MEMORY AND THE ROSEBUD

Among the ironies of the bloody and transformative Great Sioux War of 1876 is the differing manner in which Indian survivors—Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, Shoshones and Crows—embraced its legacy and recalled its battle grounds. The twist is no more apparent than in the story of the June 17 Battle of the Rosebud, a sprawling fight involving all of those tribes and occurring just eight days before the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Emotions were mixed among the Army’s Shoshone and Crow scouts. The Shoshones fought alongside Brigadier General George Crook’s soldiers on the Rosebud, then quit the war and rarely looked back. After all, the Sioux war on the northern Plains was a world apart from the Shoshones’ Wind River homeland in Wyoming Territory. For the Crows proximity proved confounding. The Little Bighorn clash, the most heralded of the scores of engagements, was fought within the very bounds of the massive Crow Indian Reservation in Montana Territory. Crow warriors scouted for Crook, Brigadier General Alfred Terry, Colonel John Gibbon and Lieutenant Colonel George Custer in 1876, but by stance and proximity they have ever after been linked to the Custer story and its aftermath.

However ambivalent but understandable the Crow embrace of the Great Sioux War, their attachment to it was not shared by surviving Sioux warriors and their descendants. For one, the Sioux do not live in the midst of the war’s major battlefields. Rather, most live on reservations hundreds of miles east in the Dakotas. Moreover, their historical attention is largely focused elsewhere. In the immediate