Custer on the Sweetwater

Rock Forehead, also called Stone Forehead and known to Whites as Medicine Arrows, kept the Cheyenne Sacred Arrows from 1850. A cousin of Black Kettle, he was camped downstream when Black Kettle's Washita village was attacked in 1868. Cheyenne oral tradition, as the Washita Battlefield site tells it, holds that at the Sweetwater Custer was asked to smoke a pipe, and the ashes were emptied on his boots with a warning that if he lied to or attacked the Cheyenne, he and his men would be killed. Custer met the Cheyenne again at the Little Bighorn in 1876.

What the plaque says

Custer on the Sweetwater Sweetwater Creek was essential to millions of southern buffalo In a region known as the Comancheria. Plains Indians camped along this freshwater stream to seek shelter from harsh winters. As Anglos continued to settle the southern plains, the incompatible cultures fought for survival. On two separate occasions in 1868, members of the Cheyenne and Sioux tribes kidnapped two Anglo women from Kansas, Sarah White and Anna Brewster Morgan. George Armstrong Custer, who earned a reputation for flamboyant and fearless leadership during the Civil War, led the 7th Cavalry and the 19th Kansas Volunteers in an Indian removal winter campaign of 1868-69. During this campaign, Custer rescued Morgan and White. On March 15, 1869, Custer's chief scout, Hard Rope, viewed a large herd of Indian ponies grazing. The Cheyenne village of 260 lodges lay below them on the banks of the Sweetwater. Hard Rope raced back to tell Custer. Aware that a fired shot would signal the execution of the two captured women, Custer proceeded ahead of his troops hoping to make a truce. The Cheyenne led Custer to a meeting with Rock Forehead (Medicine Arrows), the Cheyenne chief, and other head men of the tribe. When a dozen Cheyenne arrived at Custer's camp to entertain and serenade the officers and chiefs, Custer ordered the detention of the principal chiefs present. Custer released one hostage to relay his demand of the unconditional surrender of the two women. On the third day, after intense negotiations, Custer gave an ultimatum that if the women were not released by sunset the following day, hostile activities would commence. Peace was achieved, and on March 19, 1869, Morgan and White were returned. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Mobeetie Jail Museum — 8.4 mi
  The 1886 stone jail of the Panhandle's first county seat, the buffalo hunters' Hidetown on Sweetwater Creek that ran the courts for fifteen counties before losing its fort, railroad hopes and county seat.
• Tower Station and U-Drop Inn — 18 mi
  Shamrock's 1936 Conoco station and cafe at the corner of Route 66 and US-83, sketched in the dirt with a nail, named by a schoolboy and saved by the town.
• Roberts County Museum — 24 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Black Kettle National Grassland — 25 mi
  About a hundred federal tracts of sand hills, red shale and mixed-grass prairie around Cheyenne, land that went from reservation to wheat to Dust Bowl ruin and back to grass.

More markers nearby

• Wheeler County — 3.2 mi
• Temple Lea Houston — 8.8 mi
• Frank Willis, Sr. — 8.8 mi
• Fort Elliott Flagpole — 8.8 mi