Chief Redstone:

Keeper of the Wolf Point Country

A study of Hoonga Ea Sha (Redstone), his life, and his quiet imprint on Montana history

There are men whose names become the weather of a place: small, constant forces that shape what grows there and how people remember to gather. Chief Redstone—recorded in a few anglicized forms as Red Stone or Redstone, and whose Assiniboine name appears in twentieth-century tribal histories as Hoonga Ea Sha—is one such figure for northeastern Montana. Born roughly in the 1830s and passing in the 1890s, he was a leader of the Wadopana (Canoe Paddler) band of the Assiniboine whose life bridged the age of the free buffalo and the stern settlement of reservations. The story of Redstone is the story of a people negotiating survival and dignity in a century of cataclysmic change; it is also the story of place—Wolf Point, the Milk and Poplar rivers, and the land that would become Fort Peck Reservation, which he helped locate and defend.

Redstone’s arc is emblematic and discrete. He rose to prominence in the 1860s as the Wadopana chief at a time when Plains nations were coping with epidemic disease, intensified intertribal competition, and the inexorable advance of Euro-American commerce and railroads. Contemporary records and later tribal histories describe him as a pragmatic yet proud leader: one who in 1866 was named chief of his band and who that same decade was among signatories to agreements that attempted—however imperfectly—to limit the Northern Pacific Railroad’s intrusion into prime buffalo country. These accommodations were not mere capitulations; they were strategies intended to hold space for traditional life while protecting communities from the most immediate violences of dispossession.

If one reads the archival traces carefully, Redstone appears in two guises: as the elder who refused to be pushed from familiar river camps, and as the negotiator who accepted reservation life when violence and starvation left few real alternatives. By the mid-1870s and into the 1880s the buffalo herds—the sinews of Plains life—had collapsed under relentless hunting and environmental change. Redstone chose to establish his people at Wolf Point. That decision mattered in ways that would outlast him. Wolf Point became a locus of continuity for the Wadopana, later hosting institutions and rituals that kept Assiniboine culture alive even as colonial structures—agencies, boarding schools, allotment policies—sought to remake Indigenous lives. The name of the Indian Health Service clinic in Wolf Point, the Chief Redstone Clinic, is itself a modern echo of his residency and communal leadership there.

The treaty negotiations of 1886–87 (often cited as agreements that led to the formal establishment of Fort Peck boundaries in 1888) provide an essential lens on Redstone’s historical moment. These winter councils, mediated by U.S. Indian agents and Commissioners, were not simple transfers of power but fraught conversations about survival: about where families might plant, which hunting grounds might be reserved, and how new railroad rights-of-way would bisect ancestral ranges. Redstone’s signature as an Assiniboine chief on the documents that undergirded the Fort Peck Reservation marks him as a central actor in the legal choreography that created the modern reservation map. That map, however, should be read as a contested compromise, a fragile mutuality written in the language of federal policy, and always kept alive by the politics of local leaders like Redstone who could imagine both continuity and adaptation.

To narrate Redstone’s influence is also to describe the intimate geography he chose: the confluence of Wolf Creek and the Missouri River, the Poplar country, the Milk River bends. These were places for fishing in poor winters, for meeting other bands, and for keeping the social rhythms of the people intact. That Redstone selected Wolf Point as a home for the Wadopana—explicitly recorded in tribal history—was a geopolitical choice: building a claim to place in the face of expanding railroad investors and non-Indian homesteaders. In practical terms it anchored a band in lands that would become a focus of tribal politics and continuity, even while the U.S. government pushed allotments and boarding schools that would try to displace Indigenous authority.

Yet the story is not purely political. Memory and ceremonial life persisted. Oral historians and contemporary tribal educators (members of the Red Bottom and Canoe Paddler bands, among others) have recorded how Assiniboine elders preserved language, songs, and clan knowledge even amid the trauma of the reservation era. Scholars who have worked with Fort Peck communities emphasize that chiefs of Redstone’s generation carried obligations far beyond treaty councils; they were religious leaders, war captains, physicians of customary law and ceremony. In this sense, Redstone’s life cannot be fully recovered through treaty lists and agency reports alone. The living archive of the Fort Peck peoples—songs, names, burial places known only to families—remains the richest testimony to his significance.

