Unci Susie Shot in the Eye to be remembered

We are fundraising to honor a strong matriarch of the Lone Hill-Two Dogs tiospaye - Susie Shot In The Eye. Unci Susie's great grandson, Richard Two Dogs, was able to locate her grave site this past year and wants to honor her properly with a headstone. This will create a site that can be visited by relatives and those who want to learn about her. Her grave is located in an area in the community of Porcupine on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Southwest South Dakota. it will require making a road to her gravesite once we obtain rights of way from the BIA to do so, and fencing around the gravesite. Her direct descendants still live in the community.

 

Her story follows:

In 1898, an elderly Oglála Lakȟóta couple sat for their portraits in Rinehart’s Studio at the Pan-American Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska. Having traveled with other Oglála from the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, Shot in the Eye and his wife, Susie, were attending the exposition as part of the “Indian Congress,” a body of more than 500 individuals representing 35 different tribes invited to demonstrate aspects of their traditional native culture for the visiting public.

For her portrait, Susie Shot in the Eye donned an eagle feather headdress, apparently the same one worn by her husband for his photograph. A woman in warrior’s regalia was unusual in Lakȟóta culture but according to her family, she had earned that privilege. Twenty-two years earlier in 1876, Susie had been in the Indian village along the Little Bighorn River when the 7th Cavalry made their famous surprise attack. The story of her role during the fighting is still remembered today as part of the oral traditions passed down by her descendants, recalling one woman’s courage during the chaos of the battle.

To her family, she was known as Tȟatóheya Nážiŋ Wiŋ or Stands Against the Wind, though in later years on the reservation, she went by the name of Susie. Born about 1835 or 1836, she was the daughter of a prominent headman named Tȟaŋíŋ Máni which translates as Walks Visibly or Walks Freely. “There are different translations,” Susie’s great grandson Rick Two Dogs explains. “I think it meant that he was visible to the people because of his prominence.” Walks Visibly was leader of a small band known as the Pĥešlá (pronounced “peh-SHLAH”) or Bald Head band, a group of related families who shifted from the Sičháŋğu (Brulé) to the Oglála camp circle when Susie was a small child.

During her later years on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Susie lived with her son, Amos Lone Hill. Her granddaughter, Edna, helped to take care of her and often combed and braided her long hair. It was during such times that the elderly woman, now in her eighties, shared some of her life stories. Her granddaughter Edna later married Asay Two Dogs and she retold some of Susie’s stories to her two sons, including Rick Two Dogs. While his great grandmother had passed away years before he was born, Rick explained that “throughout my life, my mother would tell stories about her and we would listen. These are the two stories that I have hung on to.”

In the first story, Rick shares how Susie fled her first husband, a French Canadian, and made a monumental trek across the northern plains to return home, carrying her eleven-month old infant. Based on the age of her child, this event probably occurred about 1859. In the second story, Rick recounts Susie’s experience at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. She had remarried by this time and she and her family were part of the Pĥešlá band, camped on the banks of the Greasy Grass that fateful day. Rick Two Dogs tells both stories as they were passed down to him.

 

PART 1: SUSIE RETURNS HOME

By Rick Two Dogs

 

Susie’s first husband was a French Canadian, working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I have never known what his name was. One day when my grandfather Amos was about eleven months old and was playing, he touched something hot, a stove I think, and burned his hand. When her husband came home and discovered the child’s burn, he got very upset, yelling at her in French and then hit her. She told herself, “If he hits me once, then he’ll hit me again. I am not going to stay and be subject to this domestic abuse.”

So Susie prepared to leave. She made extra pairs of moccasins and she also made some beadwork to trade at the local trading post. She got a knife, a pistol and a canteen and she had a bag to carry her things. She also made a whole bunch of extra wasná or pemmican to carry with her to sustain her on her trek.

She picked a time when her husband went to work and then she started walking back home. She soon realized that her husband was looking for her. She saw him with patrols of those police and they had a member of a tribe from up there trying to track her. So she would hide in the daytime and then travel at night. Eventually, she guessed she had crossed back into the United States because they had quit looking for her.

As she traveled, she recognized the country as that of our enemies, the Assinboines. They are kind of the same as us, but they were our enemies at the time. When she entered into their country, she traveled at night again because she did not want to be detected. She later talked of coming to a range of mountains, which I think were the Little Rocky Mountains, and that is where she had an encounter with a bear.

