Dress said to originate from Battle of Little Bighorn

Empire State College Professor Clifford Eaglefeathers with a portrait of Susan Ironteeth, the woman he believes made a dress from cavalry uniforms after the Battle of Little Bighorn. (Stephen Williams/gazette reporter)

In the 140 years since the Battle of the Little Bighorn, few people have known about the dress a Cheyenne woman is believed to have made from the uniforms of dead soldiers.

But it is getting new prominence now, thanks in part to the efforts of an adjunct professor at Empire State College.

Cliff Eaglefeathers recalls being drawn to the unusual dress when he first saw it on display at a Washington state Indian history museum.

He first saw it 1989 in Spokane, before he knew the story behind it.

Eaglefeathers, a full-blood Northern Cheyenne, looked at the cavalry-blue dress and later circled back to it — and this time saw the caption identifying it as having been made by Cheyenne women from the uniforms of U.S. Seventh Cavalry soldiers who died with Gen. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

“I said to myself, this cannot be,” Eaglefeathers recalled thinking.

Twenty-seven years later, the dress is being loaned to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana for the summer, as the National Park Service marks the 140th anniversary of the most famous battle of the Indian Wars.

It is also the key artifact in an online course Eaglefeathers and two other professors are teaching this spring at Empire State College, which is based in Saratoga Springs.

The dress will be formally transferred as part of ceremonies on June 25 marking the anniversary of the Lakota and Cheyenne victory at Little Bighorn.

Custer and 262 of his troops died on June 25-26, 1876, having taken on several thousand Lakota and Cheyenne. It marked one of the last stands for the Plains Indians, as well as one of the Indians’ few victories.

The first museum closed sometime after Eaglefeathers first saw the dress, and it passed, along with 38,000 other artifacts, to the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane, where it languished.

“I kept calling,” Eaglefeathers said on Tuesday. “There was an Indian woman who worked there, and they referred me to her, and she kept saying she didn’t know what I was talking about.”

Eventually, he reached a woman at the Northwest Museum who had worked at the earlier museum, and knew about the dress.

Cheyenne perspective

Eaglefeathers, who lives in Delaware County and is an adjunct faculty member, is one of the teachers of the course, “Living History: Little Bighorn from a Cheyenne Perspective,” which has focused on the dress.

The course looks at the battle from the Cheyenne perspective, said Menoukah Case, an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies.

Making the dress from soldiers’ uniforms may be tied to Cheyenne oral histories in which Custer is said to have used women, children and elders as human shields, and sometimes mutilated women, Case said.

“Can bringing this dress home relieve the trauma in some way, or will it in some ways stir it up?” Case asked.

From the Cheyenne perspective, “It’s kind of a living piece of Cheyenne history as opposed to an artifact,” said Rhianna Rogers, an assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies who is the third teacher of the course.

Eaglefeathers, 68, said he grew up on a reservation near the battlefield knowing little of the battle. “When I was younger, we were not allowed to go to the battlefield,” he said. “When we drove by, my grandmother would say not to look at it.”

Seven Cheyenne warriors died at the Little Bighorn, though Eaglefeathers said it’s likely more died later of wounds.

After he first saw the dress while attending an Indian education conference in Spokane, Eaglefeathers said he went back to Montana and spoke to tribal elders. “Two women said they had heard about it, but never seen the dress,” he said.

But he wasn’t surprised so few people knew. “My people, at that time, they said there would be a 100-year silence about the battle,” he said. “Maybe among themselves they would talk, but not outside.”

Eaglefeathers believes the dress was made by a Cheyenne woman named Susan Ironteeth, who arrived at the Little Bighorn two or three days after the battle. Her life was “very tragic,” he said, as she saw her husband killed in another battle with the U.S. Calvary in 1878, and her children killed when Cheyenne, now surrendered and forced to relocate, tried to break out of captivity at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in 1879. Eaglefeathers’ great-great grandparents were also killed in that breakout.

There is no proof Ironteeth made the dress, and there is some dispute over whether it might have been made later than the battle era.

The June 25 ceremony at which the dress will be formally loaned to the National Park Service will be attended by Eaglefeathers, and — assuming technology cooperates — video-cast to the students.

“We’re not so much teaching as opening our hearts and minds to what may happen when the dress gets there,” Case said.

The monument, in Crow Agency, Montana, includes memorials to the Seventh Cavalry, the Indians who died and a national cemetery containing graves of those who fought in many of the nation’s wars.

Reach Gazette reporter Stephen Williams at 395-3086, [email protected] or @gazettesteve on Twitter.