The anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn (June 25, 1876) is coming up this month. In 1983, while driving from Michigan to Washington, we stopped there to take a look.
Civil War battlefields, of which I have seen a few, tend to be picturesque places near rivers or streams where there are trees and hills and low stone walls and ante-bellum farm houses and barns. The place where Custer last stood was flat, open prairie covered with parched, brown grasses. It was 107 degrees in Montana that day. After a look through the sauna-like visitors' center (if it had air conditioning, it didn't work), my traveling companion decided she'd had enough and said she'd wait for me in the car.
I decided to take a tour of the battlefield, which was tricky, even with the map provided for the purpose, because of the lack of any identifiable vegetation or topographical variation by which to navigate. The National Park Service had constructed some asphalt paths that wound their way around the battlefield, and I began to follow one. Almost immediately my attention and progress were arrested by a short post at the edge of the path topped with a 5-by-7-inch plastic sign that was tilted up at a 45-degree angle for easy reading. It said, "STAY ON THE PATH! THIS IS RATTLESNAKE COUNTRY!"
Not sure whether or not the snakes understood that they were not to come near the path, I high-tailed it back to the car, and we drove on.
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