#plains indian war horse

[beyondtheadobe]

[prairie-tales]

Horse warfare between Lakota and other Plains Indians and the U.S. Cavalry during the Battle of Little Bighorn , 1876.

Artist name and date??

Notes:

In 1876, General Custer and members of several Plains Indian tribes, including Crazy Horse and Chief Gall, battled in eastern Montana in what would become known as Custer's Last Stand.

The only survivor was a horse.

[liberty1776]

Custer vs. Crazy Horse | Part 3 | Horse-Lords of the Plains

I have a close friend that has been that has spent many years working with the Lakota people. This is me wearing a Lakota war bonnet and carbine he lent me as references for a paining I did for him, The carbine was used by a Lakota warrior at The Battle of the Little Big Horn.

This is the painting I did for my friends organization, The Warriors of The Lakota that is dedicated to helping the Lakota People, the founder of the organization first saw Lakota people when he was a boy at a Buffalo Bill Wild west show, he is the excited boy in the audience in my painting. 

Below is the Crazy Horse Monument I visited in 2015 when I visited the Lakota reservation in South Dakota. I met several Lakota chiefs. And helped with an art camp for the reservation kids. Most of the kids stayed home on the anniversary of the Custer fight, that they still celebrate as a great victory.

[whencyclopedia]

Arapaho

The Arapaho are a North American Native nation originally from the Red River Valley in modern-day Manitoba, Canada, and Minnesota, USA. They migrated south in the early 18th century and established themselves in modern-day Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, and points south. They are associated with the Plains Indians culture and have long been allies of the Cheyenne.

The Arapaho adopted an agrarian lifestyle early, which was then modified when they were introduced to the horse by French traders. Able to travel further on hunts now, they gradually became a nomadic people and, pressured by the Ojibwe expansion in the Great Lakes region, moved south. Scholar Adele Nozedar writes:

When the settlers first came upon them, the Arapaho were already expert horsemen and buffalo hunters. Their territory was originally what has become northern Minnesota, but the Arapaho relocated to the eastern Plains areas of Colorado and Wyoming at about the same time as the Cheyenne; because of this, the two people became associated and are also federally recognized as the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.

(25)

The Arapaho speak the Arapaho language (part of the Algonquian language group) and continue to practice their traditional, animistic, religion today as they did in the past, although many now blend the ancient spiritual beliefs with Christian rites and rituals. They were among the Plains Indians who participated in the Sun Dance (which they referred to as the Offerings Lodge) in the 19th century and still observe the ritual today at the Northern Arapaho Reservation of Wind River in Wyoming.

Like other nations of the Great Plains, and elsewhere, the Arapaho clashed with the Euro-American settlers migrating west in the mid-19th century. Allied with the Cheyenne and Sioux, Arapaho warriors took part in the Colorado War (1864-1865), Red Cloud's War (1866-1868), and the Great Sioux War (1876-1877), among other conflicts. The Southern Arapaho were camped with the Southern Cheyenne under Chief Black Kettle (l. c. 1803-1868) when they were attacked by US cavalry in what is now known as the Sand Creek Massacre (29 November 1864), which only strengthened their resolve to defend their ancestral lands against invasion by White settlers from the United States.

Even so, by 1868, both the Northern and Southern Arapaho understood the futility of continuing the fight against overwhelming forces and agreed to move onto reservations (which is one of the reasons so few Arapaho were present at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876). The Southern Arapaho were relocated to Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) while the Northern Arapaho were moved to the reservation of the Shoshone, their traditional enemies, in Wyoming.

Like the Pawnee, the Arapaho were allowed to continue to observe the Ghost Dance, initiated by the Paiute Nation in 1889, after the US government prohibited other nations, notably the Sioux, from doing the same. The songs and rituals that accompany the Ghost Dance enabled the Arapaho to retain much of their culture, and both Northern and Southern Arapaho continue these traditions today.

Name & Nation

The name Arapaho was given to the people by European colonists who mispronounced the name given them by the Crow nation – Alappaho ("Many Tattoos"), which the people then began to apply to themselves. They originally called themselves Hinono'eino ("the people" or "our people"). The Cheyenne referred to them as Hitanwo'iv ("People of the Sky"), but the reason for this is unclear.

In the 18th century, the Arapaho nation consisted of five bands, each with their own dialect of the Algonquin Arapaho language:

Beesowuunenno (Big Lodge People)

Hanahawuuena (Rock People)

Hinanae'inan (Arapaho Proper)

Nawathi'neha (Southern People)

Haa'ninin (White Clay People - better known as Atsina and Gros Ventre)

The Gros Ventre split from the other bands in the early 18th century and were later regarded as inferior by the Arapaho. The Arapaho nation was then defined by the four remaining tribal bands, who separated into the Northern Arapaho and Southern Arapaho with the northern band holding the position of the "mother tribe" responsible for the safekeeping of sacred objects such as the ceremonial flat pipe.

Southern Arapaho Woman's Leggings and Moccasins

Uyvsdi (Public Domain)

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[3rdeyeblaque]

On Dec 15th, we venerate Elevated Ancestor & Saint Tataηka Íyotake aka Chief Sitting Bull on the 133rd anniversary of his passing 🕊 [for our Hoodoos of First Nations descent]

Sitting Bull, of the Hunkpapa Lakota, was a fierce political leader & holy man known to be a great father, husband, & friend to all. Under him, all the Lakota bands united for survival in the Northern Plains, as he spearheaded their resistance against European invasion. He was known for his legendary courage, unyielding defiance toward U.S. military power, & contemptuous of the many broken U.S. political promises.

Tatáŋka Íyotake was born to a prominent family of chiefs on the Grand River in present-day South Dakota at a place called, "Many Caches" - known for its abundant food storage pits. He was given his name, which described a buffalo bull sitting intractably on his haunches. This, he would grow live up to.

As a young man, Tatáŋka Íyotake joined two prominent groups within his community. He became a distinguished member of the Silent Eaters (a group concerned with tribal welfare) & leader of the Strong Heart Warrior Society. At 14, he joined his father & uncles on a raid against the Crow. Here, he first encountered White soldiers as the U.S. Army had mounted a broad campaign in retaliation for the Santee Rebellion in Minnesota, enchanting the Lakota had no affiliation with. That following year, in 1816, Tatáŋka Íyotake fought U.S. troops again at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain. Later, in 1865, he led a siege against the newly established Fort Rice in North Dakota. Widely respected for his bravery & insight, in 1868, Tatáŋka Íyotake became Head Chief of Lakota Nation.

By 1874, the stage for war between Sitting Bull & the US Army was set once an expedition led by General George Armstrong Custer confirmed gold had been discovered in the Dakota Territory’s the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Lakota bands. This land was decreed off-limits to white settlement by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Despite this ban, prospectors began a rush to the Black Hills. Once U.S. government efforts to purchase the Black Hills failed, the Fort Laramie Treaty was dismissed. The commissioner of Indian Affairs decreed that all Lakota not settled on reservations by January 31, 1876, would be considered hostile.

Rightfully so, Sitting Bull and his people held their ground. In March, 3 lines of federal troops invaded the area. Sitting Bull summoned the Lakota and their allies, the Cheyenne, & Arapaho to his camp on Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory. There, he led them in the sundance ritual, offering prayers to Wakáŋ Táŋka (Great Spirit). Sitting Bull slashed his arms 100 times in sacrifice for his people. During this ceremony, he shared that he'd had a vision. He saw soldiers falling into the Lakota camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky.

Inspired by this vision, the Oglala Lakota leader, War Chief Crazy Horse, set out for battle with a band of 500 warriors at the Battle of the Rosebud. To celebrate this victory, the Lakota moved their camp to the valley of the Little Bighorn River. They were joined by 3,000 more Native warriors who had abandoned the reservations to follow Sitting Bull.

On June 25th, the U.S. 7th Cavalry launched their attack under George Armstrong Custer. They rushed the Indian encampment as if in fulfillment of Sitting Bull’s vision. Yet they were severely outnumbered & thus defeated. White outrage at this military catastrophe spurred thousands more cavalrymen to the area. Over the next year, they relentlessly pursued the Lakota bands.

Though many were forced into surrender, Sitting Bull remained defiant. In May 1877, he led his band to Canada, beyond the reach of the U.S. Army. When a U.S. General traveled north to audaciously offer him a pardon in exchange for settling on a reservation, Sitting Bull angrily dismissed him.

Four years later, in the wake of European invaders driving the Buffalo to near instinction, Sitting Bull found it nearly impossible to feed his people. So, he moved south to face surrender. On July 19, 1881, Sitting Bull’s young son handed his father’s rifle to the U.S. commanding officer of Fort Buford in Montana. Through this action, Sitting Bull hoped to teach his son “that he had become a friend of the Americans.” He also said, “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.” He asked for the right to cross back & forth into Canada whenever he wished & for a reservation of his own on the Little Missouri River near the Black Hills. Instead, he was sent to Standing Rock Reservation. His warm reception there raised Army fears about a fresh uprising. So, Sitting Bull and his people were taken further down the Missouri River to Fort Randall. They were held as prisoners of war for nearly 2 more years.

