Remembering the Cannonball River

by Dakota Goodhouse

The Lakota people keep their collective memory alive in pictographic records called winter counts. One such winter count, the Brown Hat Winter Count, reaches back to what ethnologists and historians might call “myth-history,” to circa 901 CE. This history reaches back hundreds of years and recalls the arrival of the horse in 1692, the first horse-stealing raid in 1706, intertribal conflict, contact with traders, smallpox, star falls, eclipses, comets, sun dances, white bison hunts, conflicts with soldiers, treaties, the arrival of settlers, the boarding school and reservation era, and human survival.

If the Cannonball River were excluded from primary resources like journals, maps, and winter counts, our North Dakota history would be poorer for it. There is a continuous cultural occupation of this Missouri River tributary reaching back to circa 1300 CE through the tribal histories of the Mandan, Arikara, Cheyenne, Yanktonai Dakota, and Hunkpapa Lakota.

The Cannonball River has many names. The Dakota call it Íŋyaŋ IyÁ Wakpá (“Talking Stone River”) or Íŋyaŋwakağapi Wakpá (“Stone MakesFor-Themselves River”). The Mandan people call it Pasąhxte’ (“Big Creek”). The Hidatsa know it in their language as Aashihdia (“Big Creek”). The Cheyenne refer to the Cannonball River as the “River of the Rocks.”

According to the authors of the Dakota Access Pipeline Class III survey report, they admitted to no tribal consultation. They didn’t need to consult with any tribe because the pipeline did not physically cross any reservation border. The report doesn’t mention much in the way of history and culture. What is mentioned can’t be shared, because it may lead to the destruction of the resource.

What it doesn’t say needs to be shared. The report does not mention the flood of 1825 opposite the mouth of the Cannonball River—thirty lodges, or about 150 to 180 people, drowned. There was no mention of the last camp of Wanéta, The Charger, on Beaver Creek either. Wanéta was a major historic figure in the War of 1812: he fought in three conflicts in Ohio, met President Van Buren, met King George III, and led as many as seven hundred Dakota-Lakota under Colonel Leavenworth’s command of the Missouri Legion in 1823 in the first-ever US military campaign on Plains Indians against the Arikara. A major historic figure? A former US president and an English king certainly thought so.

These few things were brought to the attention of an individual at the North Dakota State Historical Preservation Office on March 1, 2016, along with where he could find this information. The following day, that individual responded that this information could also be found in the British Museum Winter Count, in London, England.

The north and south banks of the Cannonball River are rife with physical evidence of historic and cultural occupations of people who are still here. This physical evidence of village remains and midden mounds are complemented by surviving oral tradition; there are various mentions in historic journals from British resources (e.g., Welsh explorer John Evans) to American resources (e.g., fur trader Manuel Lisa, Corps of Discovery, etc.). As to whether or not the Arikara, Cheyenne, and Mandan Indians ever interred their deceased in the vicinity of the Cannonball River mouth, it is absolutely preposterous to say that there are no burial grounds nearby—to say so would be to suggest that no one ever died in any of the cultural occupations. Alfred Bowers’s Mandan informants told him that their ancestors buried their deceased “in earlier times.”

The Sitting Rabbit map of the Missouri River, from the North Dakota–South Dakota border to the North Dakota–Montana border, was commissioned by Orin Libby in 1906. At the time, Libby was the secretary of the State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND). Libby sought out Sitting Rabbit, a Mandan Indian man, to capture the geography of the Missouri River as the Mandan knew it. Sitting Rabbit didn’t disappoint in his efforts. In fact, the Mandan Indian villages at the mouth of the Cannonball River, both the north and south bank villages, are called the “Big River Villages.” The Mandan Indian name of the Cannonball River is the “Big River.” This precious map is still in the collections of the SHSND and is available for public viewing on the North Dakota Studies website.

According to Colonel A. B. Welch’s Seven Fires (Dakotah History), sometime around 1750 the Šahíyela (Red Talkers; Cheyenne) were compelled by the Lakota to cross the Missouri River at the mouth of the Cannonball River. The Šahíyela were hard-pressed to either make peace with the Lakota or be exterminated, so they embraced their old foe and became allies. A great intertribal adoption, cemented by marriages, was arranged. But not all the Lakota were keen to make an ally of a former enemy.

