Distinctly Montana Magazine

S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 S P E C I A L S E C T I O N 93 When Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow was a young boy, he embarked on two dramatic vision quests. The second occurred when he was just nine years old. He cut off part of his finger and passed out. He saw a spiritual guide in his sleep who appeared to him and ushered him underground. He was shown thousands of bison in tunnels below the earth. Emerging into the sunlight, he saw as those thousands of buffalo were disgorged from the earth—and then disappeared. Then another kind of animal came out of the hole in the ground, something like a buffalo but different; many were white and spotted and sported long, strange tails that reached almost to the ground. It would be years before he understood what the vision meant: that the buffalo, a profoundly important resource to the Native Americans in general, and to the Crow tribe in particular, would disappear and be replaced by the domesticated beef brought to the plains by Anglo-American settlers. But that wasn't the only pro- phetic aspect of his dream. Before it ended, the little person revealed the image of an old man to the little boy. The old man was resting in the shade of a tree, and beside him was a two-story house in the manner of those made by the white man. "Do you know this old man?" asked the spirit in his vision. The little boy said that he did not. "It is you." Many years later, he would build the house exactly to the specifica- tions of his dream. Within the Crow tribe, Plenty Coups was well known as a vision- ary, both literally and figuratively, and thus his early visions were afforded great weight. Under his leadership, the Crow would not fight against the white man, as many of the plains tribes did, but aid them by supplying scouts to the "bluecoats" and helping to subdue the Sioux. Plenty Coups said, "The Cheyenne, and the Sioux... have always been our enemies... But when I fought with the white man against them it was not because I loved him or because I hated the Sioux and the Cheyenne, but because I saw this was the only way we could keep our lands... And it was my dream that taught us the way." A few moments later, he told Linderman that he is "…old and am living an unnatural life. I know that I am stand- ing on the brink of the life that nobody knows all about, and I am anxious to go to my Father, ah-badt-dadt-deah, to live again as men were intended to live." It is sad to think that he considered his life unnatural, whether in its longevity (he lived to be 84) or his eventual housing arrangement. Indeed, despite his evident pride in his house, he kept it largely unfur- nished and slept in a tipi erected beside the structure for most of his life on the proper- ty. In part, this was because tipis are better insulated in winter and better ventilated in summer. In the last three years of his life, he moved entirely into the house. Joshua Gross has been working at Chief Plenty Coups State Park for five months, having "always been interested in history, and because," he tells me, "I was always intrigued by the fascinating story of Chief Plenty Coups and Crow-U.S. relations." He tells me that, in some ways, the house is an amalgam of traditional Crow and Anglo settler ideas in home construction: "Chief Plenty Coups did work from a design, and it was based on Crow culture. The chief wanted a two-story house with a smoke hole in the top, with an eastern-fac- ing front door and no windows—just like a tipi... Originally, Plenty Coups's house was scarcely furnished. Visitors and residents would initially sit on a pile of buffalo robes with their backs against a wall, not unlike sitting in a tipi." CHIEF PLENTY COUPS CHIEF PLENTY COUPS STATE PARK STATE PARK MONTANA FISH WILDLIFE AND PARKS Scan the QR code to see more about... Chief Plenty Coups http://bit.ly/plenty406 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL

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