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Friday, February 20, 2015

Wasechun-tashunka



An Oglala Sioux chief, known in his tribe as
He was probably the son or nephew of the American Horse who went out with Sitting Bull in the Sioux war and was killed at Slim buttes, South Dakota, Sept. 29, 1875. As speaker for the tribe he signed the treaty secured by the Crook commission in 1887, by which the Sioux reserva­tion in Dakota was reduced by one-half. Nearly half the tribe objected to the cession, alleging that the promises of the commissioners could not be depended oil, and the malcontents, excited by the messianic craze that had recently reached the Sioux and by the killing of Sitting Bull, its chief exponent among them, in 1890, withdrew from the council and prepared to fight the Government. The expected benefits of the treaty proved illusory.
While the tribe were gathered at the agency to treat with the commissioners, their great herds of cattle destroyed their growing crops and were subsequently stolen. The signers expected that the rations of beef that had been cut off by the Government would be restored, and the agent began to issue the extra rations. In the following year, when drought had ruined the new crop, authority to increase the rations having been withheld, they were reduced at the most unseasonable time. The Sioux were actually starving when the malcontents took their arms and went out to the bad-lands to dance themselves into the exalted state necessary for the final struggle with the whites.
American Horse and other friendlies induced them to submit, and the episode would have been concluded without further bloodshed had not a collision occurred between some raw troops and Big Foot’s band after its surrender.
In 1891 American Horse headed the delegation from Pine Ridge to Washington, composed of leaders of both the friendly and the lately hostile party, and the conferences resulted in the issue of living rations and in fairer treatment of the Sioux.








An Oglala Sioux chief. He is said to have received this name because a wild pony dashed through the village when he was born. His bold, adventurous disposition made him a leader of the southern Sioux, who scorned reservation life and delighted to engage in raiding expeditions against the Crows or the Mandan, or to wreak vengeance on whites wherever they could safely attack them. When the Sioux went on the warpath in 1875, on account of the occupancy of the Black Hills and other grievances, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were the leaders of the hostiles. Gen. Reynolds, commanding a column of the army of Gen. Crook, in the winter of 1875 surprised Crazy Horse’s camp and captured his horses, but the Indians succeeded in stampeding the herd in a blinding snowstorm. When Gen. Crook first encountered Crazy Horse’s band on Rosebud river, Mont., the former was compelled to fall back after a sharp fight. The band at that time consisted of about 600 Minneconjou Sioux and Cheyenne.
Later Crazy Horse was joined on Powder river by warlike Sioux of various tribes on the reservation, others going to swell the band of Sitting Bull in Dakota. Both bands united and annihilated the column of Gen. George A. Custer on Little Bighorn river, Montana, June 25, 1576. When Gen. Nelson A. Miles pursued the Sioux in the following winter the two camps separated again south of Yellowstone river, Crazy Horse taking his Cheyenne and Oglala and going back to Rosebud river. Gen. Mackenzie destroyed his camp on a stream that flows into Tongue river, losing several men in the engagement. Gen. Miles followed the hand toward Bighorn mountains and had a sharp engagement in which the troops could scarcely have withstood the repeated assaults of double their number without their artillery, which exploded shells among the Indians with great effect. Crazy Horse surrendered in the spring with over 2,000 followers. He was suspected of stirring up another war and was placed under arrest on Sept. 7, 1877, but broke from the guard and was shot. See Miles, Pers. Recol., 193, 244, 1896.
Young Man Afraid of His Horses. A chief of the Oglala Sioux, contemporaneous with Red Cloud and one of the leading lieutenants of the latter in the war of 1866 to defeat the building of the Montana road through the buffalo pastures of Powder r. His Sioux name, Tasunkakokipapi, is not properly interpreted; it really means that the bearer was so potent in battle that the mere sight of his horses inspired fear. After the peace of 1868 he lived at the Oglala agency and died at Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
Sources:
Bright, William (2004). Native American Place Names in the United States.
Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, p. 125, "George Kills in Sight Describes the Death of Indian Leader Crazy Horse".
History Matters. George Mason University, He Dog interview, July 7, 1930, in: Eleanor H. Hinman (ed.),
"Oglala Sources on the Life of Crazy Horse", Nebraska History 57 (Spring 1976) p. 9,
The Authorized Biography of Crazy Horse and His Family Part One: Creation, Spirituality, and the Family Tree,
The William Garnett Interview", in The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse: A Source Book, Ed. Richard G Hardoff, 1998. p. 43
About the image:
Description
A sketch of Crazy Horse believed to be accurate. It was drawn in 1934 by a sketch artist interviewing Crazy Horse's sister, who claimed it was an accurate image.
Source
History Detectives
Article
Crazy Horse
Portion used
Yes.
Low resolution?
Yes.
Purpose of use
To show the only believed-to-be accurate sketch of Crazy Horse
Replaceable?
No. The original image is kept by Crazy Horse's descendants and was only known to be displayed once, on the History Detectives




