Chief Joseph, ( Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt ) Nez Perce (Nimiputimt) Profile

The man who became a national celebrity with the name "Chief Joseph" was born in the Wallowa Valley in what is now northeastern Oregon in 1840. He was given the name Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, or Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain, but was widely known as Joseph, or Joseph the Younger, because his father had taken the Christian name Joseph when he was baptized at the Lapwai mission by Henry Spalding in 1838.

Joseph the Elder was one of the first Nez Perc converts to Christianity and an active supporter of the tribe's longstanding peace with whites. In 1855 he even helped Washington's territorial governor set up a Nez Perc reservation that stretched from Oregon into Idaho. But in 1863, following a gold rush into Nez Perc territory, the federal government took back almost six million acres of this land, restricting the Nez Perc to a reservation in Idaho that was only one tenth its prior size. Feeling himself betrayed, Joseph the Elder denounced the United States, destroyed his American flag and his Bible, and refused to move his band from the Wallowa Valley or sign the treaty that would make the new reservation boundaries official. When his father died in 1871, Joseph was elected to succeed him. He inherited not only a name but a situation made increasingly volatile as white settlers continued to arrive in the Wallowa Valley. Joseph staunchly resisted all efforts to force his band onto the small Idaho reservation, and in 1873 a federal order to remove white settlers and let his people remain in the Wallowa Valley made it appear that he might be successful. But the federal government soon reversed itself, and in 1877 General Oliver Otis Howard threatened a cavalry attack to force Joseph's band and other hold-outs onto the reservation. Believing military resistance futile, Joseph reluctantly led his people toward Idaho.

Unfortunately, they never got there. About twenty young Nez Perc warriors, enraged at the loss of their homeland, staged a raid on nearby settlements and killed several whites. Immediately, the army began to pursue Joseph's band and the others who had not moved onto the reservation. Although he had opposed war, Joseph cast his lot with the war leaders.

What followed was one of the most brilliant military retreats in American history. Even the unsympathetic General William Tecumseh Sherman could not help but be impressed with the 1,400 mile march, stating that "the Indians throughout displayed a courage and skill that elicited universal praise... [they] fought with almost scientific skill, using advance and rear guards, skirmish lines, and field fortifications." In over three months, the band of about 700, fewer than 200 of whom were warriors, fought 2,000 U.S. soldiers and Indian auxiliaries in four major battles and numerous skirmishes.

By the time he formally surrendered on October 5, 1877, Joseph was widely referred to in the American press as "the Red Napoleon." It is unlikely, however, that he played as critical a role in the Nez Perc's military feat as his legend suggests. He was never considered a war chief by his people, and even within the Wallowa band, it was Joseph's younger brother, Olikut, who led the warriors, while Joseph was responsible for guarding the camp. It appears, in fact, that Joseph opposed the decision to flee into Montana and seek aid from the Crows and that other chiefs -- Looking Glass and some who had been killed before the surrender -- were the true strategists of the campaign. Nevertheless, Joseph's widely reprinted surrender speech has immortalized him as a military leader in American popular culture:

I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, "Yes" or "No." He who led the young men [Olikut] is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are -- perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. Joseph's fame did him little good. Although he had surrendered with the understanding that he would be allowed to return home, Joseph and his people were instead taken first to eastern Kansas and then to a reservation in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) where many of them died of epidemic diseases. Although he was allowed to visit Washington, D.C., in 1879 to plead his case to U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, it was not until 1885 that Joseph and the other refugees were returned to the Pacific Northwest. Even then, half, including Joseph, were taken to a non-Nez Perc reservation in northern Washington, separated from the rest of their people in Idaho and their homeland in the Wallowa Valley.

In his last years, Joseph spoke eloquently against the injustice of United States policy toward his people and held out the hope that America's promise of freedom and equality might one day be fulfilled for Native Americans as well. An indomitable voice of conscience for the West, he died in 1904, still in exile from his homeland, according to his doctor "of a broken heart."

Sitting Bull, Tatanka-Iyotanka Quotes

A Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man under whom the Lakota tribes united in their struggle for survival on the northern plains, Sitting Bull remained defiant toward American military power and contemptuous of American promises to the end.

Born around 1831 on the Grand River in present-day South Dakota, at a place the Lakota called "Many Caches" for the number of food storage pits they had dug there, Sitting Bull was given the name Tatanka-Iyotanka, which describes a buffalo bull sitting intractably on its haunches. It was a name he would live up to throughout his life.

As a young man, Sitting Bull became a leader of the Strong Heart warrior society and, later, a distinguished member of the Silent Eaters, a group concerned with tribal welfare. He first went to battle at age 14, in a raid on the Crow, and saw his first encounter with American soldiers in June 1863, when the army mounted a broad campaign in retaliation for the Santee Rebellion in Minnesota, in which Sitting Bull's people played no part. The next year Sitting Bull fought U.S. troops again, at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, and in 1865 he led a siege against the newly established Fort Rice in present-day North Dakota. Widely respected for his bravery and insight, he became head chief of the Lakota nation about 1868.

