The officer also told Spotted Tail that in two or three months peace commissioners would come to Fort Laramie to meet with him and other tribal leaders. According to Maynadier, the chief responded as follows:

There must be a dream for me to be in such a fine room, and surrounded by such as you. Have I been asleep during the last four years of hardship and trial, and am dreaming that all is to be well again, or is this real? Yes, I see that it is, the beautiful day, the sky blue and without a cloud, the wind calm and still, suit the errand I come on, and remind me that you have offered me peace. We think we have been much wronged and are entitled to compensation for the damage and distress caused by making so many roads through our country and driving off and destroying buffalo and game. My heart is very sad, and I cannot talk on business. I will wait and see the counselors the Great White Father will send.

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About 200 yards to the north of the post, soldiers built a scaffold to hold the coffin. The platform was about eight feet above the ground. At sunset of a bright and clear but bitterly cold day, the procession got underway. An ambulance transported the coffin to the burial site, located inside the fenced post cemetery. A 12-pound mountain howitzer followed the funeral conveyance, with the husky postilion resplendent in red chevrons. Then came the 200 Indians in Spotted Tail’s train and most of the 600 men of the garrison who were not on duty, all marching to the solemn music of the post band. The Brulés killed two white ponies, nailing the heads by their ears to the posts, facing toward the rising sun. Below the heads were containers of water for the animals to drink as they conveyed the girl to the spirit land. Soldiers formed a large square around the site, while Indians formed a circle around the crypt.

Officers placed the girl in the open coffin. Colonel Maynadier contributed a pair of gauntlets, to keep Mini-Aku’s hands warm, while other officers added such items as moccasins, red flannel and clothes — all intended to keep the maiden comfortable on her journey. Major O’Brien put in a greenback so that she could buy what she wanted on her way to the spirit world. Each of the Indian women came forth, bearing some little gift, a string of beads, an embroidered pine cone, a small looking glass. Each whispered something to the deceased and then returned to her place. Finally, Spotted Tail gave a little red book to the post chaplain, the Rev. Alpha Wright. It was an Episcopal prayer book that Brevet Maj. Gen. William Harney had given the girl many years before. The chaplain placed it inside. Many hands raised the coffin to its resting place on the scaffold, with the head placed toward the east. Chaplain Wright then conducted services, improvising a sermon. He promised that the girl would look down and take care of her father, mother and friends, and that they would soon meet her where there was plenty of game and no more snowstorms, tears or dying. The mother of the dead girl wept deeply while the father-chief often wiped his eyes.

The result of the burial at Fort Laramie was the beginning of a trust between the officer and the Brulé leader. In ending a letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, written the day following the burial, Maynadier declared, ‘The occurrence of such an incident is regarded by the oldest settlers, men of most experience in Indian character, as unprecedented, and as calculated to secure a certain and lasting peace.’ Maynadier concluded that the chief would ‘not have confided the remains of his child to the care of any but those whom he intended to be friends always.’ The officer was correct; Spotted Tail never fought whites again. Perhaps it was as Colonel Henry Carrington later conjectured: ‘As his daughter was adopted by the white man’s Great Spirit, he had no heart to fight the white man any more.’

On March 12, Spotted Tail and Red Cloud approached Fort Laramie for a council. Maynadier and his officers went out to meet them near the crossing of the North Platte River two miles east of the post. There were about 200 warriors in the party, the Sioux drawn up in a line, singing and shouting. Besides the two chiefs were other prominent leaders, among them Standing Elk, Brave Bear and Trunk. Maynadier rode into Fort Laramie with Spotted Tail on one side and Red Cloud on the other, presenting as he put it, ‘a gay and novel appearance.’ In all, there were about 700 Brulés and Oglalas that camped nearby, the people described as being destitute of everything.

After hearing their grievances about whites entering their hunting grounds, their poverty and the difficult winter, Maynadier gave them the expected feast. Red Cloud stated that he wanted to meet the Great White Father, and the officer promised to explore the possibility. Swift Bear and 40 lodges arrived in the area on the same day that Maynadier met with Spotted Tail and Red Cloud. They camped near the trading house of Red Cloud’s brother-in-law James Bordeaux, nine miles east of Fort Laramie on the North Platte River.

