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Chief Four Horns formally adopted two of Lone Horn’s Minne-
conjou brothers. Unlike Lone Horn, one of the brothers had
already fought the Crows.
Still the peace advocates persisted. Among them was Thomas
Twiss, agent to the Oglala Sioux on the upper Platte, who sent
a small camp of desolate Northern Cheyennes from hunted-out
grounds along the Great Platte River Road west to winter with
the Minneconjous and Crows, who warmly accepted the refu-
gees. Accord between the Crows and other Sioux tribes, however,
was slipping away.
Relations between the Minneconjous and Crows abruptly
collapsed in the spring of 1857 under the shock of a bizarre and
violent episode. A group of Crows was entering Lone Horn’s
camp when a young Minneconjou warrior named White Robe,
emerging with a strung bow, viciously sank four arrows into
a Crow woman wearing one of John Richard’s bright
trade blankets. It remains unknown whether White
Robe was a jilted lover or simply a psychotic.
Lone Horn’s camp police intervened, en-
abling the other Crows to leave camp with-
out further incident, but they were too late
to save the Crow woman’s life. The peace
died with her.
That summer the Sioux chiefs held their
own tribal council, a meeting dominated
by angry factions. In the end the Lakotas
voted to expel all whites from the lands
north of the Platte and west of the Mis-
souri, except for traders at existing posts
who stuck to their traditional trails. The La-
kotas would not recognize the sale of land to
whites by other Sioux tribes. They also resolved
to seize the rich Crow hunting grounds west of the
Powder River. The new Hunkpapa Chief Bear Ribs confided
in passing Army surveyor Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren
that the Sioux would keep the peace with the whites but never
again with the Crows.
Later that year Red Cloud of the Oglalas killed 10 Crows at
Castle Rock, just north of the Black Hills. Lacking the numbers
to make war, the Crows retaliated by resuming their raids against
the Sioux pony herds. In 1858 the northern Hunkpapas and
southern Oglalas and Brulés, along with their Cheyenne and
Arapaho allies, moved into the neutral ground in force. That
year Sioux warriors in the Powder River country caught up to
Big Robber, the Crow who had spoken so eloquently at the
1851 treaty council, killing him and 30 of his followers.
The Crows fought back as best they could, killing the odd
Lakota and stealing more horses, but by 1860 they’d aban-
doned the country south of the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers
—the scene of future clashes, including the climactic 1876 fight
with George Armstrong Custer on the Little Bighorn. When
Colonel Henry Carrington arrived on scene in 1866, Chey-
ennes allied with the Lakotas bluntly told him: “We stole the
hunting ground of the Crows because they were the best....
We fight the Crows because they will not take half and give us
peace with the other half.”Historian Bray notes that Lone Horn paid one last visit
to Washington in 1875. At the Red Cloud Agency that September,
amid negotiations aimed at purchasing the Black Hills—a bad faith
deal that prompted the Great Sioux War of 1876—the tireless inter-
tribal peacekeeper argued against signing any land concessions
without consulting all of the Indians who had signed the Sioux
Treaty of 1868. “Don’t you know there are more people out
than here?” he admonished those pressing to sign immediately.
“They should take part in the decision.” (Crazy Horse and Sitting
Bull had refused to attend, let alone sign anything.) Lone Horn
also ridiculed the sellouts over the relatively low price the gov-
ernment was offering for the Black Hills. “In any event,” he told
them, “you are very cheap.”
“Brother, it is well that you have said that,” Sitting Bull com-
mended Lone Horn, when the latter visited the former in camp.
The Hunkpapa leader wouldn’t sell at any price.
Lone Horn made his way to the Cheyenne River
Agency, where he soon died, possibly that year,
though perhaps as late as 1877. Lakota sources
claim he died of grief on realizing his peace
efforts might have forged an alliance strong
enough to have retained intertribal lands.
Many of his followers lived to see the Lako-
tas and Cheyennes crushed in the aftermath
of Custer’s defeat on the Little Bighorn,
where Crows and Arikaras had served the
whites as scouts and soldiers.
“Lone Horn,” Bray writes, “was one of the
great statesmen of the Lakota people.” The
Minneconjou’s efforts to unite the Plains tribes
demonstrate he had a practical understanding
of the developing situation in the region as early
as the 1850s. What little is known about him derives
from Lakota sources, and he has certainly not received the
attention he deserves.
Lone Horn’s three wives—Stands on Ground, Wind and Stiff Leg
—had given him four sons and four daughters. But in the wake
of Lone Horn’s death, it was Spotted Elk—a man he had raised
from boyhood in his lodge—who assumed leadership of the Minne-
conjous. He, too, proved ill-fated as a peacemaker. In the midst
of the Ghost Dance fervor, after Indian Police at the Standing Rock
Indian Reservation killed a defiant Sitting Bull on Dec. 15, 1890,
Spotted Elk (aka Big Foot) fled south with his Minneconjou tribe,
hoping to shelter with Red Cloud’s Oglalas at Pine Ridge. The
7th U.S. Cavalry, forever dogged by the humiliation of Custer’s
defeat, caught up to his fleeing band on a South Dakota creek
called Wounded Knee.Wild West special contributor John Koster has written several
books and numerous articles about the Plains Indians. For fur-
ther reading he suggests Fort Laramie and the Sioux, by Remi
Nadeau; The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times
of Sitting Bull, by Robert M. Utley; and “Lone Horn’s Peace,”
by Kingsley M. Bray, an article available for download from the
journal Nebraska History, by the Nebraska State Historical
Society [history.nebraska.gov].Chief Bear Ribs