Montana: Cowboys, Indians, Little Big Horn

Well, here we are on the Open Range. Open it was; every so often a cow or three would wander nonchalantly near or across the road. Our job to miss them (reminded us a bit of India). Fortunately, you can see the critters a long way off.

Cliff country near Cody, Wyoming.

And, yes, it was named for Buffalo Bill. Bill was quite a showman; he ran his Wild West Show and Congress of Rough Riders of the World for quite many years, touring the US and Europe.

Yahoo! Note the poster on the left.
An Indian. Bill was sympathetic to the Indians, more so than most people of the time. He had a bunch of Indans in his show, as well as Annie Oakley. Chief Sitting Bull toured with him for a couple of years.Old Trail Town, outside Cody
Two-headed calf. Used to be fairly common at state fairs etc.The Grant-Coors Ranch, Wyoming. Didn't serve whole meals, but did have some suitably wild-and-wooly coffee. They had quite a collection of wagons.

Statue in Billings, Montana Montana State Capitol. Statue4 of pioneers next to the flowerbed.Montana State Historical Soc Museum
Buffalo, on their best behavior, i.e. stuffed.
Buffalo in the wild. There are quite a lot of them being raised now, partly for fun and partly for meat (interesting taste, but they will not replace cows in Big Macs any time soon).There are a lot of these around...

Elk
Sheep, with a watch-llama.

These guys are really intimidating close-up. They will take on wolves or coyotes, and they get along well with the sheep.

Waiting for a Big Mac at the drive-in window, Malta, Montana

A hay-baler; not quite sure how it works. A lot of the land here is good for nothing much but Alfalfa hay, due to the short growing season. Some of has been irrigated at vast government expense; growing hay is costing the taxpayers a bundle.
Sometimes you can have accidents with hay, too. Didn't wait to see what they did about this...

Then, the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Rolling country. Custer was bent on destroying a few Indian villages, on the general theory that a dead Indian was a good Indian. He didn't quite realize that this was a powwow of practically every Indian tribe around; they had gathered together to decide what to do about all these white men taking their land. They outnumbered Custer by quite a lot; He then compounded his mistake by splitting his command into three pieces, one of which blundered right into the middle of the encampments.
This monument has the names of all the soldiers who fell. At that time, they called it the Custer Battlefield National Monument.Each of the fallen soldiers is marked by a white stone.At some point, the Indians said "Wait a minute! We were here too. A few of us even got killed." So they changed the name to Little Big Horn Battlefield, and added a bunch of stuff about the Indians.A US soldier's gravestone, white.

Fittingly, the Indians got red gravestones.They have a series of monuments listing all the tribes who fought here. One of the tribes not represented was the Crows, whose territory it was. They had decided, a few years before, that fighting the White Man was not a paying proposition in the long run.

As a reward, the National Park Service took some of their reservation land to make the Park...

And lastly, a cemetery for the horses.