Indian Memorial Removed at Site of Custer Battle
A controversial plaque honoring Indian warriors killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn has been removed from a prominent spot on the Montana battlefield where it had been placed earlier this year by American Indian activists, officials of the National Park Service announced Wednesday at its regional office in Denver.
National Park Service Director William Penn Mott Jr. said that he would appoint a committee of American Indian leaders and other private citizens to help the agency design an official memorial to Indians killed in the historic battle.
In the meantime, the unofficial plaque will remain on display in the visitors’ center at Custer Battlefield National Monument, about 60 miles southeast of Billings, Mont., where elements of the U.S. Cavalry were defeated 112 years ago.
Black Metal Plate
The black metal plate, about one yard square, was placed in quick-drying cement at the foot of a granite pillar that marks the mass grave of 220 U.S. soldiers who died at the Little Bighorn.
The grave sits atop Last Stand Hill, the highest point in the 750-acre national monument, where the bodies of Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the remnants of his cavalry force were found two days after the battle. The unauthorized plaque refers to the warriors who killed them as “Indian patriots” who saved “our women and children from mass murder.”
Historians estimate that 100 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, out of a force of about 2,400 men, were killed at Little Bighorn.
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