Sitting Bull's courage was legendary. Once, in 1872, during a battle with soldiers protecting railroad workers on the Yellowstone River, Sitting Bull led four other warriors out between the lines, sat calmly sharing a pipe with them as bullets buzzed around, carefully reamed the pipe out when they were finished, and then casually walked away.

The stage was set for war between Sitting Bull and the U.S. Army in 1874, when an expedition led by General George Armstrong Custer confirmed that gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, an area sacred to many tribes and placed off-limits to white settlement by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Despite this ban, prospectors began a rush to the Black Hills, provoking the Lakota to defend their land. When government efforts to purchase the Black Hills failed, the Fort Laramie Treaty was set aside and the commissioner of Indian Affairs decreed that all Lakota not settled on reservations by January 31, 1876, would be considered hostile. Sitting Bull and his people held their ground.

In March, as three columns of federal troops under General George Crook, General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon moved into the area, Sitting Bull summoned the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho to his camp on Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory. There he led them in the sun dance ritual, offering prayers to Wakan Tanka, their Great Spirit, and slashing his arms one hundred times as a sign of sacrifice. During this ceremony, Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw soldiers falling into the Lakota camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky.

Inspired by this vision, the Oglala Lakota war chief, Crazy Horse, set out for battle with a band of 500 warriors, and on June 17 he surprised Crook's troops and forced them to retreat at the Battle of the Rosebud. To celebrate this victory, the Lakota moved their camp to the valley of the Little Bighorn River, where they were joined by 3,000 more Indians who had left the reservations to follow Sitting Bull. Here they were attacked on June 25 by the Seventh Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer, whose badly outnumbered troops first rushed the encampment, as if in fulfillment of Sitting Bull's vision, and then made a stand on a nearby ridge, where they were destroyed.

Public outrage at this military catastrophe brought thousands more cavalrymen to the area, and over the next year they relentlessly pursued the Lakota, who had split up after the Custer fight, forcing chief after chief to surrender. But Sitting Bull remained defiant. In May 1877 he led his band across the border into Canada, beyond the reach of the U.S. Army, and when General Terry traveled north to offer him a pardon in exchange for settling on a reservation, Sitting Bull angrily sent him away.

In the fall of 1890, a Miniconjou Lakota named Kicking Bear came to Sitting Bull with news of the Ghost Dance, a ceremony that promised to rid the land of white people and restore the Indians' way of life. Lakota had already adopted the ceremony at the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations, and Indian agents there had already called for troops to bring the growing movement under control. At Standing Rock, the authorities feared that Sitting Bull, still revered as a spiritual leader, would join the Ghost Dancers as well, and they sent 43 Lakota policemen to bring him in. Before dawn on December 15, 1890, the policemen burst into Sitting Bull's cabin and dragged him outside, where his followers were gathering to protect him. In the gunfight that followed, one of the Lakota policemen put a bullet through Sitting Bull's head.

Sitting Bull was buried at Fort Yates in North Dakota, and in 1953 his remains were moved to Mobridge, South Dakota, where a granite shaft marks his grave. He was remembered among the Lakota not only as an inspirational leader and fearless warrior but as a loving father, a gifted singer, a man always affable and friendly toward others, whose deep religious faith gave him prophetic insight and lent special power to his prayers.

Chief Seattle, chief of the Suquamis Profile

Saeth'tl, probably born on Blake Island in Puget Sound, was the principal chief of the Duwamish, whose original homeland today comprises an industrial area immediately south of downtown Saettle. The city was named with an anglicized version of the chief's name. In 1833, he was described by William Fraser Tolmie, a Hudson Bay Company surgeon, as "a brawney Suquamish with a Roman countenance and black curley hair, the handsomest Indian I have ever seen." David Denny, one of Seattle's first white settlers, said that Seath'tl's voice could be heared a half-mile away when he spoke and that he cammanded his people by the force of his intellect.

Son of the Duwamish chief Schweabe, Seath'tl was about seven when George Vancouver sailed the H.M.S. Discovery into the Puget Sound and met briefly with the Duwamish and their allies, the Suquamish. Seath'tl later aided his father and other Duwamish in the construction of the Old Man House, a community longhouse one thousand feet long that housed 40 families. The Duwamish and the Suquamish formed an alliance that ringed central Puget Sound. Seath'tl took a wife, La-da-ila, and became chief of the Duwamish-Suquamish alliance at the age of 22. La-da-ila had died by 1833, when the Hudson's Bay Company established a trading post at Nisqually, in southern Puget Sound. In 1841, the first "Bostons," as the Duwamish called whites, sailed into central Puget Sound in Seath'tl's territory. Ten years later, the schooner Exact delivered the first settlers in what later became the city of Seattle.

From the beginning, Seath'tl resolved to cooperate with the settlers, but when they proposed naming their city after him, he protested that his spirit would be disturbed if his name was said after he died. The settlers retained the name away. Seath'tl had been a Catholic since the 1830s, when he was converted by missionaries. He adopted the biblical name Noah at his baptism and began regular morning and evening prayers among his people.

