The Parallel Lives

Anthropologists divide the Lakota Sioux into seven bands. One band is called the Brulé or the Sicangu, or the Burnt Thighs. In August of 1854, a village of the Brulé people, led by chief Conquering Bear, were encamped along the North Platte River just into Wyoming.

     One day, a cow that belonged to a Mormon settler wandered into the Brulé camp and one of the band’s warriors, High Forehead, shot and killed the cow. He wanted to eat steak.

     Conquering Bear rode the ten miles to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, midway between Lingle and Guernsey, Wyoming, and offered a horse to the Mormon settler as compensation for his cow.

     Lieutenant John Grattan, 24-years-old and fresh out out West Point, was determined to arrest High Forehead. He and 29 soldiers marched to the Brulé camp, and demanded the warrior.

     One U.S. Army soldier panicked and fired a first shot. The Brulé warriors surrounded Grattan and the other 29 soldiers and shot them. Conquering Bear also was killed during the melee.  

     In November of 1854, three Brulé warriors assaulted a mail coach near Fort Laramie, and killed three white men, taking the coach’s gold.

     The Brulé, now led by Chief Little Thunder, headed east into Nebraska to hunt buffalo.

     Reports of these two incidents enraged government officials back east. President Franklin Pierce assigned Brigadier General William S. Harney to lead an attack upon the Lakota Brulé.     

     Blue Water Creek begins in central Garden County, Nebraska, and runs more or less straight south until it joins the North Platte River just west of Lewellen, Nebraska. North of that junction a mere three or so miles is where the Lakota Brulé were encamped in early September 1855.

     A sixteen-page article, with text and colored pictures about the Battle of Blue Water, appeared last November in the magazine, the Smithsonian, published by the Washington D.C. museum.

     Tim Madigan, the article’s author, wrote, 

     “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.”

     On September 3, the Lakota Brulé women and men looked to the southern horizon and saw General Harney and his troops riding their way. Fearing for their lives, the women pulled down their tepees, grabbed their buffalo hides and cured meat, and fled north. 

     Chief Little Thunder negotiated with Harney, but the General ordered his soldiers to attack. 

     By accounts written later, the Battle of Blue Water was a massacre, for 86 Lakota Brulé  men, women, and children were killed, but only four U.S. Army soldiers. 

     A 25-year-old officer and West Point graduate named Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren, a mapmaker who did not take part in the attack, recorded in his diary the atrocities he witnessed.

     “After getting to camp I dressed their wounds. The feeling of sympathy for the wounded women and children and deep regret for their being so, I found universal. It could not be helped.”

     At the massacre’s site, Warren collected dozens of Brulé handcrafted items, including dolls, moccasins, buckskin pants, feather bonnets, and war shirts, taken “from the bodies of the slain.”

     He carried the artifacts back east in 1856, and donated the 69 items to the Smithsonian.

     In recent years, the descendants of Chief Little Thunder—Karen, Phil, and Harry Little Thunder—have asked Smithsonian officials to return the Warren donations to the Lakota people. 

     On August 27, 2025, Tim Madigan wrote a followup article for the Smithsonian and reported that Smithsonian officials turned over the Warren donations to the Lakota people during that last week of August, just over two weeks ago, in time for the 170th anniversary of the Battle.

     For the next two years, the Lakota will store the donations in a building atop a hill at the Ash Hollow State Historical Park, perhaps a dozen miles south of the battle site, until “the Lakota people decide their ultimate disposition. Only the Lakota will have access to them.”