White Swan
White Swan, or Mee-nah-tsee-us in the Crow language, was one of six Crow Scouts for George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry Regiment during the 1876 campaign against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Crow Indian Reservation, White Swan went with Major Reno's detachment, and fought alongside the soldiers at the south end of the village. Of the six Crow scouts at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, White Swan stands out because he aggressively sought combat with multiple Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, and he was the only Crow Scout to be wounded in action, suffering severe wounds to his hand/wrist and leg/foot. After being disabled by his wounds, he was taken to Reno's hill entrenchments by Half Yellow Face, the pipe-bearer of the Crow scouts, which no doubt saved his life.
On the 27th, after the battle, Half Yellow Face made a special horse travois for White Swan and moved him down the Little Horn valley to the Far West steamship, moored at the junction of the Bighorn River and the Little Horn, so he could get medical care from army physicians. White Swan was treated in a temporary Army hospital at the junction of the Bighorn and Yellowstone rivers. At the Crow encampments on Pryor Creek, other returning scouts reported that White Swan had died, but he survived his wounds.
Following the Battle of the Little Bighorn, White Swan continued for five years to serve as a scout with the U.S. Army, though he was disabled from wounds received in the battle, including a severely deformed right wrist and hand, and a wound in his foot/leg which caused him to limp. In photographs, White Swan also had a scar on his forehead where he had been struck with a war club in a separate battle with a Sioux warrior. Either from this blow or from other sources, White Swan could not hear and thus was unable to speak in his later life. Eventually, he was awarded a small army pension.
In White Swan's later life, he lived at the Crow Agency, after it had been moved in 1884 to its present site in the Little Bighorn valley in Montana, close to the site of the battlefield. When he could no longer be an Army scout, White Swan began to produce drawings that represented key events in his life, including events of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. These drawings were bought by visitors to the Crow Agency and the nearby Custer Battlefield, providing White Swan with a welcome source of income. These drawings have now been discovered by collectors and their artistic value has been recognized. They have recently become the subject of collectors, exhibitions, books and university theses, and prints of his drawings are now commercially produced.
While living at Crow Agency, White Swan was painted by the artist J.H. Sharp, who knew him and described him as "Jolly, good natured and a general favorite." White Swan was also photographed by Frank Rinehart, and by William A. Petzolt, producing photos included in this article. White Swan's wife had died when he was only 23 before he became an army scout, and he did not remarry. He lived for a time with an aunt, "Strikes By The Side Of The Water" who was also the mother of Curly, another Crow scout, and he and Curly were known in the Crow Agency community as brothers, though their personalities were said to be the opposite of each other.
He died in 1904, leaving no direct descendants. He is buried in the National Cemetery at the Little Bighorn Battlefield at a location described below. Although his early death and his inability to hear and speak left him out of the limelight that later fell on the other surviving Crow scouts, his outstanding bravery during the battle and his artistic ability established an enduring legacy.
Biography
Early life, names
White Swan was born in approximately 1851 though some sources state his birth date was in 1850 or 1852. He had been raised in the traditional manner of his tribe, and would have acquired warrior status in his early teens through deeds of bravery.White Swan married, but his wife died in 1873, before his enlistment as an army scout. He never remarried.
In historical references White Swan is also referred as "Strikes Enemy" and "White Goose" or Mee-nah-te-hash in the Crow language.
Army service as a Crow scout in the Great Sioux War of 1876
Background of the Great Sioux War
From 1870, the Crows had complained about hostile Lakotas encroaching from the east on Crow Indian reservation lands.The Crows requested that the U.S. Army take actions against these Sioux trespassers. From the point of view of the Crow Tribe, in 1876 finally something was going to be done.
