White Buffalo Woman spoke to the women of the tribe, telling them it was the work of their hands and the fruit of their bodies that kept the people alive. "You are from mother earth, and what you are doing is as great as what the warriors do. "She opened her sacred bag and gave the women corn, pemmican, and wild turnip, and she taught them how to make a hearth fire to cook the food. White Buffalo Woman spoke to the children as well, and she told them they were the future, and that they would pray with the sacred pipe one day.
Then she spoke once more to all of the people. She told the Lakota that they were the purest among the tribes, and for that reason the holy pipe had been bestowed upon them. They had been chosen to take care of it for all Indian peoples.
The White Buffalo Woman then took leave, saying, "I shall see you again, " and promising to return in times of need. She walked in the direction of the setting sun, and then she stopped and rolled over four times. The first time, she became a black buffalo, the second time a brown buffalo, the third time a red one, and the fourth time she rolled over, she turned into a white female buffalo calf.
Then the White Buffalo Woman disappeared over the horizon. After she was gone, great herds of buffalo appeared to give their own lives so that the people might survive. From that day on, the buffalo furnished their human relations with everything they needed, and the white buffalo became the most sacred living thing that a person could ever encounter.
This story is considered the most important of the many myths and legends handed down through generations of storytelling. Oral traditions were vital to Indian tribes. This was how they passed on their history to successive generations, how they instructed their young in the ways of the spirit, and how they paid homage to the sacred beings that inhabited their stories and myths.
The myth of the beautiful maiden who appears first in human form and then changes into a white buffalo calf was the reason why the Plains Indians so revered the white buffalo. Retelling the story strengthened and reaffirmed the power of the white buffalo. The power of the story still exists today.
Thundering across the Great Plains in great clouds of dust, vast herds of buffalo roamed the rich prairie lands that once stretched from Mexico to British Columbia, and from the foothills of the Rockies to the woodlands of the Midwest. Within such huge herds, estimated to be between 40 and 70 million animals, the number that were white is impossible to know. It can only be assumed that they were rare animals.
Whenever Indians saw a white buffalo, they killed it for sacrifice. The kill was usually taken back to camp for ceremony and ritual. Ethnographer George Dorsey studied the cults and societies of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians in the late 1800s. Their rites included skinning the entire animal and tanning the hide with horns, nose, hooves, and tail intact. After hide with horns, nose, hooves, and tail intact. After removing the skin from the carcass, the hide was dried by the wind.
Among the Teton Sioux, the skinning knife and the arrow used to kill the buffalo were purified by smoking them over sweet grass. After the hide was tanned, it would be purified as well by medicine men. Only men of the tribe who had dreamed about or had had a vision of the white buffalo could eat the meat.
In 1882, anthropologist Alice Fletcher was allowed to view the White Buffalo Festival of the Hunkpapa, a division of the Teton Sioux. This highly important ceremony lasted several days and was held in great secrecy, with guards stationed outside of the medicine tipi. A virgin maiden, selected by the hunter who had killed the buffalo, was the only person allowed to touch the skin in the course of tanning it. After that, the hide could only be handled with sticks.
Because such strong power was associated with the white hides, Cheyenne women made captives tan them. Power could be dangerous as well as holy, and if for some reason the spirits became angry over the killing of the white buffalo, their fierceness would be directed toward the slaves, not toward the Cheyenne clans women. It was reported that the Mandans also used captives if possible.
The Blackfeet believed that the white buffalo belonged to the sun god and hung the white robe on a pole near the medicine man's tipi as an offering. Other tribes were also known to hang the white buffalo robe high on a pole, and it was common for the robe to stay there until it decomposed naturally in the wind and the weather.
For many tribes the white robe would become part of a sacred medicine bundle. A medicine bundle could be owned individually, or it might belong to a clan or to the whole tribe. It might contain animal skins, feathers, pigment, sweet grass, or sacred stones, depending on the vision of the person who had put the bundle together. With the proper ritual and reverence of those involved, the medicine bundle would be used to call upon supernatural powers to aid the Indians in war, during a hunt, in sickness, or at other times when magic was needed. In 1925, ethnographer Truman Michelson recorded an interview with a Fox war chief who claimed that, from one robe, five medicine bundles were made. The robe itself became part of the major bundle, and each hoof became part of four minor medicine bundles.
In another account, Michelson reported that the Fox honored the buffalo by performing the white buffalo dance. As recorded by ethnographers and anthropologists who studied Indian ways, the white buffalo was revered in many different Indian cultures. The Fox, for example, were not a Plains tribe; they lived farther east, at the edge of eastern woodlands near the Great Lakes. The Pueblo Indians of the desert Southwest also performed a buffalo dance. The buffalo was revered wherever its influence was felt.
There is documentation of at least one Cheyenne chief who wore a white robe into battle as protection from harm. The Mandans stored the white robe in its own rawhide case, taking it out only on special occasions, at which time the owner would be allowed to wear it. A painting by Swiss artist Karl Bodmer shows the women of the Mandans' White Buffalo Society (Color Plate 1), with one of the women wearing a full white robe and the others wearing headdresses of white hide. Bodmer, who traveled for two years with Alexander Phillip Maximilian, the prince of a small Prussian state, during his explorations of the West in the 1830s, produced about four hundred paintings of American Indians, depicting in detail their everyday and ceremonial lives.
The Mandans lived in permanent villages of earth lodges along the upper Missouri River, where they planted crops and hunted and traded for buffalo. Situated along the major water route to the West, they had extensive contact with whites, and their lives were well recorded in writings and artwork. Bodmer's painting shows the most honored elder women in the tribe dancing by the light of torches. As members of the White Buffalo Society, the women were responsible for holding ceremonies to attract bison each winter.
The legend of this particular ceremony begins with a man fasting during the coldest nights of winter. Each night he heard voices, and each night the voices came closer. On the fourth night, the voices were close enough that the man could hear what they were saying: "Put a child with them." Later, a man came by carrying two children, and he told the Mandan to return to the village and prepare a feast. He did what he was directed to do, and shortly thereafter a group of strange women entered the village. They performed a special dance, ate the feast foods, and left. These were buffalo women and the two children were buffalo children. Both of the children tried to escape but only one succeeded; the remaining one was raised as a Mandan.
The Mandans believed that when the women of the White Buffalo Society danced with the buffalo child in their midst, the buffalo would return to see the child. If the proper ritual and procession were followed faithfully, the ceremony would bring blizzards, driving the buffalo into the wooded river valleys where hunters could easily kill them. In this way, the Mandans never lacked for buffalo throughout the long, cold winters.