More of South Dakota - Day 6

We left the campground around 7 am to beat the traffic. There have been thousands of motorcycles and trucks pulling motorcycles on trailers on the highway since Thursday. We stopped at a Flying J truck stop around 9 am to have a late breakfast. It was awful. The service was so slow that we never got out of there until 10 am plus the no smoking area was only three booths next to the windows.

Here's the view we had as we were getting closer to the mountains.

Our next stop was Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Fortunately it is only one mile off the I-90 and big rigs like ours can drive in there. Most people have heard of "Custer's Last Stand". Well this is where it happened. This is where he and most of the Seventh Cavalry men

fell and died.

You can see at the top of the hill ahead, the monument which was erected with the names of all the soldiers and civilians who died and there is a headstone showing the place where each soldier fell and died.

This is a closer look at the monument and the 'cemetary'.

The headstone with black marks the spot where Lt Col. George Custer fell and died. The other headstones don't have names... it just says " A soldier of the 7th Cavalry died here June 26, 1876."

There are a couple hundred other headstones lower down the hill where the rest of the Seventh Cavalry soldiers died.

I don't remember all the details but in later years, the army reburied all the Officers where they came from and the soldiers were all put in a mass grave. There is also a fairly new memorial to the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians who fought there. I think that's only fair.

Since we had eaten a late breakfast we didn’t stop for lunch. We just ate some oranges and an apple on the road. We stopped around 4:00 pm at the Mountain Range RV Park in Columbus Montana. We drove 395 miles today.