Every Kiowa year had two halves. On the calendars Kiowa keepers drew, an upright black bar stood for winter, when the grass was dead, and a small figure of a medicine lodge stood for summer, the season of the Sun Dance, which the Kiowa Tribe today writes as Skaw-Tow. Beside each mark the keeper drew the season's leading event, and the season took its name. James Mooney collected these calendars in 1892 and published them in 1898. The longest, kept by Sett'an, Little Bear, ran sixty years from 1833.
Timber-hill river
The river at Medicine Lodge appears in them under its Kiowa name, Ä'yä'daldä P'a, Timber-hill river, for a low wooded hill on its east bank. The English name came from the Kiowa too. Mooney was told it came from a medicine lodge they had built there for an earlier dance, and that the creek was a favorite place for the ceremony.
That is where the Kiowa were camped in the fall of 1867, on the ground of their summer dance, when word came to meet the government at Fort Larned. By their own account they went north, where an officer they called Old-man-of-the-thunder, for the eagle he wore on his shoulders, kept them in rations for some days. Mooney identified him as General Winfield S. Hancock. Then they went back to Timber-hill river and built a council house among the trees, across the creek from their medicine lodge, to wait for the commissioners.
Two interpreters
The treaty's words passed through two languages before they reached the Kiowa. The interpreter, Philip McCusker, spoke only Comanche, and a Kiowa man named Bä'o, Cat, put his Comanche into Kiowa. When the Kiowa told Mooney what they had been promised, they put it in one sentence: a place to go, schools, and food for thirty years, by which time they would know how to take care of themselves.
Sett'an named the season Timber-hill winter. His drawing shows a white man who looks like a soldier holding an Indian by the hand, with a tree-covered hill above the winter mark. Anko, whose calendar began in 1864, left the treaty out and recorded instead a Diné man killed on the upper South Canadian by a party he rode with. Mooney called the treaty the leading event in Kiowa history of the previous thirty years, and wrote that for the Kiowa it marked the beginning of the end.
The next summer
The next summer the Kiowa came back to the creek, near the treaty ground, for the Sun Dance. The calendars call it the Timber-hill river sun dance, and also the sun dance when the Ute killed us. At that dance a war leader sent the pipe around for an expedition against the Diné. On the South Canadian the party met a smaller Ute force and broke, seven men died, and two sacred Taime images it carried were taken. They never came back to the Kiowa.
What the government did with the treaty afterward is told at the Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty Site on the edge of town. The calendars keep the creek as the Kiowa knew it, a river with a wooded hill where they danced.