Wild West – June 2019

JUNE 2019 WILD WEST 59

MEMORY AND

THE ROSEBUD

PAUL L. HEDREN COLLECTION; INSET: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Northern Cheyenne and Lakota survivors of the Great Sioux War

recalled the fight that preceded the Battle of the Little Bighorn

By Paul L. Hedren

A

mong the ironies of the bloody and transformative Great Sioux

War of 1876 is the differing manner in which Indian survivors

—Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, Shoshones and Crows—

embraced its legacy and recalled its battle grounds. The twist is no more apparent

than in the story of the June 17 Battle of the Rosebud, a sprawling fight involving

all of those tribes and occurring just eight days before the Battle of the Little

Bighorn. Emotions were mixed among the Army’s Shoshone and Crow scouts.

The Shoshones fought alongside Brigadier General George Crook’s soldiers on

the Rosebud, then quit the war and rarely looked back. After all, the Sioux

war on the northern Plains was a world apart from the Shoshones’ Wind River

homeland in Wyoming Territory. For the Crows proximity proved confounding.

The Little Bighorn clash, the most heralded of the scores of engagements, was

fought within the very bounds of the massive Crow Indi-

an Reservation in Montana Territory. Crow warriors

scouted for Crook, Brigadier General Alfred Terry,

Colonel John Gibbon and Lieutenant Colonel

George Custer in 1876, but by stance and proxim-

ity they have ever after been linked to the Custer

story and its aftermath.

However ambivalent but understandable the

Crow embrace of the Great Sioux War, their

attachment to it was not shared by surviving Sioux

warriors and their descendants. For one, the Sioux

do not live in the midst of the war’s major battle-

fields. Rather, most live on reservations hundreds of

miles east in the Dakotas. Moreover, their historical atten-

tion is largely focused elsewhere. In the immediate wake of the conflict some

sought exile in Canada with Sitting Bull and Gall, while others, including those

aligning with Crazy Horse, surrendered at agencies in Nebraska and Dakota

Territory. Both courses were troublesome. The Canadian exile ended fitfully on

July 19, 1881, when Sitting Bull surrendered at Fort Buford, Dakota Territory—the

last of his tribe to do so. Crazy Horse, meanwhile, was bayoneted to death at

Nebraska’s Camp Robinson on Sept. 5, 1877, during the Army’s botched attempt

to arrest and remove him to Florida. For the rest of the surviving Sioux those

early postwar days at the agencies proved little more than cycles of privation and

humiliating land cessions. While the Sioux do recall Custer and the war for the

Black Hills, their primary historical focus is on Wounded Knee, the Dec. 29, 1890,

epilogue that proved far more horrific than anything occurring 14 years earlier.

Northern Cheyennes embraced the Sioux War differently yet. The war bur-

dened them greatly, in attacks on Cheyenne villages on the Powder River in

George Crook