Cheyenne Warrior Markers

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana

On the ridge above the Little Bighorn, two red granite markers stand near stone cairns that families built with their own hands. One marks the place where Lame White Man fell. The other marks the place where Noisy Walking was carried after the fighting. The cairns came first. The granite came later. The grief came first of all.

Lame White Man -- Vé'ho'énȯhnéhe in Cheyenne -- was a Southern Cheyenne who had come north after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, when Colonel Chivington's soldiers killed more than 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women and children. He joined the Northern Cheyenne and rose to lead the Elkhorn Scraper military society. By June 1876 he was perhaps thirty-seven years old, a man of proven courage who had spent his adult life defending what remained of his people's world.

On the morning of June 25, 1876, he was still dressing when Major Reno's cavalry charged the south end of the great village. He grabbed what weapons were at hand and ran toward the sound of the firing. He rallied the men around him with words that John Stands in Timber, the Cheyenne historian, recorded from the veterans who were there: "Young men, come now with me and show yourselves to be brave." They came. They drove Reno's battalion back across the river and up the bluffs. Then they turned north toward the ridge where Custer's five companies were making their last stand.

Lame White Man was killed on that ridge. In the chaos of the fighting, Miniconjou Lakota warriors who did not know him -- he was wearing a captured cavalry coat -- scalped him, mistaking him for an enemy scout. His family found him afterward and buried him as the Cheyenne bury their honored dead.

Noisy Walking -- Nestonevahtsestse -- was a young warrior who survived the battle but not its aftermath. He was carried to a willow shelter and laid on buffalo robes. His friend Wooden Leg came to sit with him. "I asked my friend 'How are you?'" Wooden Leg remembered. "He replied 'Good only I want water.' I did not know what else to say but wanted him to know I was his friend and willing to do whatever I could for him. I said you were very brave."

Noisy Walking died of his wounds.

In 1916, Sioux and Cheyenne veterans of the battle returned to the ridge and showed John Stands in Timber where the cairns stood. Stands in Timber was the grandson of Cheyenne who had fought here. He spent his life gathering the memories of those who had been present and recording them before they were lost. In 1956 he brought Don Rickey, Jr., the chief historian of the Custer Battlefield, to see the cairns. In 1958 the National Park Service put up a wooden sign. In 1999 they replaced it with the red granite markers that stand here now.

The cairns are older than any of that. The families built them in the days after the battle, before the soldiers came back, before the monument was established, before anyone outside the valley knew exactly what had happened here. They built them the way people have always marked the places where someone they loved fell: with stones carried by hand, placed one on another, in a country that was still theirs.

The Cheyenne called this battle the Fight Where the Girl Saved Her Brother, because a young woman named Buffalo Calf Road Woman rode onto the field during the Battle of the Rosebud, eight days before the Little Bighorn, and rescued her brother Comes In Sight from certain death. The name they gave to the Rosebud fight carried forward to the Little Bighorn as well, because the two battles were part of the same resistance, the same summer, the same refusal to be confined to a reservation that could not feed them.

The white markers that stand on the ridge above the river -- the ones that mark where the soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry fell -- have been there since 1879, when Captain Sanderson's detail buried the remains and erected the first stones. The red granite markers for Lame White Man and Noisy Walking came 120 years later. The gap between those dates is not a gap in history. It is a gap in whose history was being told. John Stands in Timber spent his life trying to close that gap, gathering testimony from the men and women who had been present, writing down what they remembered before they died. His book, Cheyenne Memories, published in 1967, is the record of that effort. The red granite markers on the ridge are another part of the same record.

The Northern Cheyenne Reservation lies to the southeast of the battlefield, in the country the Cheyenne have lived in since they were settled there after the wars. Lame White Man's descendants live there still. They come to the battlefield for the annual commemoration, in late June, when the grass is tall and the cottonwoods are in full leaf and the ridge looks the way it looked in 1876, before the monument and the parking lot and the white markers in their rows.

See also

• Cheyenne Warrior Markers at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (National Park Service)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument at Crow Agency, Big Horn County
• Indian Memorial at Crow Agency, Big Horn County