The Myth of Old Ree

It’s as much a grave as a monument. For more than 100 years, an obelisk has stood mightily atop a chunk of granite, rising twenty feet into the air, far above the Missouri River just west. It celebrates the Treaty of 1858, the Yankton Treaty, not the first among Sioux treaties, but right there among the earliest, and, like all of them a testimony to promises broken.

Across the face of the continent, undocumented immigrant aliens with white faces and hard-to-pronounce European names wanted good land occupied by Native people. Here in a town named Greenwood, it was the Yanktons who roamed and ruled a massive land triangle that began right here at the mouth of the Big Sioux.

Impossible as it may seem, the white man’s powers-that-be created a delegation of Yankton leaders and brought them to Washington, even though few of them had ever seen a town bigger than Ft. Randall.

What exactly those Yankton headmen did for four long months in the nation’s capital can barely be imagined, but history suggests that what kept them there couldn’t be classified as entertainment. Smutty Bear, one of the delegates was warned that if he didn’t sign the treaty, he’d walk back, a penalty Smutty Bear didn’t consider punishment.

Russell Means says their white hosts rolled out the barrels with uncommon frequency, trying to loosen up men who weren’t inclined to trade land for bib overalls. They loved buffalo, not pulling a share through Mother Earth.

Some say the Yankton headman Struck by the Ree finally signed the treaty when he was promised no white man would take possession of the red pipestone quarry where generations of Native people had dug stone for pipes and amulets, a sacred place.

For that—and the promise of $1.6 million over a fifty-year period--the Yanktons gave away (“ceded” is the historical term) 11 million Siouxland acres, some of it under your feet or your offices.

The name Stuck by the Ree is carved into the monument, a man, by legend, who was born when Lewis and Clark pulled the expedition over just down the hill at river’s edge. Suddenly, in the evening, the Yanktons brought a new baby to the counsel. The story—I must admit—is rooted in myth. No one wrote down what happened, but it’s been part of the Corps of Discovery story for more than a century. Here’s the good part: Lewis and Clark wrapped that baby in an American flag, then pledged that this favored child would be a leader of his people and a servant of peace.

Which, by the way, he was. He was a man of peace, but he hated the invasion coming through “the Yankton triangle.” Eventually, Struck by the Ree regretted the treaty he’d signed. “I am getting poorer every day,” he said. "The white men are coming like maggots. It is useless to resist them. They are many more than we are. We could not hope to stop them. Many of our brave warriors would be killed, our women and children left in sorrow, and still we would not stop them. We must accept it, get the best terms we can get and try to adopt their ways."

As you can imagine, Old Ree was half villain, half hero. Worship in the Catholic church would never begin until he was seated. But then there’s this: the old chief’s house was burned to the ground, his horses stolen by people who hated him.

Old Ree still cuts a vaunted figure. Just up the road from the monument, his cemetery stone is a tower, ten feet tall, most of it sculpted in his image. Makes him seem, still, the mayor of the place.

Old Ree grew up to be what the mythic Lewis and Clark predicted, a servant of peace. They had part of it right. Stop for yourself at the old cemetery and see the way he stands a head taller than the rest. What Lewis and Clark couldn’t have guessed what happened out here, or even their part in it.

But you have to admit it makes a good story—a little baby wrapped in a flag in the glow of firelight. Sure, it makes a good story.