WASHITA BATTLEFIELD Washita Symposium: Past, Present, and Future November 12-14, 1998

WILLIAM B. LEES
Oklahoma Historical Society

We have heard today about what happened at the Washita and elsewhere from information derived from the historical records and from the stories told by people who recall oral history. There also is another way to know about the past and that is by looking at the physical remains from the past. As human beings we make things to use in our daily lives, and we discard or lose them in the process of living, and they remain as evidence of what happened.

At the Washita, the tools of war and the tools of life in the Cheyenne village are things that could have been lost but that remain as reminders of what happened there. When the interest in the Washita becoming a national park first began, the Oklahoma Historical Society became involved in an archeological study to try to determine if there are physical remains on the site that might help us to understand what and where things happened.

With the passage of 130 years there is always some controversy about where things happened. Different people believe things happened in different places; this was and is true of the Washita. The physical remains, the artifacts, are historical facts; by interpreting them as we do other historical facts, we can try to re-anchor what we know of the past and what we know from the written record with the stories they tell. With the physical evidence we can, with confidence when we do find it, know where things happened; it allows us to reconnect with the past and the past landscape. It also helps us to reconnect with the individuals who made the history. Individual artifacts were made, used, and lost by individuals and have very powerful meaning. They tell us that certain actions occurred because individuals were there, and it is the individual level that represents the greatest tragedy.

The methods we used to do the archeology at the Washita were developed by Doug Scott and others at the Little Bighorn battlefield in the 1980s in an archeological survey using metal detectors to scan the surface of the ground to find metal artifacts. The artifacts were found in a systematic manner and mapped precisely; their placement on the site was analyzed to determine a pattern, if one existed: where things were, where things were not. Clusters of artifacts of the same type become historical facts that we can then interpret by layering them over the written and spoken history and the landscape and that can help us understand an event in a different, and perhaps better, way. The findings at Little Bighorn were substantial and significant. We hoped to have similar success at Washita; we were partly successful and partly frustrated.

The Washita is a site that holds onto its secrets very closely; we found very little evidence of the event. But we do have new evidence that helps us understand the site much better. The evidence comes from two types of investigation, one archeological, the other geological. Vance Haynes at the University of Arizona led a study concurrently with the archeology to try to understand what has happened to the Washita valley, and particularly the flood plain, since 1868.

Our studies in 1995 and 1997 covered all of the current national historic site, plus land to the west, land where the National Forest headquarters is located, and land north of the town of Cheyenne. On the Forest Service land and the land north of Cheyenne we tried to find the location where Maj. Joel Elliott died. We studied the lands west of the national historic site to determine whether it was a possible location of the village. Some Cheyennes and others believe the village was actually located farther west. The only archeological evidence of anything related to the 1868 event was found on the national historic site, with the exception of one Spencer cartridge found north of town that we do not believe is support for the location of Elliott's demise.

In the geological study we focused on the flood plain of the river. Black Kettle's village was placed on the flood plain on the south side of the river. Our initial survey of the possible site failed to find any artifacts, that is, camp debris such as kettle fragments and iron knives, related to the village; we found nothing. We also found very few ammunition-related artifacts.

Haynes looked at the flood plain by doing a series of small core holes in 1995 and 1997 and did some backhoe trenches here and there, trying to determine the history of the flood plain. When rivers migrate during floods, the water scours away earth and any items on or within it. The questions became, "Was the surface on which Black Kettle camped still there? Were we walking on the ground that Black Kettle walked on, or was it gone? Is it possible the whole flood plain had been totally eroded away and that is why we did not find evidence of the village? Haynes' conclusions are that the 1868 flood plain, the surface on which Black Kettle camped, the surface on which the Seventh Cavalry attacked Black Kettle, is no longer present. Since 1868, the whole area has eroded away and the few artifacts we found washed in from the slopes on the sides of the river valley. That means that the ground on the south side of the Washita may be sacred—and it is sacred to the Cheyennes—but it is not hallowed ground and it is not the ground that was there in 1868.

