Great Warriors II

The story of Olive Oatman's captivity with the Mohave tribe in Arizona has been retold many times, the details often garbled in the telling.  Olive Ann Oatman was born in Illinois in 1837 to a large family with at least 6 siblings, 3 brothers and 3 sisters.  In 1850, the family joined a wagon train bound for California.  As so often happened with tragedy-stricken wagon trains, Oatman's party, under her father's leadership, split with the main group near Santa Fe, New Mexico.  When they reached Maricopa Wells in what is now Pinal County, Arizona, they were warned that the stretch ahead was not only inhospitable country, but also tracked through the range of several tribes who did not welcome trespassers.  The Oatman family decided to proceed further, alone, while the other families remained at Maricopa Wells.  About 80 miles away from what is now Yuma, Arizona, the group was approached by Native Americans.  In her memoirs and to interviewers years lat...

While European settlers tended to set boundaries with markers, fences or local landmarks such as boulders and creeks, Natives often looked to larger landmarks such as mountains to designated the land within their home and hunting ranges.  Hesperus Peak is the highest summit in the La Plata Range of the Rocky Mountains.  The mountain towers over 13,000 feet above sea level, making it a favorite peak to climb.  It's located in the San Juan National Forest near Mancos, Montezuma County, Colorado, which means that it's open to anyone who wants to try.  However, this mountain is also sacred to two Native tribes, both of whom claimed the La Plata Mountains as home.  The Utes and the Navajos were traditional enemies, in part because both claimed this beautiful country as their own.  To the Navajo, Hesperus Peak is the sacred northern boundary of their homeland, the Dinetah.  The mountain is known as Dibe Ntsaa and is said to contain deposits of jet stone....

An early outpost on the frontier that served as a staging area for campaigns against the various tribes, a focal point for peace parleys and a base for several famous military units, including the 10th U.S. Cavalry, many buildings of this military post have been preserved for posterity. Fort Larned, in what is now Pawnee County, Kansas, began as an army camp, the Camp on Pawnee Fork, a junction of the Pawnee and Arkansas Rivers, to guard travelers along the Santa Fe Trail.  It saw so much activity with local tribes that in 1860, it was renamed Camp Alert, which with a post of about 50 soldiers, it had to be.  The post was later moved upstream on the Pawnee River and renamed Fort Larned, honoring Benjamin F. Larned, a U.S. Army Paymaster who served there in the Army 1854-1862, but never at the post named in his honor.  The first buildings on the site were constructed of adobe, including an officer's quarters, storehouse, barracks, guardhouse, laundres...

The Comanche were one of the more ruthless tribes in the west, ranking with the Apaches and the Sioux in what they were prepared to do to captives if and when their territory was violated.  Seen from their vantage point, the tactics they employed, including scorched earth and torture, seemed the only way to stop the inevitable.  They had no doubt heard for decades how European advancement in America had brought nothin but disease and displacement to many tribes, often to the point of extinction, and were determined that they wouldn't be the next on the list.  And, it wasn't just Whites who got on their bad side.  Other Native tribes also took the Comanche seriously and most were willing to steer clear of Comancheria, the hunting range of the Comanche in what is now Texas and New Mexico. American settlers weren't so easily dissuaded, pushing deeper onto the staked plains which formed the heart of Comancheria, and meeting any attacks by Comanche war parties with the ...

Chiefs of the various Plains tribes not only had to keep peace with White and sometimes Mexican settlers, they also had to be alert to quickly tamp down rivalry with other tribes.  A war chief was often a skilled diplomat in order to survive.  Little Raven, c 1810-1889, who also went by the name Hosa or Young Crow, was all of the above. Little Raven was born about 1810 on the banks of the Platte River in what is now Nebraska.   How he rose to prominence among his people isn't known but by 1840, he mediated a peace between the Southern Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache.  At the time he was about 30, but already known as a commanding and convincing orator.  By 1857, he understood that the traditional nomadic life of hunting buffalo on the Plains was coming to an end and his people would have to supplement their resources.  Little Raven requested agricultural tools and instruction from U.S. authorities.  The Pike's Peak Gold Rush of 1858 so...

