Distinctly Montana Magazine

45 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m and Medicine Bundles ger and resilient." Such vital and useful ob- jects were stored in medicine bundles. Medicine bundles were common to Plains Indians, and were small sacks, sometimes of animal skin, that contained priceless items of power. A medicine bundle belonging to a Pie- gan Blackfoot man from Alberta named Char- lie Crow Eagle was purchased and opened by a paleontologist in 1960. According to scien- tist and writer Adrienne Mayor, Crow Eagle's medicine bundle contained no less than "nine Iniskim: two Baculites compressus, four Pla- centiceras ammonites, an Acanathoscaphites ammonite, a Paleozoric coral, and a Corbicula clamshell, all coated in red pigment." A medicine bundle owned by White Man Runs Him, a Crow scout for Custer at Little Bighorn, contained a marine fossil and was decorated with fringe and beads that testi- fied to its effectiveness. The Crow, too, believed that fossils held baaxpee, or mystical powers, including the ability to multiply themselves, and to change in size and shape seasonally. Mayor writes how a Crow, speaking in 1907, told an anthropologist "[t]hey were light in weight early in spring, but grew heavier by summer... in the coldest winter there would be frost on them, for they breathed." Most Plains Indians, including the Crow, the Blackfeet, and the Sioux, agreed on a basic cos- mology in which the most destructive forces of the Great Plains were personified as opposing monstrous deities; as Mayor writes, "[s]ky and wa- ter/earth spirits, whose conflicts symbolized na- ture's struggle for harmony in Amerindian myths, were personified by Thunder Birds with their light- ning and Water Monsters who caused floods." The war between the Thunder Birds and the Water Monsters involved ranged warfare; they fired missiles at one another which the Sioux called kangi tame, or the blackened remains of lightning bolts. In paleontological terms, they were most of- ten belemnite fossils found after a fierce storm had washed away sediment and unearthed the ancient stones, the "spent ballistics," as Mayor calls them, of these godlike avatars of nature. As the Thunder Birds and the Water Monsters threw strange stones at each other, so too did Lakota witches, or spider men. They were taught to do so by the evil Gnaski or Crazy Buffalo, who magically "shot" a piece of the bone of a long-dead Water Monster into a Lakota man who returned to his village mad- dened, behaving like a deranged bull. Wata, the legendary first Medicine Man of the Lakota, removed the bone and warned the tribe against using Gnaski's wakan sica, or bad magic. Ritually "shooting" someone with a fossil shard became known as "stinging." Even so, there were those who were drawn to the darkness and power of the bad magic and ap- plied themselves to be ḣmuḣġa wicáša, or stinging men. While some erected stone markers around ar- Fossil Legends of the Native Americans of the Plains White Man Runs Him

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