The majority of artifacts that we found on the national historic site property were ammunition-related and most can be attributed to the United States troops that were there. The majority were Spencer cartridge cases and bullets. The Seventh Cavalry used Spencers. The cartridges are important because we can use them to try to learn about where individual troopers were placed on the battlefield. Doug Scott did firearms identification analysis on the cartridges, which is an analysis of the firing pin marks to try to identify individual firearms. Each firing pin has a unique signature just like a fingerprint, and the analysis is the process used in crime scene investigations to determine if the cartridge was fired in a specific firearm. Scott looked at about 107 fired Spencer cartridges and determined they were fired from thirty-six different weapons. We therefore have evidence for thirty-six different troopers. There were between 600 and 800 troopers at the Washita. We found evidence for only thirty-six of them. We do not know where the other troops were; they are unaccounted for based on our research.

We also found seven Henry cartridges (the Henry was a repeater that held fourteen cartridges) and four .50/70 cartridges from a model 1866 rifle. All the Henry cartridges and the four .50/70s were fired in one rifle each; there was one Henry out there and one .50/70.

Most of the Spencers were found on a fairly high ridge overlooking the Washita valley. We prepared maps that show how the Spencers were arranged on the site to show where an individual was during the event. For example, an individual with a Spencer may have moved from one area to another during the course of the event. And all the troops, at some point or another, were up on the same ridge overlooking the Washita valley. The Henrys also were located up on that ridge, but the Henry was not an issue firearm to the United States troops. It could have been owned by either an officer or scout with the Seventh or by one of their Indian opponents. The fact that they were all found in a cluster on a ridge suggests to me they were associated with the Seventh. Likewise, two of the .50/70 cartridges, all fired from the same weapon, were located on the ridge. Again, this rifle could have belonged to the Seventh or an opponent.

We found a number of rounds from a .50 caliber smooth-bore weapon and a .36 caliber revolver bullet, most likely owned by someone in the Cheyenne village. We also found a section of lead that was probably used for casting bullets. It most likely was the possession of one of the Indian defenders of Black Kettle's village.

Other items we located included some harness hardware, a United States infantry button, a military-issue trouser button, and a civilian button. The infantry button could have been from a soldier of the Seventh using surplus Civil War equipment, or more likely, the Native American opponents of the Seventh.

These artifacts, few as they are (fewer than 200 artifacts accounting for less than forty of the hundreds and hundreds of troops there, and accounting for even fewer of the members of Black Kettle's village) provide some evidence of what happened on the site. From the artifacts we can interpret that there was a cavalry position up on the ridge. Troopers either congregated or ranged from that position perhaps in pursuit of people trying to escape the village. We know there were thirty-six troopers in that area for a sustained period. The area also provides oversight of the flood plain, and, in my view, provides good evidence that the village was directly below. The position could have been an offensive position early in the attack, perhaps by Capt. William Thompson's troops or perhaps even by Maj. Joel Elliott's troops. Later in the day when the Seventh came under increasing pressure from Native Americans coming from downstream, it could have been a defensive position. We found very few spent Spencer bullets; if it was an offensive position with firing into the flood plain, the spent bullets most likely would have washed downstream with the others. If it was a defensive position, the bullets probably would have fallen on the adjacent property, which we have not investigated.

We found no hard evidence archeologically about the location of the massacre of the horse herd, but I believe the answer is probably the same as for the village. The ponies were herded into an area on the south side of the valley, but still down in the flood plain. We found some cartridges along the edge of the flood plain that might have been dropped by soldiers firing into the herd, but we found no evidence of a large number of bullets and casings that would have resulted from that event. There is a very good chance they have been destroyed by the actions of the river. Reportedly, there were bones of the herd on the site for years, but they were collected for use as fertilizer; that evidence was removed from the site many years ago.

People undoubtedly have picked up many artifacts over the years. The best evidence we have for that comes from one collector who made a map of where he found artifacts, and it pretty well mirrors what we found in that area. Most of the items we found were buried very shallow; we found a few on the surface, but the others were buried only a few inches deep.