This treaty was actually three treaties in one, with the Comanche, Kiowa-Apache, the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho.  In reality, the treaties never took effect and had little impact on the conflicts between the Army and Natives in the West. In July, 1867, Congress established the Indian Peace Commission to determine ways and means of ending the conflict with the Plains tribes.  The Commission established which tribes it deemed friendly and which tribes it deemed hostile, and slated those people for deportation to reservations in Indian Territory.  It did determine, however, that the government had not treated the various tribes honestly and fairly and that much of the conflict had been preventable.  It called for more of the same, treaties ceding more land from the western tribes.  The Commission called a treaty parley with the interested tribes for Fort Larned, Kansas.  When the commissioners, including William T. Sherman (yes, that Sherman), Alfred H. T...

This people's name for themselves meant the Real People.  However, they are often known by the neighboring Waco word, Tonkaweya, meaning They Stand All together.  Members of the tribe live today in Texas and Oklahoma.  The Tonkawa language is extinct today, with tribal members speaking English.  The Tonkawa most likely originated in northeastern Oklahoma, though by 1700, the Apache had put pressure on them to move to the Red River, which forms the boundary of what is now Texas and Oklahoma.  The Tonkawas were soon in conflict with many local tribes, including Bidais, Caddos, Wichitas, Comanches and Yojuanes.  There were accusations against the Tonkawa of cannibalism of enemies, a practice which many other Native people found especially threatening and repugnant.  The tribe eventually migrated further into Texas and Mexico, allying with the Lipan Apache.  In 1824, the Tonkawa entered into a treaty with Stephen F. Austin to provide protection of A...

The early reservation era among Native people was traumatic in many ways.  Not only were some people deported hundreds of miles into country that they did not know and weren't prepared to live in, but they also lost contact with important rituals and life-ways that had been practiced for centuries.  Despite this upheaval, some older tribal members were able to keep the flame alive and preserve important knowledge, and they had help from unusual allies.  Buffalo Bird Woman, 1839-1932 lived on Fort Belknap Reservation.  Despite the pressure from reservation authorities to assimilate, she was able to keep her traditional culture alive, gardening, food preparation, weaving and oral history.  She told much of her knowledge to Gilbert Wilson, a Protestant missionary living among the Hidatsa people.  Wilson and his brothers were Presbyterian ministers but they were open-minded enough to believe that the life experience of Buffalo Bird Woman, her brother Henry Wo...

The Nez Perce retreat was a grueling one.  When Joseph and his people finally surrendered after a standoff of several days at the Battle of Bear Paw on October 5, 1877, winter was already setting in.  Most of his war chiefs and many warriors had died.  Other members of the tribe and their families were scattered in the wilderness, with no food or shelter to protect them against a brutal Montana winter.  Joseph asked for a peace parley and found himself confronted by General Nelson A. Miles, whose patience with Natives who had left their reservations was known to be thin.  At the parley, Joseph supposedly made a speech, as follows: Tell General Howard I know his heart.  What he told me before, I have it in my heart.  I am tired of fighting.  Our chiefs are killed.  Looking Glass is dead, Too-Hul-Hul-Sote is dead.  The old men are all dead.  It is the young men who say yes or no.  He who led on the young men is dead.  It i...

The singular, scarred rock butte in the Bear Lodge Mountains of Crooke County, Wyoming holds the distinction of being the first National Monument, declared by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.  It is composed of igneous or volcanic rock and rises almost straight up from the surrounding plains and the Belle Fourche River, for a height of 867 feet.  Thousands of visitors flock to see it each year, some attempting the climb with equipment.  In 1875, Col. Richard Irving Dodge saw the butte and asked local Natives what it was called.  An interpreter told him that it was called Bad God's Mountain.  English-speakers quickly rechristened it Devil's Tower and the name stuck.  Actually, the Tower is associated with legends of the Lakota, Kiowa, Crow and Cheyenne people, who have their own names for it.  It is Bear's House, Bear's Lodge or Bear's Lair to the Cheyenne, Lakota and Crow.  The Kiowa know it as Aloft on a Rock or Tree Rock.  Local Nati...