One night there was a large storm and the lightning would light up the entrance to her shelter. Then suddenly, as the lightning flashed, a grizzly bear appeared at the doorway. The bear kind of snorted and started to growl way down deep in his throat, so she knew that he smelled her. She talked to him in Lakȟóta and said “We are just passing through. Me and my son are pitiful. If you are going to eat us, there is nothing that I can do about it.”

She was carrying these balls of wasná. So she threw him a piece and he ate it. You could hear him smacking his mouth. Eventually he went to sleep, sounding like a man snoring. By then the storm was passing towards the east. She said, “Well, if he wakes up and he is still hungry, he might change his mind. I better get out of here. I better leave.” So she walked along the wall right beside him and got out and started walking. She kept looking back to see if the bear was trailing her. But he did not follow her so she just kept walking.

She said a wolf guided her, telling her in a dream to follow his howl. The wolf said she would find her relatives within a few days. He said “My name is High Wolf. You are going to get married again and you are going to have two more sons. When you do, name the first son after me, High Wolf.” There are High Wolfs to this day here on the reservation. When she woke up, she heard a wolf howling. So she followed in that direction and it continued to guide her as she walked.

Finally, she came across a village where the community called Red Scaffold is now located on the Cheyenne River Reservation. She was cautious because she was not sure who they were. She went up to the top of a hill and saw the camp down below. Then she noticed her brother taking some horses to the water. Her brother was named Hunts the Enemy, later known as George Sword and he became the head of the Indian police here on the reservation. So she had found her family. When they saw that she had a son – she had been with her husband in Canada for about four years before she started out and so they didn’t know she had a son – they were all happy to see him. Her father said “It’s like you just walked over one hill just to come home. So I’ll name my grandson Lone Hill.” That is where the name comes from. And there are Lone Hills here on the reservation today. That was my mother’s maiden name.

So, when my grandfather grew up, he was known as Amos Lone Hill. There are two Amos Lone Hills. There is a younger one who was my uncle and then there was my grandfather. He was educated at Carlisle, Pennsylvania and he became a land surveyor. Susie also had two younger sons named High Wolf and Kills on Top. According to my mother, she never had any daughters, or at least if she did, she never talked about them. She did take in a couple of young women and raised them, but they weren’t relatives by blood.

My mother said after the vision of the wolf helping her in a dream, Susie became like a medicine woman. This wolf would show her the power of medicines and different things, so she was able to help people in that way. Later when she was blind, my mother said people would still come to her for help and she would administer herbs to them and pray for them. She would smell the herb and would know which one was the right one.

 

PART 2

Introduction

Following the killing of the prominent leader Bull Bear in 1841, the Oglála fractured into northern and southern groups of bands. Under the leadership of Susie’s father, Walks Visibly, the Pĥešlá initially aligned with the Southern Oglála confederation who moved their hunting grounds further south to the Republic River country in southern Nebraska and northern Kansas. Susie remarried, first to an Oglála named Mashed His Fingernail and then later to a prominent Mnikȟaŋwožu (Miniconjou) named High Wolf. Her husband and family continued to live with her father’s band.

During the 1860s and 1870s, Lakȟóta politics grew increasingly polarized as native leaders struggled to build consensus about how they should address the challenge of continued American expansion into their territory. Some bands advocated an isolationist policy, avoiding contact with the Americans while continuing to pursue their traditional life deep within their home territory. Others considered this approach unsustainable and instead urged for some level of accommodation. Still others argued for all-out war. Many families seemed uncertain and alternated between opposing views as events unfolded. While held together by the strong bonds of family relationships, this deep political polarization threatened to splinter these communities and to unravel the very fabric of Lakȟóta society.

