Pretty Bull

[kingsleybray]

Calling all Crow experts!

Has anyone heard of a Crow chief or headman named Pretty Bull, during the 1860s?

In January 1867 the Miniconjou Lakota chiefs Lone Horn and Roman Nose went to visit the Crows in the country west of the Bighorn River. They evidently wished to distance themselves from the war against the American forts on the Bozeman Trail, and wished to renew the peace with the Crows that Lone Horn had helped engineer a decade earlier.

In Lt. Templeton's diary, kept at Ft C. F. Smith, for March 20, 1867, he indicates that Roman Nose at least was still visiting with the Crows, and living in Pretty Bull's village.

Lone Horn may have left before Roman Nose. When Lone Horn arrived at Ft Sully for talks in early June 1867, it was noted that two Mountain Crow chiefs were with the Miniconjous and Sans Arcs. Obviously a diplomatic visit of some months' duration.

I think Roman Nose must have had regular trade ties directly or indirectly to the Nez Perce, obviously mediated by the Mountain Crows. This is because one newspaper report of the battle of Slim Buttes, 1876, mentions Frank Grouard's observation that the presence of several Appaloosa horses in the captured pony herd suggested that Roman Nose was present - he being known to favour that breed. Perhaps Pretty Bull was Roman Nose's key Crow trade partner.

[grahamew]

CHE-RA-PEE-ISH-KA-TE - Pretty Bull, signer of TREATY WITH THE CROW, 1868 (May 7):

1. CHE-RA-PEE-ISH-KA-TE Pretty Bull
2. CHAT-STA-HE Wolf Bow
3. AH-BE-CHE-SE Mountain Tail
4. KAM-NE-BUT-SA Black Foot
5. DE-SAL-ZE-CHO-SE White Horse
6. DE-KA-SHE-ARACHE Poor Elk*
7. E-SA-WOOR Shot In The Jaw
8. E-SUA-CHOSE White Forehead
9. ______ROO-KA Pounded Meat*
10.KE-KA-KE-UP-SE Bird In The Neck—Bird Head
11.ME-NE-CHE The Swan

From lib.lbhc.cc.mt.us/belue/joecrow.pdf

"Crow scholar Fred Hoxie notes that six of the eleven signers (Pretty Bull, White Horse, Wolf Bow, White Forehead, The Swan, and possibly Shot in the Face [or Jaw]) can be identified as having previous connections with the military, either as scouts, emissaries, or couriers."
www.his.state.mt.us/education/cirguides/transrzeczkowski.asp

He's in one of the Gardner photos - think he's at the far right of this one...

[Henri]

In Parading Through History, the making of a Crow Nation, he's mentioned on page 92 & 93 in the footnotes. On page 97 he's mentioned as a young warrior together with the eldery man Boy Chief. I think the story goes for the 1868 treaties.
Henri

[kingsleybray]

grahamew, henri, jinlian and friends - can we identify Pretty Bull in any of the other Gardner 1868 images from Ft Laramie?

Thankyou for the leads

Kingsley

[carlo]

Kingsley,

Pretty Bull is also listed as one of the men who later undersigned ("assented to") the August 1873 Crow Treaty, although he was not present at the agency during the actual negotiations and conclusion of the treaty.

If I'm not mistaken, the identities of the men in the Gardner 1868 photo above are as follows, left to right:

Dr. Mathews, Mountain Tail, Pounded Meat, Black Foot, Winking Eye, White Fawn, White Horse, Poor Elk, Shot in the Jaw, Crow, and Pretty Bull.

Carlo

[kingsleybray]

I wonder why Pretty Bull signed the treaty first? Sits in the Middle of the Land (Black Foot) was the principal Kicked in the Bellies leader and considered the head chief of the tribe.

[grahamew]

Perhaps because of the previous association with the whites that Hoxie mentions?

[carlo]

Kingsley,

The visit of Lone Horn and Roman Nose is very interesting in light of the diplomatic councils not even 6 months prior, where Red Cloud and Man Afraid tried to entice the Crows to join their Lakota-Cheyenne alliance against the new forts along the Bozeman trail. I always understood the meetings were inconclusive, in that the Crows did not agree nor disagree to the Lakota proposal, but requested more time to think it over. (And so never did join the alliance in the end.)

Could the visits by Lone Horn and Roman Nose have attributed to their refusal to join the alliance after all? If so, how did the 'militant' Lakota then view these Mniconju? It could thus be argued that they were not acting in the interest of the Lakota nation, as it were. Or, alternatively, this could be another good example of the Lakota individualistic tradition that every man is free to do what he wants.

It seems strange that in the midst of a war with the US, these Mniconju would seek peaceful relations with the Crow, smack in the middle of the battle zone. Why not just stay away?

