Webcams, plaque installed at Little Bighorn site in memory of Sonny Gilbert

Gary "Sonny" Gilbert and his wife, Joy, used to go jogging along a 5-mile-or-so stretch of the Little Bighorn site in Montana, where they volunteered. It was an eerie thing, Joy recalls -- almost spooky -- to trace the ground where General Custer and his men had been put to rout in 1876.

"Sometimes, I would stop and look back," she says. "And wonder, 'Did I just hear footsteps? Hoofbeats?' It's ghostly."

Since neither Custer nor his nearly 300 troops survived the events of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the Native American warriors who did never spoke of it, Custer's Last Stand is a military mystery. And to a man like Gilbert -- a Civil War re-enactor and a real-life Marine -- those quiet hills in Big Sky Country and the secrets they held were nothing short of a marvel.

"We took our first trip out there in 1972," Joy recalls, shuffling through pictures of their time at the battlefield. Sonny smiling through a snow flurry. Sonny smiling on a sunny trail. The pair of them punching information into a clunky desktop computer. "And before you know it, we went back for the centennial in 1976," Joy says.

Sonny Gilbert of Cape Girardeau volunteered at the Little Bighorn site in Montana. This year, a memorial plaque was placed at the visitors center in his honor, and two real-time webcams were added to the site. (submitted photo)

By that second trip, she says, her husband was already taken with the history of the place. A real "Custer-buff." Years later, when they had the time to devote, they became National Park Service volunteers, spending months at a time doing gruntwork for free and loving it.

"One of the first big projects we did was putting together a data system registry," Joy explains.

The Army had files on the men who had accompanied Custer on his doomed errand, but boxes and stacks of data cards are of little use to visitors. Sonny and Joy transferred all the analog files to a searchable system. Then Sonny did one better, befriending and conducting research with the descendants of the Native American warriors who fought there.

"It wasn't such an easy thing," Joy recalls, since the naming customs among the Sioux and Cheyenne differed wildly from Anglo-Saxon norms.

"Sometimes, it would even be possible for a warrior to give away his name to someone else," she explains. "So it could be very hard to keep track."

Even so, Gilbert eventually was able to identify more than 1,000 warriors from the battle.

Sonny Gilbert of Cape Girardeau volunteered at the Little Bighorn site in Montana. This year, a memorial plaque was placed at the visitors center in his honor, and two real-time webcams were added to the site. (submitted photo)

Sonny died in 2014 and requested that memorials be made to the Little Bighorn site for maintenance of the visitors center. This year, on the 140th anniversary of the battle, the center honored Sonny by installing real-time webcams along the trail so anyone with an internet connection can get a glimpse of the place he held so dear.

"He had many interests," Joy says. "He was a historian, especially of Western history, and he loved Plains Indians culture."

Having a lasting presence at Little Bighorn would have made him very happy, Joy believes.

"In my opinion, it was the greatest honor he could receive," she says. "Not everybody is going to stop and look at that plaque, I know, but for it to be there, it's a great honor."