Although we have accounted for very few of the Seventh Cavalry troops, and very few of the Native Americans, we have not found evidence of Black Kettle's village. But we know that the national historic site does contain evidence of the 1868 attack. A lot of the evidence is certainly elsewhere in the area surrounding the national historic site. There are certainly other troop positions, other Indian defender positions, that will be discovered if work is done beyond the area of our initial study. Our study shows that the actual site of the attack on Black Kettle's village is substantially larger than the national historic site; that does not mean that the national historic site is not large enough to tell the story. This was a large event and much of the evidence for it still eludes us. When we find that evidence, it will help us tell the story better. We can then take the oral accounts and the written accounts and put them back on the landscape in a new way that may provide an insight we did not have before.

DOUGLAS SCOTT
Midwest Archeological Center, NPS

Since 1984 archeologists and historians have been looking at battlefields in a nontraditional way. We have been combining oral history from various groups, not only Native Americans but in some cases white Americans, to look at sites from an archeological perspective to build a new picture of the past. The sites include more than twenty battlefields in the United States, everything from the Revolutionary War to the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the Indian wars. In Europe archeologists are looking at Roman sites, the Varius Legions in the Tuteonburg Forest, and the Battle of Naseby, which is the 1645 English civil war site where King Charles lost to Cromwell, eventually loosing the war and his head.

Perhaps the best way to look at archeology on the battlefield is to use the analogy of the crime scene. We can equate the historian to a detective who talks to the witnesses and visits the crime scene initially. An archeologist is the same person as a crime scene investigator, the forensic specialist who gathers the physical evidence. We can equate artifacts with evidence, testimony with analysis interpretation.

There are a series of interesting interactions that occurred in the West in a series of Indian war battles. A series of spheres, connected over time, led to 1876 and on into 1890s, and have relevance today. The first site is Sand Creek in eastern Colorado in 1864. It is repeatedly referred to as a massacre, as apparently Chivington's and the governor's intent was to annihilate the population, something with which I completely concur. William Lees and I and others have been trying to locate the Sand Creek site for more than two years. The traditional location identified by a variety of sources is in the so-called Dawson Bend of Sand Creek. If Lees was frustrated in not finding a lot of artifacts at the Washita, we are even more frustrated at Sand Creek; we have a total of six that might be battle-related. We found a picket pin of the type carried by army men to picket out the horses in the evening, a brass arrowhead, a bullet, and a few other items. That is not enough to say that we have the site. Something happened there, but not necessarily the Sand Creek massacre. The situation is similar to the Washita, but there are plans under way to conduct geomorphology and additional archeological investigations, including non-intrusive techniques such as remote sensing, in the near future. (That work was conducted in 1999. A combination of new historical research and archeological field investigations definitively located the Sand Creek massacre site.)

The Hancock village site, where a Cheyenne and Lakota village was burned by Winfield Hancock and George Custer in 1867, has been identified; at the present time, the Fort Larned Old Guard and the Archaeological Conservancy have purchased the site. Some archeology was done there in 1979, and then George Elmore and the late Earl and Iris Monger did a lot of subsequent investigation with active plans to develop and write up the documentation in support of the National Historic Landmark nomination. That particular site, I believe, is where Custer learned to fight the Indians. It was his first hostile situation with Native Americans in April, 1867. He was with Hancock and about 1,400 troops including infantry cavalry and artillery, when they encountered the Lakotas and the Cheyennes on a little hill. The army arrayed in battle but decided not to fight. Rather the Lakotas and Cheyennes retired to their village and conducted peaceful negotiations the next day but then left the area. It was less than three years after Sand Creek. When Custer and the other elements came in, they burned the village and captured and destroyed tons of equipment. But they also inventoried it, so we have a good idea of what was in an Indian camp at that particular time. What may have colored Custer's view of the world in the Indian fights he participated in after that is that Indians would run away if given the opportunity. After the Hancock village incident, the army was not going to let Indians escape. From there we move to the battle of the Little Bighorn, not that George Custer did not have a few intervening episodes here and there; so did the Cheyennes and Lakotas. They had some engagements on the Yellowstone in 1873 and met up again seriously in June, 1876.