Natives of the Southwest had a two-front war with both the Mexicans, who had taken over from the Spanish after 1821, and later the Americans, who took over from Mexico in 1848.  The Navajo were and are a highly successful and adaptable people who quickly learned horse and livestock raising, weaving and other skills from the Spanish and were allies of the various Puebloan peoples.  Narbona, 1766-1849, was not only a skilled warrior and charismatic leader, he was also personally wealthy as a result of livestock raising, primarily sheep, and trade.  Though he was referred to by Mexicans and Americans as a chief of the Navajo, in the sense of a principal chief, there was no such institution among the Navajo, who like many Natives, were composed of several clans or bands which were self-sufficient and didn't answer to a central authority. Narbona entered the historical record in 1824.  Several Navajo leaders had been invited to a peace parley with Mexican authorities at...

As if trails of tears and reservations weren't enough, Native American families had one more burden to bear.  Children were taken from their parents' custody and sent to boarding schools, far from home.  There, they would be forced to give up Native dress and ways, even being forbidden to speak their own languages or be called by their given names.  While the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania is the foremost example of forced assimilation of Native children, it wasn't the only school of its type.  Even in schools runs by missionary societies closer to home abuse and psychological trauma were rampant, as were diseases.  Many children went away to school and died there.  Others came back unable to re-assimilate into tribal society and unable to live in White society, either.  Schooling and missionizing among the Native populations of North America is as old as exploration itself.  French Jesuits, Spanish Franciscans, English Puritan...

As Settlers poured onto the western plains and the Army consistently clashed with one tribe after another, Native leaders faced a dilemma.  To fight the invaders inevitably meant the loss of men they couldn't replace and eventual deportation to reservations.  Cooperation with the Whites might spare their people some of this misery, but could cost a leader prestige among his own people.  One who successfully struck that balance was Plenty Coup, Principal Chief of the Crow Nation. Plenty Coup, 1848-1932, was born near present-day Billings, Montana.  His childhood name was Buffalo Facing the Wind.  He gained experience as a young warrior against his people's traditional enemies, such as the Sioux/Lakota and Cheyenne.  When still very young, he began to have visions which indicated that, one day, a strange race of people would take over their homeland, destroy the buffalo and replace them with cattle.  At first, some of these dreams seemed so farfetched ...

Sometime in the late 1880's, two old men who had once been bitter enemies sat down side by side to have their picture taken.  One was General John Gibbon, Commander of the Department of the Columbia, which included military operations for the state of Washington and Oregon.  The other was Chief Joseph, Chief of the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce.  The first time these two met, circumstances had been much different.  It was Gibbon who led the ambush of the Nez Perce at the Battle of Big Hole in 1877.  Based on their mutual history, it would've been natural if these two didn't want to be in the same area together, let alone sitting for a photograph, but they had put the past away long enough to capture a piece of personal history together. John Gibbon was born in Holmesburg, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  The family later moved to Charlotte, North Carolina where his father was chief assayer at the U.S. Mint.  The Gibbon family was wealthy enou...

This Cheyenne warrior and leader is more often known by his Lakota designation of Dull Knife, but among his own people where he is still revered for his courage he was known as Morning Star, 1810-1883.  He was head chief of the Northern Eater band of the Northern Cheyenne and a noted chief among the Northern Cheyenne people as a whole.  The details of Morning Star's life and how he rose to prominence among his people aren't known today.  He first appears in the historical record as a signatory of the Second Treaty of Laramie.  Initially the Cheyenne, along with the Lakota and other tribes, agreed to severe land concessions if the Army would guarantee to keep settlers off their land.  A subsequent gold rush in the Black Hills and homesteading opportunities on the Plains brought more settlers and more tension with the Native tribes.  The Sioux finally revolted in 1876 and the Northern Cheyenne joined them.  After the victory at the Little Bighorn/Greas...

Per the terms of the Second Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868, the U.S. government established agencies for the various tribes that had been signatories to the treaty.  The Oglala Lakota were initially placed at Red Cloud Agency on the North Platte River.  However, in 1873, the Agency was moved to the White River, near what is now Crawford, Nebraska.  Several thousand Lakota were settled at the Agency, but other bands of the Sioux Nation, along with Cheyenne, Arapahoe and others were still refusing to settle on reservations.  A military camp was attached to the Agency, named Camp Robinson, after Lt. Levi Robinson, who'd been killed while on a wood-gathering detail.  This camp was renamed Fort Robinson in 1878. Camp and later Fort Robinson played a major part in the Sioux Wars from 1876-1890.  Crazy Horse surrendered his band to Camp Robinson in May, 1877.  Later, in September, while either being photographed or placed in a cell, Crazy Horse resisted and wa...