Finally, on May 10, 1883, Sitting Bull rejoined his tribe at Standing Rock. The Indian Agent in charge of the reservation was determined to deny him any special privileges. And so, Sitting Bull was forced to work in the plantation fields. Yet when a delegation of U.S. Senators came to discuss opening part of the reservation to Whitea, he spoke forcefully, though futilely, against it.

In 1885, Sitting Bull was allowed to leave the reservation to join Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He earned $50 a week for riding once around the arena. Sitting Bull also named his price for his autograph & picture. Unable to tolerate White society any longer, he stayed with the show for 4 months.

Returning to Standing Rock, Sitting Bull lived in a cabin near his birthplace on the Grand River; still rejecting the seeds of the colonialism - Christianity & giving up the traditional ways of life - as the reservation’s rules required. He did, however, send his children to a Christian school because he believed the next generation of Lakota would need the education of their oppressors to survive in the new world.

Here, he had another vision. He saw a meadowlark on a hillock beside him say,“Your own people, Lakotas, will kill you.” Nearly 5 years later, this vision would come to fruition.

In the fall of 1890, a Minŋecoŋjou Lakota named Kicking Bear came to Sitting Bull with news of the Ghost Dance, a ceremony that promised to rid the land of colonizers & restore the Indian way of life. Lakota had already adopted the ceremony at the Pine Ridge & Rosebud Reservations, and Indian Agents there had already called for troops to bring the growing movement under control.

At Standing Rock, the authorities feared Sitting Bull, still revered as a powerful spiritual leader, would join the Ghost Dancers as well. They sent 43 Lakota police officers to seize him. Before dawn on December 15th1890, the officers burst into Sitting Bull’s cabin & dragged him outside, where his followers were gathering to protect him. In the gunfight that followed, one of the Lakota police officers shot Sitting Bull in the head.

Today, Sitting Bull rests close to his birthplace near Mobridge, South Dakota. A granite shaft marks his grave.

"They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse." - Sitting Bull.

We pour libations & give him💐 today as we celebrate him for his inspirational leadership, fearless figuring spirit, power in prayer, & his deep faith in Great Spirit.

Offering suggestions: a smoking pipe with tobacco, Lakota music, bison meat served with wild potatoes & prairie turnips

‼️Note: offering suggestions are just that & strictly for veneration purposes only. Never attempt to conjure up any spirit or entity without proper divination/Mediumship counsel.‼️

[thoughtportal]

smithsonianmag.com

How Recovering the History of a Little-Known Lakota Massacre Could Heal Generational Pain

Tim Madigan

46–59 minutes

To reach the place known as Mni Tho Wakpala, the Blue Water, you drive west from the Nebraska hamlet of Lewellen, turning from Highway 26 onto a gravel road and turning again through a gate that leads to fenced pastureland. The ancient cottonwood, now known by the Lakota Sioux as the Witness Tree, still towers above the grasslands. Blue Water Creek cuts a crooked path through a broad valley, its waters still pristine.

Then, just after sunrise on September 3, 1855, 600 U.S. Army soldiers commanded by Brigadier General William S. Harney surrounded and ambushed the village, the first time in the Indian wars of the Northern Plains that the military attacked a camp full of families. Today the attack is often known, to the extent it is known at all, as the Blue Water Massacre, but for more than a century it was remembered in a few conventional histories as a particularly ruthless U.S. military victory—the Army’s first major salvo in a 35-year campaign against the Lakota, lords of the Northern Plains, the people of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, which ended finally with their subjugation at Wounded Knee in 1890. That episode, where as many as 300 Lakota were slaughtered, is widely known. 

The same cannot be said about Blue Water. 

The bloody chain of events had begun a year earlier, in mid-August 1854, when a lame-footed cow belonging to a Mormon settler wandered into the camp of the Brulé, also known as the Sicangu, one of seven bands that make up the Lakota nation. There, along the North Platte River in what is now Wyoming, the animal was felled by the arrow of a warrior named High Forehead, who may have been hungry.

The Brulé Lakota chief, Conquering Bear, hurried to nearby Fort Laramie and offered the Mormon a horse from his own herd as restitution. The matter might have ended there were it not for the ill-fated ambition of Lieutenant John Grattan, a 24-year-old Army officer a year out of West Point. Grattan was determined to personally arrest High Forehead and make his reputation in the process. On August 19, Grattan, with a drunken interpreter and a detachment of 29 soldiers, began a ten-mile march to the Lakota camp. Frontiersmen and other civilians they met along the way pleaded with the lieutenant to reconsider, as a small city of more than 4,000 Lakota had grown up by the North Platte. “I don’t care how many there are,” Grattan told them. “With 30 men I can whip all the Indians this side of the Missouri.” 

When Grattan and his men marched into the village, Conquering Bear tried to reason with him, but the young officer made clear he would not leave without his prisoner. “For all I tell you, you will not hear me,” Conquering Bear finally said. “Today you will meet something that will be very hard.” 

Surrounded by hundreds of Lakota warriors, a panicked U.S. Army soldier fired the first shot. Grattan and all but one of his men were swiftly killed. (The last soldier eventually succumbed to his injuries.) Grattan’s body was riddled by 24 arrows. Conquering Bear, one of three Lakota who were wounded, died from his injuries several days later.

News of the killings became an object of national outrage, though in the months to come congressional and Army reports placed the blame for what happened squarely on Grattan. That November, three Brulé Lakota warriors, later identified as Spotted Tail, Red Leaf and Long Chin, close relatives of the slain chief, attacked a mail coach traveling near Fort Laramie, killing three men, wounding a fourth, and reportedly making off with thousands of dollars in gold, an act of revenge per Lakota custom.

By then, President Franklin Pierce and his secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, had already endorsed a retributive expedition of their own against the Lakota. To lead it, Davis turned to Harney, an old friend who had experience fighting Native Americans in Florida and Wisconsin. In a White House meeting, Pierce gave Harney, a barrel-chested man with a long white beard, simple orders. “Whip the Indians for us,” the president said. 

In August 1855, Harney and his men, equipped with new, long-range Sharps rifles, set out from a frontier fort. “By God I am for battle,” Harney told a fur trapper as he departed. “No peace!” By September 2, the troops were camped along the North Platte near a place called Ash Hollow, a popular stopping point for westward-traveling emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Harney learned that Chief Little Thunder, who had succeeded Conquering Bear after his death, was camped about six miles north by Blue Water Creek, a tributary of the North Platte.  

As soon as the Brulé glimpsed Harney’s troops the women began to strike tepees, loading lodge poles, skins and other belongings onto travois, sledges drawn by horses and dogs. Seeing the people flee north, Harney feared his cavalry had insufficient time to set the ambush. To stall, he sent a guide to request a parley with Little Thunder. The chief quickly obliged, galloping toward the soldiers with two of his most renowned warriors, Spotted Tail and Iron Shell. According to one account, Little Thunder approached Harney holding an umbrella as a makeshift white flag.

The conversation took place over a distance of 30 to 40 feet. The general shouted his outrage for the killings of Grattan and his soldiers and the murders of the three men in the mail coach robbery. “The day of retribution had come,” Harney said.

Thirty minutes later, feeling delay was no longer necessary, the general sent Little Thunder back to his people. He gave his soldiers the order to open fire, then took up a viewing position atop a nearby hill.

What happened next was documented in Army after-action reports, in the private letters and journals of American soldiers, and in interviews they gave late in their lives. There was also one recorded account from the perspective of a Lakota survivor, a woman named Cokawin who was in her 40s at the time and gave her testimony many years later to another Lakota woman named Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun. “The smoke of the battle blinded her,” Bettelyoun wrote in her own memoir, With My Own Eyes. “As she looked all around, she could see the soldiers galloping after groups of old men, women and children who were running for their lives. Some were running across the valley only to be met by soldiers and shot right down.”

As Cokawin tried to flee, a soldier shot her in the stomach. “The bullet ripped her open for about six inches, a glancing shot. … Her bowels protruded from the wound as she fell.” To hide, Cokawin covered herself in tumbleweed and tore off a piece of her sleeve to use as a bandage. “There she lay all day listening to guns roar and to the hoofbeats of the horses, the shouting and yelling of the soldiers who came so near at times that she thought she would be discovered. Once in a while she could hear a Sioux war cry. At these times, Cokawin said she felt like singing and giving the trill.”

Perhaps the most complete account of the massacre comes from the journal of a U.S. Army officer named Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren. The 25-year-old West Point graduate was a noncombatant, attached to Harney’s expedition as a mapmaker and topographer. Apparently appalled by the brutality he witnessed, he devoted several diary pages to describing the day’s horrors, particularly what he saw at bluff-side caves where many Lakota had sought safety. Soldiers, giving chase, fired indiscriminately into the caves, a barrage that went on until the cries of a child were heard from inside.

Warren wrote:

Wounded women and children crying and moaning, horribly mangled by the bullets … Two Indian men were killed in the hole … Seven women were killed … and three children, two of them in their mothers’ arms. One young woman was wounded in the left shoulder … Another handsome young squaw was badly wounded just above her left knee and the same ball wounded her baby in the right knee … I had a litter made and put her and her child upon it. I found another girl of about 12 years lying with her head down in a ravine and apparently dead. Observing her breath, I had a man take her in his arms. She was shot through both feet. I found a little boy shot through the calves of his legs and through his hams … He had enough strength left to hold me round the neck.

