Like other kids growing up during the 1960s, my first glimpse of Last Stand Hill was through the rear-facing window of a family station wagon.
As with other historic landmarks they’d pull up alongside, my nurturing parents provided from the front seat a crash course on the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or as I enthusiastically called it, “Custer’s Last Stand.”
I thought I knew all about “the good guys and the Indians”—it was the peak of TV Westerns, after all, when Native Americans were depicted as savages attacking homesteaders—and in turn the bloody demise of American cavalry commander George Armstrong Custer, 210 of his men, his two younger brothers, nephew, and brother-in-law.
But now, as we approach the 150th anniversary of Montana’s monumental battle of June 25-26, 1876, it’s time to view Little Bighorn from a different angle.
“From a Native American perspective—just to be heard I think is a big thing [in providing] the true and accurate portrayal of the real last stand,” Crow Tribe historian and author Alden Big Man tells me in an interview.
“Whose ‘last stand’ was it is always a good thing to throw out there, because once this battle was done, the last stand wasn’t Custer’s. It was the American Indian’s.”
And even more symbolically, for Big Man and fellow descendants of George Custer’s controversial Crow scouts—who spied and even died alongside the famous Civil War general in his infamous campaign against Crazy Horse and Chief Gall—it was the last stand for the Crow Nation.
“It’s complex,” explains Big Man, who has taught Native American Studies at Little Big Horn College in Montana and the University of New Mexico, where he received his master’s degree and doctorate.
“Because you had an invasionary force of Lakota moving within Crow lands, killing and taking our game, our food, our horses. And we didn’t have the numbers to stop them. Being long-term enemies of the Lakota, it was natural to side with the [United States] Army, which was going to force [the invaders] back to South Dakota.
“People often fail to see there is no one Indian tribe, no one tribal organization. We’re different,” he continues. “We had to defend our land.”
Crow elders, at the same time, realized “we must adapt to this new world that was coming. We didn’t come to America, America came to us. We already had the elements of pioneers, settlers—whatever you want to call them, they were already out here. There was already talk of the railroad, there was already talk of cities popping up.”
And whereas Lakota “flat out refused that lifestyle,” says Big Man, the Crow agreed “to embrace what’s coming and try to flourish amongst it.”
So instead of just “sitting here having to defend their land constantly from the attacks,” the Crow people sought to preserve their culture, including by providing scouts to Custer and his regiment in their campaign against the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes.
“Who would you trust [most] I guess was the question at that time,” Big Man reflects: the white man, who pledged to preserve the Crow civilization, albeit on a reservation, or your longtime enemy?
“What needs to be put out there is the fact that [with] these scouts … their intent was to preserve what Crow culture remained. And they succeeded. That’s why we still have a Crow Nation here. We’re here today because of them.”
In advance of the battle’s sesquicentennial in June, Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency will host the April 9-11 symposium “The Crows and the Little Big Horn: 150 Years Later”—https://crowlittlebighorn150.com/—to honor Crow perspectives, descendant voices, and historical context of the ill-fated battle and its continuing impact.
It’s significant, organizers say, because it will commemorate the Crow scouts’ participation in an important moment in American history, explain reasons for their actions, and dispel stereotypes related to Crow motivations before and during the battle.
Prominently among speakers will be Tim Bernardis, the college’s founding library director and adjunct faculty instructor in Crow Studies and History.
I ask Bernardis, an adopted family member of the Crow Tribe, why all the lasting mystique surrounding Little Bighorn today?
“I think there’s a number of reasons,” he replies. “It was probably the last, at least in the Northern Plains, the last great battle between the whites and the natives.
“But it’s kind of taken on a life of its own, with the complete annihilation of the five companies under Custer’s command. And they were completely wiped out,” he stresses. “And you have the myth and legend. There are no accounts of the battle by the white man of what happened.”
For the Crows, he adds, the battle “became a symbol that they were race traitors, because they guided the white man to the village of their enemies. Which really vilified the Crows.”
Six well-known Crow scouts who rode alongside Custer’s column are featured for the symposium: Curley, White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, Harry Moccasin, Half Yellow Face, and White Swan.
In addition, Mitch Bouyer, born to a French father and Sioux mother but who later married a Crow, was hired as a guide and translator for the Army. He was detailed with the six scouts who accompanied the cavalry.
It was Bouyer who relayed Custer’s last-minute message that the Crow scouts had successfully completed their mission and ordered them to withdraw from the ensuing battle. That said, the guide (and several others) remained and were killed.
Incredibly, it wasn’t until the 1980s that Bouyer’s remains were identified and recovered from the battlefield.
Aaron Brien, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Crow Tribe, is a descendant of Half Yellow Face and Goes Ahead, the latter among the scouts who on the fateful morning of June 25 pointed Custer to the Lakota-Cheyenne village in the Little Bighorn River valley.
Goes Ahead later revealed that he and others witnessed Custer get shot in the river.
“I just grew up hearing his name, [for] all of my life,” Brien says of Goes Ahead, including from his grandmother, who is now 91.
“When people speak about the past,” he tells me, “it gives a little sense those people are still around. It doesn’t feel so distant.”
Riley Singer, meanwhile, is descended from Hairy Moccasin, who stayed with the column until released by Custer.
Moccasin, who lived out his life as a farmer, was actually awarded a military pension “eleven months before he crossed over to the other side camp.”
Singer tells me he’s heard numerous stories passed through the generations about the Crow scouts, especially “from my grandpa and his brother.”
“I think it’s good,” he says, and helps to define tribal members and scouts in particular “as individuals.”
As for Big Man, you might say he took on the life of a Crow scout from a very young age.
“We used to play in the battlefield you know, before it was all protected like it is now,” he says.
“We pretended to be scouts. We pretended to be all the different little factions that were out there. At one point or another we played every one of them—we’d all kind of fight over who we were going to be.”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.