Garryowen, Montana

The hamlet of Garryowen carries the name of an old Irish drinking song, and the reason is grim. Garryowen was the regimental march of George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalry, and this is where the battle began.

On the morning of June twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-six, Sitting Bull's camp of Hunkpapa Lakota stood here on the Little Bighorn River. Custer divided his regiment and sent his own column along the ridge to the east, planning a pincer attack. Instead, warrior forces turned and overwhelmed each detachment in turn. Custer and the roughly two hundred ten men under his immediate command were killed within hours. A Custer Battlefield Museum now stands at this spot, holding hundreds of artifacts from the Indian Wars period alongside photographs by D.F. Barry. In front of it stands a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, erected in nineteen twenty-six on the battle's fiftieth anniversary, when survivors from both sides gathered here together to dedicate it.