My photographer’s alarm rang at 6:00am on Saturday, September 16, 2023, and for some reason, my two companions seemed to be dragging their butts that morning. As a matter of fact, we didn’t leave the Kelly Inn parking lot in Billings, Montana until eight o’clock – even though we had two major sites to visit and nearly 400 miles of driving before nightfall. I sure in the heck-fire hoped those two knuckleheads weren’t running out of gas on me.
The first leg of the day’s trek was finished in an hour; and I was thankful it flew by quickly as most of the scenery along the way had transformed back to vast grasslands. At a few minutes past nine o’clock, Vicki pulled the van into the parking lot of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, which was located in the southern part of Montana on the Crow Reservation. I was excited the battlefield was our first stop, as I was anxious to see the site where General George Armstrong Custer had died because I had visited Custer’s gravesite at West Point with Tom and Bob Moldenhauer just three months earlier.
After a quick stop inside the NPS Visitor Center, my photographer carried me along a five-hundred-foot paved walkway up to what’s known as ‘Last Stand Hill’. Once Tom had huffed and puffed his way to the crest, I saw the site where General Custer met his demise. As a matter of fact, there were 52 small, white marble monuments inside the fence-enclosed area of the battlefield where soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 7th Calvary Regiment, including Custer, had perished. Just east of that site, I saw a 14-foot-tall white obelisk that marked the site where roughly 220 American soldiers who died in the battle were re-interred in 1881.
As Tom and Vic rested on a bench near the Wooden Leg Hill overlook, a young couple walked towards us. Seconds later, I heard my photographer sarcastically yell out “Go Blue” to the man because he was sporting a Michigan State Spartans shirt. The young guy smiled, and quickly engaged in a friendly conversation with my two companions. It turned out the couple were from Holland, Michigan and were returning from a long road-trip to Alaska. They said they were pulling a camper and had planned to visit Mount Rushmore and a few other sites along the route home. I had hoped Tom would let me pose with the girl because she was cute, but unfortunately that never happened. Five minutes later, as fast as they appeared, they were gone – vanished into thin air. I knew we were scheduled to spend some time at Mount Rushmore in the next day or two, but I also knew we would never see that nice couple from Holland again.
Located about 300 feet to the north of where I last saw the Michigan State fans, I noticed the Indian Memorial in the distance. That memorial, which was dedicated on June 25, 2003 (the 127th anniversary of the historic battle), was constructed to commemorate the sacrifice of the Arikara, Crow, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota Sioux warriors who fought valiantly in the Battle of the Little Bighorn to protect their values and traditional way of life.
During our entire visit, which lasted over an hour, I had a change of heart about Custer and his famous ‘Last Stand” – which was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876. As our government, led by President Ulysses S. Grant, continued to suppress the Native Americans and force them back onto the established reservations, the natives, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, resisted and fought back. After the U.S. soldiers began their attack, in which the officers had underestimated the number of native warriors they were up against, the onslaught began. When the smoke cleared and the bodies were counted, 268 soldiers from 7th calvary were dead and 55 wounded, while less than 100 Native Americans lost their lives protecting their heritage.
For over 100 years, it was believed General George Custer was killed on the battlefield when native warriors shot him twice. But it turned out that account was wrong. Custer was shot twice and was wounded, but he continued to fight. Out of nowhere, a female warrior named Buffalo Calf Road Woman rode her horse onto the battlefield for one reason – she sought revenge against Custer, who had killed her father. As she rapidly approached the general from behind, Buffalo Calf Road Woman struck Custer on the back of the head with a tomahawk-like club. When he fell from his horse, another warrior woman speared Custer in the side with a saber to be a part of the slaying, and other women warriors took sewing utensils and stuck them in his ears. While that seemed gruesome, and perhaps over-the-top, the women did it to prevent Custer from hearing them coming in the afterlife. Or perhaps it was their way of
“sticking it to the man” the indigenous tribes believed to be pure evil.
For years at his work, before Tom retired, my photographer preached the phrase “Overconfidence is a Killer.” That ideology was very evident at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Custer went into the Valley of the Little Bighorn with nearly 650 men, and they attacked a village of 10,000 people. General George Armstrong Custer was 36 years old when he died from overconfidence, along with a tomahawk chop to the head, on June 25, 1876.
When the three of us boarded the van and left the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument behind, I had a greater sense of what happened on that sacred ground on June 25, 1876. While I will never condone war, I also can’t condemn what happened to the United States 7th calvary on that historic day. Since Europeans first arrived on this continent, most have treated the indigenous people horribly. First, the foreigners took the Native American’s land; then they herded them like cattle, forcing them from their homes to the most desolate part of the country; and finally, they tried to force them to abandon their proud culture and heritage and adopt the new American way of life. When brave tribal leaders, such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, said enough was enough – they resisted change and fought back; and continued fighting until their dying days.
Roughly halfway through our 200-mile journey to the Devils Tower National Monument in the northeastern part of Wyoming, I heard my photographer say to his wife: “Ellen, I’m so hungry, I could eat a sandwich from a gas station.” And that’s exactly what happened. As Vic pumped gasoline into the Truckster’s tank, Tom went inside the convenience store and purchased a turkey and cheese sandwich for his wife, while he bought a ham and cheese sandwich for himself. Once we were on the road again, I waited for Vic to say: “Clark, these sandwiches are all wet”; but luckily, that never happened.