Warren described his attempts to minister to the wounded and his distress at the sounds of a Lakota mother wailing for her dead baby. “The feeling of sympathy for the wounded women and children and deep regret for their being so, I found universal,” Warren wrote. “It could not be helped.” 

The story of a dying grandmother and one little boy—the son of the chief—became something of a legend among the Brulé. In 2005, exactly 150 years later, that story was recounted near the site of the massacre by the boy’s great-granddaughter, a Lakota elder and activist named Rosalie Little Thunder. “His grandmother’s blood dripped on him, but he stayed still when he heard all the hoofbeats, gunshots, cries, shouts,” she said to a group of relatives and others who had gathered for a commemoration. “He finally emerged after some silence. The Army spotted him and gave chase. He ran until he got over a little hill and found a burrow surrounded by tall grass. He hid there and stayed there until just before daylight, when it’s coldest and the dew forms. He emerged from there and started his trek—200 miles north to Sicangu country—to take word of the massacre.”

When it was over, 86 Lakota had been killed, many of them women and children. Four U.S. soldiers died. Harney confiscated tepees and buffalo meat for his expedition. The rest of the Lakota belongings were plundered or burned. Then the general marched 70 survivors, mostly women and children, some 140 miles across the grasslands to Fort Laramie. There he insisted that the perpetrators of the mail coach attack surrender. If they did not, Harney threatened to turn his captives over to the Pawnee, the Lakota’s mortal enemy.

That was why the warriors Spotted Tail, Long Chin and Red Leaf trotted on their horses into Fort Laramie a few weeks later. They were dressed in their finest regalia and sang their death songs when they surrendered, expecting to die at the end of a wasichu rope. Instead, they were taken into custody and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The next year, at the urging of the region’s Indian agent, President Pierce pardoned the Lakota warriors.

The bloody episode had divergent impacts on the Lakota. For some leaders it was a radicalizing event, evidence that the government could never be trusted—that violent resistance was the only path to meaningful tribal autonomy. One such leader was Crazy Horse, who was a teenager in the Oglala village a few miles north of the Brulé camp, and who, coming upon the massacre site, saw firsthand its terrible aftermath. “Scattered along the rocky slope were lodge rolls, parfleches, robes, cradleboards and many other village goods, all trampled and torn and burnt,” Crazy Horse’s biographer Mari Sandoz wrote in 1942, “and among these lay dark places that were blood and darker ones that were the dead of his people.” The Lakota historian Victor Douville has written that the memory never left Crazy Horse, and many say he thought of Blue Water while leading the rout of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876. 

For other Lakota leaders, such as Little Thunder and Spotted Tail, what they saw of the government’s cruelty and disproportionate firepower convinced them that their people’s best, or perhaps only, chance for survival was negotiation and eventual peace. Spotted Tail was sure the Lakota “could not win against the power of the Americans,” his biographer George E. Hyde wrote. Spotted Tail would become the chief lieutenant and eventual successor of Little Thunder, who was also wounded in the massacre but survived. Sensing the ultimate futility of resistance, the two men “prepared to lead their people down the path of peace and survival—a survival that included loss of their independence, and a forced residence on reservations,” the historian Paul N. Beck wrote in 2004. 

In March 1856, Little Thunder was forced to shake hands with Harney, who had summoned leaders of the seven Lakota bands to Fort Pierre, in South Dakota, to dictate his terms for peace—essentially, obedience and docility. In return, Harney released the prisoners he had taken at Blue Water.

A period of relative quietude between the Lakota, some of their Native allies and the U.S. government ended in November 1864, when a U.S. military force attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp near Sand Creek in Colorado, killing an estimated 230 people, most of them women and children. In the violent years to come, government promises to the Plains Indians were made and quickly broken. The Lakota and their allies won several military victories against the Army, most notably at the Little Bighorn, but as the years passed there was a sense of inevitability, culminating with the slaughter at Wounded Knee, which extinguished the last embers of armed Lakota resistance.

Little Thunder died in 1879, having handed over leadership of the Brulé to Spotted Tail in 1866, according to Douville. “He was shrewdly confident that his successor had the best qualification of securing his unfulfilled goal of accomplishing peace.”

I first came across the story of the Blue Water Massacre by accident, in early 2023, while researching a separate historical project about the American West. In the brutality of the violence and in the event’s bewildering obscurity, it immediately reminded me of another event, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when hundreds of African Americans were killed by a white mob in that city’s Greenwood community. 

In 2001, I published a book about the Tulsa massacre, at a time when few people apart from survivors or their descendants knew much about it. What happened in Tulsa, I learned, was not a historical anomaly. Immersing myself in that history not only inspired in me greater compassion for people from different backgrounds, with different histories, but also gave me a more fulsome understanding of the origins of our nation’s racial and social fissures. By the time I returned to the subject of the Tulsa massacre on its 100th anniversary for a story in Smithsonian, the atrocity had become broadly known—and, perhaps not coincidentally, hopeful signs of racial reconciliation in Tulsa and elsewhere had begun to take hold. 

Native American history has its own infamous gaps, but in recent generations many difficult truths have bubbled to the surface of the nation’s cultural awareness. Dee Brown’s 1970 landmark best seller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, revealed for a broad audience the sanitized nature of mainstream Indigenous history. (Even still, the events at Blue Water received a single sentence.) The American Indian Movement, which flourished around the same time, fought publicly and militantly for unfulfilled treaty rights and the reclamation of tribal lands. In more recent decades, scholars, writers, filmmakers, artists, activists, political leaders and others, Native and non-Native, have filled in the picture more completely. They have highlighted the relatively overlooked history of the enslavement of Native Americans, for example, or challenged simplistic narratives about American colonial expansion to focus on the ways Indigenous people helped shape this country’s borders, history and culture. 

Some of this work has broken through into popular culture. In just the past decade, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted into a movie by Martin Scorsese, publicized the true story of the Osage Nation’s extraordinary wealth after oil was found beneath tribal land—and the string of murders by white settlers intent on stealing that wealth. The Ken Burns documentary The American Buffalo traced how deliberate U.S. policy all but eradicated the once abundant animal, with disastrous effects on the Plains Indians. The theme was explored by the Ojibwe writer David Treuer in his 2019 counter-history, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present. Without the buffalo, he wrote, the Plains tribes had little choice but to move onto reservations. “The reservations might have been designed as prisons, but now they became places of refuge.” In 2021, the Chippewa novelist Louise Erdrich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Night Watchman, set on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in the 1950s, the latest of her celebrated books to draw from the realities of Native life and history. And the FX television series “Reservation Dogs” brought American viewers onto a reservation in the present day, following the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic travails of young Native Americans plotting their escape from reservation life for what they imagine is something better. 

The U.S. government, meanwhile, under the direction of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet secretary in U.S. history, has opened a federal investigation into the historical abuses of the Indian boarding school system. Haaland convened listening sessions across the country. She opened each session this way: “My ancestors endured the horrors of the Indian boarding school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead.”

In September 2023, in an effort to learn more about the massacre at Blue Water and its persistent impacts, I made the first of two long trips to the Rosebud Reservation, in south-central South Dakota, which has been a home for the Sicangu Oyate, as the Brulé now call themselves, since 1889. (Both the Lakota and French terms refer to “burnt thigh people,” a name apparently deriving from a terrible prairie fire long ago.) The reservation sprawls across more than 900,000 acres of grasslands, rolling hills and pine forests, and is dotted by small towns, smaller villages, and many ranches and farms. I met with Lakota residents carrying surnames like Little Thunder and Spotted Tail and with descendants of Iron Shell. They told me about their lives, introduced me to their songs, drums and prayers, and spoke about the importance of venerating their ancestors and keeping their ancient rituals and ceremonies. Not everybody was forthcoming. At one dinner, a Lakota elder named Phil Two Eagle, the executive director of Rosebud’s Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council, asked me succinctly: “Why are you here?” My answer had to do with an acquired belief that cultural healing is not possible without a full and honest accounting of the past. 

The past and its sometimes grim legacies were evident at Rosebud. About one-third of the Sicangu’s 30,000 or so enrolled members live on the reservation. Of those, more than half live below the poverty line. The life expectancy is a decade less than the national average, suicide rates dwarf national figures, and substance abuse is an epidemic. And yet, for many residents, leaving the reservation is close to unimaginable. “It’s hard for any of us to leave, because we’re just real social beings, and we’re grounded here with all of our family,” Gale Spotted Tail, Rosebud’s program director of child care services and the great-great-granddaughter of the chief, told me. “We don’t look through the eyes of being impoverished. We look more at the values you have as a person. We still have that kind of connection.” I learned that many Lakota weren’t aware of the history of the Blue Water Massacre or didn’t feel it was particularly relevant to their lives. Most are simply too preoccupied with the realities of getting by, Gale Spotted Tail told me. 

The first time I spoke with Karen Little Thunder, a great-great-granddaughter of the chief and the younger sister of Rosalie, who died in 2014, she explained that she saw in this effort a way to move beyond the interminable stasis of injustice. “They attacked in very early morning and just slaughtered us, and there was no time for anything except to survive,” she said. “Then the village was burned. Then the survivors were marched away to one of the forts and the women and children were taken and used as pawns. These traumas just kept happening and happening—and we’re still grieving. That’s the way it is, not just for Little Thunder relatives, but for our entire tribal people. We could not do anything except survive back then. Fast-forward 150 years, we’re still in survival mode.”