Seath'tl and his band moved westward across Puget Sound after signing the Treaty of Point Elliot with Washington territorial governor Isaac Stevens in 1854. As his people prepared to move, Seath'tl delivered a haunting farewell speech that has come to be recognized as on of history's great pieces of Native American oratory. The speech was given in Salish and translated by Dr. Henry Smith, who published it in 1887. Seath'tl's speech has been published several times after and sometimes embellished.

Environmental conservation was not a subject of general debate and controversy in the mid-nineteenth century as Euro-American settlers sped across the land mass of the United States. Yet from time to time, the records of the settlers contain warnings ny Native leaders whose peoples they were displaced describing how European-bred attitudes toward nature were ruining the land, air, and water. Perhaps the most famous warning of this type came in Chief Seath'tl's farewell speech.

"Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant-lined lakes and bays....Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimationof my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as they swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people.[Anderson]"

In the development of an environmental philosophy today, Chief Seath'tl's words are often cited as evidence that many Native Americans practiced a stewardship ethic toward the earth long before such attitudes became popular in non-Indian society. The debate ranges from acceptance of several versions of Seath'tl's speech to a belief that the original translator, Smith, as well as many people who followed him, put the ecological concepts into the chief's mouth.

Regardless of the exact wording of Seath'tl's speech, it did contain environmental themes. Seath'tl was not telling the immigrants what they wanted to hear, because they displayed no such ideological bent. The farewell speech also touched on fundamental differences between cultures.

Your God is not our God....We are two distinct races with separate origins and separate destinies....Tu us, the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors, seemingly without regret. Your religion was written on tables of stone by the iron fingers of your God so that you cannot forget it. The Red Man could never comprehend nor remember it. Our religion is the tradition of our ancestors - the dreams of our old men, given to them in the solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit, and the visions of our sachems; and it is written in the hearts of our people.

Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away among the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget the world that gave them being....It matters little where we pass the remnants of our days. They will not be many. A few more moons, a few more winters - and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land... will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours. But why should I mourn the untimely fate of my people ? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the white man...cannot be exempt from the common destiny.[Anderson]

In the middle 1850s, when the Yakima War spilled over the Cascades into Seattle under Chief Leschi, Seath'tl and his people looked on from their retreat on the western shores of Puget Sound. He died there in 1866. In 1912, a statue memorializing Seath'tl was dedicated in the city named for him.

Crazy Horse/Tashunkewitko, Oglala Profile

Crazy Horse was born on Rapid Creek in 1840. He was killed when he was only 37 years of age, September 6, 1877. He was stabbed in the back by an American soldier at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, while he was under U.S. Army protection. During his life he was a great leader of his people. He did not have an equal as a warrior or a chief. He gave submissive allegiance to no man, white or Indian, and claimed his inalienable rights as an Indian to wander at will over the hunting grounds of his people. He never registered at any agency; never touched the pen; never signed a treaty. He wanted only peace and a way of living for his people without having to live on the white man's reservations. Crazy Horse defended his people and their way of life in the only manner he knew, but only after he saw the treaty of 1868 broken.

This treaty, signed by the President of the United States said, "Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, will forever and ever be the sacred land of the Indians." He took to the warpath only after he saw his friend Conquering Bear killed; only after he saw the failure of the government agents to bring required treaty guarantees such as meat, clothing, tents and necessities for existence. In battle the Sioux war leader would rally his warriors with the cry, "It is a good day to fight;--it is a good day to die." In 1877 Crazy Horse's wife, staying at Fort Robinson, was dying of tuberculosis. His only child a daughter, had recently died of this same disease. Under a guarantee of safe conduct both into and out of the Fort, Crazy Horse agreed to confer with the Commanding Officers.

History has proven since that the intention never was to let Crazy Horse go free, but rather to ship him to the Dry Tortugas in Florida. The chief had no notion what was in store for him until he entered the guardhouse and saw the bars on the windows. Right then he was face to face with the fate the white man had intended for him. He drew a knife (the fact that he had not been disarmed is good proof that he never surrendered) and attempted to get to his Indian friends outside the stockade. Little Big Man, friend and warrior companion of Crazy Horse, carrying out his orders as an Indian policeman, seized Crazy Horse's arms. In struggling to free himself, Crazy Horse slashed Little Big Man's wrist. At this point, an infantry man of the guard made a successful lunge with a bayonet and Crazy Horse fell, mortally wounded. In the minds of the Indians today, the life and death of Crazy Horse parallels the tragic history of the red man since the white man invaded their homes and lands. One of many great and patriotic Indian heroes, Crazy Horse's tenacity of purpose, his modest life, his unfailing courage, his tragic death set him apart and above the others.

Tecumseh (Tecumtha), Shawnee Profile

Tecumseh ("Crounching Tiger" or "Shooting Star") was a major military leader and alliance builder who sought to stop Euro-American expansion into the Ohio Valley area early in the ninteenth century. Tecumseh was born about 1768 near present-day Oldtowm. Ohio. He was raised from birth to make war on the encroaching whites by his mother, Methoataske, whose husband, the Shawnee Puckeshinwa, was killed in cold blood by settlers when Tecumseh was a boy. Tecumseh and his mother found him dying. As he watched his father die, Tecumseh vowed to become like " a fire spreading over the hill and valley, consuming the race of dark souls." A few years later, Tecumseh's hatred for the whites was compounded by the murder of Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief who had been a mentor to the young man.

