The fighting men discovered a large tepee village near a creek on the Great Plains. According to the reminiscences of one of those men, ‘A great dance was in progress, in the center of which a small pole from which floated an Indian flag was standing.’ The man came up with a plan. He and several of the other well-trained fighting men would break off from the main body and surprise the Indians of the village. They would charge on horseback ‘through that portion of the village farthest removed from the congregated dancers’ and do whatever was necessary to capture that offensive flag.

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The charge began. As a diversion, the small party of fighting men set fire to the first lodge they came to before dashing for the flag. Although surprised by the sudden appearance of their longtime enemies, warriors in the village responded quickly. The fighting men soon faced, according to their leader’s account, ‘flying arrows and scathing bullets.’ The leader was about to cut the sapling that supported the flag when one of his men took a rifle bullet and started to fall from his horse. The leader and another man caught their wounded comrade and held him in the saddle as they galloped back to the main body, which had drawn off toward a bluff just west of the village.

Warriors from the village climbed on their horses and quickly gathered between their lodges and their attackers. Undaunted, the attackers came again, for they were fighting men and they had a job to do. What they did, their leader later recalled, was ‘maneuver for a feigned attack upon the south side of the village; then suddenly changing [our] course made a charge toward the north side with all the rapidity that the speed of [our] horses could accomplish.’ The villagers, however, were alert for just such a move and responded with a rapid maneuver of their own, flanking the charging men. The attackers, as their leader related, were driven ‘from [our] course over the bridge to the north of the village.’

For the next two days there was fighting off and on. Nobody from either side was killed, but many were wounded, according to the one surviving account. On the final afternoon, the opposing forces had a parley from a distance. The warriors from the attacked village, though, broke off the talks. They waved a blanket, which in sign language meant, ‘Come and fight us.’ The men who had so bravely charged the village two days before declined the offer. Soon, according to their leader, they were ‘again on the move.’

The 19th-century ‘battle’ described above has no name. Exactly when it happened is not known. Where it happened is somewhat less vague–along Prairie Creek, not too far from the Platte River in present-day Hall County, Neb. The names of the individuals involved, except for one, are not available. The lack of details might seem disappointing or annoying, but it can’t be helped. No man in the fight was required to make an official report. Perhaps the fight sounds a bit like one of those engagements that occurred when U.S. Army patrols or columns discovered a ‘hostile’ Plains Indian encampment. Well, not exactly. True, there was a leader with a plan; true, the main body divided instead of attacking as one; true, it was a surprise attack on an unsuspecting village; and true, a lodge was torched. But no soldiers were involved. Of course not, a history-minded cynic might suggest, for had the attackers been soldiers, they would have been after more than just a flag and there would have been a ‘massacre,’ one way or another.

The Indians in the village were members of the Omaha tribe, who usually lived in earth lodges in eastern Nebraska near the Missouri River, but who used skin tepees whenever they ventured west to hunt buffalo. The attackers, who had objected to these ‘easterners’ infringing on their hunting grounds, were among the most feared fighting men of the Plains. They were Oglalas, a subdivision of the western Teton Sioux, or Lakotas. On this occasion, the Lakotas and Omahas were of equal strength, and though the fight lasted much longer than most Indian vs. Indian engagements, it did not prove deadly. The battle is remembered today only because the Lakota leader who tried to capture the Omaha flag went on to greater military successes–against the U.S. Army in the 1860s–and then, in 1893, reminisced about his early years during visits with an old friend at the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. Those reminiscences can be found in the 1997 book Autobiography of Red Cloud: War Leader of the Oglalas, edited by R. Eli Paul.

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