However the Great Sioux War of 1876 that engulfed the life of White Swan, started because the U.S. Government also had its own larger agenda. Gold had been found in 1873 in the Black Hills on reservation lands granted the Sioux tribe by the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The gold strike had been made public in 1874 and by 1875 a full scale gold rush was underway. Motivated by growing unemployment caused by the Panic of 1873 ever-increasing numbers of gold seekers poured the Black Hills, establishing mining centers and boom towns. Being on the Sioux Reservation, these towns and mines were completely outside the usual framework of laws and jurisdictions for U.S. Territories, which generated chaotic conditions resulting in, among other things, no reliable base of organized law enforcement owing to the absence of federal law jurisdiction, as well as no federal marshals, courts or judges. Another important factor was the economic impact of the panic of 1873 which had left workers unemployed and the dollar devalued by a return to a de facto gold standard, augmenting a national priority for continued and increasing production from gold mines in the Black Hills.
The U.S. Government had tried unsuccessfully in 1875 to bring the Sioux living on the reservations to a conference to consider modifying the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty by the U.S. repurchasing the Black Hills back from the tribe. However in Article XII of that treaty any modification of treaty lands required the agreement of 3/4 of the tribe's adult males, and there were large bands of "off-reservation" Sioux who did not reside on the reservations and who also did not want to cede the Black Hills back to federal control. These bands lived year round in their traditional migratory way on the huge hunting preserve in the “unceded Indian Territory” in Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota given the Sioux by Article XVI of the Treaty of Fort Laramie which included the vast area extending westward from the Black Hills across the entire Powder River Basin to the crest of the Big Horn Mountains. In the fall 1875, the U.S. Government gave up on fair or equitable methods and sent out messengers to each band with an impossible ultimatum — to leave their winter camps in the hunting preserve and immediately return to their agencies in the Dakota Territories by January 31, 1876. When this predictably did not occur, as deep winter restricted travel of migratory bands, in February 1876 the Government directed army columns to converge from the south, east and west on these "off-reservation" Sioux bands in their remote encampments, with orders to bring them back to their agencies, by force if necessary.
Enlistment with the 7th Infantry, early skirmishes
One such military column commanded by Col. John Gibbon was instructed to proceed from Ft. Ellis, near present day Bozeman, Montana and march eastward, down the Yellowstone River and take up a position in southern Montana Territory to block the "off reservation" Sioux from crossing north of the Yellowstone River. In furtherance of this mission, on April 9, 1876, Col. John Gibbon went with Lt. James Bradley to the Crow Indian Agency, which was then located on the Stillwater River Drainage in Montana, to recruit Indian scouts. In an embarrassing two-hour council the chiefs of the Mountain Crows expressed their reluctance to help the expedition. They pointed out that Indian warriors traveled light and fast and struck quickly, whereas the soldiers marched slowly with wagons and thus never found the enemy.Fortunately for Gibbon, the young Crow braves did not follow the elders' advice, and sought adventure. On April 10, 1876 some twenty five Crows were enlisted for six months in the 7th Infantry by Lt. James Bradley, chief of scouts, including White Swan and Half Yellow Face. On April 13, 1876, the Crow Scouts went with Gibbon's 7th Infantry force of 477 persons, as they marched down the north side of the Yellowstone, arriving opposite mouth of the Bighorn River on April 20. Gibbon then moved eastward again along the north bank of the Yellowstone to
a camp opposite the mouth Rosebud Creek. The Crow Scouts ranged across south of the Yellowstone, and located the main Sioux village in the process of moving from Tongue River valley to the Rosebud valley in May 1876. In the course of this move, the Crow scouts skirmished with Sioux scouts.
Meanwhile, General Alfred Terry's column was marching east from Fort Lincoln, in the Dakota territory, and Terry rendezvoused with Col. Gibbon's column opposite the mouth of Rosebud Creek on June 21, 1876. General Terry's command included the 7th Cavalry under General George A. Custer.
