Unknown soldier memorial

A closer look at the memorial. (The bright sun and shadows from the trees made it hard to read the inscriptions.)

Garryowen

Someone at the trading post recommended that we come here since we couldn't visit the park. This is a few miles down the highway from Last Stand Hill, and was the location of Sitting Bull's camp before the battle.

Wikipedia tells me that the town is privately owned, and has a population of 2 (which may explain why the GPS got so confused when we were trying to find it.) There's a small museum, and a tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which may (or may not—there is apparently some doubt about this) contain the skeleton of a cavalry soldier found in 1926 when an irrigation ditch just outside of Garryowen was being repaired.

Garryowen started as a railroad station on the Little Bighorn River, where supplies for the local forts and homesteads could be delivered. The name referred to an Irish song that was the marching song for the 7th Cavalry Regiment.

Little Bighorn

The 7th US Cavalry Memorial on Last Stand Hill, at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in southeastern Montana. This is where the Battle of the Little Bighorn ended in 1876, when Custer and the last 40 or so of his men were cornered and killed.

It's such a bad picture because the battlefield is currently only open on weekends while they build a new visitor's center, so this is as close as we could get. I was disappointed not to be able to visit the battlefield, but it was hot and the trading post up the road was air-conditioned, so I managed to get over it.

Looking out over the dreary landscape in the opposite direction. The Little Bighorn river is behind the trees.

I haven't posted many pictures of the scenery yet. After the surprisingly beautiful prairies of North Dakota, the northern route that we took across Montana to Glacier National Park was a letdown: flat fields of grass, cattle, sad little towns, and mile after mile of railroad cars along the highway.

We stayed in Missoula last night and took a more southern route heading east to Little Bighorn today. That was a much prettier drive, with mountains and grass-covered hills behind the ranchland. But this is bleak.

Names of the fallen

Culloden

The battlefield at Culloden -- site of the defeat of the Jacobite rebels in 1746, the last battle fought on British soil -- is less than an hour by bus from Inverness. The good weather having fled, probably for good, it was windy and chilly, with unenthusiastic, off-and-on rain, but the moody skies were much more appropriate to such a a sad, bloody place than bright sunshine would have been.

There's a very good visitor's centre that explains the background as well as the logistics of the battle. It wasn't just Catholic Highlanders versus the Protestant English, and where you stood on the Divine Right of Kings not to be deposed as the Stuarts had been; many of the Jacobites were Protestant as well (though Presbyterian rather than Anglican), and many Scots, both Lowlander and Highlander, supported King George over the Bonnie Prince. England's ongoing issues with the French contributed as well; Charles Stuart spent much of his time before landing in Scotland trying to persuade the French to invade.

The rebels were undefeated; they had taken Edinburgh and almost taken London before -- inexplicably -- turning back. But bad luck and bad decisions brought them here, to a marshy moor on a brutally cold windy day, with an ill-provisioned army that had neither eaten nor slept facing English cannon.

It was over in less than an hour. The aftermath was brutal; the wounded were bayonetted where they lay. Those who could stand were shot. And the Highland way of life was over, with even the wearing of tartan outlawed.

Today it's a wide moor surrounded by farms, covered in shrubs and heather, with little sign of its tragic history except for the headstones marking the mass graves of those who died there.