Karen Little Thunder, today a mother and grandmother at age 59, lives on the Rosebud Reservation in a white double-wide trailer on land that has been in her family for generations. She doesn’t remember hearing about Blue Water until her early 20s, when her father handed her a few photocopied pages from a book that described the massacre. At the time, as she struggled with alcohol addiction, the significance of what she read didn’t register. 

In 2004, after several years of sobriety, she enrolled at the tribal university, where a fellow student told her that a professor named Peter Gibbs was talking about the Little Thunder family in his lectures. One day, Karen Little Thunder ran into Gibbs in the school’s Lakota studies building. “We stood in the hallway for 10 or 15 minutes,” she recalled. The topic of his lectures had been the Blue Water Massacre. “He told me in a nutshell what he was talking about in his class. I remember going through the rest of my day, like—mind blown. I needed to do something with all this information. I took as many classes as I could in the Lakota studies department, and in doing so was able to do my own research about the massacre.” 

By chance, weeks later Karen Little Thunder received a letter from two sisters, Jean Jensen and Dianne Greenwald, who had grown up close to the Nebraska massacre site. As children they hunted for arrowheads while playing along Blue Water Creek. They had heard a battle had happened there but had only a vague sense of what that was. They finally learned about the atrocity as adults, after reading books about state and local history and talking to history buffs. Now they were writing blindly to any member of the Little Thunder family whose contact information they could find. With family members and local friends, the sisters decided to include the massacre in an event commemorating local history. In years past, the event usually focused on white pioneers on the Oregon Trail who traveled through that part of Nebraska. It was time, Jensen told me, “to tell the Lakota side of the story, to make it known.” 

Not long afterward, Karen came across a photograph on the internet—a tiny doll, taken from the massacre site. She was haunted by the image. As a child, she’d learned that, where her ancestors were concerned, moccasins were never just moccasins, buckskin pants and feather bonnets and war shirts were more than mere physical objects. “My uncle Albert White Hat used to talk about how the essence of the person becomes attached to their belongings,” she said. “They are almost like living things themselves.”

And she eventually learned that the doll was hardly the only object plundered that day. Gouverneur K. Warren, the young officer who recorded his horror at the massacre, had apparently collected dozens of Lakota belongings from the site. Karen found a semi-obscure book called Little Chief’s Gatherings, written by a historian of the frontier named James A. Hanson, which had been published in 1996. (The name “Little Chief” derived from a dismissive Lakota nickname for Warren, a reference to his short stature.) Hanson described how Warren transported the Lakota belongings to the East Coast and, the next year, in 1856, quietly donated them, more than 60 items, to the Smithsonian, then a fledgling cultural institution in the nation’s capital. 

Warren never spoke or wrote publicly about his contribution to the museum. “I believe he felt remorse and embarrassment for having looted the possessions of a vanquished foe, even though his motives were entirely for the good of science,” Hanson wrote. But the items made up “one of the most significant Plains Indians collections ever made,” Hanson noted, including “dozens of pony-beaded articles of clothing—dresses, leggings, a war shirt, a headdress, baby carriers and moccasins, as well as quilled robes, trade blankets, tepee bags, pipes, a bow case, a complete set of horse gear, a knife sheath, children’s toys including the earliest known Plains Indian doll.” 

When I spoke with Hanson recently, he said he had come upon the objects by accident, as a graduate student in the early 1970s researching Sioux trade artifacts. Flipping through the card catalog in the anthropology department of the National Museum of Natural History, he recognized Warren’s name from books and western atlases he read as a boy. “Here’s a whole section of the real early stuff”—Native American artifacts—“that says, ‘Collected by G.K. Warren,’” Hanson told me. “I said, ‘My God, this is something I would love to research.’” Hanson tracked down Warren artifacts that had been scattered among hundreds of thousands of other items in storage throughout the museum. He learned that about 20 of the Warren items had once been on display, labeled as “examples of Lakota life in the 1850s.” But other than the musty references in the card catalog, there was no other written record of the collection or its provenance.

When Hanson’s book was published, it included a formal description of the massacre, a transcript of Warren’s diary and 58 photographs, many in color, of Lakota belongings. The most heartrending image was the child’s doll. Fashioned from tanned animal hide, with seeds for eyes and flowing locks made from black horsehair, it wore tiny moccasins and a blue wool cloth dress.

In 2010, Karen Little Thunder contacted the museum and was granted permission to come see the items in person. The museum’s storage facility was located in a Virginia suburb of the nation’s capital. She and her then husband, Clayton Wright Jr., passed through security and were met by a museum official named Bill Billeck. “When we started going down to where the items are actually stored, that’s where it became dark,” she remembered. “The storage cabinets were like those red toolboxes with shallow drawers. I’m wearing these little cloth gloves. We were able to go through and find and view and hold several items.” A number of the belongings appeared to be stained with blood. “It was good until we came upon what looked like a baby blanket, a wrap made out of buffalo hide. You could see a little hood for the child’s head. When I put my hand on that little baby wrap, that’s when it hit me really hard. I could see, I could feel, I could imagine a child in that wrap. I mean, it just hit me so hard. This is real. This is what happened. There was a baby in this blanket. I had to turn around and walk away. I just felt like screaming and crying and beating on somebody. It made me angry and sad at the same time.”

She composed herself and returned to the belongings. Afterward, she felt affirmed. The experience was a sign “that I’m following the right path,” she said. “It’s like when I hear a coyote or I see a beautiful eagle. Those things are answers as well.”

In 1999, Paul Soderman and his family were sorting through the belongings of a recently deceased aunt at her home on Long Island, New York, when they came across a remarkable letter. The letter was written by Soderman’s great-great-grandfather, James Harney Stover, in 1934, when he was in his 80s. In it, he told the story of visiting the White House with his family in April 1861, when he was 12 years old. President Lincoln himself entered the East Room and greeted Stover’s father by name. It turned out the two men had practiced law together in Illinois years before. “The tall president who was 6 feet 4 and a half inches, stooped down and shook hands with me,” Stover wrote. During the visit, it came up that Stover’s mother’s maiden name was Harney. In fact, Stover’s mother told Lincoln, she was the cousin of an Army general named William S. Harney. “And the president said, ‘Well, he is my general in St. Louis, and he and I were in the Black Hawk War together,’” Stover wrote. 

During the next several years, he immersed himself in Lakota culture, history and language. By chance, he met another Boulder-area resident, a prominent jazz trumpeter named Brad Upton, who shared Soderman’s commitment to atonement. Upton was haunted by the fact that his great-great-grandfather, Colonel James W. Forsyth, had commanded the troops at Wounded Knee. 

Soderman first connected with Karen Little Thunder on an internet message board, and he met her in person in 2014. A short time later, Karen told her cousin, Phil, that a relative of Harney wanted to meet him. Phil Little Thunder, a short, soft-spoken man, saw it as an opportunity to “count coup” on an enemy, the ancient Native practice of getting close enough to touch an adversary. Phil remembers thinking, “I’m going to shake his hand, and hold it real tight—and then I’m going to give him a left hook, because his ancestor did my people that way.” Then they met. “When I shook hands with him, instead of whupping him, he hugged me.”

Around that time, a Lakota elder and spiritual leader named Basil Brave Heart was leading a campaign to rename Harney Peak. As a seventh-generation descendant of Harney, Soderman publicly endorsed the effort. In August 2016, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names announced the Harney name would be removed, and the landmark would henceforth be known as Black Elk Peak, for the legendary Lakota warrior and holy man. “The initial emphasis was to get Harney Peak changed,” Soderman recalled. “When that was done, we started thinking, in collaboration with Karen and Phil, ‘What can we do now?’”

Not long afterward, the Little Thunders and their Nebraska friends gathered beneath the Witness Tree for a healing ceremony. When it was finished, Karen Little Thunder was approached by Shelie Hartman-Gibbs (no relation to Peter Gibbs), who had grown up near the Blue Water and remained active in historical commemoration there. The 150th anniversary of Nebraska’s statehood was approaching. Hartman-Gibbs and her sister had the idea of bringing part of the Warren collection back to Nebraska for a temporary exhibition. What did Karen think? “I only remember the overwhelming feeling that this was another piece of the puzzle,” Karen says.

After the women presented the plan to a large group of Little Thunder relatives, who endorsed the idea, the Smithsonian approved the loan of seven items from the Warren collection (deemed by curators as in the best condition to travel) for a three-day exhibition at the visitor center of the Ash Hollow State Historical Park. The center commemorates Ash Hollow’s significance to pioneers on the Oregon Trail, but it also sits atop a bluff overlooking Blue Water Creek and the valley where the massacre occurred. 

The belongings were flown to Denver and driven to Nebraska, arriving at Ash Hollow late on a Wednesday afternoon in July 2017. Phil Little Thunder told me that he felt a sadness and a restlessness, like a caged wolf, when he first saw the belongings, which included the doll from Hanson’s book, plus a ceremonial rattle, a decorated saddle, a bag of porcupine quills, a bow, an ammunition pouch and a powder horn. But he couldn’t help but think about the rest of the items, which remained in vaults on the East Coast. “It was like a halfway apology,” he said.