Scouting activities with Custer's 7th Cavalry leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn
On June 21, White Swan was detached from the 7th Infantry to go with the 7th Cavalry, along with five other Crow Scouts who were Half Yellow Face, White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, and Curley. The 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer was ordered by General Terry to follow the trail of the large encampment of "off-reservation" Sioux who lived nomadic lives off the Great Sioux Reservation in present South Dakota. This group was making an annual westward spring migration from their camp on the Powder River valley to the Tongue and then to the Rosebud Valley, and on to the Little Bighorn. Custer was ordered to locate the encampment of these "off-reservation" Sioux on the Rosebud Creek, or in the adjacent Little Bighorn Valley, around 20 miles inside the eastern border of the Crow Indian reservation.The six Crow Scouts shared duties with 26 Arikara Scouts, under a Chief of Scouts Lt Charles A. Varnum,. However, the Crow scouts knew the Rosebud country much better than the Arikara because this had been traditional Crow country for centuries. As far back as 1805 records indicated that fur trader Francois-Antoine Larocque had camped with a band of Crows in what was later determined to be Little Bighorn River. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 gave the Crows a large reservation running west from the Powder River that including the river drainages of the Tongue, the Rosebud, and the Little Bighorn river valleys. The repeated aggressive westward incursions of Sioux bands beyond the Powder River in the 1850s and 1860s led to another treaty, the later 1868 Crow Treaty of Fort Laramie, which established a new western boundary for the Sioux/Crow reservations at the 107 Meridian, which ran north-south and generally separated the Rosebud drainage on the east from the Little Bighorn drainage on the west. This boundary area was a sort of no-man's land with both Sioux and Crows hunting on it, and warriors from both tribes crossing it to raid and steal horses from each other.
The six Crow scouts joined Custer on June 21. "They are magnificent-looking men, so much handsomer and more Indian-like than any we have ever seen, and so jolly and sportive... " wrote Custer to his wife, Elizabeth B. Custer. He also pointed out why it was important to get them connected to the U.S. Army, "I now have some Crow scouts with me, as they are familiar with the country." Charles A. Varnum spelled it out in his reminiscences, "These Crows were in their own country."
Since this was their ancestral homeland, the Crow scouts were relied on to undertake important scouting assignments for Custer in the days after June 21 leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25.
When Custer struck the trail of the "off-reservation" Sioux, the scouts' count of 400 to 450 lodges in the encampment confirmed army sources of an "off-reservation" nomadic group of about 800 warriors. This compared favorably to Custer's force of about 600 troopers. However this initial assessment on June 21 was made on encampments dating back to May 21, when the Sioux/Cheyenne crossed from the Tongue River to the Rosebud Valley. As the scouts followed this trail up the Rosebud, past Lame Deer Creek and then on to the divide with the Little Horn Valley, they found the older trail increasingly joined and overlaid by many newer trails. These newer trails were left by many other bands of Sioux/Cheyenne coming from the reservations to join the original "off-reservation" Sioux for their yearly summer gathering. Although it was not appreciated at the time, these late arriving bands of Sioux/Cheyenne swelled the encampment from 400 to about 960 lodges, able to field close to 2000 warriors.
Custer's prior experience in pursuing other Indian bands indicated that an Indian group would scatter if they knew they were being pursued. Custer used the Crows to check these trails to rule out a dispersal of the encampment he was following. Custer tended to disregard the Crow scouts' intelligence that more and more Indians were gathering together.
On the early morning of June 25, 1876, White Swan and other Crow Scouts ascended a high point on the divide between the Little Bighorn River and Rosebud Creek. From this lookout point the scouts saw very large horse herds on the western margins of the Little Bighorn Valley, some 15 air miles away. These large horse herds indicated an unexpectedly large Sioux/Cheyenne encampment. The encampment itself was out of sight on the valley floor.
The Crow scouts questioned the wisdom of attacking such a large encampment. However, Custer was focused on his concern that his force had been detected that morning by Sioux scouts, and he feared that if he did not attack at once, the large encampment would break up into many smaller bands which would scatter in all directions, thus escaping and avoiding the decisive engagement the army hoped for. Custer accordingly made plans for an immediate attack, and as he proceeded down Reno Creek toward the Little Bighorn Valley, he created four separate detachments, intended to prevent the encampment from scattering, and to strike the village from different directions. Reno with three troops would attack the south end of the village. Custer with five troops would attack the north end of the village, and Benteen with three troops would scout briefly to the south and then join the battle to assist the other detachments; Lt. McDougall's remaining troop would act as rear guard protecting the pack train.