Native people information by name

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ALBERT AND LILLIE LECLAIRE

THE FAMILY OF ALBERT AND LILLIE LECLAIRE
Albert LeClaire, a Mdewakanton Dakota Indian, was 1st of seven children. He was born on May 12, 1885 in Mendota, Minnesota. His parents were Frederick LeClaire and Celina Robinette LeClaire. Frederick's parents were Jean-Baptiste Octave (Wakon) LeClerc (LeClaire) and Marguerite Dupuis. Octave came to Mendota with his brother Phillip in 1848. Octave and Marguerite had 12 children born between 1858 and 1884. All the children were baptized in Mendota. They resided in Mendota until the 1862 Uprising. After the uprising, they camped on land belonging to Alexander Faribault. They could not stay in Mendota because all the Dakota Indians were forced out of the state and sent to Crow Creek, South Dakota. They could not go to Crow Creek, because they had helped the white settlers. " Only Faribault's reputation in the city named for him enabled him to so defy public opinion as to harbor members of the hated Indian race on his property. As it was, he was threatened and had to publish in the local newspaper, the Central Republican Newspaper on June 10, 1863,a detailed statement identifying the Indians who were living on his land." They lived in extreme poverty, preserved from starvation only by the charity of their white friends. "They had no money, and their attempts to raise crops were largely unsuccessful. They dug and sold ginseng, until the land was so dug over that several years would be required for the ginseng to recover. They were not allowed to dig on other people's land." They lived there for 4 years, along with the other "friendlies" who had helped the white settlers during the uprising. Land records located by Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community members put them back in Mendota in 1883, and copies of land transactions between Octave and others date from then until 1887.


Octave's wife Marguerite was the daughter of Hypolite Dupuis and Angelique Renville. Hypolite Dupuis was listed on the 1849 census of Mendota. He was employed by Henry Sibley , who was a partner in the American Fur Company. He served as the first County Treasurer. He built a home in Mendota in
1856. The Dupuis House was purchased by the Minnesota Daughters of the American Revolution in 1924 to preserve the rich history of the beginning of Minnesota. It was remodeled and opened as a Tea House in 1928 The Tea House has since closed. It is currently being run by the Minnesota Historical Society. It is open for tours, along with the Sibley and Faribault homes from May to September.


Angelique Renville was the daughter of Joseph Renville and Mary, a sister of Big Thunder, the father of Little Crow (Taoyataduta). Mary was Little Crow's aunt. Angelique Renville Dupuis was a signer of the Treaty with the Traverse Des Sioux Bands of 1841, as was Joseph Renville.


Celina Robinette's parents were Vanosse Robinette and Mathilde LaBatte. Mathilde LaBatte's father, Francois LaBatte was one of the first killed in the 1862 uprising. Celina and Frederick LeClaire were married on June 23, 1880 in St. Peter's Church in Mendota. Lillian Felix was born on September 6, 1881 in Mendota She was also baptized there at St. Peter's church on Sept. 12, 1881. She was sixth of seven children. Her parents were Peter Felix Jr. and Margaret Bellecourt. Peter Felix Jr. was the son of Peter Felix Sr. and Rosalie Frenier (Mazasnawin-Iron Woman). In 1838 a Power of Attorney from Peter Felix Sr. was given to General Henry Sibley for Rosalie and daughter Sophie, to be sure they received treaty money. Rosalie Frenier signed the Treaty with the Traverse Des Sioux Bands of 1841.


Lillie attended Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania from 1897 to 1904. She was enrolled at Santee, Nebraska, although she never lived there. Lillie married Albert LeClaire on July 12, 1904 in Hastings, Minnesota. They resided in Mendota after their marriage. In 1908, she wrote to the Department of Indian Affairs asking for a patent for premises she owned in Nebraska, so she could sell it and buy a home in Mendota. Albert and Lillie lived in Mendota until about 1919, when they started farming at the Prior Lake Indian Community.

Three of their children, Oliver Albert LeClaire, Selisha Lillian LeClaire and Raymond Sylvester LeClaire were born in Mendota. Margaret Celina LeClaire and Russell Francis LaClaire were born in Shakopee. Because of the treatment the older children received at school in Shakopee (called half-breeds -dirty Indians-etc) , Lillie moved back to Mendota, while Albert stayed and farmed at Prior Lake with his son Russell. Albert and Lillie and their children can be found
on the Pipestone Indian Census in 1937 and also 1940. Albert and his parents and siblings are also listed on the 1899 Census of Mdewakanton Sioux of Minnesota done by James McLaughlin.


Albert applied for additional land at Prior Lake in 1937. J.W. Balmer, Superintendent of the Pipestone Indian School requested this for him. Two additonal plots of land were assigned to him on November 9, 1937. This land had been abandoned by George and Meredith Crooks. He also applied for
and received a Planned Productive Loan in 1939. Lillian Felix LeClaire died on August 30, 1940 at the age of 58 at West Side General Hospital.


