Bear Butte

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Seen from the south, across the brown grass of the northern Plains, the mountain has the shape that gives it its name: a long ridge of rock with a high shoulder and a lower one, the silhouette of a great bear lying down with its head turned away. It stands alone, a dark mass risen eleven hundred feet over flat country, off by itself a few miles northeast of the Black Hills proper, where the timber thins and the grassland begins. To the geologist it is a laccolith, a blister of igneous rock shoved up through the older sediments by magma that never reached the surface, cooled in place in the Eocene and since stripped bare by the weather that carried off the softer beds around it. To the Lakota it is Matȟó Pahá, the Bear Mountain. To the Cheyenne it is Noahvose. It is not a ruin. People climb it to pray today, as they have for as long as the nations have known the country, and the trees along the path carry the marks of that prayer.

This sets Bear Butte apart from the other sacred places of indigenous North America that the archaeologist can study — from the coiled effigy of Serpent Mound on its Ohio ridge, the Archaic earthworks of Poverty Point in the Louisiana lowlands, the masonry great houses of Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert. Those are sites where a vanished use is reconstructed from the ground; here the use never stopped. Bear Butte is a holy mountain in continuous service, and what it is sacred for cannot be excavated, only described at the distance the people themselves keep.

A mountain at the edge of the Black Hills

The physical facts are exact and uncontested. Bear Butte rises about 1,253 feet (382 meters) above the surrounding plain to a summit of 4,426 feet (1,349 meters) above sea level, near the town of Sturgis in western South Dakota, at the northeastern margin of the Black Hills — the range the Lakota call Paha Sapa, the hills that the deep oral tradition and the historical record alike place at the center of the people’s world. The “butte” of the English name is a misnomer of form: a butte is an erosional remnant of layered rock, while Bear Butte is intrusive, a body of magma forced up into cooler crust during the same Eocene episode that raised the rest of the Black Hills domes. Its slopes are steep, wooded with ponderosa pine and oak on the lower flanks, opening to grass and rock toward the top, where the trail reaches a long view over the plain in every direction.

The depth of human presence here is read in two registers, and they should not be confused. The archaeology of the immediate region — stone tools, camp traces, the long record of Plains hunting cultures — establishes that people have used this country for thousands of years; that much is the work of the spade and the survey, and it is firm as far as it goes. But the spade cannot reach the religious history, and the attempt to project specific pre-contact ceremony back across the centuries is reconstruction, not record. What can be said with confidence is documentary and recent by comparison. By the mid-nineteenth century Bear Butte was unmistakably a gathering-place of consequence: in 1857 a council of many of the northern nations met at its base to take counsel over the growing pressure of white settlement on the Plains, a meeting noticed in the contemporary record precisely because the mountain was already a recognized center. The names of the leaders later remembered as having come to the mountain to pray — figures of the stature of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and, into the twentieth century, the holy man Frank Fools Crow — belong to this same documented stratum, the part of the history that outside observers wrote down.

The mountain’s modern legal fate is bound to the catastrophe of the Black Hills. Under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 the United States recognized the Black Hills, Bear Butte among them, as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, held by the Lakota and their allies. The treaty did not survive the decade: George Custer’s 1874 expedition confirmed gold in the hills, a rush followed, and the United States seized the territory — a taking the Supreme Court would eventually rule, in United States v. Sioux Nation (1980), to have been unlawful, awarding compensation the Lakota nations have refused to accept, because the hills are not for sale. Bear Butte passed out of native title with the rest. That it is sacred ground held by others is the condition under which every later conflict over it has unfolded.

The mountain where the people are taught

For the Cheyenne, Noahvose is the holy mountain at the origin of the nation’s law. The name is rendered variously — “the giving hill,” “the place where the people are taught,” and in a related Cheyenne form Náhkȯhe-vose, “bear hill” — and the variation itself is a reminder that the translations come through the filter of outside transcription. The tradition the nation carries is told plainly. The prophet and culture-bringer Sweet Medicine, traveling into the Black Hills country, came to this mountain and entered it, and within found a lodge of beings who were not people but powers, and there Maheo — the sacred all-encompassing power of the Cheyenne world, often translated into English as “the Great Spirit,” though that flattening of a far less anthropomorphic concept is exactly the kind of substitution that has distorted the record of these religions — gave him the Maahotse, the Four Sacred Arrows, and with them the knowledge from which the Cheyenne derive their religious, political, social, and economic order. Two of the arrows are spoken of as turned toward man, two toward the buffalo: the protection of the people and the renewal of their life. With the arrows came the framework of the nation — the Council of Forty-four peace chiefs, the warrior societies, the body of law by which the people were to live together. The Sacred Arrows remain among the holiest possessions of the Cheyenne; what is done with them, and the inner content of the rites that surround them, is the nation’s own and is not a matter for outside narration. This is recounted here as the Cheyenne recount it: the mountain is where Noahvose gave the people their way.

For the Lakota the mountain is a place of prayer and of the vision quest, and its meaning runs through the wider relation to Paha Sapa. A person seeking a vision goes up the mountain to fast and pray alone, sometimes for days, set apart on the slope — the crying-for-a-vision by which one of the Lakota seeks understanding and the help of the sacred. That sacred is named Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka, Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery: not a single sky-god of the European kind but the holy power, wakȟáŋ, that pervades all being and is addressed in its many aspects. The vision quest is one of the rites the people hold; like the others it is described here only in its existence and its meaning, never as a procedure, because it is a living and in part guarded practice, and the operative detail belongs to those who carry it, not to a page. What an outsider may see is the evidence left behind: along the trail up the mountain, tied to the branches of the trees, hang small cloths of red and white and yellow and black and bundles of tobacco — prayer ties, each one set there by a person as the standing form of a prayer, a request, a thanks. They are not decoration and not artifacts; they are prayers in progress, and the park asks visitors to leave them untouched.