Battlefield archeology got its start as the result of a fire at the Little Bighorn in August, 1983. In 1984, 1985, and subsequent years, we have returned to the Little Bighorn to look at the site, because we can always learn more by studying a site with new techniques of gathering physical evidence. New discoveries in the documentary record coupled with studies of physical evidence often lead us to a closer look at the oral history. At Little Bighorn, some of the things we have found are items from the cavalry, parts of their McClellan saddles and gear. Of course, there is the ubiquitous Indian bow and arrow. The myth still exists of the mounted warrior with bow and arrow circling the troops, but in the case of the Little Bighorn we found only ten iron arrow points. We also found some prehistoric material that goes back to archaic times. People occupied that land long before it was contested in June, 1876.

The most common artifacts found at the Little Bighorn—and actually at almost every other battle site with which we have dealt in the post-Civil War period—are cartridge cases and bullets. The bullets, the variety of bullets, and the same type of firearms were being used all through that period. Some were obsolete muzzle-loading weapons, others were the most modern repeating rifles, and of course by 1876 the army had the .45/70 carbine and the .45 Colt revolver. At Washita we found only about 200 artifacts, at Little Bighorn we found about 5,000. We hope we will find more at Washita and other sites, and I am sure as technology improves and there is a better knowledge of geomorphology of the sites, we will.

The distribution of the artifacts is what helps us understand where things happened, where people were on the landscape. With that, we can reconstruct events. At the Little Bighorn we can talk about how Custer deployed his men in the face of the Lakota and Cheyenne attack on him. He was attacking the village of course, but instead of running they fought, and they fought well that day Custer was fairly well surrounded in short order. The latter part of the battle of the Little Bighorn probably lasted from sixty to ninety minutes before Custer's command, a command of 210, was annihilated. It ended with the traditional view of the Last Stand, and the tactical disintegration of the command, but probably we tend to focus only on the military. What we are talking about are Lakotas and Cheyennes who outgunned and outfought Custer and the Seventh Cavalry of the United States Army. That is the simple statement of what happened there. The physical evidence helped us look at it in a different way. It did not change the end of the battle, it did not change the story, but it allowed us to look at the evidence and reinterpret it in some places to become more comprehensive in its view.

What have we learned about places like Sand Creek, the Washita, and the Little Bighorn? What are we learning about the Revolutionary War battles, the Civil War battles, and others in this country and abroad? We are using archeology to interpret individual behavior from artifact patterns; we have seen what people from both sides will do in combat. We can demonstrate unit positions, in this case not units as military units, but rather as groups of people fighting together, the different cultures fighting different ways. We can demonstrate movements of people or groups around the field and interpret them to provide details of the battle. With multiple sites we can draw even broader pictures of what was happening. As anthropologists, we are interested in what people do as much as the outcome of the event: how did they behave? Why did they behave? We hope to learn something about why people do what they do in a conflict situation. We can analyze combat tactics, not in a traditional military sense but in the cultural sense, and we can ponder the role of individual and personal combat behavior.

There is little doubt that toward the end of the battle of the Little Bighorn, the command structure disintegrated, the command control had fallen apart. That is called "tactical disintegration," a sophisticated term for "Everybody got scared and there was chaos." What we are looking at is a hypothetical model of what we can do with battlefield patterns. We can deal with the individual artifact and look at the individuals, matching the cartridge cases and firing pin evidence and individual signatures and the movement of individuals around the field. We can look at groups, perhaps the group of thirty-six troopers at the Washita. We will figure it out eventually and then we can deal with holistic approaches to the battle.

All of this represents very objective sorts of approaches to dealing with the past. Then we have history, oral testimony, documentary research, and the archeological evidence. We can become very objective in looking at the past. We need to be objective at times. But there are times that we need to think about the people.

