Stolen Horses

When the rest of Clark’s contingent took to the canoes again at Camp Fortunate, Pryor and six privates had successfully driven forty-one horses all the way to the Three Forks of the Missouri, and thence up the Gallatin River and over Bozeman Pass to the Yellowstone Valley, apparently without any trouble. Then, smoke on the horizon on 18 July 1806. Twenty-four horses stolen on the twentieth. Seventeen taken on the twenty-fifth. It is conceivable that Indians had been dogging their tracks ever since Clark reached the Yellowstone on the fifteenth. Maybe before that.^[1]This particular run of bad luck began three days after Clark and his contingent left Travelers’ Rest on 3 July 1806 with fifty head of horses. They awakened on 7 July 1806 at their camp in the … Continue reading It’s possible too—perhaps probable—that the Crows knew who the white interlopers were when they saw them. They may have realized their moment had come when they saw the strangers begin cutting trees and carving canoes. Or was it pure coincidence?

A late-afternoon rainstorm on 25 July 1806, and abundant grass along the temporarily flooded banks of present-day Fly Creek, prompted him to camp there for the night, Sergeant Pryor later explained to his captain. The next morning, the horses were gone. All of them.

Unmistakable evidence showed that Indians had come within 300 feet of their camp. Pryor and his three men followed the departing hoofprints for five miles. When the tracks split and went in two different directions, Pryor pursued the larger party another five miles before giving up. The three soldiers returned to their camp, shouldered their packs, and headed toward the river, which they reached at Pompy’s Tower. There they killed a bison and built two small skin boats, bull boats, “in the form and shape of the mandans & Ricares [Arikaras].” But Pryor’s “chapter of accidents” was not full yet. Deep in the night of 26 July 1806 a wolf bit one of his hands and then turned on Windsor. Shannon shot the vicious canid. The bite of any animal, particularly a wild omnivore, is subject to infection, and the possibility of rabies must have crossed Pryor’s mind for a few days, but by the time he and his three-man detail caught up with Clark on 8 August 1806, the wound was almost healed.

Crow Horse Culture

How could the Crows have pulled off this caper? Had the seasoned but weary and homesick soldiers, though acutely aware of the dangers they faced every moment of every day, thoughtlessly relaxed their military discipline? Literally let their guard down? The very idea is both uncharitable and illogical, given the plentiful evidence that the Corps of Discovery always operated according to military procedures.

It wouldn’t have mattered in any case, for “getting” horses —not stealing them, mind you—was one of the four obligatory honors, or araxtsi’, to be attained by any Plains Indian man aspiring to chieftainship. The first was coup, which was to strike an enemy a non-lethal blow and escape without receiving one. The second was to snatch a bow or gun from the hands of an opponent without injury to oneself.^[2]Consider George Drouillard‘s experience on 22 August 1805, in Shoshone Cove. Nothing personal, mind you, just a candidate for chieftainship, maybe, trying to capture an honor. He failed, of … Continue reading The third was to become a pipe-owner or raid planner. An araxtsi’wice, or “honor owner.”

The fourth kind of araxtsi’ was gained by taking a picketed or otherwise closely guarded horse without being caught. Any great Plains Indian warrior had to become adept at that. So there was nothing extraordinary about one or more men creeping to within a hundred paces—about 300 feet—of Pryor’s camp and make off with twenty-four ponies.^[3]Lewis and Clark had observed that the Mandans and Hidatsas put their best horses in their earthen lodges at night, perhaps partly against the prowess and determination of Assiniboine, Arikara and … Continue reading Indeed, that may be why some Crow people today won’t brag about taking the expedition’s horses. It was “too easy.” Those young men could bring it off because they knew horses. Horses were extensions of their very selves. That’s partly why the Crows didn’t eat horseflesh.

Moreover, horses were the coin of the realm—”dollars” to the Crows, as to most other Plains Indians. Need was not an issue, but ostentatious wealth was. It was an Indian version of the capitalistic principle a 19th century critic would apply to a white American value: “conspicuous consumption,” the accumulation of money for its own sake.^[4]Robert H. Lowie, The Crow Indians (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935), 216, 228.

A Bold Plan Goes Up in Smoke

The sudden loss of capital immediately ended the Captain’s bold diplomatic plan to bring a delegation of Sioux chiefs to Washington City. As for Pryor, he would have to find an alternate mode of transportation. Personal survival, and that of his three charges, Hugh Hall, George Shannon, and Richard Windsor, became the new priority.