Wraps-his-Tail Rebellion Recalled in Montana

A full century after Crow warriors con­ducted an unsuccessful revolt on the Little Big Horn (eleven years following the Sioux victory over George Custer) against the authority of the United States government, a historical marker has been erected at the Crow Tribal Court Complex to note the event. The Montana Committee for the Human­ities provided funds recently to support a program at the marker’s dedication and a scholarly conference on the 1887 uprising at the nearby Hardin Middle School.

The central figure and only fatality in the uprising was a Crow leader who is known to his people as Wraps-his-Tail and was celebrated by his adversaries as “Sword-Bearer.” The scholars who ad­dressed the approximately 175 persons attending the conference at the Hardin school had labored long to piece togeth­er the details of the Crow rebellion, although some particulars remain unre­solved. Wraps-his-Tail, they concurred, had lead about 200 of his fellow tribes­men in an armed demonstration against their condition on the Crow reservation not far from the scene of Custer’s disaster of 1876. The result was a sharp engagement on November 5, 1887, with an overwhelming force of troopers dis­ patched from Fort Custer. The rebel­lion’s leader was killed near the Little Big Horn River, others were wounded, and compatriots such as Charlie Ten Bear and Packs-the-Hat survived to re­ call their experiences in the battle to the next generation.

Papers delivered at the Hardin con­ference offered varying interpretations of the immediate cause of conflict. Allen Clark of the history department at Eastern Montana College in Billings ad­dressed the subject of causation directly and noted: “Young warriors, longing for the way of life of their fathers, resenting that they could no longer gain war honors, hunt buffalo, steal horses and women from neighboring tribes, followed a prophet who conjured them into believing he {Wraps-his-Tail) was invincible because he possessed a sword that made him impervious to white men’s bullets.” Clark’s colleague at East­ern Montana, Adrian Heidenreich, con­tributed a paper on “Fictions, Fantasies, and Facts Surrounding the Sword-Bear­er Uprising,” and Don Rickey, a histori­an from Evergreen, Colorado, added comments on the subject, “Through a Glass Darkly: Contemporary 1887 Per­ceptions of People and Events on the Crow Reservation.” Finally, Joe Medi­cine Crow, a tribal historian,  recalled the results of interviews he conducted in 1950 with two participants in the action. Following the conference, many attending joined in the formal unveiling of the historical marker recounting the 1887 uprising. Tom Yellowtail, a Crow medicine man, conducted a pipe cere­mony as part of the occasion and the Night Hawk singers from Lodge Grass Montana entoned Wraps-his-Tail’s hon­or song.

Concurrent with these observations was an exhibit on the Crow uprising at the Custer Battlefield National Monu­ment Museum. Wraps-his-Tail’s shield was among the artifacts on display, thanks to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the research of Mardell Plainfeather. The Crow lead­er’s belt, borrowed from the Big Horn County Historical Museum, was also on view, as were ledger art drawings by warriors who had taken part in the 1887 rebellion.

“The Montana Committee for the Humanities,” states its executive direc­tor, Margaret Kingsland, “has consis­tently worked to encourage cooperation between tribal and other historians, and to fund the exchange of ideas between scholars and the public. Tribal histori­ans have frequently contributed vitally important new information and per­spectives to our understanding of the encounter between cultures in the West.” The Montana Committee for the Humanities, whose $1,000 grant sus­tained some of the public programs for the commemoration, is a state program of the National Endowment for the Hu­manities.