Plenty Coups

Based on Wikipedia: Plenty Coups

The Chief Who Saw Tomorrow

When he was eleven years old, a boy named Buffalo Bull Facing The Wind climbed into the Crazy Mountains of Montana to have a vision. He fasted for days, alone in the wilderness, waiting for something to reveal his people's future. What he saw would haunt him—and guide him—for the rest of his life.

He saw buffalo. Thousands of them, pouring out of a hole in the earth, spreading across the plains like a living flood. Then they vanished. And in their place came strange new buffalo—creatures with weird tails, spotted hides, and bellows that sounded nothing like the animals his people had hunted for generations.

He saw a forest struck by terrible winds. One by one, the great trees fell. Only a single tree remained standing. In its branches lived a chickadee.

The tribal elders listened to the boy's vision and rendered their interpretation: the white man would sweep across Native American lands like that wind through the forest, destroying everything in its path. Every tribe would fall. All except one—the Crow people, represented by that lone standing tree. But survival would require something almost unthinkable. The Crow would have to learn to work with the white man, not against him.

That boy would grow up to become Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Nation. And for the next seven decades, every major decision he made traced back to what he saw on that mountain.

A Name Earned, Not Given

He was born around 1848, near what is now Billings, Montana, to a father called Medicine-Bird and a mother named Otter-woman. His birth name, Chíilaphuchissaaleesh, translates roughly to "Buffalo Bull Facing The Wind"—a name that captured something fierce and unyielding in his nature.

But among the Crow, names were not permanent things. They were earned and changed as a person's story unfolded.

His grandfather saw something in the boy. He predicted that this child would become chief, would live long, and would accomplish many great deeds. So he gave him a new name: Alaxchiiaahush. The English translation—Plenty Coups—comes from the French word "coup," meaning a blow or strike. In Plains Indian warfare, a coup was an act of extraordinary bravery, and the term had been absorbed into the vocabulary of the region through French-Canadian traders and trappers who had moved through these territories for generations.

What made a coup so remarkable was what it wasn't. It wasn't killing. Any warrior could kill from a distance with an arrow or, eventually, a rifle. A true coup meant getting close enough to touch your enemy—to strike him with a special stick, steal his weapon, or take his horse—and then escaping alive. This required skill, cunning, and almost suicidal bravery. It was the difference between defeating an enemy and humiliating him, between winning a battle and proving you were simply better.

By the time Plenty Coups died, he had earned somewhere between fifty and one hundred feathers on his coup stick. Each feather represented one of these acts of valor. His grandfather's prophecy had been modest, if anything.

The Education of a Warrior

Before the vision on the mountain, before his new name, there was grief. When Plenty Coups was nine years old, his beloved older brother died. The loss devastated him. But in the depths of that sorrow came another vision—this one featuring one of the Little People of the Pryor Mountains.

The Little People are beings from Crow mythology, small in stature but immense in spiritual power. They were said to live in the mountains, and encounters with them could bring either great fortune or terrible danger. In Plenty Coups' vision, one of them delivered a message: develop your senses and your wits. Use them well. This is the path to becoming chief.

Years later, Plenty Coups would describe what followed that vision:

"I had a will and I would use it, make it work for me, as the Dwarf-chief had advised. I became very happy, lying there looking up into the sky. My heart began to sing like a bird, and I went back to the village, needing no man to tell me the meaning of my dream."

He threw himself into the training that would make him a warrior. He learned to drape himself in a gray wolf hide and slip alone into enemy camps—Sioux camps, Cheyenne camps—crawling close enough to count their warriors and study their defenses. He would return to his own people with intelligence, devise a plan of attack, and then lead the assault. Strike, take a trophy, and vanish before anyone could stop him.

His reputation grew. He was fearless and cunning, they said. Like the wolf.

He joined an elite warrior society whose members did everything backwards—eating before battles when others fasted, retreating when ordered to advance, speaking in opposites. This deliberate strangeness served a purpose beyond mere eccentricity. It unnerved their enemies. Warriors who seemed to operate by incomprehensible rules, who couldn't be predicted or understood, became objects of fear. Psychological warfare has ancient roots.