Probably the most poignant artifact I have ever seen is a finger joint from the third finger left hand of a trooper at the Little Bighorn with his wedding ring still encircling it. It reminds us that there is no way to objectify history; people were part of history, people lived and died on all sides, in conflict, in peace, and in war. It brings us back to the reality that men, women, and children died in these conflicts. There were widows and orphans left behind; there were families rent asunder on all sides. We have to remember the toll.

In the past six or eight years, we have taken the techniques used at the Washita and at Little Bighorn and applied them in human-rights cases around the world. We worked in Rwanda and in Yugoslavia for the International Criminal Tribunal. In Rwanda there was true genocide, and in Yugoslavia I have seen the face of death and massacres. I say that with a very strong kind of emotion; I bring it to your attention to stress that not all of this is dead and past; we deal with it on a daily basis. We can take these techniques and our knowledge of the past and use them to help resolve the problems of the day. In Rwanda we worked on a grave of 500 people. The man who was responsible for the machete deaths of 5,000 in one place is now in jail for life. The man responsible for the death of 200 hospitalized wounded at Vukovar in Yugoslavia could not deal with it at his trial and committed suicide. We have taken these techniques, this knowledge, and moved it to the modern era. We can learn something from the past that is good for the future.

EDWARD LINENTHAL
University of Wisconsin

I have become quite interested and fascinated and moved by three incredibly interesting examples of memory work that are now under way in Oklahoma: the tragic story of the conflict at the Washita, the excavation of the ignored story of the Tulsa race riot of 1921, and the memorial energies under way in Oklahoma City to remember the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. In his congressional testimony on the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site Act of 1996, Chief Lawrence Hart spoke of the significance of such sites:

I want to talk about the actual site, the very ground on which the Cheyenne village of Black Kettle's band once stood. The view we hold about that ground can best be understood in the context of the Oklahoma City bombing. The ground on which the Murrah building once stood has a sacredness about it. Oklahoma City assistant fire chief Jon Hansen put it best when he said that the site is a kind of holy place, for so many died there.

Hart spoke about his participation in the first anniversary services at the Murrah building when he read some of the names of those murdered:

In the never-to-be-forgotten experience that particular day, I sensed that the Murrah Federal office building site and the Washita site have similarities. First, the site in Oklahoma City is hallowed ground, just as is the site where the village stood at Washita. It too is a holy place, for our ancestors died there. Second, both events were highly traumatic. A discussion of the bombing in Oklahoma City is highly emotional; it is the same when our people discuss November 27, 1868.

These sites and others like them are indeed transformed by the events that took place on them, and while they may be sacred ground for some, the power of these sites is for many people different from, say, Gettysburg. In Oklahoma City we engage a site of mass murder. At Washita we struggle to define the site properly: was it a battle or a massacre? This is not an issue confined to Washita, of course; there are, according to an internal National Park Service memorandum written several years ago, five comparable events during the second half of the nineteenth century when the killing of innocent Indian children and women was condoned by commanding army officers: the massacre at Fair River, Idaho; the Sand Creek massacre; the battle of the Washita; the Marias River (or Baker) massacre in Montana; and the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Washita, of course, became part of the National Park Service in November, 1996. There has been a National Park Service special resource study of Wounded Knee and Bear River. But Wounded Knee is not a National Park Service site; it is on the Oglala Sioux reservation and is interpreted only minimally by the Park Service in a Badlands National Monument Visitors Center and a commemorative plaque at the site of the massacre. The Bear River massacre site is within the private ownership of at least twenty-eight different people and is narrowly interpreted by the Department of Transportation and pioneer organizations merely at a roadside pull-over. Like Sand Creek, the location of the Marias massacre is unknown. The Bureau of Reclamation, which owns the site, does no interpretation. The memo continues:

These sites of shame should all be preserved and interpreted to the American public. As long as the American people receive only a clean sanitized understanding of American history they will fail to understand the horrors and extreme sacrifices suffered by their ancestors.

