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July 15
Smoke Signals
This is our Week 3 (July 15-21) “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.
As the expedition marched south from the sacred cave that we described last week, the Black Hills came within view. “What a glorious moment,” a private named Theodore Ewert exclaimed when he first saw them on July 17.
But expedition soldiers were uneasy too. As we already discussed, Black Elk's account indicates they were under surveillance. And this week, they felt watched.
On July 13, Captain McDougall saw a “body of Indians” whom he suspected of monitoring their movements. General Custer described the encounter as proof of the “presence of Indians.” Everyone was on high alert.
The next day, a journalist for the NY World saw three sets of smoke signals, “one considerably to the left of the other two, signaling the line of our march and the fact that there are no more of us coming.” Custer agreed, interpreting the signals “as carrying information to the main body of our presence and movements.” The expedition naturalist George Bird Grinnell also recalled how “the wild Indians were exchanging signals about us.” And in his diary, Private Ewert marveled that “In the art of smoke signals the redman is a perfect master, and his code of signals is nearly as complete as our own at the signal office at Washington.”
A small party was sent to investigate the source of these signals. It included the Lakotan guide Goose, as well as a mixed-blood interpreter named Louis Agard, both of whom confirmed they were being tracked by Lakotans.
Finally, on July 18, Private Ewert again saw plumes of smoke rise up “in large dark masses, no doubt informing incoming tribes that we had invaded.”
Expedition soldiers did not really know how to read the Lakotan smoke signals. So, over the next decade the United States invested considerable resources trying to learn more about Native technologies for long-distance communication.
Lieutenant General Philip H. Sherman instructed W.P. Clark from the second cavalry, who had been stationed at the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Agencies during the 1870s, to investigate. In his published report, Clark described a “common way of announcing the success of a war party” by building “two fires a short distance from each other” and “sending up two parallel columns of smoke (two columns signify good luck).”
In the early 20th century, a BIA physician assigned to the Pine Ridge Reservation named James R. Walker described how Lakotan scouts used smoke to communicate. A scout “would build a fire” and then “throw on it a bunch of green stuff that would make a dense smoke. When the smoke began to rise he would throw his robe over it and hold it there for a few moments and then withdraw it, thus making an interrupted column of smoke. This he would repeat four times. After waiting a short time he would repeat this operation, and do so for several times. This was the signal among the Oglalas that an enemy was discovered.” “When such smoke is seen,” Walker concluded, “the men at once get their war equipment and hasten toward the place where it is seen.”
But smoke signals were not only used in warfare. They came in handy whenever one had to communicate at a distance. In 1914, an Oglalan man named Finger told Walker the story of how Wohpe brought the sacred pipe to Lakotan people. When she revealed herself to two young men, one of them lusted after her beauty and ended up dead. Whope told the other one “to return to the camp and call all the council together and tell them that in a short time they would see four puffs of smoke under the sun at midday. When they saw this sign they should prepare a feast, and all sit in the customary circle.” When Wohpe arrived several days later and joined the feast, she told the assembled Lakotans “that they had first seen her as smoke and that they should always see her as smoke. Then she took from her pouch a pipe and willow bark and Lakota tobacco.”
Clearly, smoke signals were used by spirits as well as Lakotans. Expedition soldiers, however, could not understand the true meanings of their messages.