Little Bighorn

Canon EOS 10D, 17mm (17-40), 1/180, f/10, ISO 100, edited and altered

As I was working on the Photo Safari board on Pinterest last week, I noticed a serious omission: I never blogged any of the photos I took at the Little Bighorn battlefield in July 2011. The rest of that journey was reasonably well represented with entries on the Black Hills and Badlands, but the main point of going up north to begin with somehow managed to slip into a crack between the floorboards.


Problem rectified. I took this photo looking down from Reno-Benteen Hill into the Little Bighorn valley. From this spot the units of the Seventh Cavalry who weren’t killed with Custer held off the Sioux (who bought time for their families to escape by keeping the troops besieged). The cenotaphs mark the spots where some of the cavalry’s Indian scouts died.

This photo went through standard edits to bring the colors out a bit more, which I kinda hated to do. We were there on a scorching hot summer afternoon very much like the day the battle was fought more than a century ago. So the colors here are more vivid than I remembered them.

I also removed a “keep off the grass” sign. The original photo looked like this:

Canon EOS 10D, 17mm (17-40), 1/180, f/10, ISO 100