Fuel, Little Bighorn Battlefield, and Broadus, Montana

We stayed in Columbus, Montana, on Friday evening. Since I knew that we would be crossing through multiple states on this trip, I had checked GasBuddy for diesel fuel prices. I found that as we got further east in Montana, the prices continued to drop, and were even lower in South Dakota.

We last filled up in Mount Vernon, Washington, on our way to Anacortes, back on August 5. We don't exactly know the size of our fuel tank (we've seen both 275 and 300 gallons in documentation), and we figure that we average about 6 MPG... We usually fill up when the tank gets about 1/2 empty, or between 1/4 empty and 1/2 empty, but decided to press on to a place where the fuel prices were lower.

The fuel gauge is just right of center - at about 1/4 full when we stopped at Sam's Club in Billings, Montana. Note: our fuel gauge doesn't always show us the current fill level, it bounces around a lot, staying "pinned" past full a lot of the time...

... which make the Silverleaf VMSPC help us out a lot with this information. In the lower left corner is one display of the state of our fuel tank, and on the bottom row second from the right is another display.

We can program what we want displayed on the VMSPC display, and for the fuel, we can indicate how many gallons are in the tank... for the one to the right, we have it programmed as holding 275 gallons...

For the one to the right, we have it programmed to 270 gallons (I'm not sure why we chose 270...). Note that the Silverleaf only sees fuel usage by the engine, so fuel used by other components on the bus (generator, Aqua-Hot) is not subtracted from the total remaining in the tank.

We filled the tank - at $100 max per card swipe, and $3.059/gallon, we started and stopped the pump 6 times, putting in 182.54 gallons, taking about 35 minutes in total. If the fuel gauge was correct (at about 1/4 when we started), I calculate that our fuel tank is more like 240-250 gallons in size (3/4 of tank size required 182.54 gallons to fill, so tank size = 182.54 *4/3 or ~ 243 gallons). I think that we should change the Silverleaf display to calculate based on 250 or 240 gallons, as that will then allow us to run other diesel-using items and still have room for error...

The amount of miles we had traveled was 1053 miles, resulting in 5.77 MPG. Part of the fuel would have been consumed by the generator and/or Aqua-Hot. We have also been traveling a good part of this trip in mountains.

A picture after the fill-up... unfortunately a lot of glare on the screen...

but maybe you can see that the display on the left shows 275 gallons...

... and the one on the right shows 270 gallons.

I'll try to remember to correct these the next time we fill up...

I had noticed that the route we were taking would take us by the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, so we decided to stop off there on our way.

This commemorates that location of "Custer's Last Stand" and the members of the 7th Calvary and others who died here.

The white markers indicate where a US person's body was found - the one with a black shield on the stone is Custer's. Many of those who died here are buried in a mass grave on this hillside; the bodies of some of the officers, including Custer's, were transported to other places (Custer's to West Point).

Other markers of where men died down in that valley - many of them were in two's - the guide that we went on a tour with said that it showed that they were fighting back-to-back against overwhelming odds and fighting to the death.

There were also some markers for native Americans who died here. There are fewer markers because not only did fewer native Americans die, but they were carried away by their people and given a proper send-off in their culture, so there were not markers of where their bodies were found.

There is a relatively new monument for the native American peoples who participated in the battle... the man who took us on a tour was from the Apsaalooke people - "Children of the Large Beaked Bird", who are commonly called the Crow.

Memorial to the native American tribes

Description of the Indian Memorial

It was said that the US lost the battle, but the Indians ultimately lost their way of life. They did not believe that the land was to be owned, but the US wanted to purchase the land of the Black Hills from them after gold was found there. The Indians did not want to sell... did not believe that they were allowed to sell the land.

An example of where two unidentified soldiers fell.

One of the things we learned was that in August of 1983, there was a careless cigarette tossed out that started a prairie fire across much of this area. The result was that they did a large archaeological survey across the area, finding artifacts that had been previously undiscovered.

After completing our visit to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, we continued east/southeast on US 212....

Eventually stopping at the City Park in Broadus, Montana for a quiet night of rest!