On the drive from Nashville to Moscow, Idaho, to teach philosophy for a year at New Saint Andrews College, we passed Sturgis, South Dakota (near Rapid City) and paid a short visit to the “Custer’s Last Stand” (Little Big Horn) battlefield, between Garryowen and Crow Agency, Montana. And it was just down the hill from the little white crosses that mark where troopers of the 7th Cavalry fell that we met this man and his motorcycle. (Speaking of Garryowen, it’s the marching song of today’s 1st Cavalry Division [the one with the yellow patch bearing a black stripe and horsehead in sideview profile], which absorbed the 7th.) The summer before I started classes at SWBTS, I did a two-week tour as an IRR (Individual Ready Reserve) officer with the 1st Cav down at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos), Texas, and that’s when I learned about the song, which you hear in John Wayne films, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers.  

In the battlefield parking lot (not where Custer parked, but where the National Park Service will have you park today), we met this biker, and, sure enough, he was in the area for the Sturgis Rally, about 250 miles to the southeast, in Sturgis, SD. I stumbled upon it back in the late 1990s, when I’d flown up from Kansas City to speak at an SBC Indian retreat at Custer (yes, Custer) SD. A good many folks on the plane were wearing black leather, and I figured I’d missed the dress-code memo. Turns out, they were on the way to join about a quarter million fellow bikers assembled in an around Sturgis for the annual Harley festival, with more or less wholesome and/or decadent activities in and around town and extensive ride arounds in the region, to include looks at Mount Rushmore and Devil’s Tower. (The guys on the plane had shipped their motorcycles to meet them there.)

I’d gotten there a day early, so I drove up to Sturgis for a look. I was surprised to see a fair number of mom-and-pop riders, one couple with a small poodle riding on dad’s shoulder, the pooch wearing a twinkling-light headband. I thought bikers were mostly inclined to beat you to death with pool cues, but there were family values on display in the rolling promenade up and down the main drag. Here and there, I’d hear a snarky reference to “rice rockets,” Japanese-made bikes, but my Little Big Horn man didn’t care as he made his way down from Canada on a Honda. (Incidentally, Harley-Davidson is trying to recover from a stupid foray into wokeness, alienating their customer base, a group much on display in Sturgis.) It was fun to talk with this amiable visitor from the north, and also instructional: I thought the ‘land’ in ‘Newfoundland’ was pronounced “luhn,” but, Nay, you should sound it as “land.”

As we made our way back to the car, I came upon the Apsaalooke battlefield tour booth, run by the Crow Nation Office of Tourism. For $12, we seniors (Sharon and I) could join a five-mile, hour-long, mini-coach look at the “Reno-Benteen” area, with “captivating interpretation” from the Indian perspective. When I asked them a question about Benteen’s role, I sensed their answer was impatient, and I wondered if maybe I’d offended them by my white man’s naïveté. Sharon thought they might have thought I was trying to get some of the tour without paying. Anyway, their use of a “mini-coach” prompted me to revisit a notion I’d been working on for a few months—that the Genesis 1:28 mandate to “fill the earth and subdue it” reflected more favorably on the settlers than upon the indigenous peoples of the Northern Plains.

To be sure, the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne who engaged Custer were ingenious stewards of the Buffalo. Along the way, I’d seen a list of well over a hundred uses the Indians made of the Bison, e.g., ladles from the horns, awls from the bones, hair grease from the fat, paints from the blood, quivers from the rawhide, rattles from the claws, fuel from the dung, fly swatters from the tail, medicine bags from the bladder, doll stuffing from the hair, and, of course, jerky from the meat. But I don’t think they would have come up with the mini-coach and the gasoline to propel it or the electronics for the tour guide’s microphone given hundreds of years. These were animists, oblivious to the Scientific Revolution, which grew out of a Judeo-Christian worldview. Their contemporary offspring have gained concessions from the National Park Service, which now bars climbers from Devil’s Tower for weeks each year so the Indians may worship on the “sacred” mountain, whose striated sides were thought to be shaped by the claws of a massive bear who chased kids up the magically-emerging rock face.

So yes, Europeans moving West did bad things to the Indians (and their buffaloes); and the Indians did bad things to the Europeans; and the Indians did bad things to other Indians, just as Europeans have done bad things to other Europeans. But, at the end of the day, these settlers had the conceptual wherewithal to make the most of Genesis 1:28 (including the designation and development of a great national park system, making Yellowstone, for instance, accessible to visitors in, yes, mini-coaches and family cars).

Well, a topic for another day.