Out comes junior high school history teacher Bill Rino, dressed just like all the pictures of the cavalry captain. He doesn t really look anything like Keogh though he s short and Italian. He s been coming all the way from Queens every year since 1995.
Like many re-enactors, he s very certain about what happened that day. Actually, there were four last stands, he says. Custer s, Keogh s, Weir s, and Calhoun s.
Once Reno ran, Custer was in trouble. Did you know Custer s bugler is buried in Queens? Of course, I ask him about Comanche.
Comanche was identified by Keogh s best friend, Lt. He was shot ten times, not seven. Probably by Crazy Horse.
By the way, do you know how horses gave the Indians an advantage? When they surprised Custer in the morning, they ran their horses up and down the perimeter to make a dust cloud. The cavalry couldn t see where to shoot.
And one more thing. Captain Keogh did not die while crouching under Comanche between his forelegs and getting off a few final shots. He was definitely shot out of the saddle.
You can tell from the wound in his knee. Maybe he was shot from the saddle and then continued to fight under Comanche? I ask.
Absolutely not, he says. The bugler sounds dinner but before Capt. Keogh disappears, I take his picture.
The horse playing Comanche has been taken back to the rez by the Crow so it s a solo shot of Bill standing near the river. It s dusk, and as the sun sets in the West, he straightens out his buckskin shirt, stands erect in his cavalry boots, and his chest swells, his body stretches to the sky and his eyes look off to the future as the Crow run some ponies through the Little Bighorn River behind him. The next day, I attend a press conference at the Custer Battlefield Museum in the town of Garryowen, where the first skirmish of the battle happened.
Outside the museum, a recording of Garryowen plays, the 7th Cavalry siren that lured many across the prairie to their doom. Inside, Joe Medicine Crow, 97, the grandson of Custer scout White Man Runs Him, consultant to the 1941 Errol Flynn movie about Custer, They Died With Their Boots On, is talking story. Alas, not many are here some members of the European press, a few academic types, a couple of local reporters.
The Crow elder is wearing a full war bonnet, jeans, a denim shirt, and cowboy boots. He speaks of how the Crow got horses it was before the white man found the tribe. Inter-tribal warfare started over horses, he says.
The horses reached the Crow in 1730. They reached my family in the 1950s, transforming our world as well after my parents got divorced, my mother, a life-long equestrian, got a job as one of the first female exercise boys on the racetrack. For the next five years, she got up every day at dawn and headed for the track to ride.
It wasn t a high-income gig but it helped her return to college so she could get a master s degree, and it paid our bills. It also took us into an enchanting world of misfits and outcasts who, like us, did not have a traditional family. They had each other and their sanctuary was the race track, and their best friends and saviors were horses.
The community was driven by heart, uplifted by belief in the racetrack version of sunrise (every day is a new chance), and held together by first-hand knowledge that outside the track there was one damn cruel world. From then on, my life was linked with our country s greatest partner. As with all of the Horse Nations, the Crow quickly paired up with the horse, and today have one of the country s premiere annual rodeos.
The Crow re-enactment of the Little Bighorn Battle earlier that day stands as one of the finest, most charming horse spectacles I have ever seen, with tribal history presented as a series of gorgeous, primal scenes involving the great rivers of horse. It began with the national anthem, then the Crow anthem, and then there was a prayer in Crow. A horse whinnied as the prayer finished perhaps on cue, perhaps not and then the Crow narrator told a joke: Custer and his brother Tom are on the battlefield.
Tom says, I ve got some good news and some bad news. George says, What s the bad news? George says, What s the good news?
Tom replies: We don t have to go back to North Dakota. But the horse did and on the plains it continued to carry us into battle. And today, after blazing our trails and fighting our wars, it s fighting its own last stand, in diminishing numbers, on what s left of the range in the West, its home.
Deanne Stillman is the author of the critically acclaimed bestseller, Twentynine Palms, and the recent exploration of Joshua Tree National Park, Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango, which was excerpted on World Hum. Her work appears in Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and elsewhere. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Horse Latitudes: Last Stand for the Wild Horse in the American West (Houghton Mifflin, spring 2008).
Her Web site is DeanneStillman.com. Photo by Deanne Stillman Barbara WArner on 7.
2.07 at 08:56 AM The story of the Wild Horse (s) needs to be told, the survival that man has stripped from them is nothing short of total destruction ! Thank you for being their much needed voice.
Posted by on 7.2.07 at 01:34 PM I m excitedly looking forward to Horse Latitudes, another wonderful book by you, and clearly a story with documentation that is not only important but timely.
Posted by on 7.2.07 at 02:43 PM Deanne, thanks so much for your upcoming book regarding America s wild horses.
As has the wild ones, you will be attacked, but you like the wild ones, you are strong and a survivor. These precious beings have been and continue to be victims of hate crimes , commercially exploited by professed advocates and agencies that are suppose to be protecting them. Allow them to stay free on their legal habitats and with their families, friends and with other wildlife.
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this is the harmonious American way. Mankind needs to STOP playing God and start examining their impact on our planet for heaven sakes. Posted by on 7.
3.07 at 08:47 AM It s no coincidence that Deanne chose Custards Last Stand for a sneak peak at her upcoming novel. She has been faithful and followed the America s mustangs and burros for a long time.
Like Custard and the title of her book, she knows how desperate the situation has become, that truly, the American Mustang and Burro is facing their last stand as well, and we may be the last generation to remember them running free, running wild...
. They, like everything else American these days, seem to have been sold out, and as Deanne reminds us, our future is always built on our past. The wild horses and burros of our Nation embody a spirit we once had, a connection to freedom, to courage, and a willigness to pioneer new horizons.
As we trade these values in for security, safety, domestication and comfort, we lose sight of what these living symbols represent to our National consciousness and the breath of freedom that quickens in our hearts from their presence. To those of us who have watched their calculated demise, seen the ranges swept empty, watched them disappear into trailers, never to return, those of us stand witness to this Last Stand, as Deanne so aptly calls it, leaving an irreparable ache and void, knowing that soon, without change, like the horses of Custards battle, only headstones will mark their time here too. Thank you Deanne for your timely work and am looking forward to reading more of the stories and insights you have to share about Americas wild horses and burros.
Posted by on 7.3.07 at 06:05 PM early we talk about 2008!
Posted by Organ on 7.4.07 at 08:17 AM Out comes junior high school history teacher Bill Rino, dressed just like all the pictures of the cavalry captain.
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