The Strategic Mind

But Plenty Coups was more than a fighter. He was also an orator—a skill that would prove just as valuable as his courage in battle.

In tribal councils, he spoke with a clarity and wisdom that made older men listen carefully. He had opinions about everything: how to handle raids from neighboring tribes, how to deal with the growing number of white settlers pushing into Crow territory, how to negotiate with a distant government that seemed to have limitless appetite for land.

At age twenty-eight, he was named chief. This wasn't a hereditary title or a political appointment. Among the Crow, becoming chief required fulfilling four specific requirements—acts of valor that proved a man worthy of leading others. Plenty Coups had fulfilled them many times over.

He became chief in 1876. That same year, a few hundred miles away, General George Custer led his Seventh Cavalry into the valley of the Little Bighorn River and was annihilated by a coalition of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. It was the most famous Native American victory in the long war for the American West.

Six Crow warriors served as scouts for Custer that day. They were allied with the United States Army—against other Native Americans.

This seems like betrayal until you understand the context. The Sioux and Cheyenne were not the Crow's brothers. They were their ancient enemies, rivals who had fought the Crow for generations over territory, hunting rights, and simple survival. When the Crow looked at the conflict between white America and the Plains tribes, they saw an opportunity. Help the whites defeat the Sioux and Cheyenne, and perhaps the Crow could survive what was coming.

Plenty Coups' vision had told him the wind was coming regardless. The only question was whether his people would be the tree that remained standing.

Fighting in Washington

The battles that would define Plenty Coups' legacy weren't fought on horseback with a coup stick. They were fought in meeting rooms in Washington, D.C., against senators who wanted to abolish the Crow Nation entirely and seize their remaining lands.

Over a period of ten years, Plenty Coups made multiple trips to the capital. He argued, negotiated, and maneuvered through a political system designed to dispossess his people. He was remarkably successful. While many tribes were forcibly relocated to reservations on completely foreign land—torn from the mountains and plains their ancestors had known for centuries and dumped onto unfamiliar territory—the Crow managed to keep their original homeland. They lost land, certainly. By the end, they retained only about eighty percent of what had been promised to them in earlier treaties. But they stayed in Montana. They remained on land that meant something to them.

This was not a common outcome.

Plenty Coups later described his first journey east, taken in 1880, to an anthropologist named William Wildschut. The train—which he called the "Fast Wagon"—struck him as something almost alive: "a big black horse with his belly nearly touching the ground."

Consider what these trips must have meant. A man who had grown up hunting buffalo on horseback, who had earned his reputation by sneaking into enemy camps under cover of darkness, now found himself navigating a world of gas lamps and telegraph wires, of men in suits who held the power of life and death over his people through documents and votes. He adapted. He learned the new kind of warfare. And he won more often than he lost.

The Chickadee's Lesson

Why did Plenty Coups choose cooperation when so many other Native American leaders chose resistance?

Part of the answer lies in that childhood vision. But there's something deeper in the specific image he saw—the chickadee in the last standing tree.

The chickadee is a small bird. It doesn't fight for territory like hawks or eagles. It doesn't have powerful talons or a fearsome cry. What the chickadee does, better than almost any other bird, is listen. It watches. It learns from others. It adapts to whatever the world throws at it.

When the tribal elders interpreted Plenty Coups' vision, they chose the chickadee as his spirit guide deliberately. The message was clear: survival would not come through strength alone. It would come through observation, adaptation, and wisdom.

Plenty Coups carried a pair of chickadee legs in a medicine bag for the rest of his life. Every time he reached into that bag, he was reminded of what survival required.

This philosophy crystallized in what became his most famous statement:

"Education is your greatest weapon. With education you are the white man's equal, without education you are his victim and so shall remain all of your lives. Study, learn, help one another always. Remember there is only poverty and misery in idleness and dreams—but in work there is self respect and independence."

