Locals Make Good -- Blackbird and War Eagle

Charles Bodmer--the tiny monument on the grassy hill marks Blackbird's grave

They're not an odd couple really. They’re much alike, greatly influential once upon a time, and monumentally heralded yet today. It's hard to imagine any two historic Native leaders better known to those of us who live here than the Omaha headman Blackbird--a casino is named in his honor!--and War Eagle, the Yankton/Santee who to this day proffers a peace pipe from a hill above the Missouri.

This oddly matched pair share a history of cooperation with the white colonizers whose sheer numbers altered Native life forever. Both worked with the fur traders who ran a lucrative business on the rivers back then. 

Everybody wanted furs, in great part because European gentlemen wouldn't step outside without beaver hats. French Canadians were here, and the Spanish--they built a fort near Homer. Throw in upstart Americans too in numbers eventually beyond tallying, Yankees who thought they owned the place once Lewis and Clark drew them a map. 

Honestly, it's hard to imagine our river hub as the United Nations, but in 1800 it was greatly multi-cultural--and that's not counting the Santee, Pawnee, the Omaha or the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota, all of them immensely mobile, given to hunt buffalo with the entire family in tow, hundreds of miles from home. If you threw up a cabin and parked at the mouth of the Floyd back then, you had no idea who might show up--all kinds of people speaking in tongues.

For better or worse, both War Eagle and Blackbird decided early on that their skills and experience here on the rivers could slip some money and strength and power in the bank. 

War Eagle Monument

War Eagle was a kind of scout, a pilot on the wily Missouri River, after having served as one of the region's first mailmen, running messages up and down on both sides. He knew the ins and outs of Big Muddy. It's a good thing War Eagle looks over the Missouri right now because if he didn't, his toughened spirit would have found a way to turn that whole steel statue around.

What’s more, two of his daughters married Theophile Bruguier, the three of them becoming the first permanent residents of what we now call Sioux City. 

Blackbird, an Omaha headman, learned to play along with the Yankees, just as War Eagle had. By the time smallpox took him, he was among the richest men up and down the river, a kind of Native Don Corleone, a man who sought, gained, and then controlled what went into whose deep pockets--and what didn't.

Neither of them feared the white man. Blackbird grabbed what he could when he could and had a thing about tribal rivals for his power—men who tended, strangely enough, to vanish. On the other hand, Blackbird's own wily character found ways to let whites know that, unlike the Omaha, the Yankees were the guests here. He cooperated with the colonizers but no farther than the reach of his long arm. 

When smallpox took him and so many members of his tribe (estimates vary, but losses were in the hundreds) the ceremonies surrounding his death became legendary. The story goes that he wanted to be astride his horse, looking over the river. Four years later, the mound above his grave was still of such prominence that Lewis and Clark saw it and pulled the pirogues over to investigate. 

If you'd like to know where there's an interpretive shelter marking the spot, just off Highway 75. Can't miss it. George Catlin, on an 1830s sojourn up the river, even did a painting. Way up there on the grassy hills, there's something high and mighty, enough to make a handful of the Corps get off the river to investigate.

Big names: War Eagle and Blackbird. Celebrated, both of them.  Heroes? Good question. The story of Blackbird's burial, some say, was created by white folks. The first time my grandson saw the War Eagle monument, he thought that peace pipe was an AK-47. 

The most we can say, I suppose, is that sometimes our heroes are shaped by our politics. Even today, that seems to be the truth about them--and the truth about us:  we make them what we wish them to be.