The Brown Hat Winter Count (aka Baptiste Good Winter Count; Sičáŋǧu, “Brulé”) in the winter count collections at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, has been made available in its entirety online. This winter count recalls 1762–63 as the “people were burnt winter.” The entry details a great prairie fire that caught up to their village. Many people and horses were killed in this fire. Survivors themselves were burnt on their legs and made it through this trial by jumping into Long Lake; survivors became referred to as Sičáŋǧu, meaning “Burnt Thighs.” This band of Lakota had fought the Cheyenne in the Cannonball area. The Cheyenne had retaliated by crossing the Missouri River at the mouth of the Cannonball River and tracking the Lakota along Long Lake Creek, where they set fire to the plains. The late Albert White Hat Sr. (Rosebud; Sičáŋǧu) recalled the oral tradition of the Sičáŋǧu as taking place in the Bismarck region. The conflict that resulted in the formation of the Sičáŋǧu began at the mouth of the Cannonball River. The identity of one of the tribes of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (the Seven Council Fires; “The Great Sioux Nation”) tied to this location is significant.

A map at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the only evidence of John Evans’s travels (his journals may have been destroyed or lost), provides the only testimony of his journey on the Upper Missouri River. This map was referenced and annotated by Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Evans recorded on his map a series of streams, many unknown to him by name; one of the outstanding streams he recorded was the “Bomb River,” or the Cannonball River.

The Corps of Discovery mentions the Cannonball River as “La Bullet” on October 18, 1804. Referencing Evans’s map, Captain William Clark walked that evening in search of the remarkable places mentioned by Evans but couldn’t find them—though by then, the Corps’s campsite was north of the mouth of the Cannonball River. Co-captain Meriwether Lewis noted on this same date that the cannonball-shaped concretions were “of excellent grit for Grindstones” and had his men select one to “answer for an anker.”

The Pictographic Bison Robe at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University details the intertribal conflicts among the Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa, Hunkpapa Lakota, and Yanktonai Dakota in the Heart River and Cannonball River area along the Missouri River during the 1790s. This same robe details one of many conflicts between the tribes of the Upper Missouri River that concluded in the 1803 Battle of Heart River, which saw the expansion of the Hunkpapa territory. This conflict is remembered in the Drifting Goose Winter Count (aka John K. Bear Winter Count) as Tȟa Čháŋte Wakpá ed okíčhize, or “There was a battle at Heart River.” The expansion of Hunkpapa territory is significant. This territorial boundary is recognized in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.

Ensign Nathaniel Pryor, a sergeant of the Corps of Discovery during the expedition, recorded on September 9, 1807, that the Arikara and Mandan were at war. The Mandan had killed two Arikara at the mouth of the Cannonball River. Testimony of the conflict at Cannonball River was delivered to Pryor at the Grand River by the Lakota. Pryor’s previous experience with the Arikara and Lakota made him aware that the best policy was to place every confidence in their word; they had no reason to lie.

Manuel Lisa, a fur trader of the American Fur Company, recorded that tensions were high on the northern plains among tribes who were pro-English trade, those who were pro-American trade, and American Fur Company trappers in the fall of 1812. The Crow and Lakota had killed American trappers; the Hidatsa had stolen American Fur Company horses; the Arikara had indiscriminately killed both English and American trappers; and the Cheyenne had robbed and whipped American Fur Company trappers on the Cannonball River.

Botanist John Bradbury made a journey to the Cannonball River in 1811. Bradbury noted in his journal “late in the day on June 20, the valley of Cannon-ball River, bounded on each side by a range of small hills, visible as far as the eye can reach; and as they appear to diminish regularly, in the proportion of their distance, they produce a singular and pleasing effect. The Cannon-ball River was muddy at this time; but whether it is constantly so or not, I could not learn. It is here about one hundred and sixty yards wide, but so shallow that we crossed it without swimming. We camped on a very fine prairie, near the river, affording grass in abundance, nearly a yard high. The alluvion of the river is about a mile in breadth from bluff to bluff, and is very beautiful, being prairie, interspersed with groves of trees, and ornamented with beautiful plants, now in flower.”

Among Bradbury’s findings was a species of flax he identified as Linum perenne. The Lakota know the native blue flax as Čhaŋȟlóğaŋ Nabláǧa (“HollowStem To-Blossom-from-Within”) and employ the seed in their food stock. Bradbury returned again to the Cannonball River on July 7, 1819, for the express purpose of procuring additional botany specimens.