In 5677 BC, thousands of years ago give or take, a stratovolcano known as Mount Mazama turned itself inside out in a massive explosion.  Stratovolcanoes are one of the rarer, but more spectacular and dangerous kind because they literally explode and collapse, leaving a ruined caldera that creates beautiful mountain scenery.  Perhaps the ancestors of today Klamath people were on hand to witness the big event, but they have considered the resulting lake, Crater Lake, to be a spot of sacred significance ever since. Located in Crater Lake National Park in what is now Klamath County, Oregon, there are no rivers leading into or out of the lake.  It is fed by rainwater and snow melt and drained by sun evaporation.  The result is a pristine lake that is 1,949 feet deep.  It's the deepest lake in the United States and 9th deepest in the world.  According to Klamath oral tradition, ages ago there was a battle between the forces of good and evil.  In the result...

Not all interaction between Natives and Whites was antagonistic.  Interracial relationships, usually between male Settlers and Native women, were common.  The children of those couples could function in their father's world, but they more often preferred that of their mother.  They could serve as bridges between the two worlds by being interpreters, scouts and guides.  Without such men, early exploration of North America and trade between Natives and Whites would have been more difficult than it was.  Yet, the contributions of these mixed-race individuals are often little known and overlooked.  While Sacagawea has taken her rightful place in the history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806, few people outside of frontier buffs or local historians have heard of George Drouillard and Pierre Cruzatte. George Drouillard (1773-1810) was born of a Shawnee mother and a French-Canadian father.  He learned how to read and write, was p...

Most of the names we used today for various Native tribes have come down to us from outside sources.  Early explorers often asked whatever tribe they happened to encounter what they called other peoples around them and went with it, regardless of the name that the tribe preferred to use for themselves.  Often this led to great confusion over which tribe was meant by which name.  The French term Gros Ventre, or Big Belly, is believed to have been a French misunderstanding of early Plains Sign Language and was applied to two tribes, the Atsina of central Montana, and the Hidatsa people along the Missouri River, who have already been covered in a previous post. The Atsina, or A'ani, A'aininin, or Haaninin are an Alonquian-speaking people whose name for themselves means either the White Clay People or Lime People.  Their enemies had a host of unflattering designations for them, include Snakes, by the Blackfoot, or Beggars, by the Arapaho.  The Atsina were also tra...

Even the best military commanders can have battles where things just don't go right.  Whether or not the fault was theirs or just a matter of circumstance, the buck always stops at the top.  Looking Glass of the Nez Perce suffered this unfortunate truth during the retreat of the Nez Perce toward Canada during the Nez Perce War of 1877. The Nez Perce were fighting to avoid being placed on a reservation.  Though they had held their own against the Army in several battles, being able to withdraw after each engagement, the Nez Perce leaders knew that their only safety lay in Canada.  Chief Joseph, Looking Glass and White Bird knew that their only safety lay in reaching Canada.  They crossed the border of what is now Idaho, trekked through Montana's Bitterroot range and entered the Bitterroot Valley.  While on the march, the Nez Perce warriors were under Looking Glass' command.  He convinced the local settlers that the Nez Perce would pass through the are...

A fighting retreat while bein pursued by an enemy is an extremely complex and dangerous military maneuver.  Couple that with harsh conditions and a fighting force burdened with non-combatants and the task becomes even more complex.  Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce is often called the Indian Napoleon because his command of the retreat of his people toward Canada in 1877 resembles Napoleon's disastrous Russia Campaign in 1812-13.  Napoleon, though, had a fighting marshal and rear-guard commander in Michel Ney, Prince of the Moskowa.  Chief Joseph's Ney was Looking Glass, leader of the Alpowai band of the Nez Perce, who lived along the Clearwater River in Idaho. Looking Glass, 1832-1877, was the son of a Nez Perce chief, known as Flint Necklace or, in some translations, Looking Glass Around Neck, referring to a small mirror carried on a leather string around the neck.  His son, Looking Glass, inherited the name and proved his right to his father's chiefship....

