Yellowstone Kelly: The Scout on the Rimrocks

His grave sits on a high bluff above the Yellowstone River, just north of Billings, with a wide view across the valley he spent a decade exploring. Luther Sage Kelly, known everywhere on the northern plains as Yellowstone Kelly, had asked to be buried here, and in June of nineteen twenty-nine, his wish was honored.

Kelly was born in eighteen forty-nine in Geneva, New York. He lied about his age to enlist at fifteen, hoping to see action in the Civil War, but the war ended before he reached the front. Honorably discharged from the regular Army in eighteen sixty-eight, he headed west instead of home and spent the next twelve years ranging across Montana's Judith Basin and the Yellowstone country as a hunter, trapper, and scout. He became, by all accounts, genuinely skilled at living in this landscape.

His most consequential service came as chief of scouts for Colonel Nelson Miles, who was commanding military operations against Lakota and Northern Cheyenne forces in the mid-eighteen seventies. Kelly was present at the Battle of Wolf Mountain in January eighteen seventy-seven, where Miles's troops fought Crazy Horse's warriors in a blizzard along the Tongue River. Later that year, when Miles pursued the Nez Perce under Chief Joseph northward across Montana, Kelly joined Miles as a scout during the pursuit.

He left Montana eventually, served in the Philippines, worked in Alaska, but he came back in his mind, and his instructions about burial were specific. The Billings Chamber of Commerce has placed an interpretive site at the Rimrocks near where he rests: a man who knew this country the way few ever would.