A group of students and adults hiked up a steep rocky hill on a warm fall day, huffing and puffing as they climbed. They were on a day-long field trip focused on hydrology and acknowledging Indigenous connection to the land.
Folks in the group were from Wyoming Indian High School, St. Stephens Indian School, the University of Wyoming College of Law and nearby ranches.
At the top of the bluff, they look down at Horse Creek, which meanders through Cattail Ranch northeast of Cheyenne. Beyond the valley, yellow prairie grass waved in the wind as far as the eye can see.
Sandra Iron Cloud is Northern Arapaho and teaches at Wyoming Indian High School.
“We grew up knowing that this was part of our traditional homeland from oral traditions from our grandparents and our parents…unfortunately not one treaty has been kept with our people, but we're still here,” she said.
University of Wyoming College of Law adjunct professor Jason Robison explained that one of those treaties is tied to where the group is standing.
“The 1851 treaty, named after that creek right there. Horse Creek Treaty,” he said.
The treaty involved the U.S. government and a big group of Plains tribes, including the Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux Nations. It defined their territories and was negotiated as settlers moved west in the 19th century.
“The original place where they were supposed to negotiate the deal was Fort Laramie, near the confluence of the North Platte and the Laramie River,” said Robison.
According to the professor, more than ten thousand people, mostly tribal members, showed up and there wasn’t enough room at the fort.
“So what'd they do? They moved it 30 miles downstream along Horse Creek,” he said.
The treaty was ultimately signed at the confluence of Horse Creek and the North Platte River, right over the border in what is now Nebraska.
“The tribal territory that it carved up as a shared territory for the Cheyenne and Arapaho is what we're standing on right now,” said Robison.
That territory was drastically reduced by another treaty about twenty years later, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The Northern Arapaho Tribe never received their own land and ended up on the Wind River Reservation with the Eastern Shoshone Tribe.
Sandra Iron Cloud said those treaty failures are still very alive for her.
“My history, my life is based upon the sacrifices our people made, which was giving up this land to be put on the reservations,” she said.
She’s with the Wyoming Indian High School Traditional Club and has been teaching since 1985.
“To be able to come back here and to connect my students, to be able to come connect, to walk where our ancestors were, it means a lot,” she said.
Iron Cloud and her students, as well as students from St. Stephens and the University of Wyoming College of Law, were invited to the area by rancher and water attorney Reba Epler.
The goal was to acknowledge Indigenous connection to the land, which included traditional singing and drumming near the creek from Iron Cloud and the Little Sun Drum Group. The other goal was to highlight the importance of groundwater management.
On top of the hill, Epler pointed to the creekbed in the valley below.
“When you look this way, you can see there's a ton of trees, and there's a ton of cattails, and there's a ton of willows,” said Epler.
A fence cuts the valley in half, separating a lush riparian zone from a not-so-lush part of Horse Creek, owned by another rancher.
“When you look over this way, there is none. And that is because of the management of the land,” she said.
According to Epler, the difference lies in whether or not cattle graze there in the summer. She commended Cattail Ranch owner Barb Crowl for choosing an alternative grazing schedule and protecting the vegetation along the creek.
“It is so important to make the land cooler, slow the water down, and cool the water off. It's one of our only real defenses against climate change,” said Epler.
Epler’s been working with a group of ranchers to protect the area from a neighbor’s groundwater extraction proposal and increase the health of the local creeks and streams.
“I don't want to harsh on this rancher because everybody can change, but the water is so much hotter there, there's nothing to keep it cool. It's evaporating like crazy,” she said.
The students spent time exploring Horse Creek in the afternoon, splashing in the water and tossing cattails at each other. Later, they hopped in a school bus and a long caravan of cars drove down dirt roads to Lodgepole Creek, just outside of the small town of Hillsdale.
Reba Epler’s dad Casey grew up in the area and now owns eighty acres on Lodgepole Creek with his wife Bonnie.
“The creek used to be extremely different because there was water all the time,” said Casey.
The water in Lodgepole Creek isn’t completely dried up, but it’s nothing like the lush green part of Horse Creek. Casey said the industrialization of agriculture brought big changes to the area.
“A combination of drought, excessive groundwater pumping, housing development west of us led to this,” he said.
Casey said he rarely grazes cattle at this spot because of an agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help protect a species called the Colorado butterfly plant.
“When we made the agreement with them, there were only seven plants on this 2,900 acres of creek. We reached an all time high of 279, I think, at the last count,” he said.
After the discussion, Sandra Iron Cloud’s granddaughter Jaci said there’s a lot to be worried about when it comes to water.
“Water pollution, drought, all that kind of stuff. And like they said, water pumping and oil pipelines also,” she said.
She’s Northern Arapaho and Oglala Lakota, and her parents went to the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016.
“It was a really big thing and it still is a big thing too. And it should be kept as a big thing because that should be our main worry right now – keeping our water clean and healthy for our future,” she said.
And that’s what brings this group of people together – a passion for keeping water in the west flowing.