The various Native subgroups who make up the Algonquian-speaking Cree peoples stretch across Canada from what is now Labrador and Quebec through to Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta in Canada.  They are also present in Montana, where they share a reservation with the Ojibwe/Chippewa people.  French explorers and traders first encountered the Cree along with the Ojibwe around Lake Superior.  The French word Cree is a corruption of Ojibwe terms to describe these people.  Each subgroup has their own reference for themselves with the languages they speak.  The Cree language is divided between Woods, Plains, Swampy, Moose, Northern East, Southern East, Neskapi, Montagnais and Atikemekw, as well as a Sign Language which is still in use.  Cree people number almost 200,000 in Canada alone, making them the largest First Nations/Native group in Canada if not North America. Running east to west, they are: Neskapi and Montagnais, often collectively referred to as ...

Southeastern Arizona is home to beautiful but forbidding country.  Rocky hills and valleys, covered in cactus and brush and swept by wind, the Chiricahua and Dragoon Mountains are still best left to experienced hikers and horseback riders.  Legends abound, Native, Mexican and Anglo.  Lost mines and wagon trains, outlaws and vendettas, and Apache raids, and one man who knew every crack and corner of this area and kept his secrets to himself. Enough can't be said about Cochise, one of the last hereditary leaders of Chiricahua Apache.  A brilliant guerrilla leader and Native diplomat who welded various Apache bands into allies through marriages among his own family, he wasn't about to go anywhere he didn't want to go.  When he'd had enough of Mexican raiders and American miners and ranchers trespassing on Apache land, he would retire to the Dragoon Mountains, to a place only he knew about.  Legend calls it Cochise's Stronghold.  Said to be on or around ...

This military post in what is now Fort Sumner, De Baca County, New Mexico is famous or infamous for many things, including the Lincoln County War and the exploits of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, but the most terrible thing that happened there was the internment of thousands of Navajo and Mescalero men, women and children between 1864-1866.  Known in Navajo history as the Long Walk, the 300 mile trek from their homeland in Arizona to New Mexico is still seared into Navajo memory.  In 1862, Congress authorized the creation of a military fort on the banks of the Pecos River to deal with the Confederate threat from Texas as well as raids by various tribes.  Soon after construction of the Fort, Gen. James H. Carleton authorized the creation of an Indian Reservation at Bosque Redondo or Round Wood.  Bosque is the Spanish word for a wooded river-bottom.  Carleton conceived the idea of housing both Navajo and Mescalero Apaches on the same reserva...

The Kickapoo are an Algonquian-speaking people sometimes classified as Eastern Woodlands Natives or a Plains tribe, depending on the particular band.  They originated in Wisconsin, where they were first encountered by Jesuit missionaries in the 1600's, and some bands ended up in Texas or Mexico by the 19th Century.  Their history shows just how severely one tribe could be splintered and displaced by White settlement. The name Kickapoo may originate from an Algonquian word meaning, "they stand here, now there", referring to the nomadic nature of this tribe.  Some sources believe they originated as far east as Michigan, although that isn't certain.  Closely allied with the Sac and Fox tribes, when they were encountered by Jesuit missionaries, they ranged between the Wisconsin and Fox Rivers. They joined Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763 and, along with the Sac, Fox, Ottawa and Potawatomi displaced another tribe, the Illinois.  They set up their new homes by ...

At a time when ballet was thought to be accessible only to wealthy, cultured families who could afford the lessons, costumes, etc., five young Native American women from Oklahoma proved that anyone could master this art form, no matter their heritage or social and economic station in life.  In 2007, these remarkable women were commemorated in an outdoor sculpture in Tulsa known as the Five Moons, which has become their collective designation.  All but one of them is now deceased.  They are: Yvonne Chouteau, 1926-2016, of the Shawnee and Cherokee.  She grew up in Vinita, Oklahoma.  At age 14 her exceptional talent won her a place with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.  She married a Uruguayan-born man, Miguel Tereghov, and returned to Oklahoma to found the Oklahoma City Civic Ballet, now known as the Oklahoma City Ballet. Rosella Hightower, 1920-2008, of the Choctaw.  She was born in Durwood, Oklahoma.  She studied ballet in Kansas City, and New...