Valentine T. McGillicuddy was a frail young physician whose time at Detroit’s Wayne County Insane Asylum had left him with a developing dependence on alcohol and a need for a new direction. By his early twenties, he had abandoned medicine for mapmaking, taking up work as a topographical engineer. His assignments took him across the Great Lakes and into Chicago to survey the city after the great fire of 1871.

In 1872, he saw the Great Plains for the first time, joining the United States Northern Boundary Survey, a project that would occupy him through the summer of 1874. The survey team began at Fort Totten, near Devils Lake, North Dakota, and pushed westward across 860 miles of prairie and wilderness, moving from Lake of the Woods in northern Wisconsin to the Rocky Mountains near what is now Glacier National Park in Montana. In the autumn of 1872, McGillicuddy and his fellow surveyors received new orders that sent them back into the marshy country between Lake of the Woods and the Red River. The waterlogged ground that had stalled work earlier in the season would now be frozen solid, and the boundary line could finally be completed.

To survive the winter conditions, the men adopted Sioux-style moccasins, worn deliberately oversized. One expedition member described the layering process: first one or two pairs of wool socks, then slippers made from blanket material, then square pieces of blanket wrapped around each foot from heel to toe, and finally the large moccasins, which served less as footwear and more as a way to hold the wrapping together. After the field season closed, the team returned to Detroit. Between March and June 1874, McGillicuddy shifted from the outdoors to the drafting table, plotting observations and preparing maps while other personnel worked through their field data.

That summer he led one of the topographical parties back to North Dakota and westward again, setting survey lines that would eventually define the northern boundary of Montana. He later recalled the enormous buffalo herds that seemed to cover the plains as far as the eye could see. At his survey stations, spaced twenty miles apart, he and his men often had to halt their astronomical observations entirely because the ground shook from the thundering hooves of nearby herds, throwing their instruments out of alignment. That summer brought him into contact with Major Marcus Reno and the Lakota chief Sitting Bull.

Later in the fall, as the topographical parties descended the Missouri River, he met General George Armstrong Custer at Fort Abraham Lincoln. The route of the survey work ran from Devils Lake south to Fort Totten, then through Jamestown and west along the rail corridor toward Bismarck, then north to Minot, west across the Montana line to Havre, and finally south to Fort Benton. Once the 1874 work was finished, the survey groups proceeded downstream by boat. McGillicuddy went on to Washington, D.

C. , where he began drawing maps of the border region. The assignment did not last long. John Wesley Powell, who directed the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region for the Department of the Interior, called him back into the field.

McGillicuddy took the train west to Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, then traveled overland to Fort Laramie. There he joined Lieutenant Colonel Richard Irving Dodge of the 23rd Infantry and the scientific leaders of what became known as the Newton-Jenney Expedition: geologists Walter P. Jenney and Henry Newton of New York’s Columbia School of Mines, and astronomer Horace P. Tuttle of the Cambridge Observatory in Massachusetts.

The expedition spent the summer of 1875 exploring the Black Hills, a region that was then Lakota territory and officially closed to mineral exploitation. McGillicuddy conducted surveys and gathered the data that would become some of the earliest maps ever made of the area. He climbed Harney Peak and named numerous geographic features in the hills. The expedition’s central purpose was to determine the extent of the gold deposits believed to lie beneath the land, a question that carried serious consequences for the Lakota people who held the territory by treaty.

The route of McGillicuddy’s journey ran from Bismarck south to Pierre, South Dakota, then west to Rapid City and Deadwood, a settlement that sprang up shortly after the expedition ended despite the tribe’s rights to the land. From Deadwood, the party followed the Newton-Jenney path in reverse, heading south through Newcastle and Lusk, Wyoming, to Fort Laramie, and then continuing to Cheyenne, which served as both the territorial capital and a major terminus on the Union Pacific Railroad. After the 1875 expedition concluded, McGillicuddy returned to Washington to produce maps. In May 1876, he received another summons, this time because of his original training.

