inSPIREd Sunday

Sally and Beth host inSPIREd Sunday!  

September 2017 - Hardin MT


Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, known to the Lakota and other Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass and commonly referred to among white Americans as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The battle, which resulted in the defeat of US forces, was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876. It took place on June 25–26, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River in the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana Territory.

Like many other national cemeteries, Custer National Cemetery was created after those killed in battle were already buried here. Between 1877 and 1881, troops garrisoned at nearby Fort Custer (modern-day town of Hardin, Montana) regularly gathered remains for reburial, recovered graves, and policed the battlefield for exposed bones. The first of these details disinterred and collected all identified officers, except Lieutenant John Crittenden. Lt. John Crittenden was left where he fell at the request of his family until 1932. General Custer was reinterred at West Point while most of the others were shipped to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and other private cemeteries back east at the request of their families.

Congress passed the first National Cemetery Act in 1867. It provided funds to purchase land, outlined common features, and defined appropriate, acceptable behaviors within the cemetery walls. In National Cemeteries, all rest as equals. This is opposite to the rigid caste system that defined day-to-day military operations. Here in the Custer National Cemetery, for example, Brevet Brigadier General Marcus Reno is buried directly beside Private Dale Hepler, conferring to each soldier an equal honor in death regardless of their military rank or socioeconomic status in life.