Montana National Monument Highlighted As “Place of Reflection”
There's not a lot of travel going on right now. Okay, I guess that's an understatement - Delta Airlines just reported that they've lost over $5 BILLION dollars over the last few months, thanks to COVID-19. There's been plenty of reports of mostly-empty planes taking off, some with only one or two people on board.
So yeah, when Thrillist posts an article about national monuments around the country, I think to myself, "These seem fascinating, but who knows when anybody will able to get there right now?" And then I scroll a little further down the list - and suddenly, I find one that we can access pretty easily, because it's right here in Montana.
This list is about national monuments that act as places of "Reflection, solace, and hope" - significant historical events or remembrances of tragedies in human history made up a good chunk of the list. And indeed, that's what they chose for Montana: the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, located in Crow Agency.
Here's an excerpt from the article which describes the monument:
For more than a century, Little Bighorn was simply remembered as the site of Custer's Last Stand, complete with the gravesite of hundreds of US Army soldiers, but little acknowledging the Lakota and other tribespeople fighting on the reservation during the Great Sioux War. In 1999, however, the long-mythologized Western-expansion battlefield was augmented to memorialize the tribespeople who were slain in battle, with multiple markers on the long, solemn prairie in place to honor those who fought for their land in this dark period of US history.
I like that Thrillist acknowledges the tragic history of the site, and highlights the fact that while it is known for Custer's Last Stand, the place now honors the Lakota and other tribespeople fighting for their own land who lost their lives in battle.
Have you ever been to Little Bighorn?