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June 24
Surveilling the Surveyors
Almost exactly one hundred and fifty years ago, two separate groups of people traveled through Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. The first consisted of Oglalans, and it included the well-known visionary Black Elk. The second was a much larger column of heavily armed soldiers, who numbered over one thousand men and were led by George Armstrong Custer.
Their reasons for going to the Black Hills could not have been any more different. The military expedition was sent there to find gold, to make a map of the region, and to locate a suitable spot for a fort. In contrast, Black Elk and his relatives went to the Black Hills to cut lodge poles for tipis.
While the two never came face to face, they did interact indirectly. In conversation with John Neihardt many years later, Black Elk recalled building a sweat lodge for a medicine man named Chips, who warned them that something bad was about to happen. As they fled, some “scouts reported that there were soldiers coming towards the Black Hills.” And when they returned to Fort Robinson, they told everyone “that we saw some whites going toward the Black Hills.” The assembled Lakotans agreed that something had to be done. “Crazy Horse was on the west and Sitting Bull was on the north,” Black Elk recalled, “and everyone thought they should get together and do something about the gold-diggers in the Black Hills.”
Expedition soldiers knew they were being watched. On July 6, 1874, the diary of a Private named Theodore Ewert recorded an encounter with “a party of Sioux Indians.” Although they claimed to be hunting, Ewert was certain they had been “posted here as a 'corps of observation' on the movements of our expedition.” Then, on July14, a journalist for the New York World claimed he saw smoke signals communicating “the line of our march and the fact that there are no more of us coming.” In his official report that day, Custer also interpreted the smoke signals “as carrying information” about “our presence and movements.”
Although they were brief, we can learn a great deal from these fleeting encounters. At the very least, it is clear that Lakotan people knew what was going on in their treaty lands. This leads to a fascinating question: how did they understand one of the most infamous military expeditions in American history. Black Elk's recollections, in combination with documents produced by the 1874 expedition, begin to hint at an answer.
Seen from afar, it is clear the United States Army was sent to gather intelligence in the Black Hills. Its official report described the expedition as a “reconnaissance,” and it contains pages upon pages of information about the region's geography, topography, climate, mineral wealth, and Native people. This makes it all the more remarkable to learn that Lakotans engaged in a form of counter-surveillance.
As we approach the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of these events, CAIRNS has teamed up with Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University, to write weekly “dispatches” from the summer of 1874. We do not want to rehash well-worn stories that are better left behind. Taking our cue from Black Elk, we want to try something different instead. By keeping a close eye on the expedition's movements, we can learn a great deal about Lakotan history and culture. That is our goal: to surveil the surveyors, with an eye to offering new insights and interpretations about a transformative period in Lakotan history.
Every week, we will write a new column that turns the extractive goal of this expedition back on itself, mining the rich archive of documentary records that it produced to ask what it reveals about the region's Native inhabitants. We look forward to having you along for the journey!
We are eager to hear from you! If you have any thoughts, feedback, or questions, please let us know.