Wednesday, September 19, 2018

George Catlin (1796 –1872) Distinguished Crow Indians

George Catlin (1796 –1872) Distinguished Crow Indians. While touring the U.S. Midwest, Catlin was a guest of the Crow and the Minnetaree on the upper Missouri River.

1600-1699
A group of Crow Natives went west after leaving the Hidatsa villages of earth lodges in the Knife River and Heart River area (present North Dakota) around 1675-1700. They selected a site for a single earth lodge on the lower Yellowstone River. Most families lived in tipis or other perishable kinds of homes at the new place. These Indians had left the Hidatsa villages and adjacent cornfields for good, but they had yet to become "real" buffalo hunting Crows following the herds on the open plains Archaeologists know this "proto-Crow" site in present Montana as the Hagen site.

1700–1799
Some time before 1765 the Crows held a Sun Dance, attended by a poor Arapaho. A Crow with power gave him a medicine doll, and he quickly earned status and owned horses as no one else. During the next Sun Dance, some Crows stole back the figure to keep it in the tribe. Eventually the Arapaho made a duplicate. Later in life, he married a Kiowa woman and brought the doll with him. The Kiowas use it during the Sun Dance and recognize it as one of the most powerful tribal medicines. They still credit the Crow tribe for the origin of their sacred Tai-may figure.

1800–1824
The trading posts built for trade with the Crows. The enmity between the Crow and the Lakota was reassured right from the start of the 19th Century. The Crows killed a minimum of thirty Lakotas in 1800-1801 according to two Lakota winter counts. The next year, the Lakotas and their Cheyenne allies killed all the men in a Crow camp with thirty tipis.

In the summer of 1805, a Crow camp traded at the Hidatsa villages on Knife River in present North Dakota. Chiefs Red Calf and Spotted Crow allowed the fur trader Francois-Antoine Larocque to join it on its way across the plains to the Yellowstone area. He travelled with it to a point west of the place where Billings, Montana, is today. The camp crossed Little Missouri River and Bighorn River on the way.

The next year, some Crows discovered a group of whites with horses on the Yellowstone River. By stealth, they captured the mounts before morning. The Lewis and Clark Expedition did not see the Crows.

The first trading post in Crow country was constructed in 1807, known as both Fort Raymond and Fort Lisa (1807-1813(?)). Like the succeeding forts, Fort Benton (c. 1821-1824) and Fort Cass (1832-1838), it was built near the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Bighorn.

The Blood Blackfoot Bad Head's winter count tells about the early and persistent hostility between the Crow and the Blackfoot. In 1813, a force of Blood warriors set off for a raid on the Crows in the Bighorn area. Next year, Crows near Little Bighorn River killed Blackfoot Top Knot.

A Crow camp neutralized thirty Cheyennes bent on capturing horses in 1819. The Cheyennes and warriors from a Lakota camp destroyed a whole Crow camp at Tongue River the following year. This was likely the most severe attack on a Crow camp in historic time.

1825–1849
The Crows put up 300 tipis near a Mandan village on the Missouri in 1825. The representatives of the US government waited for them. Mountain Crow chief Long Hair (Red Plume at Forehead) and fifteen other Crows signed the first treaty of friendship and trade between the Crows and the United States on August 4. With the signing of the document, the Crows also recognized the supremacy of the United States, if they actually understood the word. River Crow chief Arapooish had left the treaty area in disgust. By help of the thunderbird he had to send a farewell shower down on the whites and the Mountain Crows.

In 1829, seven Crow warriors were neutralized by Blood Blackfoot Indians led by Spotted Bear, who captured a pipe-hatchet during the fight just west of Chinook, Montana.

In the summer of 1834, the Crows (maybe led by chief Arapooish) tried to shut down Fort McKenzie at the Missouri in Blackfeet country. The apparent motive was to stop the trading post's sale to their Indian enemies. Although later described as a month long siege of the fort, it lasted only two days. The opponents exchanged a few shots and the men in the fort fired a canon, but no real harm came to anyone. The Crows left four days before the arrival of a Blackfeet band. The episode seems to be the worst armed conflict between the Crows and a group of whites until the Sword Bearer uprising in 1887.

The death of chief Arapooish was recorded on September 17, 1834. The news reached Fort Clark at the Mandan village Mitutanka. Manager F.A. Chardon wrote he "was Killed by Black feet."

The smallpox epidemic of 1837 spread along the Missouri and "had little impact" on the tribe according to one source. The River Crows grew in number, when a group of Hidatsas joined them permanently to escape the scourge sweeping through the Hidatsa villages.

Fort Van Buren was a short-lived trading post in existence from 1839-1842. It was built on the bank of the Yellowstone near the mouth of Tongue River.

In the summer of 1840, a Crow camp in the Bighorn valley greeted the Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet.

From 1842 to around 1852, the Crows traded in Fort Alexander opposite the mouth of the Rosebud.

The River Crows charged a moving Blackfeet camp near Judith Gap in 1845. Father De Smet mourned the destructive attack on the "petite Robe" band. The Blackfeet chief Small Robe had been mortally wounded and many killed. De Smet worked out the number of women and children taken captive to 160. By and by and with a fur trader as intermediary, the Crows agreed to let 50 women return to their tribe.

1850–1874
De Smet map of the 1851 Fort Laramie Indian territories (the light area). Jesuit missionary De Smet drew this map with the tribal borders agreed upon at Fort Laramie in 1851. Although the map itself is wrong in certain ways, it has the Crow territory west of the Sioux territory as written in the treaty, and the Bighorn area as the heart of the Crow country.

