Allegedly, there’s an item in the military code of conduct suggesting that no one under orders is obliged to obey any that are illegal or immoral. Clearly, if history is an accurate guide, there’s nothing in there about stupid orders.
Thus, if I’d been a soldier in Lt. Col. George Custer’s 7th Cavalry as it trotted toward a confrontation on the Little Bighorn River with an assumed 800 Native Americans who Custer planned to capture, and overheard the comment from his scout Mitch Bouyer that morning — “General,” (Custer like to be called “general,” his Civil War brevet appointment), “I’ve been with these Indians for 30 years, and this is the largest village I have ever known of” — I think I’d have taken a good look around at the available cover, which is pretty skimpy, and developed a strong desire to become an eastward-bound courier, swiftly bearing messages of the general’s heroism back to the waiting newspapers of St. Louis.
The whole operation reminds me of that great scene from Jeremiah Johnson, in which a huge grizzly chases Jeremiah into a trapper’s cabin. Slamming the door, the trapper outside hollers, “You skin that one, pilgrim, and I’ll go find another’n.” In the face of a hostile force far larger than what he’d expected, Custer divided his own into three pieces and, assuming the enemy would try to flee, urged Maj. Marcus Reno’s companies, the first of the trio, to “bring them to battle.”
In a serious uh-oh moment, Reno shortly discovered, to his discomfort, that the “hostiles” were “present in force and not running away.” A swift redeployment to a grove of trees by a bend in the Little Bighorn provided some cover — which the industrious and thoroughly irritated warriors tried to ignite — though it was but the first in a series of strategic fiascos that ended shortly afterward with the famous Last Stand.
The monument to the fallen soldiers still dominates Last Stand Hill, with small white slabs planted on the slope below indicating where each man’s body was found, a black stone marking the final location of Custer’s mortal remains. Another, circular, memorial nearby is dedicated to the warriors of the long-ago tribes who, pushed and harassed beyond endurance, decided to make their own stand here.
A little over an hour’s drive west of this somber hillside scene the Bighorn River spews noisily through Yellowtail Dam, a graceful concrete arch that impounds 70 miles of the river, generates 250,000 kilowatts of power at peak capacity, and as an unintended (but delightful) consequence, feeds cold water from the bottom of the reservoir into the river below, creating what is often called “one of the finest wild trout fisheries in the United States.”
In just a couple of days, if I manage to make my somewhat sketchy connections to Billings, my dear friend Baird and I will be perched in opposite ends of a drift boat on that river, enjoying what many (me included) consider one of life’s greatest pleasures: catch-and-release fly fishing on a beautiful river.
The mystery of fishing is what sets it aside from every other field sport. Bird-hunting, you know your dog cannot possibly flush a partridge or pheasant the size of a condor; deer-hunting, you may encounter a bear, but nothing close to the size of a rhino. Fishing, though — aha! — you can never be sure what’s down there, or what’s going to happen next. I’ll never forget a Sunday afternoon in 1950 on the Connecticut River just above Turners Falls when, fishing with my prep school roommate, something unseen took my bait. Whatever it was swam slowly, diagonally, inexorably upstream and pulled out all my 40-pount-test line to the very end, snapping it off at the reel and disappearing with it.
I know that’s not likely to happen on the Bighorn. No sturgeon or catfish there, as far as I can tell. But someone caught a 16-pound rainbow here in the recent past. I’d never land one that big, but just to get a look at one like that would be an ineffable, and sufficient, treat.
That, however, is not what makes our few days on the river such a rich experience. The land is so different — pale yellow banks of silt and loess, lined with willows, cottonwoods, Russian olive; wide, open prairie with hills rising beyond the river’s meander belt; and the familiar voice of one of my oldest friends in the other end of the boat. I can fish if I like. I often just sit and watch; either is just as enjoyable. There are few thrills in life as electric as the heavy thud of a large, aggressive fish grabbing one of the tiny flies at the end of my leader, or watching the line zip this way and that through the water. The pleasure of it all is enhanced by the many twists, turns and odd chances it’s taken to get here.
I suppose Custer felt something less than pleasure as it all went south for him; but for me, as the afternoon winds down toward my date with Jack Daniel, and I think of my own approaching end, the old Anglican evening prayer suffuses my consciousness: “… in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
