On the first Saturday of September, the cottonwood groves along Pryor Creek fill with the sound of drums, the smell of frybread, and the colors of flags carried in procession. It is the Day of Honor, and for the thirty-first year the people of the Crow Nation and their guests have gathered at Chief Plenty Coups State Park to remember the man who led his people across the great divide between two worlds.
This year's celebration, set for Saturday, September 5, carries the theme "Land, Leadership and Legacy," a fitting summary of the life it honors. The event is free and open to the public, and it unfolds over the course of a long day in the lower area of the park, forty minutes south of Billings in the small community of Pryor. The morning begins early, with a fun run through the park sponsored by Aluutaalaahu Many Arrows Community Development Corporation, the Friends of Chief Plenty Coups State Park, and Apsaalooke Nation Housing; registration opens at 7 a.m. By one o'clock, a free barbecue lunch is served — brisket, corn, beans, and frybread — and after the meal the festivities deepen: the Chief Plenty Coups Honor Guard presents the flags, and a rotating cast of artists, drummers, dancers, and speakers carries the afternoon. Vendors and local artists set up tables of their work, and visitors are encouraged to bring camp chairs and picnic blankets, for seating is limited. The day is meant to be spent on the ground, close to the place where the chief himself once stood.
The setting is no ordinary park. Chief Plenty Coups State Park preserves the log home, the sacred spring, and the farmstead of the man considered the last traditional chief of the Apsáalooke, or Crow, tribe. It is a National Historic Landmark, and its quiet acres hold the story of a remarkable life. Plenty Coups was born around 1848, in the era when the Crow still followed the buffalo across the northern plains. His Crow name, Alaxchíia Ahú, means "many achievements," and he earned it. As a young warrior he counted coups — acts of bravery against enemies — until his coup stick carried many eagle feathers, each one a deed of valor. He became a chief before he turned thirty, the last Crow chief ever chosen by the other chiefs.
But Plenty Coups was also a man of vision in the most literal sense. As a boy, fasting in the Crazy Mountains, he dreamed of a great forest in which a violent wind toppled every tree but one — and in that last standing tree lived a chickadee. The elders read the dream as prophecy: the white man's coming would sweep away the old world like a storm, but the Crow people, like the chickadee, would survive if they learned to adapt. Plenty Coups took the chickadee as his spirit guide and carried its legs in a medicine bag for the rest of his life. The vision shaped his choices. Where other tribes chose war, he chose cooperation, believing it the only path that would let his people endure.
He built a log house and lived there until his death in 1932 at the age of eighty-four. He also became a diplomat, traveling to Washington, D.C., again and again over a decade to argue against plans to abolish the Crow Nation and strip away its lands. His counsel to his people was blunt and enduring: "Education is your greatest weapon. With education you are the white man's equal, without education you are his victim and so shall remain all of your lives."
The Day of Honor itself has grown into a tradition that now spans three decades. The event has always been a collaboration — between the state park, the Crow Tribe, and the community of Pryor — and its roots run deep in the park's own history. The log home he built in fulfillment of his boyhood vision still stands in its grove of cottonwoods, beside the sacred spring where he saw himself as an old man in his dream.
For the people who gather there each September, the Day of Honor is more than a commemoration. It is a living continuation of the chief's own vision of education and cooperation between Indian and non-Indian peoples — a day when the drummers and dancers, the veterans and the vendors, the elders and the children all come together on the ground where Plenty Coups chose to build his house and his future. The theme of this year's gathering, "Land, Leadership and Legacy," names the three things he left behind: the land that became this park, the leadership that carried his people into a new century, and the legacy that still draws a crowd to Pryor Creek every late summer. As the flags go up and the frybread comes off the fire, the chickadee's people are still standing.