Plenty Coups and the Last Vision: The Crow Chief Who Preserved the Homeland

As you travel through this country, you are entering the land of the Apsaalooke, the Crow people, and the homeland of one of the wisest leaders the West ever produced. Plenty Coups was the last traditional chief of the Crow Nation. As a boy he was sent alone into the mountains on a vision quest, and what he saw there shaped the fate of his entire people.

In the vision, the buffalo poured out of a hole in the ground and vanished, replaced by strange spotted cattle. A great storm flattened the whole forest, and only one tree was left standing, the tree that held the lodge of the chickadee, the small bird that survives by listening and learning from others. The Crow elders read the message clearly. The old world was ending, and the people who survived would be the ones who listened and adapted rather than fought to the last.

So the Crow chose alliance over war. They became strategic partners with the United States in conflicts against the Lakota, their long-standing territorial rivals. In doing so they retained more of their traditional homeland than nations that fought, though not without repeated treaty violations and steady land loss through the allotment era. The Crow Reservation today covers approximately two point three million acres, the largest in Montana. It is a fraction of the thirty-eight million acres the Crow Nation controlled at contact.

In nineteen twenty-one, Plenty Coups was chosen to represent all American Indians at the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington. He laid down his war bonnet and his coup stick in honor of the fallen. He gave his own land near Pryor, just south of here, to be a park for all people. It is preserved today as Chief Plenty Coups State Park.

He died in nineteen thirty-two. He had kept his people home.