Ponca Trail of Tears - White Buffalo Girl

Black Elk's request, as History Nebraska gives it: "I want the whites to respect the grave of my child just as they do the graves of their own dead. I leave the grave in your care. I may never see it again. Care for it for me." White Buffalo Girl was a year and six months old when she died on May 23, 1877, on the forced march south. In 1960 a Tilden monument company reset the stone, and hers is the only headstone the cemetery lets visitors adorn year-round, with coins, toys, beads and flowers.

What the plaque says

Ponca Trail of Tears White Buffalo Girl A marker, 200 feet to the south, recalls the death of White Buffalo Girl of the Ponca tribe. The death of this child, daughter of Black Elk and Moon Hawk, symbolizes the tragic 1877 removal of the Ponca from their homeland on the Niobrara River to Indian Territory in present Oklahoma. Treaties in 1858 and 1865 greatly reduced the size of the original Ponca Reservation, yet the tribe remained peaceful. An 1868 error in the Treaty of Fort Laramie ceded Ponca lands to their enemy the Dakota Sioux, resulting in eight years of repeated raids against the Ponca and ending with the forced removal of the tribe to the new reservation. The journey to Indian Territory was plagued by muddy roads and floods caused by heavy spring rains. Most of the tribe suffered from disease and hardship. Several children like White Buffalo Girl perished and were buried along this route that became known as the Ponca "Trail of Tears." The people of Neligh provided a Christian funeral for the child and an oak cross was erected at the gravesite. Black Elk's last request was that the grave of his daughter would be honored and cared for by the people of the town. In 1913 a marble monument was erected and the grave has been maintained and decorated in memory of White Buffalo Girl and the Ponca. Antelope County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Neligh Mill State Historic Site — 1.0 mi
  A brick flour mill on the Elkhorn, begun in 1873, that sold its flour as Gold Medal until 1940, ground until 1969, and still has its original 1880s equipment in place.
• Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park — 21 mi
  A watering hole in Antelope County where ash from an eruption in Idaho buried rhinoceroses and horses about twelve million years ago, now uncovered in place under the Hubbard Rhino Barn.

More markers nearby

• The Neligh Mills — 1.0 mi
• The Neligh Mill Bridge — 1.0 mi
• Meadow Grove — 17 mi
• The Savidge Brothers, Aviation Pioneers — 18 mi