Redstone also witnessed the long and bitter reorganization of Indigenous life under U.S. Indian policy: the allotment acts, the establishment of reservation agriculture, the boarding school regime. The years around the 1890s saw a more sedentary, surveilled tribal life imposed by agents who believed assimilation into farming and wage labor was inevitable. For leaders like Redstone this meant painstaking negotiation with officials who promised annuities and supplies in return for land cessions and surrendering traditional mobility. Tribal histories note how this generation bore disproportionate responsibility for protecting families from starvation while trying to salvage cultural practices. The result was a new form of resilience—one written into the institutions that would later carry Redstone’s name and legacy, from Wolf Point’s powwow life to the naming of clinics and community centers.

How do we judge the contributions of a man whose public acts were largely embodied in quiet decisions—where to camp, whether to sign, how to coax a people through famine? The best historians resist easy moralism. Redstone’s leadership, read in the ledger of local outcomes, cannot be reduced to either heroic resistance or pragmatic collaboration. Rather, his life dramatizes a moral geography: an attempt to protect people, kin, and place by remaking the terms of survival. This is the deep contribution he made to Montana history: he anchored a people in a place that would remain their home, and he negotiated a precarious path through which Assiniboine civic life could be transmitted to future generations.

In the lull between archives and memory there is also an ethics to naming. The Indian Health Service clinic in Wolf Point that bears Redstone’s name is a modern recognition, an institutional inscription that links a nineteenth-century leader to twentieth- and twenty-first-century community care. Tourism pages, local histories, and tribal websites all recall the presence and choices of Redstone with varying degrees of detail and tenderness. To read them together is to see how memory is layered: federal documents testify to treaty maneuvers; tribal narratives preserve lineage and place; municipal histories record civic acts; and the present landscape—clinics, powwow grounds, school curricula—keeps the name in circulation. Place remembers differently than paper.

Finally, the legacy of Chief Redstone invites historians to practice a certain humility. There will always be gaps—the exact place of his burial remains known only to his Assiniboine descendants, for example—yet gaps are themselves instructive. They remind us that not all knowledge was meant for public record and that some custodial acts (of burial, of song, of clan responsibility) constitute the core practices that sustained tribal life well after treaties were signed. For Montana history, then, Chief Redstone is not merely an entry in a treaty list or a name on a clinic door: he is a landmark in the human geography of Fort Peck—one whose decisions shaped the social map of northeastern Montana for generations.

Notes

See David Reed Miller, The History of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, 1800–2000 (Helena: Fort Peck Community College; Montana Historical Society Press, 2008), esp. the chapter on nineteenth-century chiefs and treaties. 

Fort Peck Tribes, “Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux Tribal History,” FortPeckTribes.org. 

“Agreement with the Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Blood, Gros Ventre, Piegan, and Sioux, 1886, 1887,” tribal treaties database, Oklahoma State University. treaties.okstate.edu

Indian Health Service, Fort Peck Service Unit, listing for Chief Redstone Clinic, IHS.gov. 

Montana Office of Public Instruction, “Fort Peck Reservation Timeline,” Montana tribal histories project. 

Wamakashka Doba Inazhi (Robert P. Four Star), “History of the Assiniboine People from the Oral Tradition,” Montana Professor (online feature), on the persistence of oral tradition at Fort Peck. mtprof.msun.edu

Selected Bibliography

Miller, David Reed. The History of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, 1800–2000. Helena: Fort Peck Community College; Montana Historical Society Press, 2008. (Full text available via Internet Archive.)

Fort Peck Tribes. “Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux Tribal History.” FortPeckTribes.org. Accessed [date of access].

“Agreement with the Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Blood, Gros Ventre, Piegan, and Sioux, 1886, 1887.” Tribal Treaties Database, Oklahoma State University. Accessed [date of access].

Indian Health Service. “Fort Peck Service Unit — Chief Redstone Clinic.” IHS.gov. Accessed [date of access].

Montana Office of Public Instruction. Fort Peck Reservation Timeline. Montana Tribal Histories — Educator Resource Guide (PDF). Accessed [date of access].

Wamakashka Doba Inazhi (Robert P. Four Star). “History of the Assiniboine People from the Oral Tradition.” Montana Professor (MSU Northern online feature). Accessed [date of access].

(Additional archival and local sources consulted include the Montana Memory Project photographic collections and assorted newspaper notices preserved in regional repositories.)