Only salvaged Last Stand flag sold for $2.2m

December 11, 2010|Associated Press

BILLINGS, Mont. — The only American flag not captured or lost during George Armstrong Custer’s Last Stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn sold at auction yesterday for $2.2 million.

The buyer was identified by the auction house Sotheby’s in New York as an American private collector. Frayed, torn, and with possible bloodstains, the flag had been valued at up to $5 million.

Since 1895, the Seventh US Cavalry flag — a swallow-tailed banner known as a guidon — had been the property of the Detroit Institute of Arts, which paid just $54 for it.

Custer and more than 200 troops were killed by Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors in the infamous 1876 battle. Of the five guidons carried by Custer’s battalion, only one was immediately recovered, from beneath the body of a soldier.

And while Custer’s reputation has risen and fallen over the years — once considered a hero, he’s regarded by some contemporary scholars as an inept leader and savage Indian killer — the guidon has emerged as the stuff of legend.

For most of the last century the flag was kept in storage, first at the museum and later in a National Park Service facility.

Made of silk, it measures 33 inches by 27 inches and has 34 gold stars. The flag has several holes, and the red of some its stripes has run into the white stripes. Its once-sharp swallow-tail tips are now tattered.

“It’s more than just a museum object or textile. It’s a piece of Americana,’’ said John Doerner, chief historian at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in southeastern Montana.