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$Title{Custer Battlefield
Chapter 4  Custer Battlefield Today}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Utley, Robert M.}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{custer
battlefield
national
cemetery
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}
$Volume{Handbook 132}
$Date{1988}
$Log{Custer Hill Today*0028901.scf
}
Book:        Custer Battlefield
Author:      Utley, Robert M.
Affiliation: National Park Service
Volume:      Handbook 132
Date:        1988

Chapter 4  Custer Battlefield Today

From Battlefield to National Monument

     Almost overnight the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn became a
national shrine and tourist attraction.  Its care fell to the Army, which in
1877 built Fort Custer 15 miles to the north.  A year after the battle,
Captain Keogh's old Company 1 of the 7th Cavalry, now reconstituted, returned
to comb the battlefield and exhume the bodies of Custer and 11 other officers
and two civilians for reinterment elsewhere.  In accordance with Custer's
wishes, his widow had his remains reburied at the United States Military
Academy at West Point, New York.

     In 1879 Custer Battlefield was designated a national cemetery, and the
Fort Custer troopers worked to make it more presentable.  On top of Custer
Hill they erected a log memorial.  They remounded the scattered graves and
marked each with a substantial wooden stake.  In 1881 an imposing granite
monument, bearing the names of all the slain, arrived at the Fort Custer
landing and soon replaced the log memorial on Custer Hill.  At the same time,
the remains of the fallen troopers were exhumed from their individual graves
and reinterred in a common grave around the base of the monument.  In 1890
white marble headstones replaced the wooden stakes marking the original graves
and thus formed a rough guide to where the soldiers had been killed.

     As Indian warfare subsided, the Army began to abandon its frontier forts.
Custer Battlefield National Cemetery offered a convenient place to move the
bodies buried in the various post cemeteries.  Gradually the dead from other
Indian battles took their place in the national cemetery at the foot of Custer
Hill.  They serve as reminders of the whole sweep of military history on the
northern Great Plains.

     The first battlefield superintendent arrived in 1893.  For almost 50
years afterward, a succession of War Department officials cared for the area.
Many were retired soldiers, some veterans of the Sioux campaign of 1876.
Their personal knowledge of the battle served them well in dealing with the
growing number of visitors.  People came, the custodians discovered, not so
much to visit the national cemetery as to see the scene of "Custers Last
Stand." Many were avid relic hunters and curiosity seekers and often carried
off mementos ranging from cartridge cases to human bones and, above all,
fragments of the marble headstones.

     In 1940 stewardship passed from the War Department to the National Park
Service of the Department of the Interior.  Reflecting the changed emphasis on
historic site rather than active cemetery, Custer Battlefield National
Cemetery was renamed Custer Battlefield National Monument in 1946. Preserving
and interpreting the battlefield now became the principal mission.

     Interpretation underwent changes, too.  Originally established to pay
homage to the fallen soldiers and white civilians, the battlefield came
gradually to stand for the Indian side of the story as well, and
interpretation expanded to fill the void.  Today Custer Battlefield fittingly
commemorates not only the westward advance of the American frontier but also
the last phases of the Indians' struggle to retain their lands and way of
life.  Modern Indians, some descendants of those who fought Custer and others
of Indian scouts who served Custer, share with white interpreters the task of
explaining the Battle of the Little Bighorn to the hundreds of thousands of
visitors who come each year.

[See Custer Hill Today: Custer Hill, looking north from Weir Point]