Her daughter Margaret LeClaire Nordin was in attendance. Margaret tells a story that when her mother died, a candle by her bed went out and the glass broke, which scared the woman who was in the next bed. Albert LeClaire was injured in a car accident by his farm in Prior Lake. The hospital in Shakopee refused to treat him because he was an Indian. They had to send to Pipestone, Minnesota for an ambulance to come and get him and take him to the Indian Hospital there. This happened in December of 1941, and because of the delay in treatment, Albert passed away in Pipestone on January 28, 1942 at the age of 56. Albert's death was hastened by discrimination.

The five children of Albert and Lillian lived in poverty both at Prior Lake and Mendota. They were the object of discrimination and ridicule from the whites and at school. It is little wonder that after Albert's death, not one of them wanted to work and live on the farm. The assignment was abandoned and was eventually reassigned.


It is clear that Albert and Lillian and their family were some of the original Mdewakanton Prior Lake Indian Community residents. At one time Albert's farm was in excess of 50 acres; a substantial part of the original reservation. The barn that was built by Albert still stands on that land today, the only remnant of the early years there. Albert and Lillie's children are cousins of Norman Crooks (deceased) and Amos Crooks Jr.,enrolled members of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community and have maintained contact throughout the years to the present.


The majority of the ancestors of Albert and Lillian LeClaire are buried in St. Peter's Cemetary in Mendota. Many were baptized and married there as well.
The following history was written by Lillian Rose Brown Anderson, granddaughter of Albert and Lillian LeClaire and daughter of Selisha LeClaire and Morris Brown:

I, Lillian Rose Anderson, nee: Brown, was born in Mendota on September 8, 1934, at home.

My grandmother, Lillian LeClaire was there for my mother. I was being born breech. She had to assist the Doctor. I didn't breath for a few minutes--yes-minutes (as told to me). My grandmother hit my behind and then my back and something flew out of me and I started to cry. My mom, dad, grandmother, grandfather, and Great Aunt Jennie LaCroix all applauded, cried, laughed, hugged, said prayers, rejoiced.


I was born at 8:30 p.m. My father, grandfather and uncles wore a path around the house waiting for me to appear--their first child and grandchild.
The house I was born in was built by my father, Morris Brown and grandfather, Albert LeClaire and uncle and cousins. Shortly after my birth the house was put on skids and moved by a team of horses to where it sits today. It has been added onto by the new owners. My Aunt Margaret and her husband Reuben Nordin bought my grandparent's house in Mendota. They tore it down and built a new house farther back on the property. My cousin Clarice Gombold (nee Nordin) bought the house from them. She sold it to her sister, Roxanne Hop, who still lives there today.

Most all the people in Mendota are related and most all the houses are still there that were there when I was a child. We all went to St. Peter's church. the first Catholic church in the territory. I attended all weddings, baptisms and most all funerals there. All my ancestors are buried at Mendota. In fact, the grave yard was just up the hill behind our home. There was a time when the family was
responsible for keeping the grave yard clean. We all did it.


Our grandparents also had a farm at Shakopee. The school we attended in Mendota was the same school my mom went to. It still survives. It was sold to a private company because the village of Mendota couldn't pay the taxes. It was moved a block or so away. I feel bad about this. I wish we could get it back and make a museum for all to see. It is probably one of the last 2 room school houses left that are original. When I went to the school it was so wonderful because I knew everybody. We were like a big family of sisters and brothers. Every mother in Mendota watched out for all the children. I'd hear someone say "Dolly" (my nickname), your mom wants you to go home." We had such respect for all the people. It was Mrs. or Mr., Auntie, Uncle, Grandfather, Grandmother, Mother, Father. I didn't know that people had first names.


We moved from Mendota (Mom didn't want to move) in 1944. We had to because Dad got a job in Minneapolis. He had to walk the Mendota Bridge both ways (we didn't have a car). Then he had to take the streetcar to 15th Ave. and 6th St. It was the only job he could get. (a bartender) Dad only went to the 4th grade. My father was Irish, English and German. So you see, with 4 children to feed, we had to move out of Mendota because there wasn' t any employment there, so we sold our family home and moved to Minneapolis. We hated it!!! We went back to Mendota on the streetcar and walked the Mendota Bridge ofter to see our relatives and friends. I always walked past our old home and cried!
The Nordins, Robinettes, LeClaires, LaCroix's all lived there. I always wished I could go into my family home and stay there, but of course it wasn't ours anymore. I'd cry all the way back to Minneapolis. Mom had tears, sister Beverly and brothers Morris and Bob were pretty little so I don't know how they felt at the time. I know now they felt the same way about Mendota.