The Blue Thunder Winter Count, the No Two Horns Winter Count, and the High Dog Winter Count, all of which are in the collections at the State Historical Society of North Dakota (the High Dog Winter Count is on display at the ND Heritage Center & State Museum), all recall a devastating flood in the spring of 1825. The High Dog Winter Count remembers the flood as Mní wičhát’tÁ, or “Many died by drowning.” The Blue Thunder Winter Count remembers the flood as Mní wičhát’tÉ, also translated “Many died by drowning.” According to the High Dog Winter Count, this fatal winter camp was opposite of the mouth of the Cannonball River, and the site is remembered as Étu Pȟá Šuŋg t’Á, or “Dead Horse Head Point.” The Steamboat/Thin Elk Winter Count, in the collections of the Buechel Museum at the St. Francis Indian School on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, records that it was thirty lodges of Yanktonai Dakota who drowned in the Horsehead Bottom flood. This flood story and location is also recorded in the Medicine Bear Winter Count, located in the Hood Museum at Darthmouth College in New Hampshire. This information is repeated for the same year in the Chandler-Pohrt Winter Count at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum in Michigan.

Prince Maximilian von Wied-Neuwied travelled into the interior of North America during the summer of 1833. Wied-Neuwied has written probably more about the Cannonball River than any visitor before or since. An excerpt from his journal is shared here:

On the north side of the mouth, there was a steep, yellow clay wall; and on the southern, a flat, covered with poplars and willows. This river has its name from the singular regular sand-stone balls which are found in its banks, and in those of the Missouri in its vicinity. They are of various sizes, from that of a musket ball to that of a large bomb, and lie irregularly on the bank, or in the strata, from which they often project to half their thickness when the river has washed away the earth; they fall down, and are found in great numbers on the bank. Many of them are rather elliptical, others are more flattened, and others flat on one side, and rather convex on the other. Of the perfectly spherical balls, I observed some two feet in diameter.

The Long Soldier Winter Count entry for 1835–36 recorded an Arikara camp on the Cannonball River. The Hunkpapa Lakota went to the Arikara camp to trade for wagmíza (corn). The Arikara, not wanting the Lakota around, perhaps owing to the part the Lakota played in the Arikara War of 1823, killed six of the Lakota. A copy of the Long Soldier Winter Count is available for viewing at Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates, North Dakota.

In September 1863, General Alfred Sully lead an assault on the Siouan encampment at Whitestone Hill as part of the punitive campaigns organized by General John Pope to make Americans feel safe following the 1862 Minnesota Dakota Conflict, and to open the frontier for settlement—in particular, to open the frontier for veterans returning from the Civil War. Sully’s command killed as many as 200 (mostly women and children) and took 156 prisoners (mostly women and children). Survivors, those who escaped Sully’s assault, turned west and crossed the Missouri River at the Cannonball confluence.

A second entry on the Long Soldier Winter Count cites a conflict at the Cannonball River between the Lakota and Assiniboine in 1862–63. Twenty Assiniboine came on the warpath; there was a battle there, and they hid behind the cannonball-shaped concretions. The winter count’s entry tells us that the Assiniboine were surrounded and fired upon. The fox image that overlays the Assiniboine tells us they fought with guile.

“Chief Big Head’s [Pȟá Tȟáŋka] family crossed the Missouri River at Many Horse Head Point [Étu Pȟá Šuŋg t’Á, or “Dead Horse Head Point”] in an effort to escape General Sully,” says Wastewin Young, former tribal historic preservation officer for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “The young mothers,” she continues, “carried their babies under cover of night across the Missouri River. They plugged their noses so that their crying wouldn’t give their position away to passing soldiers.”

According to Young, Chief Two Bear and Little Soldier often established winter camp on the east bank of the Missouri River, opposite the Cannonball confluence.

On July 29, 1864, after spending two weeks hastily constructing Fort Rice, General Sully took his command of 2,200 soldiers, which included a detachment of Winnebago Indian scouts, and ascended the Cannonball River on the south bank— his punitive campaign on the Isáŋyathi Dakȟóta anew. Known or unknown, Sully also marched against the Thítȟuŋwaŋ Lakȟóta (Húŋkpapȟa, Itázipčho, Sihásapa, and Mnikȟóžu) and Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna Dakȟóta, two Siouan groups who had nothing to do with the 1862 Minnesota Dakota Conflict. Sully received a dispatch from Fort Rice at midnight on July 22 that the Dakȟóta were on the Knife River. The next day Sully’s command crossed the Cannonball River near present-day communities of Porcupine and Shields, North Dakota.

