial’s restrictive claim concerning what constitutes a grievable life by remem­bering and memorializing previously excluded human lives (McGeough, 236)” then those gaps need to be filled.  Materially, the monument to Custer has evolved by both a name change (now Little Big Horn National Monument) and the addition of new elements that include the missing viewpoints of the other stakeholders.  “The concept of presence also has been noted as central to the study of visual rhetorics… generally, the process of ‘selecting certain elements and presenting them to the audience’ implies that they are pertinent and important and, thus, imbues them with presence … by countering an absence, dominant memories are refuted and, thus, transformed” (McGeough, 243). What is implicit in this statement, and is key, is that nothing of the original monument is taken away, but rather things are added. Additions may include interpretive plaques and ‘counter-monuments’ that provide an alternative point of view  (McGeough, 231).

Underlying these material changes to the site is a more essential intellectual message: dignity of all the stakeholders.  By complementing a monument in some way, by some means, the previously unrepresented stakeholder’s participation or contribution is reflected; that group is elevated from obscurity.  That event and the associated narrative is brought into the mythology of the people and comes to be included in their identity. Yet, by retaining the original monument, we recognise that there is some element of the myth, albeit repositioned and contextualized by the additions, that bears some “value.”  While one might argue whether the defeat of Custer represented an act of heroism, or stupidity, it was a place where a battle took place and many people died.  And that is something to recall.  However, when a monument is removed,  a reference to the memory represented is cut, and so a chard in the mosaic that stakeholder’s identity is removed, which in turn often results in expressions of resistance.  

History of site (Seefeldt)

• June 28, 1876: The surviving members of the 7th Cavalry located, counted, and hastily covered the bodies of the 261 fallen soldiers
• July 9, 1876:  the New York Herald recommended “that a national monument be erected to commemorate the heroism of General Custer and his kinsmen who fell with him”
• May, 1877: The War Department first authorized the recovery of the officers who perished in the fight
• December 20, 1877:  The New York Herald announced: “There should be reared an obelisk appropriate to the fame of those who ought ever to sleep under the sod which they consecrated with the libation of their blood.”
• April, 1878:  Proposal to set the battlefield apart as a national cemetery
• October 1878: Recommendation that a proper monument be erected at the Little Bighorn, “a granite monument of sufficient size, to receive in legible characters the names of all the officers and men who fell in that fight” 
• October 1878: Orders “to collect all of the exposed bones and reinter them under a pyramid of stones”
• April, 1879: Orders to erect a monument, but as there were insufficient  stones, cordwood used instead
• January, 1879: The Secretary of War ordered the establishment of a national cemetery of the fourth class, which was conferred on August 1 
• December 7, 1886: President Grover Cleveland proclaims the national cemetery at Custer’s battlefield … officially named the Custer Battle Field National Cemetery
• February, 1879: The federal government contract for the creation of Meigs’s monument was awarded to Alexander McDonald of the Auburn Marble and Granite Works located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The 11 and a half foot high, six foot wide truncated stone obelisk weighed an estimated 38,500 pounds. Carved into the obelisk’s faces are the names of the 261 dead, including officers, enlisted soldiers, Indian scouts, and attached civilians … the monument was set in place July 29, 1881
• 1890:  246 small marble markers replace markers of where soldiers died 
• 1926: The Secretary of the Interior was authorized by Congress to acquire the 160‐acre Reno‐Benteen defense site. Two years later, a second act was passed that included language requiring that the “monument be maintained by the Quartermaster Corps, United States Army, in conjunction with the Custer Battle Field Monument.”
• July 1, 1940: The National Park Service  assumes control of the Custer Battlefield National Cemetery
• March, 1946: The name was officially changed to the Custer Battlefield National Monument
• 1950: The National Park Service budgets $96,000 for a museum at the Custer battlefield
• 1971: Discussions begin to change the name from the Custer Battlefield to the Little Big Horn National Monument
• August, 1983: Grassfires raged up Deep Ravine and across the battlefield removing most of the tall grasses
• 1990: A bill introduced to Congress calling for an Indian memorial at Little Bighorn
• October 1991: The bill passed Congress and was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush
• 1994: A design competition was announced that resulted in 554 submissions addressing the memorial theme of “Peace Through Unity.”
• Memorial Day 1999: The National Park Service starts erecting red granite markers on the exact locations where Indian warriors are thought to have been killed in the battle. 
• June 25, 2003: The Indian Memorial was officially dedicated  

References

America’s Story. Custer’s Last Stand. Accessed August 16 2020 http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/recon/jb_recon_custer_1.html

Bare, Steve Inventing Custer Review (https://www.academia.edu/33935990/Inventing_Custer_Review)

Busatta, Sandra (2007). Everybody is the Good One! Living History and Monuments at the Little Big Horn Battlefield Site. Antrocom. (https://www.academia.edu/524772/Everybody_is_the_Good_One_Living_History_and_Monuments_at_the_Little_Big_Horn_Battlefield_Site)

EyeWitness to History (1997) “The Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1876” Last Accessed August 17, 2020  www.eyewitnesstohistory.com

McGeough, Ryan (2015) Oppositional Memory Practices: U.S. Memorial Spaces as Arguments Over Public Memory. ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY 51 (Spring 2015): 231-254.  (https://www.academia.edu/19746751/Oppositional_Memory_Practices_U_S_Memorial_Spaces_as_Arguments_Over_Public_Memory)

Seefeldt, Douglas (2015) A National Monument. “A Companion to Custer and the Little Big Horn Campaign”. Wiley-Blackwell (https://www.academia.edu/15865723/A_National_Monument)

Silberman, Neil Asher (1999) From Masada to the Little Bighorn: The role of archaeological site interpretation in the shaping of national myths, Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites, 3:1-2, 9-15, (https://www.academia.edu/25755227/From_Masada_to_the_Little_Bighorn_The_role_of_archaeological_site_interpretation_in_the_shaping_of_national_myths)

Smithsonian Magazine “How the Battle of Little Bighorn Was Won” Last Accessed August 17, 2020 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-battle-of-little-bighorn-was-won-63880188/

Wikipedia “Battle of the Little Bighorn” Last Accessed August 17, 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn

Wood, Daniel Davis (2012) Book Review: The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick. Limina 18 June 2012 (https://www.academia.edu/1264278/Book_Review_The_Last_Stand_Custer_Sitting_Bull_and_the_Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn_by_Nathaniel_Philbrick) 

Zimmerman, Larry (2007) “Plains Indians and Resistance to Public Heritage Commemoration of Their Pasts” Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (https://www.academia.edu/436019/Plains_Indians_and_Resistance_to_Public_Heritage_Commemoration_of_Their_Pasts)