White Swan

White Swan (18501904), 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 (leader) 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 (1876 to 1881) 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." though some sources state his birth date was in 1850 or 1852. White Swans's battle scar to his right wrist may also be seen. 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 (1868). 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 (including influential leaders Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Crow King, Rain in the Face, Gall and many others) 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 (1868) 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. 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. 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.

The six Crow Scouts shared duties with 26 Arikara (Ree) 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 (aka Greasy Grass) 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."

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. and also could not hear, either from being hit on the head with a war club or because a rifle was fired close to his ear (reports differ).

The soldiers' retreat from the timber disintegrated into a rout, and the Sioux closed in on the now disorganized mass of retreating troopers, killing the stragglers and the disabled. Back in the timber, Half Yellow Face got the wounded White Swan on a horse and shielded by the timber, waited until the mass of Sioux warriors had turned their attention to Custer's column, now approaching the north end of the village, after which Yellow Face led the horse across the river and up the bluffs to the location where the Reno detachment was digging in, White Swan was carried on the Far West about 40 to 50 river miles down the Bighorn to the Yellowstone, where he was left in a temporary hospital facility with some of the less seriously wounded soldiers.

Curly and Half Yellow Face had not gone with the other scouts to the Crow Village and had returned with Gibbon to the mouth of the Big Horn, where White Swan was in the temporary army hospital. Records show that White Swan was discharged from Army scout duty in September 1876, but reenlisted in the Army for scouting activities in November 1877, When the Crow Reservation was further limited in size, the Agency was moved in 1884 from the site of present-day Absorakee, Montana on the Stillwater River to its present location at present-day Crow Agency in the Little Bighorn Valley, very close to the site of the battle. White Swan also moved to the new agency site.

White Swan continued to be limited by his battle wounds. White Swan had lost the lower half of his right hand, and he had a right wrist that was permanently deformed to bend sharply inward. (See photo above taken from the right side, showing injured wrist). He also limped from the bullet wound in his leg and/or foot.

Over the years since White Swan died, his artistic abilities have been recognized and his drawings have been collected. White Swan has emerged in Crow history as a talented artist. White Swan would have needed income after he had ceased to be an army scout and living at Crow Agency, just a few miles from the site of the famous battle, he found a ready market for this art. The battlefield drew visitors, and to a lesser extent so did the Crow Agency. These visitors included military men, government employees and other persons interested in the history of the famous battle, or simply interested in the Crow culture. Though White Swan could not serve as a guide or interpreter for visitors of the battle field as the other scouts did, owing to his speech impediment, his art allowed him to provide something unique to visitors who wanted to return home with an illustration that genuinely represented their encounter with Indians of the West. and the subject of University thesis. and collections.