Oglala riders retrace history (127th Anniversary of the Custer's Last Stand)

Billings Gazette ^ | June 25, 2003 | JAMES HAGENGRUBER

[Land_of_Lincoln_John]

CROW AGENCY - The descendants of Crazy Horse trotted across 360 miles of prairie for a chance to charge up Last Stand Hill early this morning.

The 20 riders of the Great Sioux Nation Victory Ride set out June 9 from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. They wanted to take a slow, contemplative path to the battlefield where their ancestors found victory 127 years ago.

It was a chance to remind the tribe's young people of the one unmistakable outcome of the battle, rider Doug War Eagle said.

"We're still here," he said.

Tuesday night the riders pitched tents in a cottonwood grove along the Little Bighorn River, about 400 yards from where Crazy Horse and his family camped. Not far away camps were filled with horsemen and women from other tribes.

They will all be galloping across the battlefield today to mark the Indian Memorial dedication. Horses were vital in Plains Indian culture, and it's only fitting they play a starring role in the dedication, said Kitty Belle Deernose, curator of the battlefield museum.

"Indian people are still very much a horse culture," she said.

The Crow are sending 200 riders, including one riderless horse to honor Pfc. Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier who was mortally wounded in a March 23 ambush in Iraq. She was the first American Indian servicewoman killed in action.

The Oglala Sioux have sent 39 riders. The Northern Cheyenne will decorate 20 horses before riding up to the monument to honor their fallen warriors. The Cheyenne-Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma have also sent a horse, Deernose said.

Mel Lonehill, of Batesland, S.D., is part of the Oglala delegation, "Lokal Oyate Kawilau," which translates to "Gathering of the Traditional People." The group began riding on battle anniversaries 10 years ago.

"We honor our ancestors by riding," Lonehill said.

Horses came to the Plains Indians with the Spanish conquistadors. The Sioux called them the "holy dog," Lonehill said. "The horse came to our people and said he would travel with us if we would respect him."

Re-enacting a horse charge up Last Stand Hill is an amazing feeling, Lonehill said. If the rider is focused and spiritually prepared, he can visualize oncoming enemy warriors, even with tourists as spectators.

The Cheyenne River Sioux riders used their horseback journey to the battlefield as a chance to educate young people on traditional values. During the two weeks of the Great Sioux Nation Victory Ride, the descendants of Crazy Horse camped in sites once covered by their ancestors' teepees. They told stories each night and paid respects to their traditional allies, the Northern Cheyenne.

A support crew drove ahead each day to set up camps. The riders raised their own money but received food and places to stay along the way. The horses spent every third day at rest in a trailer, said rider Scott Dupree. The riders weren't always so lucky.

"I was sore by the time we got here," he said.

The days were long and hard, but spirits surged at the sight of the Deer Medicine Rocks outside of Lame Deer, said rider Floyd Clown. The group was given permission to camp next to the sacred rock formations, which bear prophetic drawings of the battle and the eventual murder of Sitting Bull.

The ride was mostly to infuse traditional values in the young people, Clown said. Marking the Indian memorial dedication is just a side event.

"Our monument is already there," Clown said. "That big, white monument up on Last Stand Hill shows our victory. It shows that our grandfathers were here."

[DoughtyOne]

Thank you for the additional comments.

[vetvetdoug]

I posess a Springfield .69 caliber Musketoon that was dropped by Chivington's Colorado Cavalry at Glorietta Pass early during the Civil War that is currently on loan to a museum. Chivington was a piece of art.

[bicycle thug]

Thank you for the clarification. My wife uses my blindness to her sarcasm to use me as a foil/straightman when she wants to do humor laden commentary. So, I well understand this. ;-)

[Red Boots]

I don't make the case that the US has been fair with Indians. I am not quite as convinced as other people that we were in all instances wrong, or that a holocaust level series of events took place. And that does seem to be the prevailing idea the media desires to get across. A very interesting book in that regard is, "The Invented Indian" by (or edited by, I can't recall exactly) James Clinton. You might check it out. While I am not defending every action by the US, IMO I have read enough first-hand accounts to say that the word savage was not applied through racisim alone.