A third entry from the Long Soldier Winter Count indicates that the Húŋkpapȟa were camped at the Cannonball River in 1866–67. Gall was taken by soldiers that winter to Fort Berthold, where they stabbed him. Gall was left for dead and the camp moved on. What makes this tale remarkable is that Gall walked to the Húŋkpapȟa camp at the Cannonball River and recovered.

In 1878, the Huŋkphápȟa chief Ištá SápA (“Black Eyes”) met with William Wade, a cattle rancher on the Cannonball River, and shared this about the terrible 1825 flood:

...we camped on this bottom land just below here...it was the Wolf Month [February] and it had been warm for a long time. One night the water started coming in over the ground from the river and before we could get to higher ground we were surrounded by water and ice chunks. Our only chance was to get to high ground before we would all be covered up with water. We tried to carry our tepees and supplies but finally had to leave them and many of the women were drowned trying to save their children. Most all our old people drowned and many others. Most all our horses went under and you can still see their heads (skulls) laying [sic] along at the foot of the hills after so many, many years. Two Bears (Mato Nopa) a Yankton chief [sic], saved the lives of several women and children by carrying them from camp to the higher ground.

William Wade’s daughter Mamie met her share of pre-reservation Dakota and Lakota people. Among them was Annie Skye. Skye relayed to the younger Wade that smallpox struck the Lakota in 1837. They were camped at the mouth of the Cannonball River when “out of a clear blue sky smallpox hit them. After the death of several of their number, who were put to rest up on platforms suspended in trees, they decided to move away from this infested locality.”

Harriett Skye, Annie Skye’s granddaughter, offers a contemporary perspective on current events near the Cannonball River:

I believe that as long as they remain peaceful and unarmed, and each day they are there, is a win. This kind of action confuses those who would come in with their guns and armor because their intent is to kill. They arrested people who were praying, but the powers that be know that the world is watching, but more importantly, know that our Ancestors are watching because they fought and died so we could be here. This struggle is everyone’s struggle to maintain our clean water. Water is life.

Harriett Skye, who holds a PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley, was inducted into the North Dakota Heritage Center’s Native American Hall of Honor in September 2016.

Elizabeth Fenn, a historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, writes that the Huff phase—an occupation located between the Cannonball and Heart Rivers from about 1300 CE to 1450 CE—was when and where the Mandan became the Mandan. The south Cannonball site during this phase was unprotected—there were no palisade walls nor defensive moats surrounding the village there. The fortifications at the north Cannonball site during this same phase may well represent a key transformation in plains village life, as drought caused strife in the Missouri River valley. This may have been cause for the Mandan to move closer together and build fortifications for safety. But we need archaeological study to sort these things out.

By the time Mandan moved north from the Cannonball area to the Heart River around 1450 CE, they had embraced the key trait that made them Mandan: the Okipa ceremony, with its multi-day reenactment of their own rich history. The Cannonball area, according to Fenn, represents “the oldest Mandan cultural horizon.”

The late Vine Deloria Jr. essayed that for many Americans, “the first and most familiar kind of sacred lands are places to which we attribute sanctity because the location is a site where, within our own history, something of great importance has taken place. Unfortunately, many of these places are related to instances of human violence. Every society needs these kinds of sacred places because they help to instill a sense of social cohesion in the people and remind them of the passage of generations that have brought them to the present. A society that cannot remember and honor its past is in peril of losing its soul. Indians, because of our considerably longer tenure on this continent, have many more sacred places than do non-Indians.

“A second category of sacred lands has a deeper, more profound sense of the sacred. It can be illustrated in…[when] Joshua led the Hebrews across the River Jordan into the Holy Land. After crossing, Joshua selected one man from each of the Twelve tribes and told him to find a large stone. The twelve stones were then placed together in a monument to mark the spot where the people had camped after having crossed the river successfully. In the crossing of the River Jordan, the sacred or higher powers have appeared in the lives of human beings...the essence of the event is that the sacred has become a part of our existence.

“It is not likely that non-Indians have had many of these kinds of religious experiences, particularly because most churches and synagogues have special rituals that are designed to cleanse the buildings so that their services can be held there untainted by the natural world. Non-Indians simply have not been on this continent very long; their families have rarely settled in one place for any period of time so that no profound relationship with the environment has been possible.”

