Grasslands
From the Badlands in South Dakota to Big Sky in Montana you drive though an infinite sea of grasslands. You are also traveling the route of the Plains Indians to their final destination and near extinction.
We visited the battleground at Little Big Horn where the hubris of the US Cavalry resulted in their massacre under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The soldiers lie buried where they fell, scattered along the ridge that separated their approach from the Indian encampment, which at the time represented over two thousand Lakota, Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho.
Earlier in the day we had been to the Brinton Museum in Big Horn which contains one of the most extraordinary collection of American Indian artifacts, including a scroll on muslin by Standing Bear depicting the event leading up to and including the battle itself. It is from resources such as these that histories like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee could be reconstructed.
The cattle ranches around Big Horn have now been transformed by the Big Horn Polo Club into multiple polo fields, cut as smooth as a baseball park, and irrigated from the mountains above. Long horn cattle, now strictly decorative, stroll the meadows between. Polo season brings the worlds best, mostly Argentinians, and helicopters fly the residents in and out. The ranchers are mostly gone, and as our host said, “the billionaires have driven out the millionaires.” Manifest Destiny folds in on itself.
