on General Custer’s grave A FISEUNG-ENCURSION business was recently fined SU250 an Nonth Vancouver pros ineral court ia connection with a charge of Operating wathin i provanetll park near Bella Cooka, Acepreseatitive of Bankshind Miarme Group fie pleaded guilty tothe charge stemming from cident. that occurred between Aug. 20 and Sept 7, P92. in Kawakshoa Channel ithe biakai area. The charged: stated that the commercial enterprise Friday, July 29, 1994 - North Shore News - 9 wars conducted: WHEHOUE a park Use or tesouree-use permut Crown lawser Peter Favell said Banksland Marine Group Ine. lransported customers by pline to a dishing boat, the Baaksland Survever, where they fished within the boundaries of a provincial park. West Vancouver resident Willie Jottnson, ne ive given, hal charges dropped against him (stay of proceedings) in teblidion tothe incidents. Judge Jerome Paradis issued the fine on Jung 22. Secoud ina series abot a cultus coolve drive across the continent, CUSTER BATTLEFIELD, Montana — In the cool of early morning, before the rattlesnakes and hairy bhack spiders come out, we tourists are already paying $4 to see Caster's Last Stand Against the Hostiles. By coincidence. we nuinber about the same as the soldiers killed on this sidehill --- 275. Part of the batdefield is private- ly owned now and cattle graze upon it, The Crow Indians, Custer’s allies, occupy the nearby reserva- tion. Indians, mostly Crows, are half the full-time ULS. Park Service staff here. Our first guide this morming is Kirsten, a slender young woman college student wearing monstrous- ly unfeminine Park Service issue boots. She is one of the reasons’this is a good place to visit. Kirsten is young, too young to have experi- enced war, famine or pestilence, or to have plumbed the depths of human stupidity and depravity. But she has done her homework well. She is sure of her facts,and she gives an extraordinarily fair and well-balanced account of the white- Indian conflict on this continent. The white saw, correctly, that he could make the Great American Desert bloom economically. The Indian saw, also correctly, that it could be a Garden of Eden fora few people who trod the land gen- tly. Custer seems to have been unusually stupid, even by the stan- dards of army generals, but what can be said for the war chiefs among the Indians: Crazy Horse. Gall, Sitting Bull and the others? They must have known or should have known that they had already lost the war to smallpox and starvation. A year aftc. their victory here, they all went into captivity although, Kirsten notes, there are many Indians today who still don’t believe the war has ended. The tourists, almost all Caucasian, mostly middle aged. watch the wind move the yellow grass by the grave markers which patch the hill beside us — a clump here, a clump there. We learn that popuiar visions of the battle are wrong. There were no cavalry charges. Both sides per- formed as mounted infantry and all the charges were on foot. Probably the most important foot charge was that led by a Cheyenne chief named Lame White Man which broke the picket lines on the ridge above where we sit and apparently also broke the morale of Custer's five companies. After that the white soldiers were as sheep for slaughter. Lame White Man is the only Indian with a stone to mark where he died. As often happens, the winners had few casualties. The Lakotas probably lost oniy few dozen. whose bodies they carried away. Almost all white bodies were Paul St. Pierre CINEMA 1 SEPARATE ADMISSION FEATURES THE SHADOW 6:50 pm MAVERICK PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES collected trom where the markers show they died and put in a mass grave on the knoll. Years tater, the officers’ bodies were removed from the common grave and taken back East for bur- ial. Custer was rewarded with a plot in the Americans’ pantheon for heroes, the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. One cannot help but speculate that after a decade or so, bodies must have been hard to recognize. Possibly that body in Arlington is a poor little corporal, and Custer still lies on the sidchill among the com- mon soldiers. But does it really matter? What does matter? Kirsten details the dreary long list of Indian treaties broken by U.S. governments. The audience, perhaps because they are older, do not seem overly impressed. Major powers commonly break treaties with minor powers. A treaty between unequals is, as Germany's foreign minister said about the German-Belgian Treaty in 1914, “merely a scrap of paper.” We walk the battlefield, under strict instructions to pick up no but- tons or cartridges. Amazing, how much that day in June 1874 becomes real. Custer and his com- panies died here within an hour or so although nearby, Major Reno and Captain Benteen held off the Indians for 24 hours and most of them were rescued, an indication that majors and captains don’t lose as many brains as generals do. Years later, long after Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had been murdered while in captivity, anoth- er war chief told a white historian. “We couldn't believe it, that you were going to attack our village.” And in the ultimate irony, he added, “We would have been will- ing to have talk with you. But the while soldiers didn’t want to talk.” You can almost smell the dust and the black powder smoke, the screams of the dying cavalry horses and the cruel jeers of the victorious Lakotas, Cheyennes and Arapzhoes, Kirsten concludes her lecture by saying: “In the end, we ask our- selves. have we learned anything from the battle of the Litde Big Hom?” Probably not, Kirsten. 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