In mourning over the items, he had let out a plaintive cry. “I’ll never forget the sound,” Soderman told me. “He’s done it a few times at the Witness Tree. That’s the connection between now and then, the sound of his grief. It’s real. That’s what I try to explain to my family and others who ask, ‘Why are you digging up the past? That happened 160 years ago.’ For Phil, it might as well have happened last week. That’s how connected they are.”

Karen Little Thunder spent the night in her van at the massacre site. “And I woke up the next morning and was just so happy,” she told the Lakota Times. “I could have been dancing by myself. I felt happy. I felt laughter. I felt peaceful. That told me things were good.”

Afterward, Karen and Phil Little Thunder and another cousin, Harry Little Thunder, together with Soderman, began to discuss the possibility of getting the entire Warren collection returned to the Lakota for good. 

The timing for such an appeal felt right. Cultural institutions around the world have been reckoning, sometimes publicly, with the fact that many of their holdings were collected in ways that we now consider unethical. In the United States, federal agencies and many museums and institutions are already mandated by law to repatriate requested Native American human remains, burial artifacts and sacred objects held in their collections. The Warren collection objects don’t fall under these categories, but the Smithsonian has recently enacted a broader, Institution-wide policy called Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns. Under the policy, which went into effect in 2022, artifacts of everyday life that Native groups deem of cultural importance may qualify to be returned. In certain cases, shared stewardship agreements allow the Institution to care for the items at the request of the original owners.

I spoke recently with Kevin Gover, the Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for museums and culture and a member of the Pawnee nation of Oklahoma, who served for 14 years as director of the National Museum of the American Indian. He was forthright about how much the Institution’s perspective has evolved. “Even if we have legal title for a given artifact, if it was acquired unethically, whether by us or whoever it was that acquired it originally, then we should give it back,” he said. He cited the Smithsonian’s recent return to Nigeria of 29 “Benin Bronzes” plundered by the British during an attack in 1897. “In our parlance, that was unethically acquired. That’s why we were not just willing but anxious to return those to Nigeria. I think the same would apply here,” he said, referring to the Warren collection. “If these artifacts were from a battlefield, even worse from a massacre, clearly they were unethically acquired, not necessarily by us, but by the U.S. Army and given to us. We have an obligation to return them.”

In August, the Little Thunder group formally applied under the new policy for the return of 69 items they believe came from the massacre site. Sarah Loudin, the National Museum of Natural History’s head registrar, told me that the process for reviewing the application will take time. As the museum gathers information, it will consider questions of standing, including, for example, whether the applicants are lineal descendants of the original owners of the belongings; are official representatives of the community where the items originated or are acting on its behalf; and whether there are competing requests for the objects. 

Billeck shared Henry’s letter by email with Karen Little Thunder and Paul Soderman, writing that the letter made clear that “Warren obtained the objects at the Smithsonian and that they are from Ash Hollow or Blue Water Creek.” The Little Thunders included the letter as a part of their application to the Smithsonian. 

The formal request is one step in an ongoing process of considerable cultural and spiritual complexity. For example, in the past, some Little Thunder family members expressed reservations about reclaiming the items, arguing that other Sicangu families descended from massacre survivors should be involved. There is also a question about what the Sicangu would do with the items if they are returned. Some Lakota elders would likely advocate ritual burning, per tradition, while others favor keeping them for educational and ceremonial purposes. That raises other practical considerations, such as where the Lakota would store the items and how they would pay for any associated costs. 

In recent months, Karen Little Thunder, her cousins Phil and Harry, and Paul Soderman have been busy gathering support back home. They found an ally in Phil Two Eagle, the Sicangu treaty council executive director, who last December placed the Blue Water Massacre on the agenda for the annual conference of treaty councils from all seven Lakota bands. 

In a hotel ballroom in Rapid City, South Dakota, the Little Thunders and Soderman appeared before the conference and spoke about what happened in 1855. Afterward, the elders stood and, singing an old Lakota honor song, shook their hands. 

The next day, Phil Little Thunder read a resolution that Phil Two Eagle had helped draft. In the name of the Sicangu Oyate and the Blue Water families, it called not only for the return of the Warren collection, but also for a geophysical survey of the massacre site to identify and recover any remains of victims, and for the establishment of a memorial and interpretative center at the site. The resolution, while nonbinding, was unanimously endorsed by representatives of the seven Lakota bands. 

Gale Spotted Tail, the descendant of the Sicangu chief, has become another important supporter. “I’m in favor of it, because it will bring attention to the Blue Water,” she told me. “A lot of people don’t know about it. Healing ceremonies would come with those belongings being returned. That kind of spiritual power will help our souls. It’s an opportunity for kids here to know their identity.”

Recently, the Rosebud Sicangu’s historic preservation office, along with representatives of the Little Thunder family, have been in discussions with Nebraska state officials about storing the items, should they be returned, at the Ash Hollow visitor center. Under the proposed agreement, the visitor center would host the items in a secure and managed environment for at least two years while the Sicangu work to decide on their final disposition. During that time, according to the proposal, descendants of massacre survivors and other Sicangu tribal members would have the right to privately view the collection.

Gover, when I spoke with him, recalled attending ceremonies as director of the National Museum of the American Indian when belongings were returned to their original owners. “People would just weep,” he said. “That made it a powerful experience for us as well. It’s not even making amends. In the Native view of the universe, that is a step toward restoring balance, just putting things right to return those things to the community where they originated. There is real power in that. There are a lot of these incidents from history that still need to be put right.”

The Blue Water valley has been in private hands for generations. Today it includes a patchwork of different owners, not all of them sympathetic to the Lakota or an organized effort to remember the massacre. A Nebraska rancher named Pat Gamet, who is 56, is an exception. He owns the acreage surrounding the Witness Tree and the area where the Lakota village once stood. He says he has kept the land as it was to protect it for the Lakota people and help honor their history there. “That’s my role in all of this. It’s a very humble one.”

On that hot afternoon last year, the 168th anniversary of the massacre, about 30 people gathered under the Witness Tree with the Little Thunders. Gamet was there, and the sisters, Jean Jensen and Dianne Greenwald, and their families. In the healing circle, Soderman and his wife, Cathie, who were ceremonially adopted into the Little Thunder family a few years ago, stood side by side with Brad Upton, all of them singing ancient Lakota healing songs. The echoes from Phil Little Thunder’s drum were carried off by the wind. Karen Little Thunder spoke up. “I would just like to say thank you to everybody for being here, for being here for us, for all of us,” she said. “You’re helping us to lighten this heavy load that we carry.” 

The scene called to mind a favorite phrase of Basil Brave Heart, the Lakota spiritual leader, that has become a mantra of sorts for the people beneath the Witness Tree. 

Taku wakan skan skan, the saying went. “Something sacred is in motion.” 

[oklahomahistory]

No-Win Situation

No-Win Situation  If the Natives’ differences with white American culture and history caused problems for them, however, so did their herculean attempts to remedy that problem by acculturating themselves to the swelling United States. Large segments of several prominent southeastern Indian tribes attempted to master the ways of European and American culture, just as early American leaders such as George Washington encouraged them to do. These five tribes—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles-gained the sobriquet of the “Five Civilized Tribes" due to their strong acceptance of most of the key tenets. of an American civilization that, by most objective measurements, was succeeding, growing, and thriving far beyond their own. These tenets included its Christian religion, classical Western educational system, social culture, political institutions, and agrarian and other business practices. Famed Oklahoma historian Angie Debo cited the usefulness of the Five Civilized Tribes designation “to distinguish them from their wild neighbors of the plains.” Historian Arrell M. Gibson contrasted the powerful impact of one tribe’s mounting mixed-blood population-birthed of enterprising white fathers (Scots, Scots-Irish, Irish, English, French, etc.) and Indian mothers—with full bloods who retained old ways and associations: The mixed-bloods (among the tribes), more like their fathers than their mothers, came to adopt an advanced way of living. They developed vast estates, ranches, and businesses in the Cherokee Nation, and became slaveholders. The full bloods continued to live in log cabins, cultivated only a subsistence patch of food crops, raised horses, excelled in the old tribal crafts of hunting, fishing, a life close to nature, and now and then joined a war party for a raid on the encroaching American settlements. But many of those American settlers, including Georgians furious over the federal government’s failure to uphold its end of the Compact of 1802, feared that the Cherokees were growing too “civilized.” Why? The Georgians envisioned a large permanent-and sovereign-Indian enclave in the northwest corner of the state. They also worried that Cherokee roads, tolls, and ferries operating beyond the constraints of Georgian laws and regulations would hamper commerce with other states. Also, the tribal chiefs’ reluctance to improve the nation’s roads angered Georgian leaders. Plus, as earlier mentioned, the federal government had assured the state of the soon departure of the Cherokees. Unfortunately, the tribe itself had no part in that agreement, so they had no intention of fulfilling it. The Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles faced similar indifference or hostility to their efforts at “civilizing.” Whether practicing the old ways or the new, the realization grew among the tribes that they could not win if they remained east of the Mississippi River, no matter what course they pursued. Arkansas Territory in its original form and with two sections split off to form Indian Territory. Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer’s The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

[jiskblr]

I just finished binging The Gods are Bastards and I highly recommend it. It's set in a 'late Old West'/industrial fantasy world where the 'age of adventures' is widely considered to have ended a century ago. It follows the eight-person Class of 1182 at the Unseen University at Last Rock, an invitation-only college headed by the greatest archmage ever to live (possibly excluding dragons), Professor Arachne Tellwyrn, absolute bitch and Enlightenment philosopher. School field trips include "this town is falling apart with internecine violence, fix it" and "the werewolves around this slightly-cursed city are howling every night, figured out why and fix it". This is normal at the ULR.

