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August 5
This is our Week 6 (August 5-11) “dispatch” from an infamous 1874 expedition to find gold in Paha Sapa that took place exactly one hundred and fifty years ago. We mine the rich archive of documentary records that it produced to ask what it reveals about the region's Native inhabitants. To follow along online, click here.
The chief engineer and mapmaker for the expedition, William Ludlow, wrote on August 7, 1874, that “we passed over Elk Horn Prairie again.” The first time the expedition had crossed that place was nine days earlier, on July 28. On that day, geologist Newton Winchell described it as a treeless, undulating plain upon which they found “a large stack of elk-horns, whence the Indians call it Elk-Horn Valley, a name which is appropriately changed to Elk-Horn Prairie.”
Frances Densmore, in Teton Sioux Music, states that “the elk is a favorite animal among the young men.” She recorded a man named Shooter who dreamed of elks and who told her that they “are the emblem of beauty, gallantry, and protection.” More specifically, Thomas Tyon, a translator for the physician and anthropologist James Walker, wrote that “the Spirit of the Male Elk presided over sexual relationship.”
There is a Lakotan narrative about a poignant romance that is tied to Elk Horn Valley. Long ago there was a young Lakotan woman, Tapun Sha Win, whose beauty brought suitors from near and far. One night, a young man with a strangely radiant aura about him persuaded Tapun Sha Win that he was the one for her.
While preparations were under way for their wedding, the charming stranger made a shocking announcement to the happy people of the village. He told them that he was from the Maghpiya Oyate, the Cloud Nation, and he asked their permission to take Tapun Sha Win back to his home in the sky. The people sadly consented, and the couple left on their long journey to the sky world.
There, Tapun Sha Win and Starman lived happily together. Soon she was pregnant with their child and then months later when it was nearing the time for her to give birth, she unwarily dug up a peculiar plant that looked like tinpsila. When she pulled it from the surface of the sky world, there was a hole through which she could see her relatives on the earth below. She missed them so much that she tied together everything she had into a long rope which she fastened off and dropped through the hole. Then she shimmied down the rope, only to discover that it was too short. She hung on as long as she could, but eventually lost her grip and fell to her death.
But miraculously her baby was born alive. Some boys found the body of Tapun Sha Win and the newborn boy, who they took back to their village. There he was named Fallen Star and raised by an elderly woman. When Starman discovered the sky hole and saw his wife's body on the earth below, he walked away a short distance and, grief-stricken, he sat down and hasn't moved since. His Lakotan name is Wichaghpi Owanjila, which is now known as the North Star.
Some people believe that Tapun Sha Win fell to her death at Elk Horn Valley. Amos Bad Heart Bull named that place Ghe Shla on his map. Today that valley is called Reynolds Prairie, named after the family that homesteaded the area in 1876 when it was Ocheti Shakowian land, as stipulated in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.
In 2012, a coalition of funders led by four Ocheti Shakowian tribes purchased nearly 2,000 acres of the valley from the Reynolds family. In 2016, at the request of the four tribes, the Bureau of Indian Affairs placed that portion of Elk Horn Valley back into federal Indian trust status. The tribes celebrated the decision, while the state of South Dakota appealed it—and lost.
Elk Horn Valley