Little Bighorn Natl Mon MT (#0464)

While I'm glad I went to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the visit was disappointing for two reasons, one of which was very much my fault. The issue that wasn't all that much my fault (though I should have known better) was that I did not expect the park to be so popular that it would be almost impossible to explore it in a contemplative manner. Fortunately the rain meant that many hurried through leaving some quiet gaps.

The issue that was very much my fault was that, if I had looked more closely at the park information, I would have known that the park's primary focus was on the tactical and technical aspects of the battle, not on the greater social and cultural issues surrounding the battle. I appreciate how such tactical issues are important, but they don't interest me and thus much of the material in the park only tangentially applied to my interests.

I did, though, very much appreciate a key aspect of the park – the use of gravestone-like markers to indicate the locations where combatants died, and that those gravestones were in natural rather than mowed grass, so as to give you a sense of what the area was like at the time of the battle, and the breadth of deaths. This field, for example, has the location of the death of seven (or eight, I'm not sure of one stone) soldiers in the foreground, a large number fairly distant in the field (the left center of the picture), and four in between (see a large version of the picture).