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July 29
This is our Week 5 (July 29-August 4) “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 30, 1874, Private Theodore Ewert wrote in his diary that “we are now in sight of Harney's Peak, the highest in the Black Hills range.” It was “named after General Harney,” he continued, “who made a treaty with two tribes of the Sioux at its base in 1856.” Harney was a US General who, on September 3, 1855, lied to the leaders of a Sichanghuan village and then attacked them near the mouth of Blue Water Creek, killing more than 80 people and taking 70 women and children prisoner. Afterwards, soldiers and officers stole countless possessions of the massacre victims, some of which are now at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.
An engineer under Harney's command at Blue Water, Gouverneur Warren, named the highest peak in the Black Hills after the general in 1857. General Harney was never at the peak and the treaty he negotiated with Lakotans in 1856 was at Fort Pierre but it was not ratified by the US Senate. In 1868, he was a US signatory to the second Fort Laramie Treaty between the US and the “Sioux Nation of Indians.” Before it was renamed Harvey Peak, its name was Hinhankagha Paha (Owl Butte).
Lakotans named the mountain after a terrifying creature who lived there. Long ago, Lakotan villagers went into the Black Hills to gather slender pine trees to use as lodge poles for their tipis. At the time, it was said that an evil creature lived there. It had ugly yellow eyes and large basket-like ears, which made it resemble an owl. At night, it liked to snatch little children out of their tipis and carry them back to its lair on the top of Hinhankagha Paha, where it devoured its victims.
Over the course of four nights a long time ago, the monster abducted four little girls and took them to the mountain, where it tortured them so cruelly that all the villagers could hear their cries of anguish echoing through the deep valleys. On the fifth day, a group of warriors climbed up the mountain to rescue the children. But the monster eluded them, and they could not find the children. When they returned, the villagers decided to leave the Black Hills before any more children were lost. As they offered a final prayer for help, a man appeared. Although he was dressed like a common warrior, the villagers knew he was none other than Fallen Star, a man from the Cloud People who had married a Lakotan woman and was a supernatural protector of the Lakotan people. He told them that he had slain the monster, and their children were now living with their relatives, the Cloud People.
Today, looking up at the night sky, you can see a cluster of small twinkling stars huddled closely together called Tayamni Pa. Lakotans say that these stars, also known as Pleiades, are the little girls who Fallen Star once rescued from the phantom creature of Hinhankagha Paha.
The 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties stipulated that the Black Hills belonged to Lakotans. But when the US took the Black Hills in 1877, title to that land transferred to the United States. Today, Hinhankagha Paha and the land surrounding it remain a possession of the US Federal Government. In 2016, in response to a request by Lakotan spokespersons and a descendant of General Harney, the United States Board of Geographic Names renamed the prominent mountain Black Elk Peak after the Lakotan spiritual leader and visionary.
Coincidentally, the eleven-year-old Black Elk and his family went to the Black Hills during the summer of 1874. Could he have imagined that 142 years later Hinhankagha Paha would be renamed in his honor?
Black Elk's Vision