I had the privilege of walking Custer's Battlefield today, with two hunters who know horses well, one of them a former U.S. Army Ranger, to make terrain and range notations. The thrilling part of this was that the "Rubbing Out of Yellow Hair" at The Little Big Horn comprised numerous small battles, each of which was matched in scale and or conduct in other engagements in the Northern Plains wars and in the lives of free-trappers and mountain men.

Reno's command alone, was engaged in five distinct actions: a charge, a battle under cover of woods, a rout, the last stand of four poor bastards who retreated up the wrong slope and a siege.

Custer's command was broken in two, with each conducting numerous actions, fragmenting further into smaller units, which then fought battles of the sort a handful of men engage in against a superior force. In this one battle bitter enemies of various tribes, units and professions found many ways to end their struggle, some shoulder to shoulder with comrades, but must, scattered over a five mile stretch of river bottom, gorge, draw, slope, ridge and hilltop that might have been contested by entire ancient armies.

This walker's sense of the terrain is that, if a Land ever cared for the men that fought over it, than it was surely some other land—not those windswept sloped and pitiless defiles overlooking that lush, lazy stream like jealous sentinels.