The Crazy Horse Medicine Bundle
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The Crazy Horse Medicine Bundle (Article begins on page 2 below.) This article is copyrighted by History Nebraska (formerly the Nebraska State Historical Society). You may download it for your personal use. For permission to re-use materials, or for photo ordering information, see: https://history.nebraska.gov/publications/re-use-nshs-materials Learn more about Nebraska History (and search articles) here: https://history.nebraska.gov/publications/nebraska-history-magazine History Nebraska members receive four issues of Nebraska History annually: https://history.nebraska.gov/get-involved/membership Full Citation: Thomas Powers, “The Crazy Horse Medicine Bundle,” Nebraska History 95 (2014): 64-75 Article Summary: Powers recounts the history of Indian involvement in Minatare, where impoverished Oglala Lakotas came annually to dig potatoes before the first frost. He had learned from Barbara Means Adams, a descendent of a witness of Crazy Horse’s death, that the Lakota leader’s medicine bundle had been buried under a cottonwood tree in Minatare for safekeeping during World War II. Cataloging Information: Names: Scudder McKeel, Fast Thunder, Crazy Horse, Barney Wickard, Theodore Means, Theresa Means, Pete Swift Bird, Stella and George Swift Bird, Mabell Kadlecek, Black Elk, Barbara Means Adams Nebraska Place Names: Pine Ridge, Minatare, Fort Robinson Keywords: Oglalas, medicine bundle, Crazy Horse, Barbara Means Adams Photographs / Images: ledger art depiction of the death of Crazy Horse as portrayed by Amos Bad Heart Bull, potato harvest in the North Platte Valley, a farmer tending an irrigation ditch near Minatare, Battle of the Little Big Horn portrayed by Amos Bad Heart Bull, attendees of the 2013 Fort Robinson History Conference near the spot where Crazy Horse was killed, photograph by Charles Howard of Crazy Horse’s body scaffolded on a hilltop overlooking Camp Sheridan T H E CraZY HOrse MediciNE BUNdle BY THOMAS POWERS ard times soon came to the Oglala Lakota the traditional way, with a sweat bath. The time of in the years after Crazy Horse was killed in greatest hardship and deepest poverty for the Ogla- H1877. In their early years on the Pine Ridge las came in the 1930s, when there was almost no reservation the Oglalas raised cattle and horses work on the reservation and people, especially the with success, but during the First World War, when elderly, sometimes died of starvation in their lonely prices were high, they sold most of their animals cabins during the winter. By this time the days of on the advice of agency officials and local white Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show were long over and ranchers. After the war they never managed to the reservation Indians no longer had much to rebuild their herds. Without animals to feed they sell. Most of the old pipes, beaded shirts, and war began to lease or sell their land. The great epi- paraphernalia had gone quickly and other things of demic of Spanish Influenza swept the reservation a sacred character, carefully wrapped and hidden in 1919 and killed hundreds of people, in many away, were too precious or personal to sell. Bead- cases because they tried to treat themselves in ing and quillwork were still done by Indian women 64 • NEBRASKA history The death of Crazy Horse as portrayed by Amos Bad Heart Bull (ca. 1868-1913), an Oglala Lakota tribal historian known for his ledger art, which adapted traditional Native American pictography to the medium of paper. NSHS 11055-2241-18 SPRING 2014 • 65 but prices were low and customers few. In 1930, at the top of the potato hill were especially vulner- according to the young anthropologist from Yale, able. Even a touch of frost would leave the potatoes Scudder Mekeel, only one Indian received “steady dotted with greenheads and you’d have to get rid monthly wages” in the White Clay district of Pine of them. Some of the Oglalas sent their younger Ridge, which included the agency offices—a man children to the Minatare grade school but in most paid $50 a month to herd cows for the trader. families everybody worked, from the old grannies For some years, Mekeel reported, Indians had down to children as young as five or six. If the men been going south in the fall to pick potatoes on had trucks or wagons they might hire out to haul the big farms along the North Platte River down in potatoes to the cellars. And it wasn’t just potatoes; Nebraska. Some traveled in old cars or trucks but there were sugar beets to be topped and piled for quite a few of the people made the