Custer's ghost asks: Where have all the flowers gone?

Last week, the Wyoming Public Media page featured an article by Kamila Kudelska about a new book, Wyoming History in Art, compiled by the Wyoming State Historical Society. The book showcases paintings by Osage, Wyo., native Dave Paulley, who passed away in 2020. The paintings were commissioned in 1989 to celebrate the state's centennial. Historian Jeremy Johnston wrote the narratives that accompany the paintings. To buy a book, send an email to linda@wyshs.org

The WPM feature story showed one of the paintings, "Custer's Troops in Floral Valley, 1874." It shows troopers picking flowers and making bouquets. In the background, a wagon train rolls. At first, I thought it was a fanciful scene. "How interesting. The troopers killed at the Little Bighorn are picking flowers." I thought it might be some metaphor to what was to come two years later in another valley.

I hadn't yet read the book so I didn't know that it was a recreation of an historical scene. The soldiers are some of the 1,000-some that made up Custer's Black Hills Expedition. More than 100 wagons hauled supplies from Fort Abraham Lincoln near present-day Bismarck, N.D., down through northeast Wyoming and into the Black Hills. They encountered a flowered valley along the way. After weeks of barreling through the treeless plains of N.D., they were entranced by the wildflowers and stopped to pick them, make bouquets, and fashion wreaths for their mounts. 

I've lived in Wyoming 30 years and never heard this wonderful story. History is so filled with oddities. We see the echoes of those events down through our times. Custer was charged with exploring the area that hadn't yet been properly mapped by white folks. As an aside, Pres. Grant's staff mentioned that if he finds any gold, be sure to let The Great White Father know before telling anyone else.

Custer found gold among the wildflowers and all hell broke loose. A gold rush commenced and lands sacred to Lakota and other Plains tribes were invaded by rough men with demonic gleams in their eyes. Treaties had insured that the Black Hills wound remain in Indian hands. The Plains War erupted in earnest. It led to the pillaging of the Black Hills and the enmity of the tribes. Some 200 of the flower gatherers followed Custer into an ambush at what Native Americans call the Battle of Greasy Grass. 

It eventually led to the killing and atrocities that culminated at Wounded Knee. And the beat goes on.

The painting deserved a poem. So I wrote one, a prose poem. It was be a prose poem or it may be flash fiction. There doesn't seem to be a clear dividing line and maybe that's a good thing. 

Custer Botanicals

Custer’s Troops in Floral Valley, July 1874. It’s beautiful this painting by David Paulley. Oil on canvas, 24 by 16 inches. Mounted troopers on the Black Hill Expedition pick wildflowers under an azure sky of a Dakota Territory summer. A bearded trooper on a black horse clutches a bouquet of Goldenrod, Blackeyed Susan, blue flax. He looks behind him, over his bedroll, sees his young love back home run to him through Floral Valley. She wears a yellow dress, looks just as she did when her lover left for the West’s Indian Wars. She wants to send him away with a final kiss. She smiles, tears streak her skin. The sun dodges behind a cloud and when it reappears two years on, his love’s shining face is replaced by the paint-streaked dusk of a Lakota Sioux warrior. He wields a stone war club and runs to the fight. A revolver replaces the flowers in the soldier’s hand. The warrior charges. The soldier fires. The warrior falls, face pressed into the field of mashed flowers. The soldier looks up and more Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho charge him. They scream. Why are they screaming? Seemed like only moments ago he picked flowers in a valley, surrounded by fellow flower-mad troopers. In the distance, wagons rolled north, loaded with guns and butter, trinkets and liquor to becalm the natives. “It was a strange sight,” Custer reported to Congress in 1875, “my men with beautiful bouquets in their hands, while the head-gear of the horses was decorated with wreaths of flowers fit to crown the queen of May.” In Montana, 2021, Custer’s soldiers lie beneath the prairie, reach out for the roots of tickseed and yarrow, sunflower and beardtongue. Tell us your flower secrets. Tell us what it feels like among the bees and butterflies and sweet summer rain. Let us hold you again, wreathe our horses with you, inhale the blossoms of Floral Valley on this slow march to Valhalla.