The painting invariably moved and excited my imagination. It was impossible to look at it without wondering what it must have been like to face certain death, so far from home, against impossible odds, and how I might have behaved had I been there myself.

Some 65 years later, gazing across the drab brown valley of the Little Bighorn, I know how I would have behaved: I wouldn’t have been here. There’s almost no place to hide! Except for trees growing along the watercourses, you can see 20 miles in almost any direction. The notion of several hundred soldiers at the end of a long wagon-train supply line and armed with single-shot rifles on a mission to defeat, discipline and corral several thousand Indian warriors riding good horses and armed with the latest repeating Winchester rifles was military planning at its most hubristic. No, thanks! One look at Colonel Custer, and I’d have applied on the instant to the Army Logistics Management College for the duration of the Indian Wars.

The end of the Civil War highlighted the immense opportunity for settlement in the American West and freed underemployed military leaders for frontier duty. When George Custer, on a scouting mission for the Army, brought back news of the discovery of placer gold in the Black Hills (Indian land, by treaty with the United States government), prospectors and miners flocked illegally into the hills. They were followed by hunters and settlers who set to work extirpating the buffalo upon which the native way of life depended, and fencing native land. The natives responded just the way you and I would if we had no legal recourse. The Grant Administration, under pressure from various interests to make the West safe for manifest destiny, ignored treaties and began to force the Indians onto ever smaller and less useful tracts of land.

The Indians were nomadic buffalo hunters, not farmers. The reservation restrictions prevented them from following the herds wherever they led. Most of their leaders seem to have realized that their way of life was doomed, and sought accommodation from the government. But they were under the same pressure that President Grant was, from their own people. After an alliance arranged by chief Sitting Bull between the Lakota and the Cheyenne, thousands of Indians left the reservations in the spring of 1876. The military, once alerted, set out about a month later to encircle the Indians in a three-way pincers movement near the Wyoming-Montana border and force them back onto the reservations. They had no inkling of what numbers they were up against.

The two columns of troopers from the east and west, along with their baggage trains and pack mules, converged at the mouth of the Rosebud River, north of the Indian camps on the Little Bighorn, and turned south. The column approaching from the south in Wyoming, however, ran into a surprisingly large force of Indians on the upper Rosebud River and was essentially defeated. While it paused to regroup, Custer, ever eager to engage and unwilling to wait (he often invited correspondents to accompany him in order to report his exploits), began an attack alone on the main village of Indians on the Little Bighorn

Custer had already made one mistake by refusing the offer of Gatling guns, which would have been crucial when facing such superior numbers. He made a second in deciding to attack the village after a trusted scout told him that in thirty years he’d never seen an Indian village that large. Then he made a third by dividing his already outnumbered force into three commands.

Precise accounts of the ensuing hours are impossible to come by, but the first group to engage, that of Major Reno, found the Indians “in force and not running away” – which had not been their experience before this. Preventing the three groups of soldiers from rejoining, thousands of mounted warriors surrounded and swarmed them. Only a few soldiers escaped by building breastworks and holding out till infantry reinforcements finally arrived. The rest were all killed.

I stood with my friend Baird at the squat obelisk atop “Last Stand Hill,” looking down at the scattered headstones that mark where each soldier’s body was found; Custer’s stone was faced in black. They had died all over the hillside. In spite of that, the battle was the last hurrah of the tribes; General Sheridan used it as a pretext for mounting an overwhelming military incursion into Indian Territory. A few dozen yards from the hill stands a newer Indian memorial, a circular dugout with photos and quotations from the chiefs around the inside wall. Above the north wall looms a magnificent skeletal steel sculpture of a Spirit Warrior outlined against the sky.

We walked down the hill to the visitors’ center, where a Park Service ranger – a Texan; we’d chatted with him earlier – described the conflicts leading to the battle, the many details of the fatal day itself, and the sad aftermath when the infantry arrived and began burying the bodies scattered across the open hills. At the end of his spirited story, he turned suddenly (and probably unofficially) philosophical, and asked, “All that death and sadness, and what did it accomplish? Nothing. Everybody lost. What have we ever accomplished by killing each other like this?”