hundred and the wagons to haul to the refineries, as well. twenty mile trip in horse-drawn wagons, heading The work went on all day every day until Satur- south on the road out of Pine Ridge to Rushville, day night, when there was a band concert in town Nebraska, where the show Indians used to gather to and everybody drove in to buy provisions, or go take the train before Buffalo Bill died in 1917. From to the Minatare movie theater, or fix a car, or get Rushville they proceeded south through Alliance a horse shoed at one of the two blacksmith shops where a dogleg headed them toward Bridgeport owned by men named Helmick and Jensen. The or Scottsbluff or the towns in between along the Great Depression disappeared for a few hours river. One of these was the bustling little farm town every Saturday night during potato picking time, of Minatare. There hundreds of Pine Ridge Indians when more than thirty businesses stayed open late would gather every September in tent camps on the on main street alone, including four grocery stores, farms where they worked, often setting up in the three car dealerships (Ford, Dodge and Chevro- same place, under the same big old cottonwood let), three clothing stores, an Ace Hardware and tree or in the same grassy spot along an irriga- the Boston store owned by Maw Anderson where tion ditch, year after year. Two grandchildren of Barney Wickard worked on Saturday nights as a Fast Thunder were among those who took their teenager. There were a hundred and thirty year- families south for a month or six weeks, making round jobs in Minatare then and the town doubled the trip every year right through the 1930s and into on Saturday nights when as many as three hundred the early 1940s, until the war got in the way. Fast Indians would come into town. You couldn’t find a Thunder had called Crazy Horse “cousin” and he parking space for a whole block on either side of was present the day Crazy Horse was killed. One of Main Street. his grandchildren who made the annual trip to Mi- As Barney Wickard remembered it, everybody natare was Theodore Means, son of Fast Thunder’s got along. On the western edge of town there was a daughter Fannie (and of Bruce Means, interpreter swimming hole in the Minatare irrigation ditch and for the agency doctor at the time, James Walker). on hot fall days Barney Wickard and Marvin Kishi- The other was Stella Swift Bird, daughter of Fast yama and Indian boys like their friend James Red Thunder’s oldest boy, Mark Red Star, known as Old Fern would all go down to a certain place beneath Man Flesh by his great-grandson, Pete Swift Bird. a big old cottonwood tree and swim, generally skin- They usually pitched their tents side by side along ny dipping. “There’s more mud in that hole than a windrow of cottonwoods on a place owned by water,” people used to say. It was the cottonwood a Japanese farmer just outside of Minatare. Some- tree that identified the place; the swimming hole times they pitched wall tents of the kind used by itself was no different than any other stretch of the the military in World War I, and sometimes they put ditch, which was perhaps a dozen feet wide and up a classic tipi style of tent. straight as an arrow for miles. Cottonwood trees The work in the potato fields was hard and long, grow big but this particular tree was truly of mam- remembered Barney Wickard, who lived his entire moth size. It is still there, seventy years after Barney life in Minatare except for the war years. The day Wickard and his friends used to jump or dive into began about 6 a.m. and sometimes continued until the water from the big tree’s branches. The trunk of eight in the evening, with a constant trekking of this tree is fifteen feet or more around. A silvery log horse-drawn wagons from the fields to the two po- limb on the bank of the ditch, broken off from the tato cellars in town where the potatoes were stored main stem, is shoulder high and as hard as rock. until they could be sold and shipped off. The trick It has probably been lying there for a half century. was to get the harvest in before the frosts came. Po- Earth-moving equipment would be required to tatoes only two or three inches below the surface dispose of this log, not to mention the tree. One 66 • NEBRASKA history imagines it will be a kind of landmark for the next who told her about it when Barbara was in her mid- Potato harvest in the North hundred years. twenties. On the day I met her, when Barbara was Platte Valley. Workers dig, Inevitably the Second World War changed in her fifties, she told me a remarkable story about pick, and haul potatoes at the C.