Riding for the Guidon

U.S. CAVALRY SCHOOL AT LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD IS A REAL-LIFE HISTORY LESSON.

- DENNIS TUBERTY

I stood on the banks of the Little Bighorn River at Medicine Tail Coulee Ford. Early one morning last June, I saw a small group of Indian ponies come down to the opposite bank for water. Their classic silhouettes in the predawn light of the Eastern sky were reflected in the water and caused me to have a reflection of my own.

I remembered when I was about seven or eight years old, playing Cavalry and Indians by a small creek that used to flow behind our homestead after a heavy rain. I was with my older brother. We were riding our horses back and forth through the creek and fighting or chasing make-believe Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. We were outfitted with black hats, light-blue denim shirts and dark denim jeans with a yellow crayon stripe down the legs along the outer seams. We were armed with wooden swords, pistols and carbines that were honed from old scrap one-by-four-inch lumber.

That was the beginning of my journey into the history of the American West, and I must thank my brother for my being at that hallowed spot that morning well over 60 years later. This is the spot at the ford on the Little Bighorn where two companies of Custer's battalions tried to cross and attack the village. They were repelled by a brave band of Sioux warriors led by the War Chief Crazy Horse. I was imagining what was going through their minds at that moment, how they must have felt on both sides of that water-fear, anger or something else? I was looking out at the surrounding landscape, absorbing what it must have looked like. Much of it is as it was then; the large clay bluffs to the south, the coulee to the center and the Greasy Grass Ridge to the north.