To reach the place known as Mni Tho Wakpala, the Blue Water, you drive west from the Nebraska hamlet of Lewellen, turning from Highway 26 onto a gravel road and turning again through a gate that leads to fenced pastureland. The ancient cottonwood, now known by the Lakota Sioux as the Witness Tree, still towers above the grasslands. Blue Water Creek cuts a crooked path through a broad valley, its waters still pristine.
On that hot, windy afternoon in September 2023, the first of my three recent visits, it was easy to imagine what had unfolded by that placid stream long ago. For the Lakota village of a leader named Little Thunder, the buffalo hunt in late summer 1855 had been particularly bountiful. Some 40 tepees, home to about 200 people, stood beside the water. Women would have been at work tanning hides for tepees, moccasins, shirts and breeches, and drying and curing meat for the coming northern winter. Warriors would have seen to weapons and horses. Children would have been at their games. Old men would have gathered around the fires with their sacred chanupas, their pipes, perhaps reminiscing about the days when the wasichu, the whites, were mere curiosities.
Then, just after sunrise on September 3, 1855, 600 U.S. Army soldiers commanded by Brigadier General William S. Harney surrounded and ambushed the village, the first time in the Indian wars of the Northern Plains that the military attacked a camp full of families. Today the attack is often known, to the extent it is known at all, as the Blue Water Massacre, but for more than a century it was remembered in a few conventional histories as a particularly ruthless U.S. military victory—the Army’s first major salvo in a 35-year campaign against the Lakota, lords of the Northern Plains, the people of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, which ended finally with their subjugation at Wounded Knee in 1890. That episode, where as many as 300 Lakota were slaughtered, is widely known.
The same cannot be said about Blue Water.
The bloody chain of events had begun a year earlier, in mid-August 1854, when a lame-footed cow belonging to a Mormon settler wandered into the camp of the Brulé, also known as the Sicangu, one of seven bands that make up the Lakota nation. There, along the North Platte River in what is now Wyoming, the animal was felled by the arrow of a warrior named High Forehead, who may have been hungry.