Some might read these words as capitulation, as a surrender to white values. But consider what Plenty Coups was actually saying: learn their tools, master their systems, become so capable that they cannot dismiss or destroy you. This wasn't abandonment of Crow identity. It was a strategy for preserving it.

The Last Great Chief

In 1921, the United States dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. The ceremony honored an unidentified American serviceman killed in World War One, and organizers wanted representatives from across American society to participate.

They chose one person to represent all Native Americans: Plenty Coups.

He was seventy-three years old. He stepped forward in his traditional war bonnet, the feathers cascading down his back, and delivered a short speech in Crow. Then he removed the bonnet and his coup stick—the physical record of a lifetime of valor—and placed them on the tomb. They remain there today, preserved in a display case.

What did it mean for him to give up these sacred objects? The war bonnet represented his identity as a warrior. The coup stick recorded every act of bravery he had ever accomplished. And he laid them down on a tomb honoring a soldier from a war fought between nations his ancestors had never heard of, for causes that had nothing to do with the Crow.

Perhaps he saw it as a final bridge between worlds. Perhaps he was honoring the death of the warrior way of life itself. Or perhaps he simply understood, as he had understood since he was eleven years old, that survival required adaptation—and that sometimes you have to give up what you were to become what you need to be.

The Vision Fulfilled

When Plenty Coups died in 1932 at age eighty-four, his people called him the last of the great chiefs. They didn't elect another after him. The old ways of choosing leaders—through acts of valor, through earned authority—had no place in the new world.

His childhood vision had come true in every detail. He had grown old, just as the vision promised. He married a woman named Strikes-the-iron but had no children of his own. The buffalo were gone, replaced by cattle—those strange creatures with weird tails and spotted hides that he had seen pouring out of the hole in the earth. White society dominated everything.

But the Crow survived. Their land, though diminished, remained theirs. Their culture, though changed, continued. The tree had not fallen.

Four years before his death, Plenty Coups visited Mount Vernon, the Virginia plantation where George Washington had lived. Something about that visit moved him deeply. Washington had been the father of a new nation, a leader who had guided his people through an impossible transition. Perhaps Plenty Coups saw something of himself in that legacy—or something of what he hoped to leave behind.

When he returned home, he donated 195 acres of his personal land to create a public park. He wanted future generations to have a place to remember. The log cabin where he spent his final years still stands there, now part of Chief Plenty Coups State Park near Pryor, Montana. Visitors can walk the grounds, visit his grave, and learn about a man who saw the future when he was eleven years old and spent seven decades preparing his people for it.

The Unfinished Question

Was Plenty Coups right? Did cooperation save the Crow in ways that resistance could not?

It's impossible to know what would have happened if the Crow had joined the Sioux and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn, if they had chosen to fight the tide rather than swim with it. Other tribes that resisted were eventually defeated, confined, and in many cases scattered. The Crow kept their homeland. But they also lost the buffalo, the old ways of earning status, the freedom to live as their ancestors had lived.

Plenty Coups himself seemed to understand this paradox. Late in his life, when author Frank Bird Linderman visited him to record his autobiography, the old chief spoke freely about his youth—the raids, the coups, the glory of the warrior life. But when Linderman asked about the years after the reservation was established, Plenty Coups fell silent.

"Nothing happened after that," he said. "There is nothing to tell."

He didn't mean that literally, of course. Plenty of things happened—the trips to Washington, the political fights, the slow work of adaptation. But for Plenty Coups, the meaningful life, the life worth telling stories about, was the warrior life. Everything after was just survival.

And yet survival was what mattered. The Crow are still here. They still live in Montana. They still practice their ceremonies and speak their language and remember their history. The tree is still standing.

Plenty Coups' final recorded words on the subject of war carry a weight that feels heavier now than it might have in 1930:

"I hear the white men say there will be no more war. But this cannot be true. There will be other wars. Men have not changed, and whenever they quarrel they will fight, as they have always done."

He had seen too much to believe in permanent peace. He had also seen too much to believe that survival required fighting. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is refuse to fall.