Bear Butte is not the property of a single nation. It is sacred to the Lakota and to the Cheyenne above all, but also to the Arapaho and to a wider company of Plains peoples, and pilgrims come to it from many nations across the year. The breadth is itself worth marking, because it cuts against the habit — old in the outside literature — of flattening distinct peoples into one generic “Indian” spirituality. The Cheyenne who comes to Noahvose comes to the mountain where Sweet Medicine received the arrows and the law; the Lakota who comes to Matȟó Pahá comes to a place woven into the Black Hills and the people’s relation to the sacred; an Arapaho elder brings an Arapaho understanding. These are related traditions of the same northern grasslands, not a single one. The shared thing is the mountain and the practice of going to it; the meanings each nation carries up the path are its own. Even the documented modern history reflects the breadth: in 1945, with sons away at war, the Northern Cheyenne sought and received leave to hold a prayer ceremony on the mountain for their safe return — one recorded instance, in the part of the record outsiders kept, of a living use that the people did not need the record to validate.

The mountain, then, is itself the holy thing. There is no temple on it and no monument; the sanctity is in the rock, the trees, the height, the silence. This is the distinction that the comparison with the archaeological sites makes sharp. At Chaco the sacred was built — raised in coursed sandstone, aligned to the sun, and left when the people moved on, so that the descendants of its makers, the Ancestral Puebloans, revere a place their ancestors made and departed. In the eastern woodlands the Mississippian world and its predecessors heaped the earth itself into serpents and ridges and platform mounds, sacred works of human hands now studied as ruins. Bear Butte was made by no one. It was found holy and is held holy, and the holiness has never lapsed into the past tense. It is the living term in the series — the one sacred place of this continent’s first nations that the encyclopedia can describe in the present indicative throughout, because the people who keep it are present and sovereign and still climbing the path.

Bear Butte rising alone from the South Dakota plain at the edge of the Black Hills. William Neuheisel from DC, US, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

A living site under pressure

Bear Butte’s standing in American law is double, and the doubleness is the source of its troubles. The state of South Dakota established Bear Butte State Park in 1961, and the mountain was entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and designated a National Historic Landmark on December 21, 1981 — federal recognition of its national importance. These designations protect the mountain as a place of historic and cultural value; they do not hand its religious use back to the nations for whom it is holy, and they do not insulate it from what is built around it. The result is a sacred mountain that is also a state park drawing general tourists, ringed by private land beyond the park boundary, in a part of the country where one of the largest motorcycle gatherings in the world arrives every August.

That gathering is the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, run from the nearby town since 1938 and grown to draw hundreds of thousands of riders. Its expansion toward the mountain has produced the central modern conflict. The flashpoint came in the mid-2000s when an entrepreneur began building, about two miles from the mountain, what was advertised as the world’s largest biker bar, with an outdoor concert amphitheater — a development that brought amplified music and crowds within earshot of a place whose ceremonial use depends on quiet. Native advocates from the Lakota and Cheyenne nations protested the granting of its liquor license and, in the years since, the steady creep of bars, campgrounds, and stages toward the butte. Their request has been consistent and modest: a buffer around the mountain, restrictions on alcohol and amplified events near it, and, in plain terms, that the mountain be left in peace during the seasons of prayer. In 2011 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Bear Butte to its list of America’s eleven most endangered historic places, citing exactly this encroachment.

The law has rarely sided with the nations. The most prominent legal effort, Fools Crow v. Gullett, challenged the state’s 1982 management plan — the limits it placed on when and how long ceremonies could be held on the mountain, the construction of viewing platforms and parking — as a burden on religious freedom under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. That act itself marks how recent the protection is: the free exercise of Native religion was effectively without federal safeguard, and much of it under active suppression, until that 1978 statute, and the act proved to carry little enforceable weight. Frank Fools Crow and his co-plaintiffs lost at the district and appellate levels, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The pattern — sacred-land claims defeated by a property and management regime that recognizes the site’s significance but not the nations’ authority over its use — is the same one that has run through the larger fight over the Black Hills.

Some ground has shifted by purchase rather than litigation. Between roughly 2016 and 2018 the Northern and Southern Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and the Rosebud Sioux acquired tracts of land around the mountain, buying back a measure of the buffer the courts would not grant. The campaign to protect Bear Butte continues to be carried by the nations themselves, in the press, in the licensing hearings, and on the mountain, where, as the regional reporting on the rally’s growth records, tribal voices keep asking for respect for a place still in ceremonial use. The figure that recurs in their language is the one the Wikipedia record and the older accounts both register: a place of prayer, meditation, and peace, asked only to be allowed to remain so.

There is a long history compressed in that asking. The mountain has watched the 1857 council that tried to hold the country, the treaty of 1868 that promised the hills and the seizure of 1874 that took them, the decades when the ceremonies that still rise from its slope were carried on under threat of the law, and the slow, partial, never-finished return of recognition. The cloths in the trees are not relics of any of that. They were tied there this year, and will be again, by people climbing a mountain their ancestors climbed for the same reason — to fast, and to pray, and to ask the holy power of the world for a vision on the height where, in the Cheyenne telling, the people were first given their way of living.

→ Related: The Lakota · The Pueblo · The Anishinaabe · Wakan Tanka · White Buffalo Calf Woman · The Thunderbird · Gitche Manitou · Kokopelli · Serpent Mound · Poverty Point · Chaco Canyon · Ancestral Puebloan · Mississippian Cahokia