There are a number of issues that emerge from the document. First, in some cases site interpretation awaits proper location of the site; second, the claim put forth that these are all sites of shame, more like sites of mass murder than battle sites; and third, that remembering these places as part of the national landscape is important, not only to pay homage, but for the civic health of the nation. It is important also to know that there are other sites of shame not related to Indian-white conflict, such as the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857 when Mormons killed a wagon train of settlers on their way to California.

It is interesting to see how memory resists, and then finally accepts in some ways, dealing with these kinds of things. The first study of Mountain Meadows was not done until 1950, and there are still very sensitive issues in the Mormon church about the role of Brigham Young and whether the execution of one Mormon who was in immediate command was a way of protecting Brigham Young and the church. In a wonderful and provocative book, Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, Kenneth Foote addresses the evolution of the memorialization of Mountain Meadows. On the landscape, Mormons sought immediately to obliterate completely all signs of what happened—the murder of memory. They left the bodies to appear as if they were victims of an Indian attack. Then, eventually they were buried in a mass grave in defensive pits built by the immigrants themselves—the victims. The site remained unmarked until 1932 when the Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association, with the approval of Mormon officials, erected a low stone wall around the grave and placed a commemorative tablet; road signs helped visitors find the site. In the 1960s the Mormon Church purchased the site and removed the signs so the site was very difficult to find. The signs were returned in the 1980s, and in 1990 a new memorial was erected, overlooking the valley in which the massacre took place—largely funded by families of the immigrants, clearly a very difficult story to tell.

When I read about this process of memorialization, of effacement and obliteration, and then years and years later a period of intense remembering, and finally coming to terms, I am often reminded of the very powerful statement that the great American poet Robert Lowell made as he reflected on the Robert Gould Shaw memorial that stands on the Boston Common. The Shaw Memorial is dedicated to the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, one of the first black regiments to fight in the Civil War for the Union. About half of the regiment was destroyed in July, 1863, at Battery Wagner in South Carolina; it is a very moving memorial. When Lowell wrote his poem, it was the 1960s when Boston was in the agonies of racial conflict and had not yet come to terms with the memorial and what it meant about the inclusiveness of America. Lowell said the monument "sticks like a fish bone in the city's throat," and these stories stick like a fish bone in our throats.

At Wounded Knee, surprisingly there is still a contested issue, for some anyway, on the issue of battle or massacre, and I frankly did not expect to find the sort of internal discussion that went on at least until recently within the National Park Service. I want to give you a sense of some of the struggles in talking about this site. In 1952 a regional director of the National Park Service talked about the "bloodbath of Wounded Knee, the era of aboriginal revolt coming to a tragic and devastating finish." In 1959 in a House bill to try to establish the Wounded Knee Battlefield, "bloodbath" was repeated. In 1976 Robert Utley, an eminent historian who began his long and distinguished career in the National Park Service as a seasonal ranger at the Little Bighorn, testified before the Congress on a bill to liquidate liability of the United States for the massacre of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee. Utley said the following:

Wounded Knee was a terrible tragedy a stain on our history that we recall with sorrow and shame, It is wholly understandable that the friends and relatives and descendants of the Indian victims of Wounded Knee regard it as a massacre. But "massacre" is a loaded word. It connotes premeditated indiscriminate slaughter of defenseless people. I am fully aware that contemporary evidence can be extracted from the vast body of original sources to support almost any interpretation one wants to place on Wounded Knee. Sound history however, is a careful synthesis of all the evidence in which corroboration of individual testimony is sought, and the possible and the probable and the credible carefully weighed. The historical evidence from both white and Indian sources does not substantiate Wounded Knee as a massacre in terms of premeditation or lack of discrimination between combatants and non-combatants. Assuredly it was a terrible lamentable tragedy, but it seems to me that we should view it in terms of decent ordinary people caught up in the passions and insanities of an armed conflict that none of them intended or anticipated.