Crow Dog



Crazy Dog (Kangisanka). An Oglala Sioux chief. He took no prominent part in the Sioux war of 1876, but in 1881 he shot Spotted Tail in a brawl, and for this was tried before a jury and sentenced to be hanged, but the United States Supreme Court ordered his release on habeas corpus, ruling that the Federal courts had no jurisdiction over crimes committed on reservations secured to Indian tribes by treaty. Other deeds attested his fearless nature, and when the Ghost-dance craze emboldened the Oglala to go upon the warpath, angered by a new treaty cutting down their reservation and rations, Crow Dog was one of the leaders of the desperate band that fled from Rosebud agency to the Badlands and defied Gen. J. A. Brooke’s brigade. He was inclined to yield when friendlies came to persuade them, and when the irreconcilable’s caught up their rifles to shoot the waverers he drew his blanket over his head, not wishing, as he said, to know who would be guilty of slaying a brother Dakota. When the troops still refrained from attacking, and the most violent of his companions saw the hopelessness of their plight, he led his followers back to the agency toward the close of Dec. 1890.
Sources:
Brown, Dee (1970), Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-11979-6
Crow Dog's Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century (Studies in North American Indian History) By Sidney L. Harring p. 107. Publisher: Cambridge University Press (February 25, 1994) Language: English ISBN 0-521-46715-2.
Famous American Crimes and Trials: 1860-1912 by Frankie Y. Bailey, Steven M. Chermak pp. 101–105. Publisher: Praeger Pub (October 2004) ISBN 0-275-98335-8.
About the image: Crow Dog-enwikipedia-Public domain,




A winter Count

Did you know?

What is a Winter Count?
A winter count is a pictographic calendar or calendar history composed of ideographs or glyphs. These tribal records were kept by Blackfeet, Mandan, Kiowa, and especially the Lakota or Teton Sioux. There are approximately 100 in existence (but many of these are duplicates). (Burke) The Dohasan Calendar of the Kiowa, for example, covers 60 years from 1832 to 1892. As time was reckoned from the first snow to first snow, a winter count image would represent an overlapping year, for example, 1833-1834. In Sioux, a winter is Òwaniyetu." Calendars were called "waniyetu yawapi" from verb yawa to count or read, or Òwinter recordsÓ or Òcounting backÓ The person who painted the yearly drawings and kept the calendar in his care was called the Keeper, a tribal historian.. He selected a single remarkable even in consultation with others to denote a year.Winter counts documented episodes in the history of an extended family or tiyospaye who camped together. The images functioned as mnemonic devices to trigger memories. Natural and cultural, historical depicted. The glyphs may represent personal events, disease epidemics, battles, horseraids, or astronomical events. In the Sam Two Kills Winter count, the death of Turning Bear, who was killed by a train, is depicted (just above Two Kill's left foot in the John Anderson photo).
Often the years are recorded in a spiralling pattern going from the center to the periphery, but this is by no means standard. The calendars are painted on buffalo hides and later some, like the Anderson winter count, were copied to cloth and paper.
The first winter count to receive scholarly analysis was Lone Dog Winter Count. Since Garrick Mallery's pioneering work in 1877, a number of other winter counts were discovered in the private collections of persons who obtained them in the late Indian Wars/Early reservation period. For these known winter counts, systematic efforts were made by Mallery and others to obtain accurate interpretations of the glyphs from the "keepers" and other Native consultants who knew their meanings in the late 1800s. See an example from Mooney's description of the Kiowa Winter Count, Summer 1841 glyph. In 1886, in the 4th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnography, Mallery compares five winter counts : Lone Dog (Yantonai), Flame (Two Kettle), Little Swan (Minneconjou) , plus Mato Sapa/Black Bear (Miniconjou). Included in MalleryÕs study is a section written by William H. Corbusier who describes two Oglala counts kept by American Horse and Cloud Shield. Corbusier also had access to the White Cow Killer (Oglala) account and the Battiste Good (Brule) account. The latter is unusual in that it begins in the year 900 A.D. and includes thirteen generations of seventy years (or camp circles) with individual images for the years 1700 to 1879. The Good winter Count was published in the 10th BAE Report with color plates.Swift Dog (Hunkpapa) was collected by scholar Frances Densmore. James Howard built on the foundation established by Garrick Mallery. He brought more calendars and interpretations to light in the mid-20th century and did significant comparative analysis. See Howard's "Carried Flags around Winter" from British Winter Count for 1796-97. Bibliography
Sources:
Chamberlain, Von Del, “Astronomical Content of North American Plains Indian Calendars,” Archaeoastronomy, 15 (5) 1984.
Online: Burke, Christina E. “Collecting Lakota Histories: Winter Count Pictographs and Texts in the National Anthropological Archives,” American Indian Art Magazine, 2000-2001
McCoy, Ronald T. "Winter Count: Teton Chronicles to 1799" (No. Ariz. Ph.D. disst. 1983)
Photo: Curtis, Edward 1908.