Carlo

[kingsleybray]

Good questions, Carlo. And many militant Lakota undoubtedly looked critically at the diplomacy of Lone Horn and Roman Nose. Lt Templeton at Ft C.F. Smith heard various rumours from the nearby Crow camps, that Roman Nose had left the hostile Sioux, and that the latter intended killing Roman Nose if they found him.
Getting at your last question "Why not just stay away?" the answer must be grounded in these hunting grounds in eastern Montana were at the heart of the already shrinking northern herd buffalo range - what the Lakotas called the Buffalo North. The herds were already gone from what's now South Dakota. You could join Southern Brule and Southern Oglala tribesfolk in southwest Nebraska, but that was to desert one's own lands - and to swap one set of regional problems with the Americans for another.
Some Lakota bands were already settling near posts like Ft Sully and Ft Rice, knowing that the old life was coming to an end, and reluctantly preparing to take up the new life of the reservation - the Treaty of 1868 was less than 18 months away - of farming and handouts. Of course many other bands, Lone Horn and Roman Nose included, were not prepared for that - they wanted to maintain the old life. The Bozeman Trail garrisons put those bands on a collision course with the USA. For younger war chiefs the solution was obvious - war against the Americans - but many older chiefs such as Man Afraid of His Horse sought to balance their commitments to the Lakota way of life with a commitment to seeking a negotiated solution to the crisis in the hunting grounds. They had grown up in the heyday of the buffalo robe trade, a trade that meshed the interests of Indians and whites, and they took seriously the pledges of friendship between the races that they and their fathers had made over the previous 50 years.
In this light we can see Lone Horn and Roman Nose briefly (the Crow diplomacy fizzled out by summer 1867) trying to win a tribal-level Miniconjou consensus over a new alliance with the Crows, one that would permit shared hunting rights - the continued access to buffalo herds that was the without-which-nothing of Plains Indian life.
Lone Horn and Roman Nose were certainly building on the diplomacy of Red Cloud and Old Man Afraid of His Horse in August 1866. Working out all the implications of this period of Lakota-Crow dialogue is one of my ongoing research goals. Remember that the two Oglala leaders had not spoken with one voice. When Red Cloud pressed the Crows to make an alliance with the Lakotas and join his projected fall-winter campaign against the Bozeman Trail posts, Man Afraid undercut Red Cloud by saying he had received new tobacco from Ft Laramie and that final decisions on a major offensive must wait until he, since 1851 the acknowledged intermediary of the Oglala people with the Americans, had had a chance to
sound out the prospects of a new and just peace.
It's a fascinating period, and I have a lot of questions too. Looking at this Lakota-Crow diplomacy I wonder to what extent warrior and headmen's societies were involved with counterpart societies across the tribal divide - consider the Plainswide distribution of such warrior associations as the Fox and the Dog soldiers. My hunch would be that these clubs formed channels of communication across tribal boundaries. Maybe, for instance, it could be that Roman Nose and Pretty Bull belonged to a shared warrior society like the Fox.


Kingsley

[jinlian]

Sept 6, 2010 13:38:29 GMT -5 kingsleybray said:

grahamew, henri, jinlian and friends - can we identify Pretty Bull in any of the other Gardner 1868 images from Ft Laramie?

Thankyou for the leads

Kingsley

There're many problems with the identification of the Crow leaders in the F. Laramie photographs by Gardner. I remember a "Yellow Bull" that could be in fact have been our man - have to look for these images in my CDs.

[carlo]

Very valid points re. the hunting grounds, Kingsley. One can only imagine the difficult discussions that would have been held in Lone Horn's and Roman Nose's camps on their plans to seek peace with the Crows and essentially turn their backs on their own brothers. Drastic times call for drastic measures, I guess, and these were trying times to say the least. Facing the same problem, the militant Lakota opted for war while they opted for peace.

Their, and Red Cloud's, diplomatic missions to the Crows, although with different objectives, are also to be viewed in light of the recent Lakota-Crow war. Fighting only just recently abated, and the climactic battle where the Crows desperately defended their remaining homeland against the Lakota - the first battle of Pryor/Arrow Creek - was still very fresh in everyone's mind. That the Crows, basically all but pushed from the Powder/Tongue River hunting area by the Lakota, were even willing to talk to the Lakota diplomats is quite amazing.

I like your theory on potential intertribal links between the various warrior societies; I have not read any evidence on this, so would be very interested in what you are able to dig up - or anyone else reading this of course.

(Btw, re. Pretty Bull; he is identified as Pretty Young Bull in the online Gardner collection. Maybe this will help in your search.)

Carlo

[carlo]

The Crow-Lakota relationship during the 1867-68 timeframe was confusing, to say the least; a seemingly firm alliance between the Crows and the US was more than once put to the test by temporary Crow-Lakota truces.

As referenced earlier, in January 1867 Lone Horn & Roman Nose went on a peace mission to the Mountain Crows and in June 1867 at the Fort Sully talks, Mountain Crow headmen were still found among the Miniconjous & Sans Arcs. Yet in May of that same year, Lakotas raid a mule herd from Fort CF Smith, including some 40 Crow horses from Iron Bull’s camp nearby. Even more surprisingly, a month later, the Crows actually help out other Lakota horse raiders -- some of the stolen horses broke free and were returning to the fort when Crow warriors drove them back to the Lakota raiders. Then, in October 1867, Crow warriors join a war party of Lakotas, Cheyennes and Arapahos, in a raid against the Shoshone.

The Crows had already lost the Powder River country to the Lakotas and the 'neutral ground' around Fort CF Smith was no more by mid-1867. Unable to hunt freely and facing a very real threat of starvation by the fall of 1867, it seems clear that the Mountain Crows & Kicked In The Bellies were playing both sides (US & Lakota) in an effort to get out on top while still retaining their way of life. Both the Crows and Lakotas actually shared the objective of the abandonment of the Bozeman Forts. Leaving them in their country would mean the end of the old Crow life, yet abandonment potentially meant further encroachment by the Lakotas.

The shared objective did not ensure peace between the nations, although there is clear evidence that the Crows and Lakotas continued to aid each other politically during the Laramie talks. Yet in spite of (or possibly because of) the Fort Laramie Treaty, by the spring of 1868 the customary bellicose relationship between the Lakotas and the Crows had resumed and ushered in almost a decade of unrelenting warfare.

Carlo