With these events, prospects for peace on the Plains looked promising. The surrender and discussions with these bands of Sioux were auspicious beginnings for treaty negotiations that were slated for Fort Laramie on May 20. Red Cloud, the fabled Oglala chief who had counted 80 coups against his Indian enemies in war, was the key. Just emerging as a leader of the resistant Sioux in the southern half of the Northern Plains, he commanded respect. Blessed with a beautiful oratorical voice, his words complemented his deeds. While the Indian War of 1865 was over, it would be Red Cloud who determined whether there would be an Indian War of 1866, for Spotted Tail had made his peace forever. In 1868 Spotted Tail was one of many native leaders — Lakotas, Cheyennes, Arapahos and Crows — to sign the Fort Laramie Treaty, which, among many other things, called for an end to all war between the Plains tribes and the U.S. government and its citizens.

Over the years, legends grew about the Indian maiden, and different names surfaced. Colonel Maynadier in his accounts of the affair called her Ah-ho-ap-pa (’Wheat Flower’) and then Hinziwin (’Fallen Leaf’). Eugene Ware, who was the post adjutant at Fort Laramie when the funeral took place, also called her Ah-ho-ap-pa in a magazine article and in his book The Indian War of 1864, published in 1890. This became ‘Falling Leaf’ in other renditions by numerous authors. In 1867 Louis Simonin, a Parisian traveling the West, identified her as Moneka. A newspaper in 1902 identified her as Shunk-hee-zee-wah (’The Girl that Owned the Yellow Mare’). A 1909 account named her ‘Fleet Foot,’ and it seems that her white acquaintances called her Monica when she was living at Fort Laramie. Other names included ‘Faded Flower,’ ‘White Flower’ and ‘Princess.’ And so it went, each new story adding embellishments and often new names for Spotted Tail’s famous daughter. In some stories Mini-Aku was having a secret affair with an officer who promised to marry her. When it did not work out, she died of a broken heart. Some identified the officer as Captain Levi Rienhart, of the 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, who died in an Indian fight west of Fort Laramie on February 13, 1865. One of the most intriguing stories is found in Carrie De Voe’s Legends of the Kaw, appearing in 1904. De Voe relates that Mini-Aku’s lover was Thomas Dorion, a military courier. He had been sent as a messenger of peace. Staying with the Brulés for a short time, he had fallen in love with the girl and desired to marry her, and she had expressed a willingness to become his wife. However, Mini-Aku grew ill and died before it happened.

During the 1880s a song written by some unknown Fort Laramie soldier kept the legend alive. Whenever men gathered to sing, ‘Fallen Leaf’ was sure to be heard. Johnny O’Brien, a son of a Fort Laramie enlisted man, remembered the verses even when he was 90 years old:

Far beyond the rolling prairies
Where the noble forest lies
Dwelled the fairest Indian maiden
Ever seen by mortal eyes.
And her eyes were like the sunset
Daughter of an Indian Chief
Came to brighten life in autumn
So they called her Fallen Leaf.
Fallen Leaf the breezes whisper
Of thy spirit’s early flight,
And within that lonely wigwam
There’s a wail of woe tonight
Through a long and tangled forest
All upon a summer’s day
Came a hunter weak and weary
From his long and lonely way.
Weeks went by but still he lingered.
Fallen Leaf was by his side.
And with love she smiled upon him
Soon to be his woodland bride
One bright day this hunter wandered
Through the prairie all alone.
Fallen Leaf she watched and waited
But his fate was never known.
On a summer’s day she fainted.
In the autumn leaves she died,
And they closed her eyes in slumber
Near the Laramie riverside.

Mini-Aku was indeed a tragic figure, with hopes unfulfilled and dreams that never came to be.

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This article was written by John D. McDermot and originally appeared in the February 2006 issue of Wild West.

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