Deloria concluded: “The third kind of sacred lands are places of overwhelming holiness where the Higher Powers, on their own initiative, have revealed Themselves to human beings. We can illustrate this point in the Old Testament narrative. Moses spent time herding sheep on Mount Horeb. One day to his amazement [he] saw a bush burning with fire but not being consumed by it. Approaching this spot, Moses was startled when the Lord spoke to him. ‘Put off thy shoes, for the place where thou standest is holy ground.’ This tradition tells us that there are places of unquestionable, inherent sacredness on this earth, sites that are holy in and of themselves. These holy places are locations where people have always gone to communicate and commune with higher powers.”

Ray Wood, renowned expert in Plains Indian cultural and archaeological sites on the Upper Missouri River whose firsthand field experience goes back before the dams of the 1950s, interprets the data from the John Evans 1796 map in regard to the Cannonball River locality that what Evans recorded as “Jupiter’s Fort” is without a doubt a prehistoric Mandan village. According to Wood’s findings regarding the north Cannonball site, “Not only was it a defensive setting, but the village was also fortified by a curving ditch that isolated a level upland spur from the adjoining upland. The village today is badly disturbed by plowing, but from the air one can clearly see the fortification ditch and the numerous bastions protruding from it. Little wonder that Evans referred to it as a fort.” In his Prologue to Lewis & Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expeditions, Wood captures the number of remarkable Indian village sites north of the Cannonball River.

As part of the Dakota Access Pipeline review process, the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Ofiice conducted a follow-up survey west of Highway 1806 and found that no significant sites were destroyed. The physical evidence, or lack thereof, cannot be disputed. According to the chief archaeologist’s published note, he and his associates were looking west of Highway 1806, perhaps because Standing Rock tribal historian Tim Mentz conducted his own survey and called attention there with his findings. The north Cannonball site and the mouth of the Cannonball River, the confluence of history and culture, is east of Highway 1806.

In 1999, the Cannonball Ranch was inducted into the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. It’s one of the oldest ranches in North Dakota. According to the Hall of Fame, the ranch served as a gathering point as early as 1865. The ranch included a hotel, a general store, a ferry crossing, a steamboat landing and fueling station, a military telegraph station for Fort Rice, and a stage line to the Black Hills in the 1870s and ’80s. The ranch also included two houses, a barn, a blacksmith shop, a bunk house, an ice house, a laundry, and a tennis court. The North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame’s strict criteria for eligibility to be recognized is that a ranch must have been “instrumental in creating or developing the ranching business, traditions, and lifestyles of North Dakota’s western heritage and livestock industry.”

In contrast to what’s happened in North Dakota, in 2010 Walmart planned to construct a supercenter near Wilderness Battlefield (a Civil War battleground in Orange County, Virginia), and people invested in the history of that site grew concerned. Eventually, enough people held that ground as sacred and historical that plans for the supercenter were dropped in January 2011. Coincidentally, Walmart and state officials had argued that nothing significant occurred on that site.

The sum of the north bank of the Cannonball River—with a million years of geological history and seven hundred years of continual occupation, intertribal conflict, smallpox, botany, trade, steamboat traffic, US military history, and early ranching—have made that location significant.

Spiritual pilgrimages were conducted on the plateaus located on the north bank of the Cannonball River, what John Evans called the “Hummit.” There are little to no traces of these vision quests, and there shouldn’t be. People went to pray, not to leave evidence. In September 2016, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Reverend Michael B. Curry, made a pilgrimage of his own to the Cannonball River camps and town. He listened and prayed with the community there. Curry’s visit calls to mind Psalm 99:9, “Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his holy hill; for the Lord our God is Holy.” The mystery of creation can be seen there today as the early peoples beheld it.

The Cannonball River, and specifically the north Cannonball site and its importance to the first nations and to North Dakota, must be taken into account for its religious or spiritual significance, its role in intertribal conflicts, its role in the 1837 smallpox epidemic that struck the Húŋkpapȟa at that location, its role as the starting point in General Sully’s 1864 punitive campaign, and for the historic Cannonball Ranch.

The Cannonball River and all its attributes are important to all North Dakota citizens, to new citizens, and most importantly of all, to the future. Let us put our minds together to educate ourselves and one another about the things we hold dear, and to resolve to respect our story, our histories, and our sites of significance.

Keúŋkeyapi. That’s what they said.

DAKOTA GOODHOUSE is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. His research has appeared in the Smithsonian’s The Year the Stars Fell and other publications. Visit his blog at, thefirstscout.blogspot.com.