Blackbird Hill

About this property

Blackbird Hill, about three miles south of Macy, Nebraska, also known as Big Elk Hill, is a historic site which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. It was a traditional burial site of Omaha chiefs, including Blackbird The site was visited by Lewis and Clark in 1804. It includes petroglyphs. It is on private land and is not open to the public. It was painted by George Catlin and by Karl Bodmer. Blackbird Hill, particularly in Nebraska, may be associated with lost love due to it being the setting of a folktale which was popular in the early twentieth century. One account of the story was recorded in Nebraska Folklore, a pamphlet printed in 1939 as part of the Work Projects Administration's Nebraska Writers' Project. According to the 1939 story, on a fall day in the mid-eighteenth century, members of the Omaha tribe happened upon a white man wandering their territory who was "raving mad and nearly starved." The Omaha took the man to their medicine man, who nursed the man back to health. After regaining his strength and sanity, the man decided to return to his home in the eastern United States, but first told his benefactors the story of how he had fallen into such despair. The man had been shipwrecked for five years while returning from a business venture abroad. The girl whom he had planned to marry eventually lost hope that he would ever return and instead married the man's childhood friend. When the man returned home and learned of this, he set out to find his sweetheart, whom he assumed had moved west with her new husband to California in search of gold. When he could not find her in California, he began his journey home, heartbroken. On his return voyage, he sailed down the Missouri River and one evening landed at the foot of Blackbird Hill, where he saw a trail which he followed up the hill to a cabin. He knocked on the door and, to his surprise, his sweetheart answered. The two declared their love for each other and the woman promised to leave with him the next day. The woman's husband returned shortly after and she told him she planned to leave him. The husband begged the woman to stay, but she would not. Mad with rage, the husband took his hunting knife from his pack and killed his wife, nearly decapitating her with the knife. Then the husband, upon realizing what he had done, gathered up his wife in his arms and carried her to a cliff on the hill. The husband flung both himself and his wife's body down the cliff into the waters of the Missouri. The man from the east had been nearby but could not stop the tragedy and instead was struck with shock upon witnessing the horrors and could not tell the Omaha anything that had happened between that night and the day he was rescued. The man returned home, but never forgot about the horrors he had seen on Blackbird Hill. The Omahas never forgot the story either, and it is said that in October, when the moon is full, one can still hear the screams of the woman on Blackbird Hill and that no grass grows where her blood was shed.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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