Peace Through Unity

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana

Forty years after the battle, Chief Two Moons of the Northern Cheyenne stood on Last Stand Hill and said: "I was once the enemy of the white man. Now I am the friend and brother, living under the flag of our country." He was seventy years old. He had fought here in 1876. He had watched Custer's soldiers die on this ridge. Now he stood beside the men who had come to bury the hatchet, and he said what he believed.

Ten years after that, in 1926, General Edward Godfrey of the Seventh Cavalry -- a young lieutenant in 1876, one of the officers who had held the hill on Reno's position -- stood at the same place and said: "The hatchet has been with the Red race, the symbol of war. We now unite in the ceremony of burying the hatchet, holding it a covenant of our common citizenship and everlasting peace."

These ceremonies happened. The words were spoken. The men who had fought each other shook hands on the ground where they had fought. Whether the peace they were celebrating was the peace of genuine reconciliation or the peace of conquest is a question that each person who visits this place must answer for themselves.

Two Moons was born around 1847 in the country of the Powder River. He was a war chief of the Northern Cheyenne, and he led his warriors at the Little Bighorn on June 25 and 26, 1876. He was also present at the Battle of the Rosebud, eight days earlier, where General Crook's column was turned back by Crazy Horse's warriors. After the Little Bighorn, the Army pursued the Cheyenne through the winter of 1876-1877. In January 1877, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie attacked Dull Knife's village on the Powder River and destroyed it. The Cheyenne surrendered at Fort Robinson in May 1877. Two Moons was among those who surrendered.

He spent the rest of his life on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, the country his people had fought to keep. He became a recognized leader among his people and a figure of some interest to the journalists and historians who came to interview the survivors of the Little Bighorn. He told his story many times. He was consistent in the details that mattered: the village was large, the soldiers came from two directions, the fighting was fierce, and the warriors won.

Edward Godfrey was twenty-seven years old at the Little Bighorn, a lieutenant commanding Company K in Benteen's battalion. He survived the battle on Reno Hill and came to the field with the relief column on June 27. He spent the rest of his military career studying what had happened and why. He wrote and revised his account of the battle for more than forty years, interviewing survivors on both sides, reading the testimony of the Court of Inquiry, and trying to reconstruct the sequence of events from the fragmentary evidence available. He retired as a general in 1907. He was still revising his account when he died in 1932.

The ceremony of 1926 brought these two men together on the ground where they had fought. Godfrey was eighty-one years old. Two Moons was seventy-nine. They had spent fifty years on opposite sides of a history that neither of them had chosen and that both of them had survived. The hatchet they buried was a ceremonial hatchet, made for the occasion. The peace they proclaimed was the peace of old men who had outlived the war.

Enos Poor Bear, Oglala Lakota elder, said at the dedication of the Indian Memorial in 2003: "If this memorial is to serve its purpose, it must not only be a tribute to the dead; it must contain a message for the living. Power through unity."

Black Elk, Oglala Lakota, whose words were recorded by John Neihardt in Black Elk Speaks, said: "Give them now the flowering stick that they may flourish, and the sacred pipe that they may know the power that is peace."

The Peace Through Unity memorial at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument holds these words and the history behind them. It does not pretend the history was simple. It does not pretend the peace was free. It holds the words of the men who were there -- Two Moons, Godfrey, Poor Bear, Black Elk -- and lets the visitor decide what they mean. The ground beneath the memorial is the same ground where the battle was fought. The words spoken on it are the words of people who knew what the ground cost.

Two Moons was there. Godfrey was there. The words they spoke forty and fifty years after the battle were the words of men who had lived with what happened here and were trying, in the time they had left, to make something of it.

See also

• Peace Through Unity at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (National Park Service)
• Indian Memorial at Crow Agency, Big Horn County
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument at Crow Agency, Big Horn County