The world has a bunch of interesting religious and physical peculiarities keeping the magic embedded into the world pretty thoroughly. Like the frontier that the Old West covered is not just plains occupied by Indians, it's the Golden Sea, a literally-trackless, unmappable infinite prairie where the only reliable directions are "uphill is further in, downhill is further out", and no way to predict where along the frontier you'll pop out. Even time warps; at one point the Class of 1182 meet and fight a smilodon. (A similar thing happens in the forested Deep Wild, where lives Naiya the elder goddess of nature.) There's still natives - the plains elves live primarily within or around the edges of the Golden Sea, and have a native-like culture. And an army of horse nomads once escaped into it and raided the entire frontier for a decade before they got worn down by attrition.

The main cast, Class of 1182:

Trissiny Avelea: Hand of Avei, i.e. the world's sole paladin of the goddess of justice, war, and feminism. Orphan raised by the Avenist church, intelligent and extensively educated in war and law, but initially very sheltered. Spends most of the story expanding her range, learning to think along other lines, use other methods of problem-solving than combat, and inhabit other perspectives. (She was 13 before anyone reassured her that being heterosexual wasn't a mental disorder.)

Princess Zaruda Carmelita Xingyu Sameera Meredith Punaji, "Ruda" to everyone at school. Princess and presumptive heir to the pirate kingdom of Punaji. Like her entire family, cursed "to drink and never be drunk", meaning she's the only student exempt from ULR's dry campus. Incredibly stereotypical, except when she chooses not to be. Extremely competent politician and swordfighter, but least scary member of her class.

Teal Falconer: heiress to Falconer Industries, manufacturers of the best and most common enchanted carriages (her father is essentially Henry Ford). Host to the archdemon Vadrieny, youngest of the daughters of Elilial, goddess of cunning and Hell, and sole survivor. Teal is a butch lesbian bard, an extremely committed pacifist, and managed to prevent herself and Vadrieny exploding when she was possessed by the power of love and acceptance. Vadrieny nonetheless lost all her memories.

Shaeine nur Ashaele d’zin Awarrion: youngest daughter of the drow Matriarch of House Awarrion, which produces the diplomats for the city of Tar'naris, a drow city which recently allied with the Tiraan Empire. Shaeine is a priestess of the 'upper-tunnel' drow goddess Themynra, goddess of judgment, and a trained diplomat like all her family. (As opposed to Scyllith, elder goddess of light, beauty, and cruelty, creator of Hell, who the 'lower-tunnel' drow worship and Themynra's worshipers keep bottled up away from the surface.)

Juniper: dryad, youngest of Naiya's daughters. Extremely hot, extremely dangerous, extremely difficult to kill, and even more extremely unwise to kill, because Naiya would take issue with her murderer and everyone else within about a half-mile. Knows almost nothing about civilization except how it tastes (kinda like pork), but she's here to learn. By the end of her freshman year, she has let more sexual partners live than all other dryads put together. Complete sweetheart.

Fross: pixie, the tiny, completely inexhaustible granddaughters of Naiya. Probably the smartest pixie to ever live, due to her wild talent that allowed her to eat fey energy and turn it into intellect and arcane energy instead of just enhancing her fey gifts. Absolutely fascinated by civilization and has read everything she could find about how it works before the first day of classes. Also a complete sweetheart.

Tobias Caine: Hand of Omnu, paladin of the god of life, the sun, and agriculture. Skilled in Sun Style martial arts, a philosophically-pacifist Omnist style; also skilled in being the mom friend. Like Triss, orphan raised by his church, but his temple was in the big city so he's a lot less isolated. Quietly gay, which is probably frustrating since the only other guy in his year is his brother in all but name.

Gabriel Arquin: half-hethelax demon, which means he could be thrown off a mountain and he wouldn't even sprain an ankle. Pathologically bad at thinking before he speaks, at least initially. Nice guy once he starts to cool off his hothead. Gets a major promotion at the end of freshman year which I won't spoil.

Non-Students:

Eserite Bishop Antonio Darling: Currently the representative to the Universal Church of the Pantheon from the church of Eserion, god of thieves and subtlety. Formerly Boss 'Sweet', head of the Thieves' Guild. Everybody's friend and model believer in Eserite theology, whose first dictum is "all systems are corrupt". Handed over High Priest duties to Boss 'Tricks' and became Bishop instead to pursue some personal political and covert agendas.

Professor Arachne Tellwyrn: archmage of archmages, absolute asshole, professor of history, political science, and philosophy. Philosophically opposed to having chill but will sometimes attempt it for practical reasons. Doesn't know where she was born, and interrogated every extant god about it before she settled down to found the University. Committed deicide once; everyone agrees that he fucking had it coming.

Joseph P. Jenkins: The Sarasio Kid, greatest wandslinger in the world. Walking stereotype of a polite, well-mannered roving hero. Never misses. Almost never loses a hand of poker. High-functioning autistic savant who literally perceives the entire world as data and can compute all the math required for impossibly-good trick shots in his head instantly.

Also featuring: Zanzayed the Blue, notorious fop and wastrel of a dragon, who has a three-millennium feud with Arachne which is almost indistinguishable from a close friendship. Avenist Bishop Basra Syrinx, expert duelist, fantastic political operator, and complete sociopath. Archpope Justinian of the Universal Church, who apparently sincerely desires to elevate all of humanity (and probably other sapients) to divinity and yet is among the most contemptibly hateable pieces of shit ever to grace the page. Principia Locke, tag 'Keys', inscrutable con-artist and possibly the best thief in the world. Jenny Everywhere, world-shifting adventurer and favored employee of Vesk the god of bards. (And unlike all her other open-source appearances, actually well-used by the story.) Brother Ingvar, Huntsman of Shaath, unwilling prophet. Duchess Ravana Madouri, who coup'd her father and brother at the age of 17 and successfully framed them for the treason they had committed but concealed.

[lurkingintheforest]

Crowley's Ridge rises 250 feet above the surrounding territory and runs from southern Missouri into Northeast Arkansas for 200 some miles. It sits in the alluvial plain of an ancient channel of the Mississippi River. It bears the name of it's first permanent white settler, Benjamin Crowley, who came to the ridge in 1821, but only by way of a consequence of the infamous New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812. Crowley held a land grant for land further north in Missouri, for his service in the War of 1812, but upon arriving he found that the original plot was submerged by the earthquakes. Upon reaching the ridge, Crowley announced to his family, "This will be okay". The ridge, ranging between one and 12 miles in width, was a wild territory with bear, wolves and catamounts (mountain lions). It was also used as refuge by local Native American tribes when the Mississippi River flooded. The Quapaw tribe used it for an encampment during hunts, and Crowley did not interfere with their use of the ridge after his land grant was transferred to the ridge.

The first night that Crowley and his family stayed in their new log cabin, his favorite horse was severely mauled by a bear. This area was also where the Arkansas Wild Man was first seen and described for decades, often assumed to also be refugees from the New Madrid earthquakes, which numbered over 10,000 in 2 years. The assumption was that some residents fled the unnerving destruction and became feral. Later these tales have been assumed to be of a Bigfoot creature. Crowley's Ridge was also the scene of large numbers of Native Americans traversing west to Indian Territory, including the Trail of Tears. It is also the site of a number of hauntings.

Sources:

https://www.arkansas.com/native-american-history-heritage/history/prehistoric

https://ualrexhibits.org/trailoftears/slides/crowleys-ridge/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowley%27s_Ridge

https://www.arkansas.com/articles/exploring-crowleys-ridge

© Dark Ozarks 2022, 2023

#darkozarks #ozarksnoir #noir #noeasyanswers #mysteries #creepy #folklore #thathappened #mystery #thathappenedhere #history #legend #arkansas #ozarks #theozarks #storytelling #podcast

[boricuacherry-blog]

Comanche warriors had for centuries taken female captives, of all and any race, and fathered children by them who were raised as Comanches. The kidnapping of a blue-eyed, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker in 1836 would mark the start of the white man's forty-year war with the Comanches, in which Quanah Parker [Cynthia's half-breed son] would become a key figure.

The only borderland where white civilization met hostile Plains Indians was in Texas. Oklahoma was pure Indian territory, where beaten tribes were forcibly relocated, often right on top of warlike plains tribes. The Parkers' land was like the tip of a blunt finger of Anglo civilization jutting out into the last stronghold of untamed Indians in America. In 1836 it was a very dangerous place. There had been recent Comanche raids in the area: a caravan of settlers had been attacked and two women kidnapped; a month later a family had been attacked on the Guadalupe River; two men killed and a woman and her two children taken captive. She had somehow escaped, and later wandered battered, bleeding, and nearly naked into a camp full of astonished Rangers in the middle of the night. As it was, the Parkers were easy prey. They were too new to the western frontier. When a large band of Indians rode up to the fort at ten o'clock in the morning, seventeen-year-old Rachel Parker guessed incorrectly, and perhaps wistfully, that they were "Tawakonis, Caddoes, Keechis, Wacos," and other sedentary bands of central Texas - but they soon realized they had made a disastrous error in leaving themselves so exposed. Had they fully understood whom they were confronting - mostly Comanches, but also some Kiowas, their frequent running mates [and the only other tribe that hunted on horseback] - they might have anticipated the horrors that were about to descend on them.

