Rosebud Battlefield Worth Visit
Eight days before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, another US Army unit encountered many of the same tribesmen who would wipe out five companies of the Seventh Cavalry. Forty miles by paved highway from the Little Bighorn site, south and east off Montana highway 338 is the Rosebud Battlefield State Park.
Gen. George Crook, a veteran of wars with the Apache bands in Arizona had been sent north to join with Custer in a pincers movement against the Plains Indians. At the Rosebud, with an army of nearly 1,000 troopers and infantrymen, Crook came near to having his own “Last Stand.”
The battlefield is something of a mirror image of the Little Bighorn. Crook was encamped on the low ground along Rosebud Creek, the Indians came down off the rolling prairie and attacked him.
The Rosebud site is lightly developed for tourism, and brochures are not always available in the honor-system boxes at the site. An excellent short history and map of the Rosebud is available at the Little Bighorn information center.
From the shallow valley of Rosebud Creek, visitors can walk and drive up the coulees. A few hundred feet above the valley floor, the broken land turns into a rolling prairie that runs out to the horizon, a horizon marked by the low hills beyond the Little Bighorn valley. It is not difficult to imagine the emotions when Crook’s troopers chased an apparently fleeing foe up the coulees and onto the plains, and then suddenly realize that these magnificent horsemen had now drawn them out, scattered the troopers, and had them at their mercy in a warfare of movement and speed.
There is no monument to Crook’s 10 dead. At approximately the site of the first parking lot, he buried them, and then rode his entire force across the gravesite to obliterate it and protect it from imagined and anticipated desecration. It is worth the trouble to walk up one of the coulees and look across the rolling plain. It says so clearly that you have crossed the threshold from an army encampment, down along the water, to the endless plains where the horsemen rule.
The brochure doesn’t mention that, after his licking at the Rosebud, Crook retreated back to his base on the Tongue River in present day Sheridan, Wyo., and simply went on vacation. He and his men were trout fishing and bear hunting when Custer died. Although maligned, Crook returned to his Arizona base and continued to be a relentless pacifier and persecutor of the Apache bands. He was a great general in broken and mountainous terrain, but he was, to use perhaps appropriate metaphor, “buffaloed” by the endless prairie. A general capable of putting Geronimo’s back to the wall had no answers on the borderless plains.