Chieft Plenty Coups:

last of the great chiefs — a remembered road through wind and sage

He walks into memory like a figure lit from within, a silhouette carved by prairie light and weathered by more winters than the maps keep count of. Plenty Coups — Alaxchiiaahush, “Many Achievements” — was born about 1848 on the rim of what we now call the Bighorn country, a child of Crow hills and buffalo trails whose life would span the last great flush of the Plains and the slow, inexorable shape of a new world. His story is one of courage and prophecy, of hard-won peace, and of a tenderness for his people that was both stubborn and wily enough to keep the Crow alive when so many nations around them were broken. 

A boy of the cliffs, a dreamer by nature, Plenty Coups grew up in the old ways. He learned to hunt and to ride; he learned the language of coup-sticks and feathers, of counting coup and the quiet ranking of honor among warriors. As a child he journeyed on vision quests into the Crazy Mountains — ritual wanderings that were meant to open a corridor to the other world. There, in a dream that would shape his life, he witnessed a strange and terrible transformation: the buffalo sank into the earth and were replaced by spotted cattle; a vast forest fell beneath a great wind, leaving only one tree standing; and he foresaw himself, at last, an old man sitting under that lone tree. The vision’s message was blunt and final — the old order would pass, and the survival of his people would depend upon a kind of prudence and adaptation that many could not yet see. 

It might seem an odd thing to say — that a warrior became the tribe’s greatest strategist by dreaming — but on the Plains, dreams were not idle dreams. They were treaties with the future. Plenty Coups used his visions like a scout uses a ridge: to gain perspective. He proved himself in battle, gathering coups and feathers until his name, the English rendering of his Crow title, came to speak of both deed and destiny. Yet as the 1870s unrolled into conflict and treaty, he recognized the horizon the visions had shown him. When the Lakota and Cheyenne rose against white encroachment, the Crow often stood apart or allied with the United States — a hard, pragmatic choice born of old enmities (notably with the Sioux) and a new calculus about survival. Plenty Coups did not romanticize this decision; he understood it as stewardship. 

In 1876, at about twenty-eight years of age, Plenty Coups was named a chief — not because he sought power, but because he had earned the quiet authority that makes others follow. This was the year of Little Bighorn: the world was burning in sudden, bitter ways and allegiances mattered. The Crow’s cooperation with U.S. forces, and the Crow warriors who served as scouts, marked a painful but calculated choice. Plenty Coups’ counsel was plain: preserve the people, protect the land that remained, and survive to tell the tale. His prophetic vision had warned him of the coming wind; now, with a calm that can be mistaken for coldness by those who prefer drama, he turned toward diplomacy without surrendering dignity. 

There is a passage in the remembered conversations he shared with the writer Frank Bird Linderman where Plenty Coups explains, as if reciting a small poem, what his dream had meant: the forests were the native ways, the wind was the white man, and the lone tree — the Crow people — if they learned to bend without breaking, might yet survive. It is tempting to render this as the stoic acceptance of loss; but Plenty Coups’ acceptance was not defeat. It was a strategic perseverance. He used speeches in Washington, persistent negotiation, and the stubborn protection of Crow land to make the vision’s single tree a place where future Crow generations could take shade. 

He traveled to Washington D.C. and to other seats of power, not as supplicant, but as a representative whose bearing carried the weight of an entire nation behind it. Plenty Coups argued against policies that would have dissolved Crow lands and dispersed his people. He insisted, with that same unshowy authority, on the land that would become his final, generous act: in 1928, as his health waned, he willed his personal property — some two hundred acres — to be held for the future use of the Crow people. The land that had seen his boyhood vision became, in his mind, a practical covenant between past and future. 

Perhaps the sweetest contradiction of Plenty Coups’ life is that the last of the “great chiefs,” as many called him, was neither a relic nor a mimic. He refused to let ceremony become mere museum piece. He bent to the necessities of a changing world, sure; but he also preserved the stories, the songs, and the laws that made Crow identity a living thing. When he died on May 3, 1932, the Crow council — so reverent of his guidance — refused to pick another principal chief in his place. They felt, in some way, that the old order had changed too irrevocably for another to claim the same mantle. His passing was less an end than a turning of the page that his own visions had always promised: the end of the chase across the open prairie and the beginning of a new work of tending. 

Museums and memorials now try to hold his life in frames: photographs taken at midlife where the lines on his face read like a topography of decisions; the house he lived in on the Crow Reservation, preserved as Chief Plenty Coups State Park; the artifacts cataloged in the Smithsonian and scattered archives; a plaque in places like Arlington that remember a man who carried his people forward rather than backward into grief. These are tidy things, and they matter — they matter because memory needs shape. But no image quite catches the private tenderness of the man who once, near the end of his days, gently told the story of an eagle feather and a child. He spoke of teaching not just with the swift authority of a chief who had counted coup, but with the slow patience of one who had learned what it means to keep a people whole. 

For many who come to the Crow lands now — schoolchildren on a field trip, a traveler pausing at the state park, a family bringing their elders to sit in the shade — Plenty Coups exists both as a historical figure and as a presence. He is the man who foresaw cattle replacing buffalo, who took the white man’s arrival as a storm to be sheltered against, rather than an enemy to be undone. He walked willingly into the hard work of diplomacy, using his prestige and charisma to bargain for space and for continuity. When the prairie was being fenced in and the long migrations were halted, he preserved what could be preserved: community, law, and the language of the Crow people. 

If his life has the shape of a poem, it is a poem of balancing: between war and peace, between the past and the future, between pride and persistence. The feathered war-bonnet in his photographs tells one story; the land he devoted to his people, and the diplomacy he practiced, tell another. He lived as if he kept two tongues in his mouth — one for the old songs, and one for the new treaties — and spoke both with equal fluency. That fluency is a kind of love-letter to survival, a practical tenderness that was at once stoic and subversive. The crow that survives, he seemed to say, must be clever, adaptable, and unashamed of its cunning. 

Today, as we walk across the same grass and look up at the same bright, enormous sky, Plenty Coups’ vision reads to us as a parable and as a roadmap. His life asks an old, gentle question: when the wind comes, what will you do? Will you brace and break, or will you bend and root? The last great chief bent without bowing; he negotiated without selling his soul. And in doing so he left a legacy that is quietly heroic: a people still here, their songs still sung, their stories still told around fires lit in the particular way of the Crow. 

If there is any romanticism in remembering him, it should be this — not a glossing over of sorrow or loss, but a deep gratitude for the steady intelligence that chose survival without capitulation. Plenty Coups is the sort of leader whose measure is not headlines or monuments alone, but the resilience of children who can still speak their language under the shadow of that lone tree. In the hush that follows the long prairie wind, one can imagine him, older and quieter, smiling as he watches his people take root. 

Sources & further reading:

Wikipedia — Plenty Coups. 

National Park Service — Chief Plenty Coups (Bighorn Canyon NRA). 

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks — Chief Plenty Coups State Park. 

Historic Montana / Chief Plenty Coups Home (National Historic Landmark). historicmt.org

National Museum of the American Indian / Smithsonian collections (photographs and artifacts).

Arlington National Cemetery blog — Chief Plenty Coups and the American Indian Tribute to the Unknown.