What happened next is one of the most famous events in the history of the American frontier, as the start of the longest and most brutal of all the wars between Americans and a single Indian tribe.

[Warning: edited descriptions of disturbing violence]

Rachel Parker and her sister watched in horror as the Indians surrounded her uncle and impaled him on their lances, and then [tortured], while probably still alive. This all happened very quickly. Rachel, attempting to run with her fourteen-month old son, was soon caught, and she would write, "a large sulky Indian picked up a hoe and knocked me down." She fainted, and when she came to was being dragged by her long red hair, bleeding profusely from her head wound. Meanwhile three of her relatives were stripped naked and scalped, while her granny was [sexually assaulted] and left for dead, although she would miraculously survive. Two women and three children were taken captive. Two of those children would become household names on the western frontier. The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward: All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured to death as a matter of course, some more slowly than others; the captive women were gang-raped. Some were killed, some were tortured. But a portion of them, particularly if they were young, would be spared. Babies were invariably killed, while preadolescents were often adopted by Comanches or other tribes, or sold and ransomed back to the whites for horses, weapons, or food.

-S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon

[beyondtheadobe]

[mancalledhoss]

Bull Chief, Crow: (1825 -1914). As young man he was part of war-parties and always returned home without honor. He believed it was unnecessary to fast in order to be successful in battle, therefore opted not to fast. Being unsuccessful after returning from battle after battle, Bull Chief decided to climb Cloud Peak, which is the highest peak of the Bullhorn Mountains in Wyoming. Bull Chief stayed up on Cloud Peak and fasted for four days and four nights, but still had no vision. Seeing that his current attempts were failing, and all of the other men in his tribe counting coup he again decided to try something new. For this attempt, he went up to the head of Red Lodge Creek to fast for four days and for four nights in blinding snow.  He had a vision - Saw his own lodge and a splendid bay horse standing in front of it. It was not explained as to what this vision meant, but thereafter Bull Chief began to do remarkably well in battles. Shortly after the vision, Bull Chief was able to get his first honor and started counting coupe frequently. Counting coup is the highest honor for winning intertribal wars between Plains Indians. It is one of the traditional ways of showing bravery in the face of an enemy and involves intimidating him, and, it is hoped, persuading him to admit defeat, without having to kill him.

[bensdesignerhut]

Western Beauty

Western wear is a category of men's and women's clothing which derives its unique style from the clothes worn in the 19th century Wild West. It ranges from accurate historical reproductions of American frontier clothing, to the stylized garments popularized by Western film and television or singing cowboys such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers in the 1940s and 1950s. It continues to be a fashion choice in the West and Southwestern United States, as well as people associated with country music or Western lifestyles, for example the various Western or Regional Mexican music styles. Western wear typically incorporates one or more of the following, Western shirts with pearl snap fasteners and vaquero design accents, blue jeans, cowboy hat, a leather belt, and cowboy boots.

Hat

Lawman Bat Masterson wearing a bowler hat. In the early days of the Old West, it was the bowler hat rather than the slouch hat, centercrease (derived from the army regulation Hardee hat), or sombrero that was the most popular among cowboys as it was less likely to blow out off in the wind.The hats worn by Mexican rancheros and vaqueros inspired the modern day cowboy hats.By the 1870s, however, the Stetson had become the most popular cowboy hat due to its use by the Union Cavalry as an alternative to the regulation blue kepi.

Stampede strings were installed to prevent the hat from being blown off when riding at speed. These long strings were usually made from leather or horsehair. Typically, the string was run half-way around the crown of a cowboy hat, and then through a hole on each side with its ends knotted and then secured under the chin or around the back of the head keeping the hat in place in windy conditions or when riding a horse.

The tall white ten gallon hats traditionally worn by movie cowboys were of little use for the historical gunslinger as they made him an easy target, hence the preference of lawmen like Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson for low-crowned black hats.

Originally part of the traditional Plains Indian clothing, coonskin caps were frequently worn by mountain men like Davy Crockett for their warmth and durability. These were revived in the 1950s following the release of a popular Disney movie starring Fess Parker.

Shirt

1950s style Western shirt with snap fastenings of the type popularized by singing cowboys A Western shirt is a traditional item of Western wear characterized by a stylized yoke on the front and on the back. It is generally constructed of chambray, denim or tartan fabric with long sleeves, and in modern form is sometimes seen with snap pockets, patches made from bandana fabric, and fringe. The "Wild West" era was during the late Victorian era, hence the direct similarity of fashion.

A Western dress shirt is often elaborately decorated with piping, embroidered roses and a contrasting yoke. In the 1950s these were frequently worn by movie cowboys like Roy Rogers or Clayton Moore's Lone Ranger. Derived from the elaborate Mexican vaquero costumes like the guayabera, these were worn at rodeos so the cowboy could be easily identifiable. Buffalo Bill was known to wear them with a buckskin fringe jacket during his Wild West shows and they were fashionable for teenagers in the 1970s and late 2000s.

Another common type of Western shirt is the shield-front shirt worn by many US Cavalry troopers during the American Civil War but originally derived from a red shirt issued to prewar firefighters. The cavalry shirt was made of blue wool with yellow piping and brass buttons and was invented by the flamboyant George Armstrong Custer. In recent times this shield-front shirt was popularised by John Wayne in Fort Apache and was also worn by rockabilly musicians like the Stray Cats.

In 1946, Papa Jack Wilde put snap buttons on the front, and pocket flaps on the Western shirt, and established Rockmount Ranch Wear.

Coat When a jacket is required there is a wide choice available for both linedancers and historical re-enactors. Cowboy coats originated from charro suits and were passed down to the vaqueros who later introduced it to the american cowboys. These include frock coats, ponchos popularised by Clint Eastwood's Spaghetti Westerns, short Mexican jackets with silver embroidery, fringe jackets popular among outlaw country, southern rock and 1980s heavy metal bands, and duster coats derived from originals worn in the Wild West. More modern interpretations include leather waistcoats inspired by the biker subculture and jackets with a design imitating the piebald color of a cow. Women may wear bolero jackets derived from the Civil War era zouave uniforms, shawls, denim jackets in a color matching their skirt or dress, or a fringe jacket like Annie Oakley.

For more formal occasions inhabitants of the West might opt for a suit with "smile" pockets, piping and a yoke similar to that on the Western shirts. This can take the form of an Ike jacket, leisure suit or three-button sportcoat. Country and Western singer Johnny Cash was known to wear an all-black Western suit, in contrast to the elaborate Nudie suits worn by stars like Elvis Presley and Porter Wagoner.The most elaborate western wear is the custom work created by rodeo tailors such as Nudie Cohn and Manuel, which is characterized by elaborate embroidery and rhinestone decoration. This type of western wear, popularized by country music performers, is the origin of the phrase rhinestone cowboy.

Trousers

Cowboy wearing leather chaps at a rodeo

A Texas tuxedo comprising a denim jacket, boots and jeans. In the early days of the Wild West trousers were made out of wool. In summer canvas was sometimes used. This changed during the Gold Rush of the 1840s when denim overalls became popular among miners for their cheapness and breathability. Levi Strauss improved the design by adding copper rivets and by the 1870s this design was adopted by ranchers and cowboys. The original Levi's jeans were soon followed by other makers including Wrangler jeans and Lee Cooper. These were frequently accessorised with kippy belts featuring metal conchos and large belt buckles.

Leather chaps were often worn to protect the cowboy's legs from cactus spines and prevent the fabric from wearing out.Two common types include the skintight shotgun chaps and wide batwing chaps. The latter were sometimes made from hides retaining their hair (known as "woolies") rather than tanned leather. They appeared on the Great Plains somewhere around 1887.

Women wore knee-length prairie skirts,red or blue gingham dresses or suede fringed skirts derived from Native American dress. Saloon girls wore short red dresses with corsets, garter belts and stockings.After World War II, many women, returning to the home after working in the fields or factories while the men were overseas, began to wear jeans like the men.

Neckwear

Working cowboy wearing a bandana or "wild rag," 1880s During the Victorian era, gentlemen would wear silk cravats or neckties to add color to their otherwise sober black or grey attire. These continued to be worn by respectable Westerners until the early 20th century. Following the Civil War it became common practice among working class veterans to loosely tie a bandana around their necks to absorb sweat and keep the dust out of their faces. This practise originated in the Mexican War era regular army when troops threw away the hated leather stocks (a type of collar issued to soldiers) and replaced them with cheap paisley kerchiefs.

