Travel-Little Bighorn Battlefield TB

This travel bug has a modest goal, to circulate more than five years and to be moved by at least 25 cachers.  As of 5-Jul-19 it had survived for 3.1 years and had been moved by 16 cachers.

Please drop it in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean, protects the number and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Travel bug photos are appreciated and will be re-posted here.

In the fall of 2015 we took a trip from Texas to the northwest.  We made stops in Wyoming, Montana, Alberta and British Columbia.  I am always on the lookout for things to convert to travel bugs.  This bug is one such item.

This narrative might be titled “My life with General Custer.”  In the days when it was still legal to do so, this nine year old boy used to go with his father to watering holes.  While my dad was drinking and talking with his friends, I would wander around the bars looking at advertisments, reading bottle labels, or playing on the shuffleboard when it wasn’t occupied.  One of the places we regularly went had a print on the wall titled “Custer’s Last Fight.”  I was really taken with it because there was so much detail and I studied it whenever I saw it. 

Then, on a family vacation in 1950 (I was 11), we stopped at the Custer Battlefield in Montana.  I was a great experience.  The interpretive center was a room overlooking the battlefield; the room also had a large table with a 3-D rendering of the surrounding topography.  The Ranger was a teacher and his description of events was captivating.  He showed us where Benteen and Reno were positioned and told us why they didn’t come to Custer’s aid.  To that point, I had never had such an enlightening experience.

Some years later I went to college at a smallish school in north-central Kansas, Fort Hays State.  There was a Custer Hall and a Custer Island.  The former was a girl’s dorm, the latter was an oxbow in Big Creek. The men’s Honor Society at the school is the Seventh Cavalry.  Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th Cavalry Regiment used Fort Hays as headquarters during his 1868-1869 campaign against the Cheyenne and the Kiowa.  The local legend was that Custer’s command regularly camped at Custer Island.

Through the years I have followed the battlefield stories in various media, all updating interpretations of events at the Little Big Horn.  In 2015, the wife and I stopped at the battlefield, 55 years after my first visit.  The prairie of the field of battle was still beautiful, the array of stones marking where soldiers fell was still impressive, but the interpretive center had no recent information, there was no 3-D table and the ranger talk was a memorized, monotone monologue delivered outside, looking into the sun.  I guess this was another example of you can’t go back.  Still, I captured some nice photos (see the uploads).