Fort Sarpy near Rosebud River carried out trade with the Crows after the closing of Fort Alexander. River Crows went some times to the bigger Fort Union at the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri. Both the "famous Absaroka amazon" Woman Chief and River Crow chief Twines His Tail (Rotten Tail) visited the fort in 1851.

In 1851, the Crow, the Sioux and six other Indian Nations signed the Fort Laramie treaty along with the US. It should ensure peace forever between all nine partakers. Further, the treaty described the different tribal territories. The US was allowed to construct roads and forts. A weak point in the treaty was the absence of rules to uphold the tribal borders.

The Crow and various bands of Sioux attacked each other again from the mid-1850s. Soon, the Sioux took no notice of the 1851 borders and expanded into Crow territory west of the Powder. The Crows engaged in "… large-scale battles with invading Sioux …" near present-day Wyola, Montana. Around 1860, the western Powder area was lost.

From 1857 to 1860, many Crows traded their surplus robes and skin at Fort Sarpy (II) near the mouth of the Bighorn River.

During the mid-1860s, the Sioux resented the emigrant route Bozeman Trail through the Powder River bison habitat, although it mainly "crossed land guaranteed to the Crows."  When the Army built forts to protect the trail, the Crows cooperated with the garrisons. On December 21, 1866, the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho defeated Captain William J. Fetterman and his men from Fort Phil Kearny. Evidently, the US could not enforce respect for the treaty borders agreed upon 15 years before.

The River Crows north of the Yellowstone developed a friendship with their former Gros Ventre enemies in the 1860s. A joint large-scale attack on a big Blackfoot camp at Cypress Hills (Canada) in 1866 resulted in a chaotic withdrawal of the Gros Ventres and Crows. The Blackfoot pursued the warriors for hours and killed allegedly more than 300.

In 1868, a new Fort Laramie treaty between the Sioux and the US turned 1851 Crow Powder River area into "unceded Indian territory" of the Sioux. "The Government had in effect betrayed the Crows…" On May 7, the same year, the Crow ceded vast ranges to the US due to pressure from white settlements north of Upper Yellowstone River and loss of eastern territories to the Sioux. They accepted a smaller reservation south of the Yellowstone.

The Sioux and their Indian allies, now formally at peace with the US, focused on intertribal wars at once. Raids against the Crows were "frequent, both by the Northern Cheyennes and by the Arapahos, as well as the Sioux, and by parties made up from all three tribes." Crow chief Plenty Coups recalled, "The three worst enemies our people had were combined against us …"

In April 1870, the Sioux overpowered a barricaded war group of 30 Crows in the Big Dry area. The Crows were killed to either last or last but one man. Later, mourning Crows with "their hair cut off, their fingers and faces cut" brought the dead bodies back to camp. The drawing from the Sioux winter count of Lone Dog shows the Crows in the circle (the breastwork), while the Sioux close in on them. The many lines indicates flying bullets. The Sioux lost 14 warriors. Sioux chief Sitting Bull took part in this battle.

In the summer of 1870, some Sioux attacked a Crow reservation camp in the Bighorn/Little Bighorn area. The Crows reported Sioux Indians in the same area again in 1871. During the next years, this eastern part of the Crow reservation was taken over by the Sioux in search of buffalo.  In August 1873, visiting Nez Percés and a Crow reservation camp at Pryor Creek further west faced a force of Sioux warriors in a long confrontation. Crow chief Blackfoot objected to this incursion and called for resolute US military actions against the Indian trespassers. Due to Sioux attacks on both civilians and soldiers north of the Yellowstone in newly established US territory (Battle of Pease Bottom, Battle of Honsinger Bluff), the Commissioner of Indian Affairs advocated the use of troops to force the Sioux back to South Dakota in his 1873 report. Nothing happened.

1875–1899
In early July 1875, Crow chief Long Horse was killed in a suicidal attack on some Sioux, who previously had killed three soldiers from Camp Lewis on the upper Judith River (near Lewistown). George Bird Grinnell was a member of the exploring party in the Yellowstone National Park that year, and he saw the bringing in of the dead chief. A mule carried the body, which was wrapped in a green blanket. The chief was placed in a tipi "not far from the Crow camp, reclining on his bed covered with robes, his face handsomely painted." Crow woman Pretty Shield remembered the sadness in camp. "We fasted, nearly starved in our sorrow for the loss of Long-Horse."

Exposed to Sioux attacks, the Crows sided with the US during the Great Sioux War in 1876-1877.  On April 10, 1876, 23 Crows enlisted as Army scouts. They enlisted against a traditional Indian enemy, "... who were now in the old Crow country, menacing and often raiding the Crows in their reservation camps." Charles Varnum, leader of Custer's scouts, understood how valuable the enrolment of scouts from the local Indian tribe was. "These Crows were in their own country and knew it thoroughly."

Notable Crows like Medicine Crow and Plenty Coups participated in the Rosebud Battle along with more than 160 other Crows.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn stood on the Crow reservation. As most battles between the US and the Sioux in the 1860s and 1870s, "It was a clash of two expanding empires, with the most dramatic battles occurring on lands only recently taken by the Sioux from other tribes." When the Crow camp with Pretty Shield learned about the defeat of George A. Custer, it cried for the assumed dead Crow scouts "… and for Son-of-the-morning-star [Custer] and his blue soldiers …"

On January 8, 1877, three Crows participated in the last battle of the Great Sioux War in the Wolf Mountains.

In the spring of 1878, 700 Crow tipis were pitched at the confluence of Bighorn River and Yellowstone River. Together with Colonel Nelson A. Miles, an Army leader in the Great Sioux War, the big camp celebrated the victory over the Sioux.