Building on a post about calendars I wrote last year, there are many systems to specify which year is which. The Gregorian calendar counts solar years from an arbitrary point loosely linked to the birth of the historical Jesus. The Hijri calendar counts lunar years since the prophet Muhammad had to flee Mecca. Classical Athens chose someone by lot each year to be the man for whom the year was named, so you might say “Oh, this happened in the year of Miltiades.”
The winter count was the system several Indigenous nations of the American Great Plains used to specify which year was which. There wasn’t a solitary winter count that everyone referenced. Anyone who wanted to could start their own winter count, and that was fine. At the end of each winter, a chronicler maintaining a winter count would decide what singular event from the previous year was most significant. Then they’d paint an image referencing that event on an animal hide. The next year, they’d paint an image of the next year’s most significant event beside last year’s. This continued until the historian filled up the hide, whereupon they or their successor would get a bigger hide, reproduce all the images, and continue the winter count from there. Copies were also made by people from other bands so they could reference the same calendar.
I’m not aware of any high-profile winter counts that are still being updated, but I’m sure there are some lower-profile, private, and/or family-oriented winter counts that folks are keeping current.
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When you needed to reference a specific year, you’d go to the winter count, point at an image and say, “Here. It happened in the year Chief Wounded Hand died.” Then if you needed to know the time between that year and other years, you could just count the number of pictures and say, “That was six years before the year we put red flags of gratitude on all the rocks and hills.”
This post is about the Big Missouri winter count, maintained on a bison hide from 1796 to 1926 by a Dakota band living near the Missouri River in what is today South Dakota and Nebraska. The last historian to maintain the Big Missouri winter count, a Dakota man named Kills Two, wrote down for posterity what each image signified.
Because the items on the Big Missouri winter count are, definitionally, the most significant thing to happen that year, there are some odd and remarkable things recorded on that bison hide. Many are particularly gameable: unusual events you might choose to have befall your party. I selected what I thought were the most gameable events, but also included a few for their historical significance. I kept close to Kills Two’s description of each event. At the end of the post, there’s a rollable random encounter table of just the gameable events.
The Gregorian year I give for each of the below events is the Gregorian year in which the event was painted. Because painting happened at the end of winter, an event that happened in summer 1799 would be the 1800 entry on the Big Missouri winter count.
1803: Crows and Dakotas met while both were hunting bison. Being enemies, a fight ensued. A blinding snowstorm arose suddenly, and both sides had to camp. When the storm passed, the two sides discovered they were camped close together and the fight resumed.
1807: A Crow enemy snuck into the band’s camp for unclear reasons. He was killed.
1814: The band killed a Pawnee who was carrying something they’d never seen before: a gun. Other Dakotas from other bands presumably had guns (guns flooded westward during the War of 1812), but this band had never seen one before.
1818: A sudden blizzard froze ducks and geese in flight. The ground and the tipis were covered with dead birds.
1823: A man named Slicer had his feet and legs frozen so badly they came off.
1829: Nothing of consequence happened. (Or perhaps Kills Two simply did not wish to share the meaning of this image?)
1831: Four white bison were killed, the largest number in history. Swift Bear owned the only horse fast enough to capture them. It remains a belief among the Plains nations that white bison are sacred, but the particulars differ. This band honored them by hunting them.
1834: The winter the stars fell. This great meteor shower happened on November 12th 1833, and thus was recorded as the defining event of the year that preceded spring 1834. Every winter count that’s been studied records this meteor shower as the defining event of that year.
1837: The band fought with Pawnees across the frozen Platte River with arrows. Those daring enough to go on the ice were killed.
1841: The death of the Great Medicine Man, famous because he could change common substances into necessitates like tobacco, gunpowder, lead, and sugar, and noted because he wore a gaily painted robe (depicted).
1843: Many dead bison calves were discovered this spring, though what they died from could not be determined.
1844: Cheyennes traded great herds of horses with the band for the sacred Cheyenne Arrow. The Pawnees had taken the arrow from the Cheyennes, and the Dakotas recovered it for them. Using the arrow, the Cheyennes could predict the outcomes of wars. If blood were found on it, the battle was abandoned. If clean, it would be won.
1855: Plenty of money. A group of Dakotas robbed a guarded stagecoach carrying the payroll for a fort. This was the incident for which Spotted Tail was arrested and then released: see here.
1882: Spotted Tail killed by Crow Dog. Again, see here.
1888: The stomachs of two women were tapped. An unknown ailment affecting them caused great bloating. The physician at the government agency opened a hole in their stomachs to relieve the pressure, but both women died.
1891: Death of Spotted Elk (a Ghost Dance leader, depicted) at the Wounded Knee massacre.
1912: Turning Bear killed by a passenger train at Valentine, Nebraska.
1918: Many young men joined the U.S. Army to fight in World War I.
Table of Gameable Encounters
Roll 1d10. When you roll an item, cross it off. If you roll a number that’s been crossed off, treat the result as one higher.
| 1 | 1888: Terrible bloating, perhaps fatal. |
| 2 | 1807: Enemy sneaks into camp for unclear reason. |
| 3 | 1818: Frozen birds fall from the sky. |
| 4 | 1841: Alchemist in a gaily painted robe. |
| 5 | 1803: Two linked fights in a snowstorm. |
| 6 | 1831: Four white bison. |
| 7 | 1823: Frostbite so bad your limbs fall off. |
| 8 | 1843: Young animals dead of unknown cause. |
| 9 | 1837: Battle across a frozen river. |
| 10 | 1834: The stars fall. |
| 11 | 1814: Enemy carrying remarkable, never-before-seen weapon. |
| 12 | 1855: Guarded stagecoach full of money. |
| 13 | 1844: Arrow that tells the future. |
| 14 | 1912: Vengeful train. |
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Sources:
– Sioux Winter Count: A 131-Year Calendar of Events by Roberta Carkeek Cheney (1998), which gets most of its best content from the record Kills Two made.
– Illustrations from Speaking of Indians by the Dakota activist and anthropologist Ella Deloria (first published 1944, republished 1998)