Sculpted by Gary Casteel
 
1863 Signed and Numbered Limited Edition Monument Replicas
 
After the battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, approximately 39 cavalry horses that had been shot for breastworks during Custer’s Last Stand, were found among the dead.  Since the battle there have been three reburials of the soldiers’ remains to reinter remains exposed by the elements and scavengers —in 1877, 1879, and 1881.  Part of these burial and reburial incidents included the gathering and burial of the horse bones that had been left on the battlefield since 1876.  The horse pit or horse cemetery is the location where battle-related horse skeletal remains were deposited in 1881 during the installation of the Seventh Cavalry memorial on Last Stand Hill.  
  
In 1879, the graves of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s battalion were carefully remounded, and stakes placed at the original Seventh Cavalry casualty sites. The scattered remains of the cavalry horses were collected and placed inside an 11’ cordwood monument erected on Custer Hill as a temporary memorial.  Captain G.K. Sanderson, 11th Infantry, stationed at nearby Fort Custer, supervised the 1879 detail and reported: “…I accordingly built a mound…. out of cordwood filled in the center of the mound with all the horse bones I could find on the field.... This grave was then built up with wood for four feet above ground, well covered, and the mound built over and around it. The mound is ten feet square and about eleven feet high; is built on the highest point immediately in rear of where Gen’l Custer’s body was found…Newspaper reports to the effect that bodies still lay exposed are sensational… I believe the large number of horse bones lying over the field have given rise to some of such statements, and to prevent any such statements being made in the future, I had all the horse bones gathered together and placed in the mound where they can not be readily disturbed by curiosity seekers.” 
 
In July 1881, the cordwood monument was dismantled, and a 36-thousand-pound granite memorial was erected at the same location. Lt. Charles F. Roe, 2nd Cavalry, supervised the work and reported: “I placed the monument on the point of the hill within six (6) feet of the place where the remains of General Custer were found after the fight.” Cordwood from the original 1879 memorial was utilized by Lt. Roe’s detail to line the horse cemetery.
 
The Seventh Cavalry horse cemetery was originally discovered on April 9, 1941, when National Park Service maintenance staff were digging an excavation for an overflow water drainage pipeline that ran from the old water reservoir tank on Custer Hill. 
 
The most famous survivor of the battle was a horse named Commanche.  On June 25, 1876, Captain Myles Keogh rode Comanche at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.  The battle became famous when their entire detachment was killed.  Comanche was found two days after the battle, badly wounded.
 
This excerpt is taken directly from a record of that time:
 
“He was found by Sergeant [Milton J.] DeLacey [Co. I] in a ravine where he had crawled, there to die and feed the Crows. He was raised up and tenderly cared for. His wounds were serious, but not necessarily fatal if properly looked after…He carries seven scars from as many bullet wounds. There are four back of the foreshoulder, one through a hoof, and one on either hind leg. On the Custer battlefield (actually Fort Abraham Lincoln) three of the balls were extracted from his body and the last one was not taken out until April ’77…”
 
Although badly wounded, Commanche was nursed to health and pampered by the Seventh Cavalry until his death in 1890.  Commanche’s remains were stuffed and are located at the Dyke Museum at the University of Kansas. Commanche is a powerful symbol of all the horses killed at the Little Bighorn and today is the only known surviving physical set of remains of a post-Civil War cavalry horse.
 
The marker was erected in 1881 and is located in Crow Agency, Montana, in Big Horn County.