Blackbird Bend

Karl Bodner's Blackbird Hill

More than a couple of centuries have passed, so I can't imagine that some guy with a baseball bat is going to come by and break my leg. The goons, I hope, are long gone. 

So let me just call it the way I see it. Chief Blackbird--yes, I know there's a fine casino named after him, as well as a bend in the river--Chief Blackbird was Tony Soprano in braids and a blanket. The man ruled--I mean ruled--Omaha country, a chunk of Missouri River land that stretched from Yankton to Belleview and more, both sides of Big Muddy.

That's no small pickins. Took some doing, I'm sure, to rule the roost. It was, I'd guess, an entire kingdom, not to mention the fact that just before 1800 there were a couple thousand Omaha people. That's the world the man ruled, and rule he did.

He'd established his powerful reputation in war, frequent battles against every other band along the river--Pawnees, Ponca, Otoes, Kanzas. When he was a boy, he was captured by the Sioux--and escaped. Seriously. 

Chief Blackbird never lost any sleep on account of the encroaching white man. When the French or the Spanish came up or down the river, he soon enough determined the only way to deal with the onslaught was to beat the foreigners at their own game. There was, back then, good money to be made and goods to be won in beaver pelts and buffalo hides. All right, he might have said, let's find a way to cut a deal. 

Along the way, he picked up some nastiness. Blackbird, like any other mafia don, liked nice things and wasn't afraid of flaunting it. He was a wheeler-dealer, and when his starving people started smelling graft, they weren't about to take it--big chief or no big chief. 

His white traders told him he ought to take care of business, then handed over a medicine bag of arsenic. "This stuff'll take care of things," those white men told him, snarling out a smile, I'm sure.

Blackbird was in over his head, and he knew it. To hold on to what he had, he thought it just might be helpful to cast a spell and register some mysterious power. So he did. He used that arsenic like a banana clip, told people who'd opposed him that soon enough they'd get their due, swore to it. And then, shockingly, they keeled over not long after he told them they would. Wasn't a magic show either, just arsenic. Suddenly, Blackbird had big medicine; his power only grew. Blackbird became a prophet. 

And so it went until he met an enemy arsenic or gunfire wasn't going to best. The Omaha, like every other tribe up and down the Missouri, had no defense against an enemy that crept in without a sound and carried no rifles or any visible means of aggression. In silence, the enemy came in like an invisible mist, crept up and over the land in a way that left the Omaha people dead or dying.

The process grew all too clearly in just a few months. Six days or so after the fever began, people died of systemic shock--the entire body shut down. Often, those able to live through it were left blind, horribly scarred. Mercy killing was not uncommon. Warriors went into battle simply because they preferred to die with dignity. 

Smallpox took the Don. Blackbird came down with the disease--who knows how? He had no magic to fight it. 

He was buried up above ground and above the river, at a spot where today a memorial in his honor sits along Highway 75. His lifeless body was strapped to his horse, just the way he wanted to be, eyes over the river below watching for traders coming up the Missouri.   

Four years later, Lewis and Clark pulled ashore and climbed the hill to pay respects. Blackbird's mound must have been really hard to miss. 

In death, of course, he was not alone. Researchers estimate that as many as 1500  Omaha died.

He fell to a curse not even the godfather could escape.