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The Custer Battlefield National Monument, for which even the name is controversial, marks the site where George Armstrong Custer, a highly ambitious United States Army officer who benefitted throughout his career from a quick trigger finger and an disinclination to do anything by half measures, died with several hundred of his soldiers. It is a site that accurately embodies the changing visions of the American West, including both a view of the West as a playing ground for imperialistic westward expansion, and an equivalent Native American perspective on the site as the resting ground for Indian hopes and aspirations. While the ArmyÕs losses were commemorated at the site, not until recently were the many Indian dead so noted.
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