How (Not) to Name a Mountain

Harney, Black Elk & conflicting visions of the center of the earth.

I spent last weekend roaming the Black Hills of western South Dakota with my friend Zach. We hiked, ate campfire hash, and talked a lot about history.

The Lakota people call these hills Paha Sapa, though they are not so much hills as mountains, rising like a dark island from the windswept plains. The region’s highest point, Black Elk Peak, is also the highest point in the U.S. east of the Rockies. At 7,242 feet, it rewards its many pilgrims, tourists, and photographers with a spectacular panorama of the surrounding hills, which fall away in giant rock formations and dense timber.

Many Lakotas view Paha Sapa as the center of the earth. From Black Elk Peak, it’s easy to see why.

Zach forgot his phone but remembered his Blackwing pencil.

The Lakotas were not the first Native Americans in the region, but Paha Sapa seems to have acquired a spiritual significance for them by the time they settled there in the early 1800s. As American expansion moved west, conflicts arose between the Lakotas and overlanders, Oregon Trail pioneers, and (with frustrating regularity) the U.S. military.

This led to a series of treaties between the Lakota people and the U.S. gov., which acknowledged, among other things, the tribe’s sovereignty and claims to specific land. Remarkably, the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie included all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River within the Great Sioux Reservation, of which the Lakota were assured “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation.”

Spoiler: it didn’t last.

Massacres & Romantic Tales

According to Annie D. Tallent, the first white woman to enter the hills, no expedition succeeded in penetrating the region prior to 1874 except that of U.S. General William S. Harney. She writes:

With members of his staff, [Harney] climbed the rugged peak, which was honored with that brave officer's name, and on its lofty summit unfurled our national emblem for the first time to the mountain breeze, and under its sacred folds pledged to it their allegiance and undying loyalty in numerous bumpers of sparkling champagne, as evidenced by the many empty bottles discovered on the spot by the pioneers about two decades later. And thereby hangs a romantic tale.

Revelry aside, the only problem with this story is that it never happened.

It’s true Black Elk Peak was formerly named after Harney, who received the honor after leading a punishing military campaign against a band of Brulé Lakotas in 1855. Harney was hired to avenge the killing of 30 U.S. soldiers by Indians the year before. In response, his men killed 86 Lakotas, mostly women and children, and captured 70 others. But this massacre took place far outside the hills, in Nebraska, and there’s no evidence Harney himself ever “climbed the rugged peak.”

Another view from the rugged peak.

Perhaps Tallent was conflating the exploits of Harney with another U.S. military officer whose name still haunts the hills: George Armstrong Custer. In the summer of 1874, Custer led the first major expedition into the heart of Paha Sapa to investigate widespread rumors of gold. Custer’s party was taken by the beauty of the country, and his cavalrymen decorated their horses’ bridles with wildflowers. They also found gold.

At one point, Custer and a few others climbed Harney Peak. Historian Jeffrey Ostler gives this account:

Atop the peak, Custer and his party drank to Harney's health and then bestowed new names on two prominent peaks to the northwest. One, Terry Peak, honored Custer's commander, Brigadier General Alfred Terry, leaving the other (three hundred feet lower in elevation) for Custer himself.

Thus began the Black Hills Gold Rush, precipitating a string of historic tragedies: wild encroachment and gold mining on Lakota lands, Custer’s demise at the Battle of Little Bighorn, and, ultimately, the confiscation of the Black Hills by the U.S. government in violation of its 1868 treaty. This final move was also a violation of the Fifth Amendment, according to a 1980 ruling by the Supreme Court, which said concerning the matter: “a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.”

Today, the U.S. owes the Sioux Nation $2 billion for illegally seizing the Black Hills. But the tribes continue to refuse the settlement.

The land was never for sale, they say.

Spearfish Canyon in the Northern Hills. We watched little brown trout dart around this pool for ten minutes.

The Whole Hoop of the World

Of course, the Lakotas were never fond of their sacred landmarks wearing the names of men like Custer and Harney. So, celebrations erupted when, in 2016, Harney Peak was renamed to Black Elk Peak.¹ Nicholas Black Elk was a noted holy man of the Oglala Lakota people. At the age of 9, he received a mystical vision about the future of the Black Hills and the Lakota people, recounted in the words of John G. Neihardt in his classic Black Elk Speaks:

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

Black Elk told Neihardt the “highest mountain of them all” was Harney Peak. This vision of total unity would both disturb and guide him throughout his life, which saw such calamitous events as the Battle of Little Bighorn—where he fought alongside Crazy Horse, his cousin—and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Black Elk was an old man when he finally, physically, ascended the mountain that would bear his name. He’d also been baptized into the Catholic Church by this time, yet he remained faithful to his boyhood vision.

Black Elk prayed to the Great Spirit for his people, weary but hopeful that “some little root of the sacred tree still lives.”

Black Elk on the mountain of his vision, 1931.

After our climb, Zach and I ate lunch atop Black Elk. The noon air was clean and bright. Dozens of strangers sprawled about the rocks, resting and feeding the wild and wildly curious chipmunks who occupy the peak. A train whistle cried somewhere very far below.

The champagne bottles are gone, but I thought of Custer and his men, claiming the surrounding peaks of their newfound El Dorado. I pictured Harney raising a toast to his flag. Conquerors, all.

What would you have done?

Then I remembered Black Elk and the flowering tree and the whole hoop of the world. I watched the green hills blur blue into the blue sky. I tossed my apple core to a chipmunk.

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Whatever Black Elk’s vision meant, it was not some cheap universalism, not for him, anyway. The Lakota holy man gave his life for the health of his people and his land. As a Catholic catechist, he taught others the faith of one Lord, one baptism, one God and Father of all.² Black Elk perceived that all people live and move and have their being in the same God and from the same Earth, and that this net of relations is sacred.

The gold miner, by contrast, runs roughshod over notions of sanctity in his quest for material wealth. He views the Earth as little more than the sum of its scarce resources—less a mother than a mule.

“The Earth itself is better than gold because it produceth fruits and flowers,” wrote Thomas Traherne. I suspect Black Elk would agree.

The repercussions of the Black Hills Gold Rush are still apparent across the region, now overwhelmed by tourism, that awkward engine of commercialism. You can purchase Black Hills gold at roadside shops, hit up slot machines in Deadwood, or witness a fireworks display over the granite faces of four American presidents carved into a mountainside. But over Rushmore looms a still-higher mountain, now named after a man who once said “the Holy Land is everywhere.”

Driving by Rapid City on our way home, Zach and I passed a billboard that read: RETURN THE LAND, HEAL THE PEOPLE. What would this mean for South Dakota, for the nation? I don’t know. But I’m beginning to wonder.

1. Gov. Dennis Daugaard initially resisted the change: “I suspect very few people know the history of either Harney or Black Elk.” This strikes me as an argument for naming my next child Lamech.

2. Some readers will be interested to hear that Black Elk is actively being considered for sainthood, which would make him the first male Native American saint of the Catholic Church: https://www.rapidcitydiocese.org/black-elk-cause/