At precisely 2:17pm, I heard Tom shout out in excitement: “I see it – I see Devils Tower; and it’s still fifteen miles away.” Sure enough, from an opening in the camera case, I spotted the 867-foot-tall igneous rock butte; and I couldn’t wait to get closer. After all, it was a Presidential site – at least in my mind. On September 24, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt established Devils Tower as America’s first national monument; although there is no documentation as to whether or not TR ever visited the site in person.
Although we got snarled in a small traffic jam as we headed into the park, we got lucky and found a parking spot not too far from the Visitor Center. From there, Tom carried me onto the Tower Trail, which was a 1.3-mile paved hiking path that circled the entire monument. While there were a lot of other visitors on the trail, the weather was ideal for our hike – not a cloud in the sky and the temperature was in the mid-70s.
The view of the mammoth monolith from the trail was spectacular and seemed to change every few feet my companions hiked. During his frequent breaks from walking, Tom sat on benches, or on large rocks, where I listened to him play the movie’s five-note extraterrestrial tonal phrase on his cell phone. Over and over, my photographer used the tones in an effort to entice the alien mother ship to make an appearance, but nothing appeared in the blue sky above us. Even when we got to the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, where the extraterrestrial mother ship’s landing site was located in the movie, there was nothing except trees and rocks for as far as the eye could see. Oh, I saw a handful of turkey vultures as they circled the summit, but no alien spacecraft. Perhaps we were too early; maybe we needed to wait for nightfall before we’d see strange lights in the sky.
Now let me take you on a journey; a 1.3-mile hike around the base of Devils Tower through the lens of Tom’s camera. This is our version of ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’.
We had spent two hours at Devils Tower National Monument, and in my opinion, it was some of the best time spent on the trip. When the three of us returned to the van, I stood in the camera case and wondered why Teddy Roosevelt never visited the site. He loved the west and had been all over that part of the country – yet he never made the pilgrimage to see the formation he deemed the first national monument. Perhaps it was due to the lack of animals around the formation; after all, we didn’t see one creature beside the high-flying turkey vultures. Then it dawned on me – what if Roosevelt had visited the monument and had a close encounter with an alien. My guess is there would be an extraterrestrial’s head mounted on a wall at Sagamore Hill today.
As we headed back down the road that took us out of the park, we made a stop at the popular visitor’s venue known as Prairie Dog Town. The 40-acre site is located near the Belle Fourche River and is home to over 600 of the small rodents. For roughly a half hour, the three of us watched as the black-tailed prairie dogs searched for late day snacks and at times, sat up playfully for Tom’s camera. I thought for sure my photographer would throw the rodents a scrap of lettuce from his sandwich, but he didn’t get fat by sharing his food with ground squirrels.
It was late in the day and my two companions were exhausted from their hike around Devils Tower. But we still had 112 miles to travel before we’d arrive at our hotel near Hill City, South Dakota. Vicki was concerned about driving in the darkness as she worried about deer running into the road. Tom and I, on the other hand, were excited for the darkness as we hoped to see another alien spaceship during the two-hour trip.
Once the sun went down shortly after seven o’clock, the journey to the hotel seemed to take forever in the darkness. The monotony was broken up, however, when we drove through the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, as the entire city seemed bustling with excitement on that Saturday night. We saw thousands of people walking the sidewalks and hanging out in bars – Deadwood was alive and seemed like a place we should’ve planned on visiting during our time in the area.
With Deadwood behind us, my photographer’s wife navigated the dark and winding roads that took us through the Black Hills National Forest. That’s the moment Vicki said she was hungry and wanted to stop for food. There was a huge problem – we were in the middle of nowhere and it was late in the day. Tom tried to pacify her when he said: “The first restaurant we see on the way to the hotel, we’ll stop to eat.” Unfortunately, there were no towns; no restaurants; not even a gas station to buy a sandwich. I laughed when Tom said in his Clark Griswold voice: “We pass a goddamn McDonald’s every hundred yards for a thousand miles, but when you really need one, you end up driving your ass off. This is no way to run a desert!” Vicki found no humor in his impersonation.
Located less than a mile from our hotel destination, my two companions saw a Phillips 66 gas station and convenience store that was still open at 8:15pm in mid-September. When the pair returned to the van with a handful of groceries, I noticed they had purchased a package of hot dogs, some buns, and bottles of mustard and ketchup. It looked like it was going to be a Three Dog Night for my photographer.
The three of us were familiar with the Mountain View Lodge as we stayed there for two nights during our 2021 western excursion. After Tom lugged their belongings up the wooden steps and into their room, I thought my out-of-shape photographer would pass out on the bed. But once he smelled the aroma of hot dogs cooking in the microwave, he immediately came out of his stupor.
From my position alongside the room’s television set, I watched in amazement as Tom ate his three hotdogs like he was Joey Chestnut on steroids. But suddenly, my attention went from the dining table to the TV set. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. The 1987 movie called ‘La Bamba’, which featured Lou Diamond Phillips as Ritchie Valens and Marshall Crenshaw as Buddy Holly, was on television. A little over a week earlier, I had stood inside the Capitol Theater in Davenport, Iowa and the Laramar Ballroom in Fort Dodge – two venues where they performed in 1959. And in less than a week, we were scheduled to visit the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay where Ritchie and Buddy performed one day before they were killed.
Even though there were many historically inaccurate aspects to the movie, it still broke my resin heart when I watched the singers perform at the Surf Ballroom and then board the airplane which sealed their fate. Throughout the remainder of the night, especially after Tom extinguished the lights at eleven o’clock, I was left ‘Crying, Waiting, Hoping’ they’d come back, because I just couldn’t get them off my mind. After all, I just had a close encounter of the third kind with Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson – which was a lot better than the close encounter Roy Neary had at Devils Tower.