As Euro-American settlement began to explode accross the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes shortly after 1790, Native resistance expressed itself in attempts at confederation along lines of mutual interest. A confederation that included elements of the Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Miamis, and Ottawas told the United States in 1790 that settlers were not to transgress beyond the Ohio River. Thousands of settlers were surging into the area, ignoring governmental edicts from both sides. The settlers, who were squatters in the Indians' eyes, sought military help after members of the Native confederacy began attacking their settlements. Military expeditions were sent into the Ohio country during 1790 and 1792, but the Native confederacy remained unbowed and unmoved. In 1794, a force under the command of General "Mad Anthony" Wayne defeated the confederacy's warriors at Fallen Timbers ( a battle in which a young Tecumseh fought). In 1795, most of present-day Ohio and parts of Indiana were surrendered at the Treaty of Greenville.

Native resistance surged again shortly after the turn of the century under the aegis of Tecumseh. As he came of age after the American Revolution, his influence grew rapidly not only because of his acumen as a statesman and a warrior, but because he forbade torture of prisoners. Both settlers and his Native allies trusted Tecumseh. By the turn of the century, as the number of settlers grew, Tecumseh beagn to assemble the Shawnees, Delawares, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Kickapoos, and Wyandots into a confederation with the aim of establishing a permanent Native state that would act as a buffer zone between the United States to the east and English Canada to the north. One white observer recalled Tecumseh as a commanding speaker. His voice was said to have "resounded over the multitude...his words like a succesion of thunderbolts." He advanced the doctrine that no single Native nation could sell its land without the consent of the entire confederacy that he was building. Rallying Native allies with an appeal for alliance about 1805, Tecumseh said, "Let us unite as brothers, as sons of one Mother Earth...Sell our land? Why not sell the air... Land cannot be sold." He tried to unite the southern tribes by appealing to history.

Terretorial governor William Henry Harrison (who would later popularize his coming battle with Tecumseh at Tippecanoe in a succesful campaign for the presicency with the campaign slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too") tried to undermine the growing strength of Tecumseh's Indian union by negotiating treaties of cession with individual tribes. Since only a portion of each tribe or nation's warriors elected to follow Tecumseh, Harrison found it easy enough to find "treaty Indians" among those who did not elect to fight. By 1811, Harrison negotiated at least fifteen treaties, all of which Tecumseh repudiated. Harrison's wariness of Tecumseh's power sprang from a deep respect for him "The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing and more than any other circumstances bespeaks him as one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and to overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would, perhaps, be the founder of an Empire that would rival in glory Mexico or Peru. No difficulties deter him". For his part, Tecumseh was particularly galled by the fact that Harrison had chosen as his territorial capital the village of Chillicothe, the same site (with the same name) as the Shawnees' former principal settlement. At one treaty council, Tecumseh refused to meet Harrison's terms. Finding himself seated next to Harrison on a bench, Tecumseh slowly but aggressively pushed him off its edge then told Harrison that that was what was happening to his people. During his last conference with Tecumseh, Harrison bid the chief to take a chair. "Your father requests you take a chair," an interpreter told Tecumseh, to which the chief replied, "My father! The sun is my father and the earth is my mother. I will repose upon her bosom." He then sat crosslegged on the ground.

Tecumseh was also angry over Harrison's treaty of September 30, 1809, with the Delaware, Potawatomi, Miami, Kickapoo, Wea, and Eeel River peoples. For $8,200 in cash and $2,350 in annuties, Harrison had laid claim for the United Staes to roughly three million acres of rich hunting land along the the Wabash River, in the heart of the area in which Tecumseh wished to erect his Native confederacy. When Tecumseh and his brother , also a Shawnee war chief, complained to Harrison that the treaty terms were unfair, Harrison at first rebuked Tecumseh by saying that the Shawnees had not even been part of the treaty. The implicit refusal to recognize Tecumseh's alliance angered the Indians even more. Realizing that Tecumseh's influence made it politic for him to do so, Harrison agreed to meet with him. At a meeting on August 12, 1810, each side drew up several hundred battle-ready warriors and soldiers. Harrison agreed to relay Tecumseh's complaints to the president, and Tecumseh said that his warriors would join the Americans against the British if Harrison would annul the treaty. Nothing came of Harrison's promises, and in 1811, bands of warriors allied with Tecumseh began ranging out of the settlement of Tippecanoe to terrorize nearby farmsteads and small backwoods settlements. Harrison said he would wipe out Tippecanoe if the raids did not stop; Tecumseh said they would stop when the land signed away under the 1810 treaty was returned. Tecumseh then journeyed southward to bring the Creeks, Chicksaws, and Choctaws into his alliance. He carried the message that he had used to recruit other allies.

