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July 22
Hospitality and Hostages
This is our Week 4 (July 22-28) “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.
On July 26, 1874, the expedition came across an old “Indian” camp and what looked like a hastily abandoned campsite. They found smoldering coals and discarded animal bones, as well as fresh-cut tipi poles. They also found wooden stakes driven into the ground for stretching and drying animal skins.
Later that day, Arikaran scouts located a third camp of twenty-seven Lakotans (fifteen children, seven women, and five men). When a company of soldiers (and newspaper reporters) arrived, Fred Power, writing for the St. Paul Press, found an “encampment” that “looks beautiful, as we saw it through our glasses. The white buckskins newly tanned, that covered the lodge poles, were as white as an officer's tent before it comes in contact with storm or sunshine. The [women] seated on the ground cutting up deer meat, others eating and some beading moccasins, the young Indians lying around in every attitude enjoying their freedom and the sunshine, and the dogs, lying in the shade of a tipi were happy.” It was an idyllic scene, but Custer ordered the soldiers to surround it while the interpreter Louis Agard approached to make contact.
The outcome of that encounter was disastrous for the camp and its inhabitants. One of the men, Long Bear, was shot, and another, One Stab, was held hostage and forced to serve as a guide for the expedition. Everyone else fled, but to avoid benefitting the expedition, they first destroyed their possessions they had to leave behind, including their lodges, tools, and food stores.
But before these tragic events, expedition accounts record that in response to the sudden appearance of enemy scouts and US soldiers, one of the Lakotan men, Slow Bull, invited some of the soldiers into his wife's buffalo hide tipi. Amazingly, she was a daughter of the famous Oglalan leader, Red Cloud. “Mrs. R. C. Slow Bull,” as Nathan Knappen of the Bismarck Tribune called her, “had been much frightened” by the unexpected visitors. But upon realizing that immediate violence was averted, she “gave expression to a countenance indicating a warm heart [and] became very sociable and was really glad to welcome us and entertained us in a lively manner.”
According to Dakota ethnographer Ella Deloria, “The tipi was a carefully designed and pridefully erected structure, in obedience to exact rules of procedure and making, and a safe, kindly place inside.” Knappen noted that Mrs. Slow Bull's tipi “was the neatest and cleanest of the five” in the camp and that her family's belongings “not needed for immediate use were packed away, neatly tied up in clean skins. The floors were carpeted with other skins, and on every hand was evidence of taste and industry–and vanity as well.”
The four essential components of a tipi, according to Delora, were the lodge poles, the buffalo hide cover, the lacing pins that hold the ends of the cover together, and the anchoring pins that hold the cover to the earth. Regarding the poles, pine was preferred “because of its strength and slenderness. All women aspired to owning pine lodge poles someday, but not all were ever that fortunate.”
Mrs. Slow Bull and the women who owned the other tipis were in the Black Hills to harvest lodgepole pine trees and prepare them as tipi poles for their lodges. They were processing game animals for meat, clothing, supplies, and tools for their families, and gathering herbs and berries for medicines and fruit. Confronted by enemy scouts and American soldiers, Mrs. Slow Bull responded with grace and hospitality, welcoming them into her home. Expedition members reciprocated with violence.