Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument

Read the stones and the battle lays itself out. Two days after the fighting, men of the 7th Cavalry buried their dead where they had fallen, in shallow graves marked with stakes; Custer himself was later reburied at West Point. In May 1890 a detail under Captain Sweet spent twelve days crossing the field to replace the stakes with white marble markers, and where two men were believed to lie together they set two stones side by side. The markers run down the ravines and along the ridges in lines and clusters, and they are still how visitors and historians reconstruct what happened.

The Lakota and Cheyenne dead were not left on the field. Their families carried them away for burial in their own way, and some marked the places where they had fallen with small cairns of stone. Nothing official marked them. The first known request for a warrior's stone came in 1925, from the daughter of Lame White Man, the Cheyenne leader who fell on the west face of Battle Ridge, and a wooden marker went up for him in 1958. On Memorial Day 1999, after consultation with the Cheyenne and Lakota, the Park Service set the first red granite markers on the field, for Lame White Man and for Noisy Walking, cut with their Cheyenne names and the English beside them. The first for a Lakota went up on June 26, 2001, at the Reno-Benteen site, for Long Road, a Sans Arc killed in the fight on the bluffs; it was cut to the same dimensions as the 1890 stones.

More red markers have followed wherever a warrior's place can be confirmed, among them one for an unknown Lakota warrior dedicated in 2003. The white stones still far outnumber them, a count that records whose dead were left lying on the field rather than whose fell. The monument is off Interstate 90 at Crow Agency, on the Crow Reservation, with the Custer National Cemetery beside the visitor center and a road along the bluffs to the Reno-Benteen defense site.