They're not an odd couple really. They’re much alike, greatly influential once upon a time, and heralded yet today. It's hard to imagine any two historic Native leaders better known to those of us who live here than the Umoⁿhoⁿ headman Blackbird--a casino is named in his honor!--and War Eagle, the Yankton/Santee who to this day proffers a peace pipe from a hill above the Missouri.
This oddly matched pair share a history of cooperation with the white colonizers whose sheer numbers eventually altered Native life forever. Both worked with fur traders who ran a lucrative business along the rivers back then.
Everybody wanted furs; European gentlemen wouldn't step outside without beaver hats. Furs brought the French Canadians here, and the Spanish--they built a fort near Homer. Throw in upstart Americans, too, in numbers eventually beyond tallying, Yankees who thought they owned the place once Lewis and Clark drew them a map.
Honestly, try to imagine our river hub as the United Nations. In 1800 it was greatly multi-cultural--and that's not counting the Santee, Pawnee, the Umoⁿhoⁿ or the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota, all of them unimaginably mobile, given to hunt buffalo hundreds of miles from home and staying out there for half a year. Right here, you didn’t know who might show up--all kinds of people speaking in tongues.
For better or worse, both War Eagle and Blackbird decided their skills and experience here on the rivers could slip good money, strength, and power into their pockets.
War Eagle was a kind of scout, a pilot on the wily Missouri River, after having served as one of the region's first mailmen, running messages up and down on both sides. He knew the ins and outs of the Big Muddy. What’s more, two of his daughters married Theophile Bruguier, thereby becoming the first permanent residents of what we now call Sioux City.
Blackbird, an Umoⁿhoⁿ headman, learned to play along with the Yankees, just as War Eagle had. By the time smallpox took Blackbird, he was among the richest men up and down the river, a kind of Native Don Corleone, a man who sought, gained, and then controlled what went into deep pockets--and what didn't.
Neither feared the white man. Blackbird grabbed what he could when he could and had a thing about tribal rivals for his power—men who tended, strangely enough, to disappear. On the other hand, Blackbird's wily character found ways to let whites know that, unlike his people, the white man was the guest here. He cooperated with the colonizers but no farther than the reach of his long arm.
When smallpox took him and so many Umoⁿhoⁿ, the ceremonies surrounding his death became legendary because, it is claimed, he wanted to be astride his horse, looking over the river. Four years later, the mound above his grave was still of such prominence that Lewis and Clark saw it and pulled the pirogues over to investigate.
Want to know where? No problem. There's an interpretive shelter marking the spot, just off Highway 75. Can't miss it.
George Catlin, up the river thirty years later, even did a painting. Way up there on the grassy hills, there's something high and mighty—Blackbird’s grave.
Big names, both of them: War Eagle and Blackbird. Celebrated, both of them.
Heroes? Good question. The saga of Blackbird's burial, some say, was created by white folks. The first time my grandson saw the War Eagle monument, he thought that peace pipe was an AK-47.
The most we can say, I suppose, is that sometimes our heroes are shaped by our politics or what we want them to be. Even today, that seems to be the truth about them--and the truth about us.