For the most part the trip failed to bring new allies. During this time, the command of the existing alliance fell to Tecumseh's brother Tenskwatawa, who was called the Prophet. On September 26, 1811, Harrison decamped at Vincennes with more than nine hundred men, two-thirds of them Indian allies. He built a fort and named it after himself on the present-day site of Terre Haute, Indiana. Harrison then sent two Miamis to the Prophet to demand the return of property Harrison alleged had been stolen in the raids, along with the surrender of Indians he accused of murder. The Miamis did not return to Harrison's camp. The governor's army marched to within sight of Tippecanoe and met with Tenkswatawa, who invited them to make camp, relax, and negotiate. Instead, Harrison's forces set up in battle configurations, and the Prophet's warriors readied an attack. Within two hours of pitched battle, Harrison's forces routed the Indians and burned the village of Tippecanoe as Tenskwatawa's forces scattered into the woods.

Returning to the devastation from his travels, Tecumseh fled to British Canada, where, during the war of 1812, he was put in command of a force of whites and Indians as a British brigadier general. During the battle in Ontario (Canada), Tecumseh was killed on October 5, 1813. After it, some of the Kentucky militia who had taken part found a body they thought was Tecumseh's and cut strips from it for souvenirs. (His warriors, who had dispersed in panic when Tecumseh died, said later that they had taken his body with them.) Having commited twenty thousand men and $5 million to the cause, the United States had effectively terminated armed Indian resistance in the Ohio Valley and sourrounding areas.

A statue called "Tecumseh" plays a major role in traditions at the U.S. Naval Academy. The statue was originally the figurehead of the ship 'Delaware' and, as such was said to portray Tammerund (Saint Tammany), a Delaware chief who befriended William Penn. The figure was renamed "Tecumseh" in 1891 and installed at the academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where its supernatural aid is often requested to help midshipmen pass their exams.

The real place where Tecumseh's bones are is Walpole Island.

Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator Profile

Born a Blood near contemporary Calgary, Alberta, Crow Foot was raised as a member of the Siksika Blackfood. He became a leading chief in the Blackfoot Confederacy, an ally of immigrating whites and an advocate of peace with them.

Native enemies, especially the Cree, Crow Foot was known as a fierce warrior who took part in his first battle at thirteen. In 1866, Crow Foot became known to settlers after he rescued Albert Lacombe, a Catholic priest. Crow foot also refused to ally with Sitting Bull''s Oglala Lakota after they excaped to Canada following the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

In 1877, Crow Foot was a principal spokesman for the Blackfoot Confederacy as several chiefs signed Canadien Treaty No. 7, which ceded most of the land in what would become southern Alberta to Canada. In 1883, Crow Foot sought peace between Native peoples and the Canadien Pacifik Railway, which was building track accross the Canadian prairies. The railroad all but obliterated the Blackfoots hunting economy, but Crow Foot himself was rewarded by the railroad with a pension. in 1885, Crow Foot's adopted son Poundmaker sought his alliance in the Second Riel Rebellion. By adopting Poundmaker, a dissident Cree, Crow Foot had subverted the Blackfoots' traditional enemies.

By declining participartion in the Second Riel Rebellion, Crow Foot again refused to fight the encroaching whites. Crow Foot spent his later years traveling as a peacemaker between various tribes after his personal life had been marked by the tragedy of losing nearly all his children to smallpox and other diseases imported from Europe.

John Wooden Legs (Kummonk'Quiviokta), Cheyenne Profile

Wooden Leg was a veteran of the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn and later atribal judge. As judge, he was told at one point that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had issued an edict that Indian men could not have more than one wife. This was part of a general governmental offensive against polygamy, which also affected the Mormon settlers of Utah. As tribal judge, Wooden Leg was charged with enforcing the new rule. He sent a tribal police officer to gather all Northern Cheyenne men who had more than one wife and gave them the news.

Initially, most of them resisted, but then they came up with strategies to circumvent the law: telling Indian agents that the extra wifes were really in-laws, for example, or maintaining two households with one wife in each of them. Wooden Leg related a story of how he pondered telling his own two wifes of the order. He was stricken with remorse as his younger wife, who had no children, was moved out of his house. "A few years later I heard that she was married to a good husband. Oh, how glad it made my heartto hear that!" Wooden Leg related his memories to Thomas B. Marquis, who published them in 'A warrior who fought Custer' in 1931.

Black Hawk (Makataimeshiekiakiak), Sauk Profile

Famous war chief from the Thunder Clan of the Sauk. Black Hawk, a Sauk chief, lent his name to the frontier war that gave Abraham Lincoln his one experience in soldiering. Born near Rock Island, Illinois, the future war chief grew up during the period of Spanish ascendancy in the Mississippi Valley.

Hostile to American fur traders who manned the trading posts at St. Louis when the United States took over that area in 1804, he refused to recognize the Treaty of St. Louis, in which Sauk and Fox tribes relinquished their claim to all lands east of the Mississippi.

