A GRAVE LEGACY

Private William Othniel Taylor gazed numbly across the Little Bighorn battlefield on the morning of June 28, 1876, three days after he and fellow troopers of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, commanded by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, had charged into a large Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment on the banks of the Montana Territory river. Taylor and comrades had been pinned down by the enemy for 36 hours with limited water before being saved by relief forces that brought astonishing news: Custer and his entire command had been annihilated.

“Our errand now was to seek our comrades who had died with Custer and pay our last respects by a scant and hasty burial,” Taylor recalled. “The most that could be done was to cover the remains with some branches of sagebrush and scatter a little earth on top, enough to cover their nakedness, a covering that would remain but a few hours at the most when the wind and rain would undo our work and the wolves, whose mournful and ominous howls we had already heard, would scatter their bones over the surrounding ground.” Standing on that desolate ridge, Taylor could never have imagined how those shallow graves would soon mark a very different type of battleground—one on which various factions exploited the dead in skirmishes over class warfare, politics and legacy.

Each year upward of 240,000 people make a pilgrimage to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Grave markers scattered across its grounds carry different meanings for different people. The site has also generated an estimated $14 million a year in tourist dollars, thanks largely to one iconic name: Custer. Yet, the morbid allure of the Little Bighorn dead is not an uncommon phenomenon.