PARK AND CCA\ETERY 
255 
was at once engaged. Instead of meeting 1500 
Indians under Santanta, he was met by not less 
than 6,000, under Chiefs Gall and Rain-in-the-Face. 
It became a death grapple from the first. Custer 
threw out a strong skirmish line; every one of the 
skirmishers were slain and the marble headstones 
which tell where they fell are beautifully aligned. 
As the main body moved into action, great masses 
of the enemy rose from in front of Custer out of 
the gullies and swung around to his back; on the 
first hillside he divided his command, and sent two 
companies of sixty men down the left side of the 
hill, while' he kept to the right in a parallel line 
advancing into a deep ravine. Here he met with 
terrible opposition, and was cutoff from the others. 
With his thinned ranks he kept advancing, however 
until he reached the high ground where he met his 
death. On reaching the top of the hill, the separa- 
ted command caught sight of their leader and made 
a heroic struggle to reach him. They fell in fours, 
by twos, and singly; you can count the stones, sixty 
in number. Could anything be more pitiful. When 
Custer reached the top of the hill, 1000 fierce 
Cheyennes, under the satanic “Rain-in-the-Face,” 
rose up from the ravine, in front of Custer, like 
ravenous wolves, and the end came quickly. Close 
by Custer’s body lay the bodies of his two brothers 
Tom and Boston Custer, as also his nephew Artie 
Reed, and the N. Y. Herald's reporter Kellogg. 
“Rain-in-the-Face” killed the two Custers, so Gall 
says; he cut Tom Custer’s heart out and he says he 
ate it as he had taken a savage oath to do. Custer 
was next to the last man to die, only one remaining, 
and that was the pretty curly haired trumpeter. 
He would not surrender but kept up the fight, 
after the others were silent. He was found with 
his head near Custer’s feet, and on his pallid face 
the slight trace of a smile. 
The government intends and will no doubt in a 
few years, have a fine national cemetery here. They 
have moved to this spot the post cemetery of Fort 
McKinney, Wyo., and also the remains of the 
victims of the Fetterman massacre, which occured 
in 1866, near Fort Phil Kearney, eighty-nine in 
number. 
A neat little railway station is erected at Crow 
agency, Mont., which is only four miles from the 
battlefield. 
This is the simple story of the battle as inter- 
preted from the the solemn records. It was not a 
butchery but a battle — a mistaken one but never- 
theless a battle, fought with intelligence on the 
part of Custer. T'wo-hundred and sixty-two rode 
with Custer. Two-hundred and sixty-two died, 
overwhelmed. 
J. M. Montgovicry. 
SCENE OF LAST RALLY, CUSTER BATTLEFIELD, CROW AGENCY, MONTANA. 
Sanitation in Burial. 
Bacteriological science has freed the world Horn 
another bogy- — to wit, the pestilential character of 
graveyards. It has long been imagined that the 
places in which human bodies were literally re- 
turned “earth to earth” were veritable breeding 
places of disease. The germs of the maladies 
that had caused the death of the bodies and innum- 
erable other germs and poisons generated by the 
processes of decay were supposed to permeate the 
soil, to rise from it in noxious exhalations, and to 
contaminate the streams of water that might flow 
near by. Great cemeteries were supposed to be 
a serious menace to the health of the cities, and 
one of the strongest arguments in favor of crema- 
tion has been that thus all these evils would be en- 
tirely abolished. Without entering into any contro- 
versy regarding the respective merits of incineration 
and inhumation, it maybe said that this old notion 
of graveyards was ill-founded. Nature reports 
the results of a most careful and elaborate investi- 
gation of the subject which was recently made by 
Dr. Losener. In the experiments the actual con- 
ditions attending ordinary burial were adhered to 