During the War of 1812, Black Hawk (whose Indian name was Makataimeshekiakiak) fought for the British under the leadership of the famous Tecumseh. Continuing to brood over the injustice of the Treaty of St. Louis, he attempted, between 1816 and 1829, to enlist. In 1832 he led two hundred warriors and their families back across the Mississippi. Disappointed when no help was offered by neighboring tribes, he was on the verge of seeking a truce precipitating the Black Hawk War. On August 2, 1832, the Indians were overwhelmed at Bad Axe River, Wisconsin, and Black Hawk was taken prisoner.

When President Andrew Jackson ordered Black Hawk brought east in 1833, the Sauk chief became a celebrity and attracted great crowds. His courage, integrity, and dignity were revealed in his Autobiography (1833), which has become an American classic.

Red Cloud, Oglala Sioux Profile

As a warrior and a statesman, Red Cloud's success in confrontations with the United States government marked him as one of the most important Lakota leaders of the nineteenth century.

Although the details of his early life are unclear, Red Cloud was born near the forks of the Platte River, near what is now North Platte, Nebraska. His mother was an Oglala and his father, who died in Red Cloud's youth, was a Brul Red Cloud was raised in the household of his maternal uncle, Chief Smoke.

Much of Red Cloud's early life was spent at war, first and most often against the neighboring Pawnee and Crow, at times against other Oglala. In 1841 he killed one of his uncle's primary rivals, an event which divided the Oglala for the next fifty years. He gained enormous prominence within the Lakota nation for his leadership in territorial wars against the Pawnees, Crows, Utes and Shoshones.

Beginning in 1866, Red Cloud orchestrated the most successful war against the United States ever fought by an Indian nation. The army had begun to construct forts along the Bozeman Trail, which ran through the heart of Lakota territory in present-day Wyoming to the Montana gold fields from Colorado's South Platte River. As caravans of miners and settlers began to cross the Lakota's land, Red Cloud was haunted by the vision of Minnesota's expulsion of the Eastern Lakota in 1862 and 1863. So he launched a series of assaults on the forts, most notably the crushing defeat of Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman's column of eighty men just outside Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, in December of 1866. The garrisons were kept in a state of exhausting fear of further attacks through the rest of the winter.

Red Cloud's strategies were so successful that by 1868 the United States government had agreed to the Fort Laramie Treaty. The treaty's remarkable provisions mandated that the United States abandon its forts along the Bozeman Trail and guarantee the Lakota their possession of what is now the Western half of South Dakota, including the Black Hills, along with much of Montana and Wyoming.

The peace, of course, did not last. Custer's 1874 Black Hills expedition again brought war to the northern Plains, a war that would mean the end of independent Indian nations. For reasons which are not entirely clear, Red Cloud did not join Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and other war leaders in the Lakota War of 1876-77. However, after the military defeat of the Lakota nation, Red Cloud continued to fight for the needs and autonomy of his people, even if in less obvious or dramatic ways than waging war.

Throughout the 1880's Red Cloud struggled with Pine Ridge Indian Agent Valentine McGillycuddy over the distribution of government food and supplies and the control of the Indian police force. He was eventually successful in securing McGillycuddy's dismissal. Red Cloud cultivated contacts with sympathetic Eastern reformers, especially Thomas A. Bland, and was not above pretending for political effect to be more acculturated to white ways than he actually was.

Fearing the Army's presence on his reservation, Red Cloud refrained from endorsing the Ghost Dance movement, and unlike Sitting Bull and Big Foot, he escaped the Army's occupation unscathed. Thereafter he continued to fight to preserve the authority of chiefs such as himself, opposed leasing Lakota lands to whites, and vainly fought allotment of Indian reservations into individual tracts under the 1887 Dawes Act. He died in 1909, but his long and complex life endures as testimony to the variety of ways in which Indians resisted their conquest.

Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa), Lakota Profile

Black Elk, also known as Hehaka Sapa and Nicholas Black Elk. He was a Oglala Lakota holy man. Black Elk was born in December 1863 at Little Powder River, Wyoming and died in the year 1950. He was born into a tribe of the Plains Indians, the Oglala Sioux. He had five sisters and one brother. At the age of nine, Black Elk received a great vision. This vision portrayed the Powers of the World, each giving Black Elk a gift and a special power. The Grandfathers, represented the powers of north, south, east, and west. With the gifts that he received, Black Elk was given the center of the nations hoop.

As an adult Black Elk became a medicine man and a prominent member of his tribe. Thirty years before his death, Black Elk became a Catholic.

Black Elk's life encompassed the U.S.-Sioux wars, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. He left the reservation and toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Europe, returning in 1889. He converted to Catholicism in 1904 and became a catechist on reservations for several decades.

In 1930 Black Elk met the poet John Neihardt, a meeting that resulted in the book Black Elk Speaks (1932). Black Elk dictated his autobiography to Neihardt and recounted Lakota history and traditions in an effort to preserve them. The book received little attention at first, but the 1961 reprint ignited a new interest in Lakota ways and spirituality. Controversy has swirled around the book. How much of the book is Neihardt and how much is Black Elk? Was Black Elk a believing Christian or hiding his true Lakota spirituality under a Christian mantle to appease white culture? Or did Black Elk embrace the Lakota and Christian religions in a blend of both?

