The Little Bighorn and a Pocket Knife

 

 

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

The Little Bighorn and a Pocket Knife

One of the most poignant artifacts to be seen at the museum / gift shop / ticket booth / visitors’ center at the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn is an ordinary pocket knife with a yellow bone handle.  Although buried for decades, it looks as if a little penetrating oil and a few turns with an Arkansas stone could set it right.

This knife, in style similar to the modern stockman or congress, reposes beneath glass along with another pocket knife, buttons, a wedding ring, watch parts, coins, pipes, combs, and other personal items of the sort carried by men in 1876 and now.  All these things, and thousands more, have over the years been discovered in the earth of grassy hills which, except for one terrible day in 1876, have always enjoyed quiet and relative isolation.

In a battlefield museum one expects to see weapons, uniforms, and other bits of militaria, but the non-reg gear reminds us that battles are not fought by keyboard commandos, recruiting posters, or propped and padded geriatric actors with bad wigs and obsequious staffs, but by 19-year-olds who miss their moms and dads.

This pocket knife was probably carried by an ordinary soldier, a private or a corporal.  Sure, it might have been owned by an officer or by any of the lads who won the day; after all, in 1876 many of the Cheyenne and Sioux carried far more modern rifles than the government-issue, and a man who could buy or trade for a good new Henry repeater could also buy a good American or English pocket knife.  But the chances are this knife was owned by a trooper, a G.I.

No man is fully dressed without his pocket knife.  A soldier now known but to God used his good little pocket knife to work his horse harness, repair clothing and equipment, skin and gut small critters, cut his food, cut a fishing pole, sharpen a pencil, open a letter from home, cut rope and string, open boxes, dig for splinters, clean his teeth and fingernails, clean a fish, shape wood, and split kindling, and for therapy whittle a stick around the evening campfire while having a smoke and talking with his messmates. 

And then one day our soldier, exhausted and terrified, was killed in an hour of racket and chaos, along with lots of other young men, both Yanks and Indians, because an American government decided that a treaty between two nations meant only what the president thought it should mean on any given day.

And so our soldier’s pocket knife, along with D-rings, tobacco pouches, shell casings, eyeglasses, belt buckles, arrowheads, horseshoes, and saloon tokens, was left in the soil of Montana.  So were the bone, blood, and flesh of the soldier.

It’s a nice knife.  Useful.  Modest.  None of the “tactical” gimcrackery so fashionable just now.  It’s a knife for honest work, not for show, though our soldier must have been proud of it.  He made a good, sensible purchase at the sutler’s or in a hardware store all those years ago. 

Too bad his leaders, both in Washington and on the ground in Montana, couldn’t have made similarly sensible choices.

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