Seeing Buluksée

Crow Elder Grant Bulltail always thought that buluksée, the water creature, was a mythical being. That was until he SAW one in 1986! Described here in vivid detail.

Grant Bulltail references two different water creatures that appear in Crow stories. Although they are sometimes confused in the storytelling, bimmuummaakoole (meaning “lives in the water.”) is a larger Loch Ness Monster-like being, while buluksée refers to another somewhat smaller water monster. Grant refers to the buluksée that he and his father – and others – saw near Pryor Creek in Montana, as a dinosaur. Grant did a sketch of the buluksée he saw which appears in the video below.

Wants to Die, also called Plain Bull, was another Crow who had an encounter with the water monster known as buluksée. Shot in the hip by a Cheyenne warrior in 1876, Plain Bull was crippled but by no means weak. When he was pulled into the water by this fearsome water beast, Plain Bull used his powerful buffalo energy to defeat it.  Dragging it onto dry land – all the way up a bank – he turned the buluksée on its back so that the beast was helpless.

This incident happened east of present-day Pryor, Montana – about a mile up Pryor Creek from Grant Bulltail’s own sighting of a buluksée in the 1980’s. After defeating him, Plain Bull let the monster go back into the river having been assured it would “not bother the people anymore.”

Grant explains that buluksée had often been sighted at Pryor Creek. Apparently, the creek provided an ideal habitat for this type of water monster. With steep banks on either side and dense brush at the bottom, no one goes there, and cattle have been known to disappear into its murky depths. The dense tangle of vegetation at the bottom of the steep sides provides a safe place for the beast. Grant suspected that buluksée laid its eggs on the land alongside the creek. In an unrecorded conversation Grant described how he had seen one of these beasts standing in the road next to the “dead water ” alongside the Creek with its back to him and the family members in his car. As he stopped the vehicle to watch, he reports that he saw about 10 or so little ones scurried across the road in front of his parked car.