About my grandparents, Albert and Lillian LeClaire--they were the salt of the earth, respected and loved by all. My grandmother Lillian was at the birth of many Mendota babies. She raised 5 kids. She was a wonderful person. I spent many many days and nights with her and grandfather. She used to feed anyone who knocked at the door, mostly transients. The railroad tracks were just across the highway in Mendota. They would knock on the door and ask for food. She'd give them a meal and they'd do work around the yard. I think all the hobos on that railroad line knew about Lillian LeClaire, the Angel of Mendota. You were pretty sure of a meal at her door.


We used to go to the farm when Grandmother was out there. She preferred to stay in her home in Mendota. She had a pickle keg at the farm outside the door and us kids always would dive into it. Most all my cousins remember the pickle jar. My cousins, Uncle Albert's children were living with Grandmother and Grandfather at Mendota. We were always together--there and at the farm.
Mendota was a wonderful place to grow up. Everyone was either related by blood or by marriage. We knew everybody and everybody knew us. Our houses didn't have numbers on them. Everybody knew where your house was. You had to go to the only grocery store (Mr. Newhouses) for the mail. We all had mail boxes there.


We walked all over (no cars). We'd meet to get the mail and before you knew it, half the town was either in the store or outside just visiting. I wish I could go back there and buy my ancestoral home.


Our mother and uncles were treated very badly as children. My mother was the most beautiful curly haired little girl ever, and she and my uncles were called "dirty Indians". That was at Shakopee school, so Grandmother LeClaire took them back to Mendota, where she grew up. Our family, the LeClaires go back to the early 1800's in Mendota. We are Mdewakanton!

www.mendotadakota.org/about/gean/albertlilly.htm

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Albrecht Family

link below-

familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/j/o/h/Renee-L-Johnson/index.html

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Little Crow

Little Crow was born Tayoyateduta (His Red Nation) in ca. 1810 in the Mdewakanton Dakota village of Kaposia. He was the first son of the chief, Wakenyantanka (Big Thunder), and his wife Minneakadawin (Woman Planting in Water) and the grandson of Chetanwakuamani, who was noted in history for signing the Zebulon Pike treaty of 1805. Little Crow grew to be a very ambitious man, and one without physical fear. He acquired a reputation of being a brave warrior. During these years, he also learned to read and write English. When his father accidentally shot and killed himself in 1846, Little Crow became the chief of his tribe. Two of his half-brothers attempted to assassinate him shortly thereafter, but only succeeded in wounding him. Little Crow banished them, and when they returned, had them executed.

When treaty negotiations began at Mendota in 1851, Little Crow was elected as the speaker for his tribe. After these negotiations were completed, he became the first chief to sign the Treaty of Traverse Des Sioux. Little Crow thought that this treaty would enable his people to "never be poor". This was not the case however. Almost immediately, trouble began. The government did not want the Sioux to own their own land, which was one of the stipulations of the treaty. Although they protested, the chiefs had no choice but to sign the revised treaty. Part of the money from the sale of the land was paid to traders instead of to the tribes, to be held in "trust" for future purchases. However, the Indians never saw any returns from the money.

In 1858, Little Crow and the other lower Sioux chiefs traveled to Washington D.C. in hopes of convincing the government to redress the broken promises of the last treaty. Instead, the government threatened to take the land they wanted by force and so coerced the chiefs into signing away a ten-mile tract of their reservation. Although Little Crow had spoken for the entire delegation, tribal resentment over the signing away the land caused his popularity to decline.

During the following years, unrest among Little Crow’s people grew as the provisions and annuity money promised by the treaties was often too late, too little or not at all. When news of the Spirit Lake massacre committed by Inkpaduta and his band threatened to cause a war to break out, Little Crow stepped in once again. He volunteered to lead a war party against Inkpaduta’s small band and they brought back four scalps and several women captives. Then Indian superintendent, William J. Cullen, admitted that Little Crow’s intervention had helped to advert the very real possibility of a war.

When the Sioux heard of the white man’s Civil War in the spring of 1861, they were very curious about what it would mean to them; some worried that the Confederates would enslave the Indians should they win. Tensions among the Dakota increased in the summer of 1862, when the annuity payments were not made on time. In August, starving Indians broke into the agency warehouse, forcing the Indian Agent, Thomas Galbraith, to give them provisions. The tribe soon called for an election for a new speaker, feeling that Little Crow had failed them.

