Little Bighorn Skirmishes Continue 120 Years Later Custer Buffs Say Modern Indians Desecrated Cavalry Troopers’ Mass Grave

More than 120 years after Custer’s Last Stand, the battle of Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument rages on.

In the latest skirmish, fans of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer claim the Montana park’s Indian superintendent allowed modern Indians this summer to desecrate the mass grave where 200 of Custer’s 7th Cavalry troopers are buried.

The superintendent, Gerard Baker, denies the accusation. He claims, in turn, that “Custer buffs” themselves dishonored the grave.

The controversy flared after 120th anniversary ceremonies in late June at the 765-acre site of the most famous battle of the West’s 19th-century “Indian wars.” Little Bighorn lies about 65 miles southeast of Billings, inside the Crow Indian Reservation.

In his ongoing effort to make the site “more user-friendly for Indians,” Baker allowed Lakota tribe members - descendants of the warriors who wiped out Custer’s troopers in 1876 - to conduct a “Victory Dance” June 25 near the monument marking the cavalry grave.

Baker said that as part of the ceremony, tribe members touched the stone obelisk four times with a stick to symbolize “counting coup,” an old battle ritual in which Indian warriors proved their bravery and skill - and humiliated their enemies - by hitting them with special sticks and getting away safely.

Custer enthusiasts - some of whom already claim Baker has gone overboard “Indianizing” the National Park Service monument - were outraged.

“All non-participants of the ‘Victory Dance’ were asked to clear the area to allow the mass grave of our comrades to be danced upon, desecrated and finally endure the counting of coup on the monument itself,” complained one non-Indian witness, a correspondent for the quarterly Custer/Little Bighorn Battlefield Advocate, a private newsletter. Under the pen name “Pam Allen,” she wrote an account for the California publication’s summer issue.

“They were counting coup, and the Indians were enjoying it,” publisher Bill Wells added last week.

Baker disputed their account.

“They did not - I repeat, did not - dance on the mass grave. They didn’t spit on it. They didn’t kick it. They didn’t do anything else. The counting-coup ceremony by the Lakota was done very respectfully. It was done with no mockery,” Baker said.

Baker, a Mandan Hidatsa Indian, said the participants did dance on the nearby site of a future memorial to the Indians who died at Little Bighorn.

But he said they stepped across the mass cavalry grave - normally off-limits except with park permission - only to touch the stone monument, which is in the middle of the grave site.

Baker said he had received “a tremendous amount of letters, 95 percent positive,” about the ceremony, all but one from non-Indians.

He said that several days before, participants in a cavalry event sponsored by Wells’ newsletter stood “directly on the mass grave.” Baker, one of the invited speakers, said he felt “uncomfortable” doing it. “If anybody stood on the mass grave, it was the Custer buffs, Bill Wells and his group,” he said.

Wells shot back that it was Baker who invited them to do so, adding, “He’s in damage control now.” But Baker denied Wells’ version of the events.

And so the combat continues over the former Custer Battlefield, which Congress renamed four years ago - over the objection of some pro-Custer historians - to reflect the battle’s location, rather than its most famous victim.