Another well-known Western accessory, the bolo tie, was a pioneer invention reputedly made from an expensive hatband. This was a favorite for gamblers and was quickly adopted by Mexican charros, together with the slim "Kentucky" style bowtie commonly seen on stereotypical Southern gentlemen like Colonel Sandersor Boss Hogg. In modern times it serves as formal wear in many western states, notably Montana, New Mexico

[whencyclopedia]

Cheyenne

The Cheyenne are a North American Native nation, originally from the Great Lakes region, who migrated to modern-day Minnesota and then to areas in North Dakota and further southwest. They are associated with the Plains Indians culture and, after mastering the horse, became one of the most powerful nations of the American West.

Initially hunter-gatherers, the Cheyenne adopted agriculture and lived in permanent dwellings, raising crops that included wild rice. Some of the Cheyenne's defining characteristics are given by scholar Michael G. Johnson:

they lived in fixed villages, practiced agriculture, and made pottery, but lost these arts after being driven out onto the Plains to become nomadic bison hunters. They became one of the focal points of the Plains culture, characterized by tipi dwelling, development of age-graded male societies, geometrical art, and the development of the ceremonial world renewal complex, the Sun Dance. (118)

After their migration from the Great Lakes region, caused by the influx of other Native peoples into the area, they abandoned permanent settlements for a nomadic lifestyle, adopted the teepee (tipi) as housing, and followed the buffalo, which, like with other Plains Indians nations, was their primary food source. At first, they used dogs as pack animals to move their villages, but, after they mastered the horse in the 17th century, horses became their central mode of transportation as well as a status symbol of wealth and power.

They spoke (and still speak) the Cheyenne language which belongs to the Algonquian language group and allied themselves with the Arapaho, another Algonquian-speaking nation, in the early 19th century. The Cheyenne and Arapaho have continued their relationship up through the present day.

They hold to an animistic religious belief that all life is sacred, imbued with a spirit, and interconnected. Religious rituals include the Sun Dance, which is said to have been given to them by their great prophet Sweet Medicine, who also instituted formal government, societal structure, and the original four military societies that would become increasingly important in the wars of the 19th century fought against Euro-American expansion across their lands and the genocidal policies of the US government.

Conflicts with the US Army, the mass slaughter of the buffalo by white hunters to eliminate their food source, and the introduction of European diseases greatly reduced the number of Cheyenne throughout the 19th century, during which they were forced onto reservations as more of their land was taken by white settlers. Today the majority of the Northern Cheyenne live on the reservation in Montana while most of the Southern Cheyenne live on the reservations in Oklahoma.

Name & Nation

The name they are most commonly known by was given by the Sioux. Scholar Adele Nozedar comments:

The name Cheyenne was, for a while, believed to be derived from the French word for "dog" which is chien, since this people had a noted society of Dog Soldiers. However, the name is actually a Sioux word meaning "people of different speech." The Cheyenne name for themselves, Tsistsistas, means "beautiful people." (93)

The meaning of Tsistsistas has actually been translated in several ways, including "the people", "like-minded people", and "like-hearted people." They called their homelands Tsiihistano, meaning "home of the people," which, at the height of Cheyenne power, stretched from Montana to Texas and their economy depended on the great herds of bison, which they hunted across these lands seasonally.

The Cheyenne nation, originally of three groups, expanded to ten prior to the 19th century, including:

Heviqs-nipahis

Hevhaitanio

Masikota

Omisis

Sutaio

Wotapio

Oivimana

Hisiometanio

Ogtoguna

Honowa

These ten make up "the people" of the Cheyenne nation, who are represented by delegates to the governing body known as the Council of Forty-Four, but there are other bands who are also considered Cheyenne. Further, the nation is divided into the people known as Northern Cheyenne and Southern Cheyenne.

Continue reading...

[3rdeyeblaque]

On September 6th, we venerate Ancestor Tašhúŋka Witkó aka "Crazy Horse" on the 146th anniversary of his passing 🕊

[for our Hoodoos of First Nations descent]

Crazy Horse was the legendary Oglala Lakota Warrior who spearheaded the war against invading colonizers sweeping the land & recognized as a great leader committed to preserving the traditions and values of the Lakota ways of life.

Tašhúŋka Witkó was born into war; at a time when the European colonizer threat was growing, encroaching on sacred land & driving friction between Indian communities. Even as a boy, the warrior spirit was strong in him. He raided horses from Crow Nation at age 13. Once he came of age, he took up initiation through Vision Questing. Tašhúŋka Witkó fasted alone in the wilderness for four days and nights seeking guidance from Great Spirit. What he received from this monumental moment would chart his course through life as the greatest warrior his People had ever known. He earned his reputation among the Lakota, not only by skill, but also by his fierce determination to preserve the traditions of his people. He was known for refusing to be photographed, leading with the traditional belief that by doing so would capture an essence of his soul.

By his mid-teens, Tašhúŋka Witkó (by then Crazy Horse) was already a full-fledged warrior; known for his staggering bravery and prowess on the battlefield. He rode into battle with a hawk feather in his hair, a rock behind his ear, & a lightning bolt slashed across his face. The ancestral mysticism and rituals that went into preparing him for battle is what blessed him with the power & protection to succeed.

He led his first war party in Oglala Chief Red Cloud's war against the European colonizers invading lands Wyoming from 1865-1868. He met U.S. forces in open battle for the first time in 1876 after he became a resistance leader against the Lakota being forced onto reservations. He led a band of Lakota Warriors alongside Sitting Bull, the Cheynne, & other neighboring Tribes in counterattack in the Battle of Little Bighorn against Custer’s 7th U.S. Cavalry Battalion. Custer, 9 of his officers, & 280 soldiers, all lay dead in his wake. From then on, the U.S. Gov. targeted the Northern Plains tribes who resisted its encroachment. After a year of forcing the displacement of many Indigenous communities, slaughtering the Buffalo population, and driving their starvation into surrender, eventually the same fate fell upon the Olglala Band of Lakota Nation. In 1877, under a truce flag, Crazy Horse traveled to Fort Robinson to negotiate terms of mutual surrender.

Negotiations with U.S. Military leaders broke down, allegedly as a result of the translator's incorrectly translationof what Crazy Horse said, which spurred them to quickly imprison Crazy Horse. Once he realized their scheme, Crazy Horse broke free & drew his knife. A infantry guard made a successful lunge with a bayonet and mortally wounded him. Crazy Horse succumbed to his wound shortly thereafter once it became infected. After his death, his parents buried him at an undisclosed location near Wounded Knee, South Dakota. There he rests among with the Ancestors he venerate so deeply.

"[ “Where are your lands now?”] “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” - Crazy Horse's response to a U.S. Cavalry man's taunts at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

We pour libations & give him💐 today as we celebrate him for his unbridled warrior spirit, his leadership, prowess, & for being a beacon of light leading all Indigenous American descendants back to our traditional ways of life.

Offering suggestions: prayers toward his elevation, libations of water, offerings of tobacco, & Oglala Lakota songs/prayers

‼️Note: offering suggestions are just that & strictly for veneration purposes only. Never attempt to conjure up any spirit or entity without proper divination/Mediumship counsel.‼️

[oklahomahistory]

No-Win Situation

No-Win Situation  If the Natives’ differences with white American culture and history caused problems for them, however, so did their herculean attempts to remedy that problem by acculturating themselves to the swelling United States. Large segments of several prominent southeastern Indian tribes attempted to master the ways of European and American culture, just as early American leaders such as George Washington encouraged them to do. These five tribes—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles-gained the sobriquet of the “Five Civilized Tribes" due to their strong acceptance of most of the key tenets. of an American civilization that, by most objective measurements, was succeeding, growing, and thriving far beyond their own. These tenets included its Christian religion, classical Western educational system, social culture, political institutions, and agrarian and other business practices. Famed Oklahoma historian Angie Debo cited the usefulness of the Five Civilized Tribes designation “to distinguish them from their wild neighbors of the plains.” Historian Arrell M. Gibson contrasted the powerful impact of one tribe’s mounting mixed-blood population-birthed of enterprising white fathers (Scots, Scots-Irish, Irish, English, French, etc.) and Indian mothers—with full bloods who retained old ways and associations: The mixed-bloods (among the tribes), more like their fathers than their mothers, came to adopt an advanced way of living. They developed vast estates, ranches, and businesses in the Cherokee Nation, and became slaveholders. The full bloods continued to live in log cabins, cultivated only a subsistence patch of food crops, raised horses, excelled in the old tribal crafts of hunting, fishing, a life close to nature, and now and then joined a war party for a raid on the encroaching American settlements. But many of those American settlers, including Georgians furious over the federal government’s failure to uphold its end of the Compact of 1802, feared that the Cherokees were growing too “civilized.” Why? The Georgians envisioned a large permanent-and sovereign-Indian enclave in the northwest corner of the state. They also worried that Cherokee roads, tolls, and ferries operating beyond the constraints of Georgian laws and regulations would hamper commerce with other states. Also, the tribal chiefs’ reluctance to improve the nation’s roads angered Georgian leaders. Plus, as earlier mentioned, the federal government had assured the state of the soon departure of the Cherokees. Unfortunately, the tribe itself had no part in that agreement, so they had no intention of fulfilling it. The Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles faced similar indifference or hostility to their efforts at “civilizing.” Whether practicing the old ways or the new, the realization grew among the tribes that they could not win if they remained east of the Mississippi River, no matter what course they pursued. Arkansas Territory in its original form and with two sections split off to form Indian Territory. Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer’s The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.