A short grass prairie at the Little Bighorn Battle National Monument. in Montana. Photo by Brett Whaley
An old log house story
By Clara Caufield
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today People who pen weekly columns sometimes find it challenging to come up with a subject. I don’t know how writers such as Tim Giago have managed to do that every week for over forty years. Maybe he and others of similar ilk simply have more to say than I do. This week, my inspirational or “gabby” well is running a little low, thus, I write about what is on my mind: my old house, since I have recently been spending much time, money and energy re-cooperating from a home invasion. Actually, it is not mine; I am only the current caretaker for some wonderful friends, Butch and Chris Small who have given a life-estate to this scribbler and A Cheyenne Voice newspaper. It is a log house made of hand-hewn notched logs, first constructed in 1877, one year after the battle of the Little Big Horn. It sits about a mile from Busby (White River Cheyenne community) on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and as the crow flies about twenty miles from the actual site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The first part, now converted into two rooms (an office and cowgirl cave), in which I now live, was built by Samuel S. Busby, a white man who homesteaded this acreage, built a cabin and then a trading post. The cabin sits on a small bluff overlooking the Rosebud Creek which meanders along the backside of the property and behind that there is a large meadow, fringed by sandstone bluffs. That site is historical, though not widely known as such and therefore has not been much disturbed. On the eve before that famous battle in 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Calvary camped in that very meadow, the night before their date with fatal destiny. Many of the Cheyenne, including tribal elder Mae Whistling Elk who now owns that actual ground jokingly say “Custer should have slept in.” But he and the 7th Calvary did not sleep in, eager to rise early in the pre-dawn hours to try and massacre Indians, the twenty mile jaunt from here to the Little Big Horn not considered much of a distance by riders and horses hard seasoned through much campaigning.
Read the rest of the story on the Native Sun News Today website: An old log house story (Clara Caufield can be reached at acheyennevoice@gmail.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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