“The Calahan Family Salutes General Custard” by Mike Calahan

March, 1981

We were driving from Colorado to Washington, moving for the third time that year alone, when a sudden change of plans occurred to my dad. Instead of driving west into Utah, then up to Idaho, he decided to drive north to Montana. What I could make out, based on what my dad told us between cigarette puffs and hacking coughs, was that we were on our way to honor the unspecified deeds of a few, or maybe several, unnamed individuals of vague and generalized historical significance.

Minutes turned into hours, and hours…well, turned into more hours. Entertainment at this time was as elusive as an adult in a Charlie Brown cartoon. There were no smartphones, no products that enabled individual consumption of media. We were left to our imaginations and worse… conversation. Eventually, all four members of the Calahan family took to humming TV show theme songs in unison. The Love Boat, Laverne & Shirley, Three’s Company, and so on. It was around the time my dad and I started in on what my sister termed the ‘gazillionth rendition in a row’ of the Bonanza theme, my dad suddenly announced, “We’re here!”

“Here” was Crow Agency, Montana, and the Custer Battlefield National Monument.

We parked the car and headed toward the visitor center. A recording boomed from speakers that surrounded the predominantly empty parking lot, describing the scene of 1876 as “…a horrible stench,” adding that “…news of the Custer massacre brought outrage and a demand for vengeance from the populace back east.”

It was the phrase ‘a horrible stench’ that evoked something rare in my 9-year-old brain. Suddenly, my enthusiasm for learning had risen from its crypt of indifference and found itself ravenous for knowledge. I had so many questions! Was there a lot of blood? How much blood? Did people slip on the blood? Can we still see the blood? If we find any blood, can we keep it?

I asked my dad for details of what had become known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. “Well, this is the place where General Custard fought a ton of Indians,” my dad explained. “Custard’s men fought like real heroes, but there were too many Indians, and they all got killed.”

“How many Army guys died?”

My dad shrugged. “A thousand or so. Sounds like a lot, but there was somethin’ in the neighborhood of ten thousand Indians.”

Immediately, I scanned the Montana horizon for any indication of housing tracts, apartment buildings, or even mobile home parks, but there was nothing. Whatever neighborhood that had once been home to 10,000 Indians had disappeared long ago.

Inside the visitor’s center, accurate information was delivered via the press of a button located beneath exhibits of miniature battlefields and artifacts encased in glass. Through the recordings, I learned that, in reality, a total of 268 US soldiers had been outnumbered 5:1 by the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne.

My dad and I looked upon the miniature battle of the Little Bighorn, strewn with its miniature bodies, its miniature violence, and its miniature sorrow, with the emotional weight usually brought about by a really good documentary. “They sure were brave,” my dad muttered.

For the next several seconds, I watched the balding, paunchy Calahan patriarch explore a thought; a relatively deep(-ish) thought for him, as evidenced by his biting the inside of his lip and chewing a hangnail from a nicotine-stained index finger. “Ya know somethin’,” he finally said. “I bet they woulda won if they’da had better guns.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “and helicopters!” For that one, I got an approving pat on the back.

For the next leg of our historical morbidity, we took a stroll along the actual battlefield.

At the end of a paved road, we paused at the memorial: a granite obelisk listing the names of those who perished (well, only “ the good guys” as my dad called them). I looked up and down each of the monument’s four sides, scanning a first name here and a last name there. I felt my dad’s hand on my shoulder and, as I turned, I saw a rare look of solemnity on his face. For the first time I could remember that didn’t involve him listening to a Marty Robbins song, my dad actually seemed choked up. He looked down at me with pursed lips and the slightest of nods, then turned us both around to soak in Little Bighorn.

“This is lame,” my sister, Michele, said. She then left to wait in the car instead of “glorifying a murderer” whom, at the time, I took to mean Sitting Bull. With my mom back at the visitor center, filling her purse with free pamphlets from the rack of local attractions, my dad and I walked to the exact spot where Custer and his men perished.

As we looked upon the landscape of yellow hills that had once been drenched in blood and remained a reminder of man’s inhumanity toward man, I did the only thing I could think of to honor the men whose sacrifice my dad felt such kinship with. Instead of Taps, I hummed a slow, maudlin version of the Bonanza theme. This awarded me a second pat on the shoulder from my dad. Touching wasn’t employed often in the Calahan family, so those rare times really meant something special.

As my dad surveyed the landscape with as much a sense of pride and valor as any 20th-century non-veteran could affect, all I could imagine was the possibility of an alternate ending.

What would it have taken for the battle to have ended differently? I mean, if someone, say, a 9-year-old boy trained in Special Ops, had gone back in time to 1876 with modern weapons, all of those soldiers would still be alive. Imagine the look on Sitting Bull’s face when this elite team of pre-adolescent commandos from some sort of branch of the military that wasn’t important right now came swooping in with its time machine helicopter, machine guns blazing, flamethrowers flaming, and grenade launchers…grenading. Imagine the explosions and the gun flares and the slow motion and the…

“What are you smilin’ about?” my dad asked.

Embarrassed by the truth that I was relishing in the euphoria of my imagining what could easily have been a semi-decent action movie, I instead put on a wholesome grin, one that accentuated my dimples, and said, “Oh, uh, because the Army guys are all in Heaven, now.”

“The Indians ain’t,” my dad scoffed. “They believe in the happy huntin’ ground.”

If my dad’s hunting trips were any indication, I imagined this happy hunting ground was not only rife with fish and game but also with flatulence, dirty jokes, and Igloo coolers filled with Coors.

Soon, it was time to leave.

As we drove away, we all, except for my dad, belching and coughing, remained quiet. In fact, the silence of the next few hours was only interrupted by the occasional, whispered pew-pew-pew or rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat sounds I muttered as I relived what, no doubt in my mind, was an historical but cinematic battle.

Later that night, as I lay in the motel bed I was forced to share with my dad (my mom and sister sharing the other), I stared up at the dingy ceiling and contemplated what were, for me, also deep(-ish) thoughts. It dawned on me that the battle itself, the utter waste of human life, was all for nothing. With a shrug, I had to assume that after finally getting their own land and living in real houses with bathrooms and radios, the Indians must have realized how wrong they had been to attack Americans.

After all, the Americans just wanted to be free. What right did they have to take that away through force?