Susie’s family band, the Pĥešlá, is an excellent representation of how the divisive politics of the period could split family bands. Following the death of Walks Visibly, perhaps in the late 1850’s or early 1860s, Susie’s brother, Day, and her husband, High Wolf, both emerged as the band’s next generation of influential leaders. After the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, all of the southern Oglála bands initially fled the area of violence along the Platte River by rejoining their northern relatives. Over the next several years, however, a majority of the Southern Oglala returned to the Republican River country, with the exception of the Pĥešlá and a closely related band known as the Wačhéuŋpa. By the time of Red Cloud’s war along the Bozeman Trail in 1866-68, the Pĥešlá band had split. A portion of the band led by Day joined the Wažáže, “a troublesome group” according to interpreter Billy Garnett. The remaining Pĥešlá band under High Wolf aligned with the more moderate Paybaya band, led by Man Afraid of His Horses. By the early 1870s, High Wolf’s band began coming into the newly established Red Cloud Agency to receive rations and High Wolf himself accompanied Red Cloud to Washington, D.C. in 1872 to meet the Great White Father.

Susie’s story of the Little Bighorn, as recalled by Rick Two Dogs, notes that High Wolf’s Pĥešlá band was at the Red Cloud Agency during the winter of 1875-76. Like a number of other Oglála, they headed north the following spring – not to join in the fighting as some army officers feared but instead to visit relatives and to attend the annual gathering, a centuries-old celebration of Lakȟóta community that culminated with the sacred Sun Dance ceremony. As the tribes gathered in Montana for the festivities, a group of related Wažáže bands – including the Pĥešlá, Wačhéuŋpa and Pȟahiŋsiŋté – were assigned a position together on the northern “horn” of the ceremonial Oglala camp circle. After the Sun Dance concluded, the assembled bands moved to the Little Bighorn where they set up lodges along that creek.

At the time of the 1876 gathering, Susie was about forty years old, still married to High Wolf, with at least two sons old enough to help defend the village. This is her story, as Rick remembers it being told to him.

 

SUSIE AT THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN

By Rick Two Dogs

 

Susie also told my mother about her participation in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. She said they went out in the spring, traveling with a mixed group of Oglálas from different bands. They joined the Little Bighorn camp about seven days before the actual battle. That day, she said they were planning to move the camp down river. The whole camp was going to move. They were starting to wake up early and she was getting ready, packing things and helping her mother.

Then she heard gunfire to the south. There was more and more gunfire and she said it got closer. Then a man rushed up and said her cousin, White Eagle, had been killed. She asked her relatives, “I want to go and find the body and bring it back.” So she and a couple of her female cousins left on horseback. She said she joined a group of warriors and found this man who said he knew where he was lying. As she followed with this group of warriors, suddenly a mass of warriors riding came up behind her and they were pushing her towards the enemy. This must have been during the early part of the battle when they [Major Reno’s soldiers] were attacking the south. The Hunkpapa camp was there.

A warrior had given her a pistol before the battle and she had that with her. She said suddenly as they were riding there was a soldier beside her. So she shot him in the side and the soldier fell from his horse. She said she was being pushed towards the river. She was able to finally turn her horse and move along the side of the river bank where she saw a wounded soldier down there. This man was crawling along the river. She shot him and then jumped down over the bank and took his scalp. She said “I took that in revenge for my cousin.”

She went back up the bank, then got on her horse and followed along there. The other two cousins found White Eagle’s body before she did, because she been pushed out in the other direction. They were at his body where he was killed when she arrived. I think he was shot through the chest. Another relative brought up a horse with a travois and they rolled him on to the travois and moved him back towards the village. I guess they buried him later that day, in the late afternoon.

So that is her story of her participation. She was able to kill two soldiers and get one scalp. From the second soldier, I think she said she took his gun and some ammunition.

After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, she came to Fort Robinson with her band, the Pĥešlá, early in the fall. I think she said they traveled back to the agency in late August of the year of the battle. Crazy Horse came in in the Spring the following year.

 

After the establishment of the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1878, the Pĥešlá band settled along Porcupine Creek near other Wažáže bands. Susie’s husband, High Wolf, died about 1891, she then remarried about 1896 to another veteran of the Little Bighorn, Shot in the Eye (Ištá Ogná Ópi). According to Rick Two Dogs, her new husband was originally known as White Mountain but he received this new nickname after being hit in the left eye by a bullet at the Little Bighorn. “He told my mother it must have been from a great distance, that the bullet was already starting to tumble and losing its velocity when it hit him,” he said. “But it was enough to knock him off his horse and stun him for a while.” After Shot in the Eye’s death in 1917, Susie lived the remainder of her life with her son, Amos Lone Hill. She died on the Pine Ridge Reservation March 29, 1925.