There are, in the files on Wounded Knee in the National Park Service historian's office, a host of documents. Some speak of Wounded Knee as a massacre in which the army rode down and killed, intentionally, fleeing women and children. There are early twentieth-century reports by the Seventh Cavalry that defend the army. They use terms such as "engagement," "battle," "final clash," "significant clash." There is a 1993 National Park Service suggestion for legislation for a "Wounded Knee National Memorial," and, it is noted, the 101st Congress expressed support for the establishment of a memorial to those, in the National Park Service's words, "so tragically slain," and it spoke of the "events" at Wounded Knee. Later, the National Park Service argued that "the ambiguous term 'massacrer' (again which suggested premeditated and wholly one-sided slaughter) is not wholly supported by documentary evidence and will stir needless controversy. We urge that the word 'massacre' be replaced throughout the bill by terms like 'tragedy,' 'incident,' 'disaster,' 'catastrophe,' or 'carnage.'"

In a different voice, of course, are the collected oral histories from the viewpoint of the Sioux, the Wounded Knee interviews of Eli S. Ricker, and interviews with direct descendants of survivors of Wounded Knee done in 1990. In an excerpt from an interview conducted in July 24, 1990, Leonard Littlefinger, a direct descendent of Joseph Horn Cloud and John Littlefinger, his grandfathers, both of whom survived, recalled hearing from them that there was a woman sitting on the ground rocking a baby in her arms. They saw a soldier take the bundle from the woman and fling it on the ground, far enough away that the mother could not reach it. The soldier had a rifle and fired three or four shots into the bundle. The mother stood up and began running with her arms outstretched, and then the soldier leveled the rifle on her and fired maybe five or six shots into her head.

We know of the power of Wounded Knee for the Sioux from a book by Roy Rosenzweig and David P. Thelen, The Presence of the Past, that explores how different American communities connect to history. They show that Wounded Knee remains by far the most important historical event for Pine Ridge residents and for the Sioux generally. The local memorial was the historic site that the largest number of residents mentioned having visited, and the only historical event that interviewees mentioned more often than the massacre at Wounded Knee as having had a major impact on them was the 1973 occupation of that site by 200 members and supporters of the American Indian Movement. The authors write:

At least one quarter of our respondents mention the Wounded Knee massacre in the course of their interview even though we had not asked about it, and for most of them the story of how soldiers came in and killed women, children, and babies left indelible lessons about how you can not trust the U.S. government, and how cruel people can really be to another race. One interviewer recalled that a woman told him, "We are still talking about Wounded Knee like it happened today."

Clearly one of the roles for those of us in public history whether it is the National Park Service people or those of us from universities who work with public historic sites and interpret controversial historic sites, is to understand that these events are not past, these events are in fact living events, very much in the hearts and consciousness of people today. If Wounded Knee someday becomes a National Park Service site, how is the interpretation to be done? What is the narrative in which to put the story? Public history at its best engages difficult episodes of our past to stories told at sites, and at best, these places are demilitarized zones where different, even irreconcilable, stories can be told.

To my mind, the greatest success story in American public history and the most controversial historic site in the United States, is the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Between 1876 and the mid-1970s, the site was understood, the story was told and controlled, by people who looked upon the Little Bighorn as a shrine to George Armstrong Custer and the men of the Seventh Cavalry. Whether it was in books or plays, or some of the worst poems in the history of Western civilization, or music or art, or rituals that took place there on the anniversary or on Memorial Day, what was the message of the Little Bighorn? The message was that Custer and his men were Christlike figures who died and shed their blood so that the American West could be opened to civilization, and so that Native Americans could be led "to ways of pleasantness," in the timeless words of somebody who spoke at the fiftieth anniversary, Henry Hall, a self-proclaimed authority on American Indians. For a hundred years that was the dominant interpretation of the battle of the Little Bighorn. It began to change with a classic conflict over ownership of the story when Sioux and others came, particularly at the centennial, and said, "You don't own this, we do, or at the very least we should be allowed to tell our own stories at a public historic site." So beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing today, the National Park Service struggles to engage opening the place to a whole series of American stories. The controversies, of course, have been endless—over a quote from Black Elk, on the visitors center, over what books get sold at the bookstore, and certainly over battlefield brochures that moved from talking about the heroism of Custer and the Seventh to the more recent battlefield brochures that refer to "the last hard efforts of the northern Plains Indians to preserve their ancestral way of life." The museum at the Little Bighorn has changed; it used to be about Custer: Custer on the Plains, Custer at West Point, Custer in Indian wars. The entire museum was about Custer.

