Crazy Horse & Custer Tour

You head north to Cheyenne, where the Nelson Museum of the West gathers Plains Indian material, cowboy regalia, Charro art and frontier army artifacts under one roof. At the Oregon Trail Ruts State Historic Site near Guernsey you picnic beside grooves worn into solid sandstone by iron-tired wagon wheels. Fort Laramie National Historic Site, a fur-trade post from 1834 bought by the Army in 1849, became the great meeting place of the Northern Plains, a trading stop for Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho and the site of the treaty councils of 1851 and 1868, and a National Park Service ranger will welcome your group before you explore. Driving on, you stop at the site of the Grattan Fight of August 1854, the clash most historians treat as the opening engagement of the First Sioux War, with a screening of Cheyenne Autumn en route. You arrive at Fort Robinson State Park, 22,000 acres of Pine Ridge escarpment country in northwest Nebraska, for a group dinner and presentation at the post, and overnight inside the park at the Fort Robinson State Park Lodge.

Your morning begins at the Fort Robinson guardhouse site, where Crazy Horse was fatally wounded resisting confinement on September 5, 1877, four months after his surrender, followed by the Fort Robinson History Center and the Cheyenne Outbreak Museum, which tells of Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyenne fleeing north through the snow in the winter of 1878-79. At the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, on the site of James Bordeaux’s 1837 post, some 6,000 primary artifacts document the trade that first bound Native and European economies together on the Plains. Crossing into South Dakota toward Pine Ridge, you take up the Ghost Dance, the religious movement that swept the Plains in 1889 and 1890 and alarmed agents into calling for troops; Sitting Bull was killed at his home on the Grand River, on the Standing Rock reservation to the north, on December 15, 1890. Two weeks later, on December 29, the Seventh Cavalry surrounded a band under Spotted Elk at Wounded Knee and opened fire, killing more than 250 Lakota, most of them women and children. Your historian will speak here, on ground that is sacred and visited with the respect it requires. You continue to Rapid City, founded in 1876 by prospectors supplying the illegal gold rush into the Black Hills and known to the Lakota as Mni Lúzahaŋ Otȟúŋwahe, or “Swift Water Place.”

You board the 1880 Train at Hill City and ride a working steam locomotive through the Black Hills to Keystone, feeling the transition from a world of horses and buffalo to one of timetables and iron. Lunch is on your own at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, with time to tour Gutzon Borglum’s carving, and to consider that it stands in hills the Lakota never ceded. A short drive brings you to the Crazy Horse Memorial, begun in 1948 by Korczak Ziolkowski at the invitation of Lakota elders; its 87-foot face was dedicated in 1998, with the mounted warrior and outstretched arm still to come. Late in the afternoon you reach Deadwood, where the Days of ’76 Museum holds one of the region’s finest collections of horse-drawn vehicles and Lakota material, before an evening free on the streets where Wild Bill Hickok was shot at a poker table.

The Vore Buffalo Jump is a natural sinkhole into which Plains peoples drove bison from roughly 1500 to 1800, before the horse transformed hunting; the bone bed below holds the remains of as many as 20,000 animals in readable strata. Devils Tower National Monument, known to the Lakota as Matȟó Thípila or Bear Lodge, stands 867 feet from base to summit and rises 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River, and in 1906 became the first national monument in the United States. Prayer cloths still hang in the trees at its base. In the afternoon you reach Fort Phil Kearny on the Bozeman Trail, the post at the heart of Red Cloud’s War of 1866-1868, the only conflict in which the United States abandoned its forts and conceded the field to a Native nation. On December 21, 1866, a decoy party that included Crazy Horse drew Captain William J. Fetterman and eighty men over Lodge Trail Ridge into an ambush of more than a thousand Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors, and all eighty-one died. The following August, at the Wagon Box Fight a few miles away, new breech-loading rifles produced a very different outcome.

You begin at Connor Battlefield on the Tongue River at Ranchester, where troops attacked Black Bear’s Arapaho village in August 1865. At Rosebud Battlefield State Park on June 17, 1876, roughly a thousand Lakota and Northern Cheyenne under leaders including Crazy Horse fought Crook’s column and its Crow and Shoshone allies to a standstill, and Crook withdrew to resupply, taking his command out of the campaign eight days before it was most needed. Lunch is on your own near the Custer Battlefield Museum at Garryowen, which stands on the site of Sitting Bull’s camp at the southern end of the great village, with a screening of the 1912 silent film Custer’s Last Fight. You then arrive at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument on the anniversary of the battle itself, where on June 25 and 26, 1876 the Seventh Cavalry attacked the largest concentration of Plains warriors ever assembled and Custer died with all five companies under his immediate command, the last of them on the rise now called Last Stand Hill. There is time at the visitor center and the Indian Memorial before you continue to Billings.

You return to the valley for the reenactment staged by the Real Bird family on Crow tribal land beside the Little Bighorn River. It is less a battle pageant than a chronicle: generations of change on the Northern Plains told from the Crow perspective, building to a full mounted reenactment of that hot afternoon in June 1876. Bring a hat, sunscreen and a rain jacket, since the seating is open bleachers on open ground. Your coach returns you to Billings, where the evening is free to explore the city’s restaurants and brewery district.

You travel south into Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, where a local guide takes you to the canyon overlook, the Crow tipi rings on the benchland above, and the Bad Pass Trail, worn by Native travelers moving between the Bighorn Basin and the plains for centuries; lunch is a picnic on site. Continuing to Cody, you cross country where bison once grazed in the hundreds of thousands and newcomers from the East arrived first in a trickle and then in a flood. The town was founded in 1896 by William F. Cody at the height of his fame, when his Wild West show was selling a version of this history to audiences from Brooklyn to Vienna. An exclusive guided tour takes you through the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, comprising the Buffalo Bill Museum, Plains Indian Museum, Whitney Western Art Museum, Cody Firearms Museum and Draper Natural History Museum, the best single place in the country to see how the West was mythologized, and by whom. The tour closes with a chuck wagon farewell dinner beneath the Wyoming sky, a fitting last night for a journey that began on the edge of the plains in Denver.

There will be one morning transfer to Yellowstone Regional Airport (COD) in Cody.