[DoughtyOne]

Thank you. I should read up on the topic more.

[Ditter]

We have been there too. It is a very special place. You can almost feel things that happened there.

[kms61]

Clearly there were depredations on both sides. And the aboriginals fought among themselves before the Europeans ever arrived...For example the Sioux were originally woodland dwellers until conflict with the Chippewa forced them onto the Plains.

That said, if we consider American culture/civilization to be superior, then we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. The moral equivalency argument isn't one that I find compelling.

What happened in the Americas wasn't unique...invasion and conquest is a near-universal human theme, and the more technologically advanced culture ALWAYS supplanst the less advanced one. We could have handled the transition better and more ethically, but maybe that's expecting to much of 16th-19th Century humans (or maybe 21st Century humans for that matter).

We weren't the worst--I think it's indisputable that the Spaniards hold the dubious distinction, although the Russians in Alaska gave them a run for their money--but we weren't the best either.

The Indians probably fared somewhat better under British Colonial rule than in the American nation-state that supplanted it, and there was much less conflict in British Canada than on the American Frontier...so much so that it was possible to maintain order on the Canadian Frontier with a paramilitary police force (the North West Mounted Police, which later became the RCMP) rather than an army of conquest and occupation, as was necessary south of the border.

I would guess of all the colonial powers, the Indians probably fared best under the French, who were generally more interested in trade than in settlement.

[Red Boots]

Killings there were on both sides, yes, but depredations? Read this first hand account from Rachael Pratt, aged 15 when captured by the Comanches in Texas. She describes what happened to her new born baby. " He was about 6 weeks old, when I supposed they thought he was too much trouble, five or 6 sturdy Indian men came where I was suckling my infant; one of them caught it by the throat and choked it till it was black in the face and while doing so the rest of the men were holding me from trying to relieve my child. At length they pulled it from my arms by force, threw it up in the air and let it fall upon the frozen ground until life was, to all appearances, entirely gone.I tried to recover it, and as soon as they saw that it had recovered a little, they treated it as before several times, then they tied a thong around it's neck and threw it into the large hedges of prickly pears, which are 10 or 12 feet high, they would pull it down through the pears... several times , then they tied the end of the rope to their saddles, and would drag it round to me." This is not a rare account, there were others and worse from this book: Mary Donoho, first LAdy of the Santa Fe Trail. Check out the first hand accounts of the first Jesuits among the tribes of the NE ( A Few Acres of Snow is a book that describes some of these). They were tortured in the most terrible ways imaginable, by men, women and children. I guess one could make the arguement that the destruction of their cultures were equally henious, and perhaps they were, but in all my reading of American history, I have yet to read an account of pure torture, often done apparently for the pure enjoyment of it, done to Indians by whites.Killings, yes, torture, no. Yet unfortunate as it may be, there are lots of such accounts of such treatment to settlers by Indians. IMO, this was a clash of cultures between which there could be no reconciliation.

[kms61]

Read the accounts of the Sand Creek Massacre. Chivington's men went on an orgy of butchery that would have made the SS cringe. Depredations on Indians by whites? Absolutely and in spades.

"Ours" was a civilized, Christian culture, or at least we like to think so. We should have done better.

[satan]

Doesn't matter - if you ain't cav you still ain't shit.

[Red Boots]

If you know of such accounts, I'd like a reference, because they may well exist. I haven't read everything yet, she said modestly, just most of it. Now I have to go for the evening, unfortunately, but it's been fun.

[Red Boots]

I don't think that counts as equavlent, because it was a battle, and stuff happens in war. I'm talking about just for fun, torture.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***Try Washita, Sand Creek, and the aforementioned Wounded Knee. The United States did not
cover itself with glory in dealing with the aboriginal population of North America. No other
way to spin it. ***


Read the book MASSACRES OF THE MOUNTAINS by J. P. DUNN JR.
written around 1888.

Another good one is MY LIFE ON THE PLAINS BY G. A. CUSTER

And THE INDIAN WARS OF 1864 by Captain Eugene Ware.