That has changed dramatically. It changed because of the energies of the National Park Service. It changed because of the inclusion of Native Americans, not as part of the story but as able to tell their own stories at the American public site. It changed because there were people like Neil Mangum and Jim Court in the National Park Service at the Little Bighorn. It changed because of the work of Barbara Sutteer and Gerard Baker, the first two Native American superintendents of the Little Bighorn who were seen by extreme Custerphiles as defiling and contaminating the shrine of the Little Bighorn. The visceral hatred expressed in letters, even in public documents, is absolutely stunning. Baker has letters from people who say "When that memorial goes up, I'm bringing up a hundred men to tear it down." (It is humorously ironic to me that when I was working at the Little Bighorn in the early years, Neil Mangum and Jim Court, who had really started the energies at the Little Bighorn, were the bad guys to the Custerphiles! And then came Sutteer and Baker—even worse bad guys. Mangum came back still later as a kind of conquering hero.)

What we have there now will forever change the way we look at the Little Bighorn; it will permanently and physically emplace on American soil a memorial that will forever say that this is not only a site for those who come to honor Custer and the Seventh Cavalry, but the Indian Memorial at the Little Bighorn will permanently emplace a whole other set of memories. The Little Bighorn is a powerful and wonderful example of what we can accomplish in public history, and we need to be reminded of the constructive nature of all of the stories that we tell. For a hundred years we constructed a story about Little Bighorn, but the power of stories that become ideology is that they seem natural, they do not seem like constructed stories anymore. When things began to change at the Little Bighorn, it seemed to Custerphiles like a defilement of the sacred and natural story, when in fact what we have is a reinterpretation.

I want to end with a couple of comments about the revision of history. A number of months ago, I had what I call a nice ice cream cone spoil. I was in my den looking at the television (I was looking for a ball game), and there on the screen was Pat Buchanan. That was enough to spoil my ice cream most days, but I kept it on because Buchanan was talking about the Little Bighorn. He was saying "and they changed the name of the battlefield and those liberal politically correct folks now want to wipe out the memories of our heroes of the Little Bighorn and they've given it to the forces... and blah blah blah." By that time my ice cream cone was really spoiled, but I began to realize what a bad job we historians have done about explaining to people what we do.

There are a couple of wonderful definitions, to my mind anyway, about what history is. The first one comes from a Vietnam veteran named William Adams in response to the notion that history is just facts. (What have we been talking about today? The facts of the Washita are not in dispute. What do we make of those facts? What narrative do we place them in? It makes a big difference to a lot of people. We have to choose narratives with care, because narratives say something about who we are and the moral choices we make about what stories we tell.) Adams was talking about the Vietnam War, but he could have been talking about the larger question of history when he said, "The Vietnam war is no longer a definite event so much as it is a collective and mobile script in which we continue to scrawl, erase, and rewrite our conflicting and changing views of ourselves." Adams was not thinking of history as a set of frozen facts, but a script that each generation rewrites, according to its own questions, anxieties, desires, and dreams. "Revisionism!" would scream those on the righteous right.

But there is nothing new about looking at American history in this way. Carl Becker, writing in 1935 (and there is no one on the face of the earth who could consider Carl Becker a so-called revisionist historian), said the following: "Neither the value nor the dignity of history needs supplement by regarding it as an unstable pattern of remembered things, redesigned and newly colored to suit the convenience of those who make use of it." An unstable pattern of remembered things, redesigned and newly colored to suit the convenience of those who make use of it.

What is going on at the Washita and so many other public history sites is exactly this redesigning and newly coloring of an unstable pattern of remembered things, and the enriching memories of those for whom this memory here is visceral and real and contemporary combined with the expertise of the National Park Service in telling public stories, it is one of the stories that will help us enrich our long history and help us understand much better who we are as Americans.