Elk embrace the Lakota and Christian religions in a blend of both? Black Elk's religion was so strong that it had a drastic impact on many lives. Many of the people Black Elk used to care for as a medicine man came to him for advice, and many followed in his direction.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Black Elk performed reenactments and was a speaker on Lakota life. He told Joseph Epes Brown the details of several rituals and Brown published The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Oglala Sioux in 1953. A fall in 1948 invalided him and he died in 1950.

Red Cloud (Makhipiya-luta) Sioux Chief Profile

As a warrior and a statesman, Red Cloud's success in confrontations with the United States government marked him as one of the most important Lakota leaders of the nineteenth century.

Although the details of his early life are unclear, Red Cloud was born near the forks of the Platte River, near what is now North Platte, Nebraska. His mother was an Oglala and his father, who died in Red Cloud's youth, was a Brul Red Cloud was raised in the household of his maternal uncle, Chief Smoke.

Much of Red Cloud's early life was spent at war, first and most often against the neighboring Pawnee and Crow, at times against other Oglala. In 1841 he killed one of his uncle's primary rivals, an event which divided the Oglala for the next fifty years. He gained enormous prominence within the Lakota nation for his leadership in territorial wars against the Pawnees, Crows, Utes and Shoshones.

Beginning in 1866, Red Cloud orchestrated the most successful war against the United States ever fought by an Indian nation. The army had begun to construct forts along the Bozeman Trail, which ran through the heart of Lakota territory in present-day Wyoming to the Montana gold fields from Colorado's South Platte River. As caravans of miners and settlers began to cross the Lakota's land, Red Cloud was haunted by the vision of Minnesota's expulsion of the Eastern Lakota in 1862 and 1863. So he launched a series of assaults on the forts, most notably the crushing defeat of Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman's column of eighty men just outside Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, in December of 1866. The garrisons were kept in a state of exhausting fear of further attacks through the rest of the winter.

Red Cloud's strategies were so successful that by 1868 the United States government had agreed to the Fort Laramie Treaty. The treaty's remarkable provisions mandated that the United States abandon its forts along the Bozeman Trail and guarantee the Lakota their possession of what is now the Western half of South Dakota, including the Black Hills, along with much of Montana and Wyoming.

The peace, of course, did not last. Custer's 1874 Black Hills expedition again brought war to the northern Plains, a war that would mean the end of independent Indian nations. For reasons which are not entirely clear, Red Cloud did not join Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and other war leaders in the Lakota War of 1876-77. However, after the military defeat of the Lakota nation, Red Cloud continued to fight for the needs and autonomy of his people, even if in less obvious or dramatic ways than waging war.

Throughout the 1880's Red Cloud struggled with Pine Ridge Indian Agent Valentine McGillycuddy over the distribution of government food and supplies and the control of the Indian police force. He was eventually successful in securing McGillycuddy's dismissal. Red Cloud cultivated contacts with sympathetic Eastern reformers, especially Thomas A. Bland, and was not above pretending for political effect to be more acculturated to white ways than he actually was.

Fearing the Army's presence on his reservation, Red Cloud refrained from endorsing the Ghost Dance movement, and unlike Sitting Bull and Big Foot, he escaped the Army's occupation unscathed. Thereafter he continued to fight to preserve the authority of chiefs such as himself, opposed leasing Lakota lands to whites, and vainly fought allotment of Indian reservations into individual tracts under the 1887 Dawes Act. He died in 1909, but his long and complex life endures as testimony to the variety of ways in which Indians resisted their conquest.

Sogoyewapha, (Red Jacket), Seneca Profile

Born about 1752, died in 1830; his Nation, the Senecas, his home, near Geneva; his real name, Sogoyewapha, the name "Red Jacket" coming from an embroidered scarlet jacket presented to him by a British officer during the revolution; saw service on the American side in the War of 1812.

Friend and Brother: - It was the will of the Great Spirit that we should meet together this day. He orders all things and has given us a fine day for our council. He has taken His garment from before the sun and caused it to shine with brightness upon us. Our eyes are opened that we see clearly ; our ears are unstopped that we have been able to hear distinctly the words you have spoken. For all these favors we thank the Great Spirit, and Him only.

Brother, this council fire was kindled by you. It was at your request that we came together at this time. We have listened with attention to what you have said. You requested us to speak our minds freely. This gives us great joy ; for we now consider that we stand upright before you and can speak what we think. All have heard your voice first we will want to look back a little and tell you what our fathers have told us and what we have heard from the white people.

I Delivered at a council of chiefs of the six Nations in the summer of 1805 after Mr. Cram, a missionary, had spoken of the work he proposed to do among them. Brother, listen to what we say. There was a time when or forefathers owned this great island. Their seats extended from the rising to the setting sun. The Great Spirit had made it for the use of Indians. He had created the buffalo, the deer, and other animals for food. He had made the bear and the beaver. Their skins served us for clothing. He settled without the shedding of much blood.

But an evil day came upon us. Your forefathers crossed the great water and landed on this island. Their numbers were small. They found friends and not enemies. They told us they had fled from their own country for fear of wicked men and had come here to enjoy their religion. They asked for a small seat. We took pity on them, granted their request, and they sat down among us. We gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison in return.

