527 - Custer Park - World News
News of Custer’s death and defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 made global headlines. This was, in part, because Custer’s expedition was well-documented by Mark Kellogg, a reporter for the Bismarck Tribune whom Custer invited along as a war correspondent. Kellogg was among those killed at the Battle of Little Bighorn but his earlier accounts chronicling the campaign had been published in papers far and wide. After the battle, Tribune owner Clement Lounsberry telegraphed the news to eastern papers—an event memorialized with a plaque along 5th Street near the location of the telegraph office at the Northern Pacific depot downtown. For many readers, it was incomprehensible that the nation should be celebrating its centennial one day and questioning its ability to fulfill Manifest Destiny the next.
Following her husband’s death, Libby Custer had worked tirelessly to influence public opinion and transform her husband from a reckless and ambitious figure into a celebrity war hero. She wrote three biographies of Custer that perpetuated myths about the Battle of Little Bighorn.One of the earliest attempts to debunk these myths was the 1926 book Soldiers of the Plains written by Patrick E. Byrne, Bismarck resident and former Secretary to Democratic Governor John Burke (1907-1913). But, over the decades, the story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn has been written about time and again and scenes of Custer’s “last stand” have appeared in numerous movies–and with varying degrees of accuracy. In the 1950s, the Mandan Chamber of Commerce even commissioned a playwright to create the Custer Drama as a tourist attraction, which ran for nearly ten years, until 1967.
Remarkably, Mark Kellog’s diary survived the Battle of Little Bighorn and is carefully curated by the State Historical Society of North Dakota. You can visit the Innovation Gallery at the Heritage Center and State Museum in Bismarck to learn more about the impact this battle had on the people of the Northern Plains.