General George Crook, who had met McGillicuddy during the Black Hills expedition, was organizing a military campaign into the Powder River Basin and needed a physician. McGillicuddy traveled west by train to Cheyenne, where he encountered the showman William F. Cody and the gunfighter James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill. He continued by rail to Medicine Bow Station and then overland to Fort Fetterman, where he spent several weeks treating men wounded in Crook’s engagement at the Rosebud.

From there he moved into the field, joining Crook near Goose Creek, and remained with the general through the rest of the summer and fall as an assistant surgeon while the detachment moved east and then south into the Black Hills. He was present at the Battle of Slim Buttes and reached Camp Robinson in October. The campaigns took Crook’s column north toward the Yellowstone River, where McGillicuddy and the other physicians treated survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Then the force turned east, then south, heading back toward the Black Hills.

The route passed through Sheridan, Wyoming, and Hardin, Montana, near the site of the Little Bighorn fight, then east to Miles City and south toward Bowman, North Dakota. The troops who fought at Slim Buttes endured what became known by several names: the Horse Meat March, the Starvation March, or the Mud March. With supplies exhausted, the famished soldiers were forced to slaughter their horses and mules for food and to push on through waterlogged mud under continuous rainfall. McGillicuddy treated the wounded as the column struggled south through the Black Hills into Nebraska, reaching Fort Robinson near Crawford.

The nearby Red Cloud Agency served the Lakotas under the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. McGillicuddy had first seen Red Cloud Agency on October 9, 1875, during the Newton-Jenney Expedition, when the distribution of treaty annuities created intense activity. When he returned with Crook’s troops in the autumn of 1876, he was immediately assigned as assistant surgeon at Camp Robinson. He would spend the next two decades in the Black Hills region.

During the summer of 1877 he treated both soldiers and the Native Americans who had surrendered and were attached to the agency, including Crazy Horse’s wife, Black Shawl Woman, who was suffering from tuberculosis. He had developed a substantial acquaintance with the Oglala leader from the time of his surrender in May, and he attended Crazy Horse in the hours after the chief was stabbed on September 5, 1877, remaining with him until his death shortly before midnight. For two more years, McGillicuddy treated Native American and military patients alike, moving with them when closure of the Red Cloud Agency led to the opening of a temporary agency near the Missouri River in South Dakota. He also participated in military expeditions sent to apprehend the Northern Cheyenne under Dull Knife and Little Wolf after they fled the Darlington Agency in Indian Territory during the fall of 1878.

He remained at Camp Robinson until shortly before Dull Knife and his followers escaped from the barracks where they had been confined after their surrender. In January 1879, McGillicuddy was in Washington, D. C. , where he attracted the attention of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

He returned in March to the new agency being established for the Lakotas at Pine Ridge, this time as Indian agent. The next seven years proved the most turbulent of his life. He administered the agency with an inflexible hand and clashed repeatedly with Red Cloud, the respected elder leader of the tribe, who opposed every effort the agent made to compel tribal members to adopt white cultural practices. McGillicuddy later said he was the most scrutinized agent in the Indian service, though no charge ever brought against him was substantiated.

He was eventually removed from the position for political reasons, after refusing to replace his long-serving clerk with a political appointee. He and his wife Fanny, who had accompanied him since 1876, relocated to Rapid City, where he became the community’s first mayor and the first president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. During the unrest that preceded the Wounded Knee massacre in the winter of 1890–91, he served at the request of Governor A. C.

Mellette, treating both soldiers and Native Americans in the aftermath of the incident. After Fanny’s death, McGillicuddy left the Black Hills for California. He remarried in 1904, and his second wife Julia recorded his life story in a 1941 biography titled McGillicuddy, Agent. He died in 1939 at the age of ninety.

His cremated remains were placed in a crypt atop Harney Peak, the summit he had been the first white man to ascend in 1875.