The little trip west--xii

Looks pastoral enough, don't you think? Well, looks can deceive, as they say.

The whole business starts a day's travel away. A cow, a Mormon Bessie in fact, steps away from a saint's wagon and stumbles into a gathering of hungry Lakota. They dispatch and therewith devour her with the kind of meal they hadn't enjoyed in ages.

That Mormon on the trail was furious. When the Lakota offered him a horse to salve his wound, pick of the fleet, that wasn't enough. The method of putting out little fires along the trail put whatever the affair in the hands of the Indian agent, not the military.

The angry Mormon went to the military, where justice was handed over to a young turk named Grattan, who'd claimed a hunger to duke it out with Indians. Grattan led a company of cavalry into the Brule village. The headman, the chief, Conquering Bear, who was angry, came out to parley, turned back to his people, and was shot dead.

Grattan and his men lose. Badly. Ain't pretty. Not at all.

A year later, a day's ride back east along the Platte, just a few miles north of Ash Hollow, a commander named Harney, a Tennessean, took 600 cavalry with revenge in their souls into a camp of 250 Brule Sioux. The night before, Harney had moved troops around the encampment to surround the Brules, who, when they discovered their predicament, went off. The shooting--the killing--began. Wasn't pretty. Not at all. Same butchery, a year later, but now it's white guys wielding their Bowie knives. Eye-for-an-eye, scalp for a scalp.

Of the 250 Brule, 87 were dead and 70 women and children were captured. It's the battle by which Harney earned his Indian name, or one of them, "Woman killer."

Today a sign on the highway tells the story and gives directions where the slaughter took place. So I hunted for it on gravel roads. If there's signage out there, I missed it; but by my calculations, the Battle of Ash Hollow took place somewhere around here on Blue Water Creek.



If I had told you none of that, you might think I took this placid shot--as well as the one at the top of the page--because the meandering Blue Water Creek seemed such delight out on the western plains of Nebraska, just off the Oregon Trail. But if I tell you that right here horrifying atrocities took place that I'd rather not talk about, if I'd tell you that right there beneath those trees blood was let in a fashion far beyond imagination, and it was accomplished by white men, young men, most of whom had likely grown up in some church, then the picture looks different, doesn't it? It's chilling, even in the heat of August. Trust me. I was there.

Harney and his men couldn't forget the Grattan Massacre that went on a year before, just like the Sioux could not forget the Massacre at Blue Creek in September of 1855. It was, in many ways, the beginning of the Great Sioux Wars.

Think of this: way out east, significant books were being published--Leaves of Grass, Walden, Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, all of them in or around those years.  Just up the road, hundreds, maybe thousands were camped in the palm of the most beautiful hills Oregon travelers had seen since they left Independence, Missouri.  

Wouldn't it be nice if the story we could tell was all about beauty?

Did I mention Harney's men took brand new rifles into battle, long guns whose rifling inside the barrel put a spin on brand new bullets that thereby traveled perfectly straight for a half-mile or more? Great stuff for killing.

Or how about this? Did you know that the tallest peak in the Black Hills was named after "Woman Killer," who was also dubbed "The Butcher." For many years climbers loved the awesome view above it all from Harney Peak.

His name was removed in 2016. The Black Hills loftiest lookout was given another name: Black Elk Peak. Changing whims. Changing ways.

There are no ghosts at the site of the Battle of Ash Hollow. I looked. I sat there wondering whether someone might appear. You may think I'm crazy. Maybe you'd be right. 

But neither is the story or its people really gone, are they?