Butte Country

Crow Butte, about 400 feet high, southeast of Crawford, has a story with two endings. In both, an Apsáalooke (Crow) party cornered by Lakota fighters climbed to the top, the Lakota held the one narrow path up the south side, and old men covered the others as they slid down the steep north face on ropes of whatever cloth they had. In one telling the old men are carried away on white birds and the two nations make peace. A 1901 Omaha World-Herald account sets it in the winter of 1869-70 and ends it with all twenty-seven dead.

What the plaque says

Butte Country Perhaps no spot in Nebraska is so surrounded by historical and geographical landmarks as this one. Numerous landmarks of the period of the Indian Wars are visible from here. The site of a legendary battle between the Sioux and Crow Indians, Crow Butte, lies directly to the south. It was also a pioneer landmark for Indians, soldiers, and cattlemen. To the west are the Red Cloud Buttes. From these well-known buttes, one may see the town of Crawford to the east, Fort Robinson to the south, and the site of the Red Cloud Agency to the southeast. The escarpment stretching north from the buttes was also a prominent early landmark. Approximately half a mile northwest of this point is the site of the Treaty Tree. There in September, 1875, while thousands of members of the Sioux Indian Nation looked on, the Allison Commission made an unsuccessful attempt to buy the Black Hills area from the Indians. It was not until after the bloody campaigns of 1876 that the Sioux Commission, headed by George Manypenny, succeeded in purchasing the area. Historical Land Mark Council

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Robinson State Park — 8.0 mi
  The army post beside the Red Cloud Agency where Crazy Horse was bayoneted in 1877 and Morning Star's Northern Cheyenne broke out into the January cold of 1879.
• Toadstool Geologic Park — 16 mi
  A pocket of badlands in the Oglala National Grassland where sandstone caps balance on clay stems, ancient tracks cross the rock, and a trail leads on to a 10,000-year-old bison bone bed.
• Museum of the Fur Trade — 21 mi
  A museum of what traders and Native nations exchanged, from the oldest known point blanket to a Lakota leader's silver cross, beside the rebuilt Bordeaux trading post east of Chadron.
• Agate Fossil Beds National Monument — 29 mi
  A fossil quarry on the Niobrara that also keeps the gifts Red Cloud and other Lakota and Cheyenne visitors gave the ranching family who were their friends for thirty-five years.

More markers nearby

• The Council Tree — 1.2 mi
• Crawford — 5.0 mi
• Crawford 1891 School Bell — 5.0 mi
• The Death of Baptiste Garnier — 5.0 mi