Wild West – June 2019

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of goods at last arrived on September 20, the American contin-
gent gifted prominent tribal leaders U.S. officers’ brass-buttoned
blue uniforms complete with scabbarded swords, though recip-
ients declined the confining boots that came with them. They
also received peace medals bearing President Millard Fillmore’s
likeness. Indian women and children received blankets, bolts
of cloth, beads and kettles. Also presented with food they had
no idea how to cook, some dumped it on the ground, keeping
the containers.
The Big Talk of September 1851 had achieved an improbable
peace agreement between most of the horseback warrior tribes of
the northern Plains, and white dignitaries reported that attendees
headed home without engaging in violence and often with genu-
ine expressions of friendship and admiration. Recorded on the
skin side of a buffalo hide, a Sioux pictographic winter count
from the period records “Peace with the Crows.”
Several of the tribal signatories soon received invitations to
Washington, D.C. Father De Smet named Lone Horn as one of
the “deputies” who accompanied him to the capital. Taken on an
almost certainly intentional tour of the Navy Yard, they marveled
at the foundries, steam engines and stout 64-pounder cannons.
Reportedly impressed with the power of the whites, Lone Horn
returned home even more strongly committed to peace.
Accidental visitors soon tested his resolve. In the fall of 1852
a hunting band of Nez Perces, allies of the Crows, blundered
into Lone Horn’s camp by mistake amid a snowstorm. Receiv-
ing a cool welcome from Minneconjou warriors, the Nez Perces
thrust a peace pipe on Lone Horn.
He accepted it, openly shelter-
ing the friends of his tribe’s tra-
ditional enemies.
Tribal accounts cited by histo-
rian and Crazy Horse biographer
Kingsley M. Bray hold that Big
Robber of the Crows and Red Fish
and Lone Horn of the Minnecon-
jous worked out an agreement for
a joint-use zone west of the Black
Hills. By 1853 Crow tribesmen
were known to be living on the
central Plains, to which the Sioux
and Cheyennes had, since about
1830, denied them access. In the

winter of 1852–53 Lone Horn’s Minnecon-

jous fell short on food. After subsisting a

while on prairie turnips and wild fruit, they

moved into the joint-use zone shared with

the Crows, where the hunting was better.

There were no objections. The next year

Red Fish and Lone Horn led their bands

into the Black Hills—outright Crow country

—where the tribes feasted together and

shared the same trader, John Richard.

The peace outlasted the tenure of Thomas Fitzpatrick,

who returned to Washington in the winter of 1853–54 even as

short rations spread discontent among the Indians. Congress had

cut the annuity period from 50 years to 15, though it increased

the annual payment to $70,000. But the rations didn’t always

reach the Indians. “The Cheyennes and the Arapahos, and many

of the Sioux, are actually in a starving state,” Fitzpatrick re-

ported. “They are in abject want of food half the year....Their

women are pinched with want, and their children constantly

crying with hunger.”

Fitzpatrick himself contracted pneumonia and died on Feb. 7,

1854. That summer Conquering Bear, who on Horse Creek had
      reluctantly accepted the title of Sioux head chief, was shot in
      the back during a confrontation with a hotheaded young offi-
      cer and his drunken mixed-blood interpreter over a stray cow.
      Retribution, while not swift, was certain. In early September 1855
      Colonel William S. Harney, directed by President Franklin Pierce
      to “whip the Indians,” attacked the North Platte River camp
      of Conquering Bear’s successor, Little Thunder, killing more
      than 80 Lakotas, about half of whom were women and children.
      But the treaty tribes still refrained from fighting one another.
      The Crows along the South Platte were even known to join the
      Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapahos in raids on the Pawnees.
      The Hunkpapas, a senior branch of the Sioux, were an ex-
      ception to the treaty, as their chiefs had not signed it. They
      claimed the annuities were in-
      tended to make the Indians the
      white man’s dogs, and they dis-
      dained the gifts due them under
      its terms. In 1855, as the agent
      at Fort Clark on the Missouri
      sought to distribute annuities,
      Hunkpapa and Sihasapa (Black-
      feet Sioux) warriors actually de-
      stroyed the trade goods. The next
      year, in a ceremony rife with
      political overtones, Hunkpapa

Intertribal Treaty

The peace brokered between the

Sioux and Crows on Horse Creek in

September 1851 lasted only six years.

Prophetic Pictograph

The central figure on this Crow

tepee bears a peace pipe in

one hand and a rifle in the other.