Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

From subsequent inquiries of survivors of the battle I have learned that the location of these excavations is about at the place where were buried the bodies of the two soldiers (John Wenzel and Edward Kennedy) and of the scout (Charles White) killed in the fight … I am, from the evidence, led to inquire whether the Indians, who returned to the village to look for their own dead, might not have dug up these bodies, dragged them up to the two little hills, and had dances around them … Can it be, therefore, that the bones of the killed on the victorious side have been bleaching in the sunlight all these years?

Today a visitor can drive east from the small town of Buffalo for twenty-one miles, crossing over the Slim Buttes themselves. Approximately two miles west of the hamlet of Reva on the south side of the highway you will find a bronze-plaque roadside marker and the eight-foot-tall shaft of a stone monument erected on a small patch of state ground a half mile from the actual site of the village. Beyond the nearby fence the rest of the site is land owned by the family of George Lermeny, whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with on the phone but whom I have not had the honor of meeting in person. Lermeny’s grandfather came from Canada to settle on that ground in late 1886.

Former Sergeant John A. Kirkwood helped place the stone pylon monument that was financed by Anson Mills after Walter M. Camp confirmed the site. But, despite Camp’s protests, Mills elected to place the tall spire a half mile from the village site and close beside the highway, where the old general wanted it to be seen by the cars that passed by on that narrow east-west route. In August of 1920, three years after the ground had been identified, the markers were dedicated, complete with three separate headstones commemorating those white men who fell at Slim Buttes, all enclosed inside a tall wrought-iron fence.

Those two markers are as close as you will get to the battlefield. The passerby, tourist, amateur historian, and researcher are not allowed onto Lermeny’s property, where a third marker stands at the mouth of the ravine, indicating where Wenzel and White were killed. Erected in 1956 by the South Dakota State Historical Society, it reads:

Siege of the Ravine

American Horse, family

and six warriors ran here

at dawn attack. By noon

four warriors were dead.

American Horse, fatally

wounded, surrendered with

those left. Here Jonathan

White, “Chips,” civilian

scout, was killed.

In my phone conversations with George Lermeny, the rancher remained adamant that he wanted no further attention given to the site. “It’s been too much trouble for us already,” he said to me, then went on to tell how in recent years several researchers had come to him seeking permission to go over the village site and the surrounding hillsides with their metal detectors, and to complete analytical terrain surveys. Because those researchers subsequently wrote books on the Slim Buttes battle, Lermeny feels there’s been too much of a rising tide of publicity surrounding his family’s home.

The Reva, South Dakota, rancher told me, “We’ve had too much attention given us. I’m hoping things’ll eventually quiet down and we can go back to making a living here. This is our family business. Six generations have worked this ground. We just want to be left alone now.”

In fact, the home George Lermeny shares with his wife rests in the draw where on that rainy night of September 8, 1876, Anson Mills waited for the gray light of dawn with 150 troopers, located to the northeast (and across the present highway) from the Sioux village.

As much as I was personally disappointed in not getting a chance to meet George Lermeny and to walk that creek bottom, climb those knolls and hills south and west of the village site, look myself for the rifle pits used by Chambers’s infantry on the afternoon of September 9, then follow the path of the Fifth Cavalry’s retreat on the morning of the tenth—I can nonetheless understand his possessiveness of that beautiful piece of ground.

I can sympathize with it entirely in light of what I see done by visitors at Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, visitors to the battlefields that dot the western plains.

Shamefully, all too few American citizens are truly respectful of our past or do they truly honor the historical and spiritual significance of that sacred ground. As much as I am sorry that this is one piece of hallowed soil I did not get to walk across, much less have the opportunity to sit and listen to the ghosts whisper through the branches of the buffalo-berry bushes heavy with their bright-red fruit— I find myself in total sympathy with George Lermeny.