The white people, brother, had now found our country. Tidings were carried back and more came among us. Yet we did not fear them. We took them to be friends. They called us brothers. We believed them and gave them a larger seat. At length their numbers had greatly increased. They wanted more land; they wanted our country. Our eyes were opened and our minds became uneasy. Wars took place. Indians were hired to fight against Indians, and many of our people were destroyed. They also brought strong liquor among us. It was strong and powerful, and has slain thousands.

Brother, our seats were once large and yours were small. You have now become a great people, and we have scarcely a place left to spread our blankets. You have got our country, but are not satisfied; you want to force your religion upon us.

Brother, continue to listen. You say that you are sent to instruct us how to worship the Great Spirit agreeably to His mind; and, if we do not take hold of the religion which you white people teach we shall be unhappy hereafter. You say that you are right and we are lost. How do we know this to be true? We understand that your religion is written in a Book. If it was intended for us, as well as you, why has not the Great Spirit given to us, and not only to us, but why did He not give to our forefathers the knowledge of that Book, with the means of understanding it rightly. We only know what you tell us about it. How shall we know when to believe, being so often deceived by the white people? Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agreed, as you can all read the Book?

Brother, we do not understand these things. We are told that your religion was given to your forefathers and has been handed down from father to son. We also have a religion which was given to our forefathers and has been handed down to us, their children. We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all the favors we receive, to love each other, and to be united. We never quarrel about religion.

Brother, the Great Spirit has made us all, but He has made a great difference between His white and His red children. He has given us different complexions and different customs. To you He has given the arts. To these He has not opened our eyes. We know these things to be true. Since He has made so great a difference between us in other things, why may we not conclude that He has given us a different religion according to our understanding? The Great Spirit does right. He knows what is best for His children; we are satisfied.

Brother, we do not wish to destroy your religion or take it from you. We only want to enjoy our own.

Brother, you say you have not come to get our land or our money, but to enlighten our minds. I will not tell you that I have been at your meetings and saw you collect money from the meeting. I can not tell what this money was intended for, but suppose that it was for your minister; and, if we should conform to your way of thinking, perhaps you may want some from us.

Brother, we are told that you have been preaching to the white people in this place. These people are our neighbors. We are acquainted with the answer to your talk, and this is all we have to say at present. As we are going to part, we will come and take you by the hand, and hope the Great Spirit will protect you on your journey and return you safe to your friends.

Satanta (Set-Tainte), Kiowa Profile

Born on the Northern Plains, Satanta ("White Bear Person") was the son of Red Tepee, who was the keeper of the Tai-me, the Kiowa medicine bundles. During his boyhood, he was known as Guaton-bain or "Big Ribs". He was a young man when a prominent warrior, Black Horse, presented him with a war shiled that he used while raiding in Texas and Mexico.

During the early days of the Civil War, he conducted many raids along the Santa Fe Trail. He would later become a principal chief in the Kiowa Wars of the 1860s-1870s and was known as "The Orator of the Plains." When Little Mountain died in 1866, Satanta became the leader of the war faction of the Kiowas. His rival was Kicking Bird of the peace faction. As a result of his rivalry, Lone Wolf became the compromise choice for the position of principal chief. Meanwhile, Satanta and his warriors continued raiding in Texas.

Famed for his eloquence, Satanta spoke at the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 where the Kiowas ceded their lands in the valleys of the Canadian and Arkansas Rivers and agreed to settle on a reservation within Indian Territory. However, some of the Kiowas were slow to move onto their lands in Indian Territory. When Satanta came under a flag of truce to tell the U.S. Army that he had not been with Black Kettle at the Battle of the Washita, General Philip H. Sheridan held him and several other leaders as hostages until their bands had relocated to Indian Terretory.

In May 1871, Satanta was in a war party that attacked the Warren wagon train with Satank, Big Tree and Mamanti. Later, Big Tree, Satank, and Satanta were seized for trial after bragging openly about their exploits. Satank tried to escape on the road to Texas; he was fatally shot. Big Tree and Satanta went to trial and were sentenced to death. Indian rights groups objected to the harsh penalties, however.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs even contended that they should be released because their actions were associated with war and not murder. In 1873, they were paroled on a pledge of good behavior for themselves and the entire Kiowa tribe. However, Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Arapaho war parties renewed their raids on white settlers under the Comanche leader Quanah Parker. These actions started the Red River War of 1874-1875. Satanta tried to prove to army officials that he was not a party to the raids.

In September 1874, Big Tree appeared before the Cheyenne Agency at Darlington to state that Satanta wished to surrender peacefully. True to his word, Satanta surrendered the next month. Although it appears that he had not violated the terms of his parole, Satanta was taken into custody and then imprisoned at Huntsville, Texas. On October 11, 1878, sick, tired, and despairing that he would ever be released, Satanta jumped off the upper floor of the prison hospital and committed suicide.

The proud and dignified warrior was buried in Texas. His grandson, James Auchiah, received permission in 1963 to bring Satanta's remains to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, so that he could be interred with other Kiowa chiefs.

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