Also THE SAVAGE YEARS An anthology edited by Shepard Rifkin.

You will never think of the Indians as "sweet little red skinned darlins" again.

The Little Big Horn is in CROW indian territory. The CROWS fought along side the 7th Cavalry. The Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapaho were INVADERS into CROW Land.
Will this re-enactment have the CROWS defeated by the Sioux and Chyennes again?

[kms61]

Don't put words in my mouth. I never said anything about "sweet little red skinned darlins." I'm fully aware of what went on between the Indians and the whites, as I've said in other posts.

The Indians were no saints. You seem to be under the illusion that the whites were. That's where we part company.

[kms61]

Sand Creek was no battle. It was an attack on a camp of Cheyenne who were believed that they were under a truce. The death toll was 25 Indian men, and 98 women and children, many of whom were mutilated. There were 9 casualties on the militia side, most caused by friendly fire. That doesn't sound like a battle to me.

Links to follow later. I'll be away for a while.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***Read the accounts of the Sand Creek Massacre.******


I have. What the Soldiers found in the camp of these "innocent Indians" will interest you.
A blanket fringed with the scalps of white women.
Scalps of men and boys so fresh they had not been tanned or streached on hoops yet.

"...What says the dust of the two hundred and forty and eight men, women, ranchers, emigrants, herders, and soldiers, who lost their lives at the hands of these Indians? Peaceble? Now we are peaceably disposed, but decline giving such testimonials of our own peaceful proclivities, and I say here as I said in my own town, in the Quaker country of Clinton, State of OHIO, one night last week, I STAND BY SAND CREEK!"
J. M. CHIVINGTON 1883

"Colonel Chivington's speech was received with an applause from every pioneer which indicated that they, to a man, heartily approved of the course of the colonel twenty years ago, in the famous affair in which many of them took part, and the man who applied the scalpel to the ulcer which bid fair to destroy the life of the new colony, in those critical times, was a doubt the hero of the hour."
---ROCKEY MOUNTAIN NEWS 1883

[in the Arena]

I just finished "Son of the Morning Star", quite a history lesson...

[kms61]

Irrelevant even if true, which is doubtful. Your source is hardly a credible one. Nevertheless, attacking under a flag of truce, and massacring women and children was a criminal act. Not unlike Waco.

I never thought I would run across anyone who actually defended the mass murderer Chivington. May he burn in Hell.

[MARTIAL MONK]

The death toll was 25 Indian men, and 98 women and children

And those missing men were down at the sports bar shooting pool? Denver and surrounds were being bloodied by raids. Unspeakably vicious raids. Women and children. At least some raiders had been traced to the Sand Creek camp. Those scalps were fresh.

Chivington's men were scum and they committed atrocities. They cut off womens' breasts for coin purses. They were barbaric but it didn't happen in a vacuum.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***Irrelevant even if true, which is doubtful. ***


Are you saying fresh scalps in a "peaceful" Indian camp are irrelevant?
I suppose when Custer found slaughtered settlers and followed their murderer's tracks in the snow back to the Washita camp (where he witnessed a white captive child taken in the raids by these "peaceful" indians disemboweled by a squaw) is irrelivant also!

When Captain Ware went west in the spring 1864 he found the plains at peace. He was informed by older soldiers that the Indians would go back on the warpath when the grass was tall enough to support a war pony! They did.


The soldiers later cursed Chivington because he padded the number of Indian dead at Sand Creek. They hoped he had killed more!

You doubt this evidence?
Report on the Conduct of the War 1864-65 pt 3.
Report of 1867 on Condition of Indian Tribes.
Senate Document No. 26, 1866-67
Documents from Interior Department concerning Custer's Fight on the Washita. Sen. Doc. No 13, 1868-69.
Documents from War DEpartment concerning Custer's Fight on the Washita. Sen Doc No. 18, 1868-69.

You have been getting your history from too much Hollywood trash like,
TOMAHAWK
SOLDIER BLUE
LITTLE BIG MAN.