However, four days later, on August 17, Little Crow was awakened with the news that four young Wahpetons had killed several white men and women at the Acton Post Office. The tribe needed Little Crow’s experience with the white men to deal with this new situation. Little Crow knew that the white men would take vengeance for their slain women. The chiefs had only two plausible options: to turn over the murders to the soldiers, or to go to war. The first option was discarded after much discussion. The civil chiefs were divided over the war issue—Wabasha, Traveling Hail, Taopi and Wakute opposed it; Big Eagle, Red Legs, Mankato, and Little Six supported it. Despite all of the confusion, Little Crow lead a number of warriors to the Redwood Agency early the next morning and killed around 20 white men. Thus began the Dakota Uprising. Many of the Dakota began rampaging across the countryside, killing many white settlers. Little Crow disapproved of killing people who had not harmed them and pleaded with the warriors to spare the women and children. Little Crow lead an ineffective attack on Fort Ridgely on August 21 and again on August 23. He led the attack on New Ulm, succeeding in burning most of the town, and raided Hutchinson and Forest City. When Henry Sibley’s army arrived in Yellow Medicine, where the Dakota were camped, Little Crow knew that this was probably the last fight. On the morning of September 23, the Dakota attacked and were driven back by Sibley’s skirmishers, most of who were Civil War veterans. Among the thirty or so Indians killed, was the chief, Mankato. Little Crow could no longer rally the warriors. He retreated up the Red River with some of his people. He continued to try to rally support among other tribes but had little success.

On June 10, 1863, Little Crow left from his sanctuary at Devil’s Lake to make a raid into Minnesota to gather up horses for himself and his family. He brought with him several men and one woman. The group soon split up, leaving Little Crow and his fourteen-year-old son alone in the "Big Woods". On the morning of July 3, 1863, Little crow and his son, Wawinape stopped to pick raspberries near Hutchinson. A settler named Nathan Lamson spotted the two Indians while he was hunting with his son and shot and killed Little Crow. Wawinape was injured but managed to return to his people at Devil’s Lake.

Wawinape was later captured and sent to Davenport, IA, where he converted to Christianity and took the name Thomas Wakeman. He became the founder and first Secretary of the Y.M.C.A. among the Sioux. Wawinape had four sons and two daughters: Solomon, Ruth, John, Jesse, Ida, and Alex Rev. John Wakeman was a Presbyterian preacher, Jesse Wakeman, who succeeded his father at the Y.M.C.A., and Alexander Wakeman, who was an American Marine in France during World War I, and later graduated from an Eastern medical college and became a prominent practicing physician. Ida discovered Little Crow's bones hanging in a Minnesota museum. She returned home and told her brother, Jesse, who in turn went to the museum to see for himself and then preceded to "fight" for the return of his grandfather. Eventually the bones were returned and Little Crow was buried in 1971.

link below-

www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/history/mncultures/littlecrow.html

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Scott Campbell

Scott Campbell, who was 15, went with Lewis and Clark. After the expedition, Scott went with Lewis to St. Louis and stayed with him until he was killed. At that time, Scott went back to his people in Minnesota.

Jackie

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BLACK ELK
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(1863-1930)

Oglala Lakota holy man, traditional healer, and visionary.
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Black Elk was born in December 1863 on the Little Powder River, west of present-day South Dakota. He was the son of the elder Black Elk and White Cow Sees Woman. Black Elk was the fourth person in his family in as many generations to bear this name.
———Black Elk was a man seasoned with a lifetime of idiosyncrasies. He experienced the tail end of the U.S. and Sioux wars and the beginnings of U.S. oppressive policies toward his people. He also lived during the early reservation period, before the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 took full effect. He was three years old when the Fetterman Battle was fought, five years old during the signing of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, not quite a teenager during the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and a young man of twenty-seven when Chief Big Foot and his band was massacred at Wounded Knee Creek in December 1890. This latter event occurred just eight miles from where Black Elk made his home in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He spoke carefully of these events in interviews with the poet John G. Neihardt.
———During Black Elk's young adulthood, missionaries attempted to convert the Oglala Lakotas to Christianity, and not many escaped the intense measures inflicted upon those who resisted. Black Elk was no exception. He attempted to understand Christianity after he was subjugated to it, and was baptized Nicholas Black Elk on December 6, 1904, at the Holy Rosary Mission near present-day Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Although the role of staunch Catholic was forced upon him, he played it well to appease his oppressors.
———Black Elk's Lakota spirituality remained strong throughout his life. He was part of the underground traditional religious movement, which began shortly after the U.S. government banned native religious practices. These underground activities became a vital part of his life, as did his visible life as a staunch Catholic. He mastered both, but he feared that U.S. policies would overcome the Lakota Nation and destroy his community's identity. Many of the Lakota traditional holy men and healers of that time shared that basic philosophy. Some chose to record the Lakotas' sacred knowledge and information via non-Indian writers in the hopes of preserving it for future generations of Lakota people.
———Remarkably, Black Elk committed himself to this task. During the summer of 1930 he dictated his life story to John Neihardt, and the resulting book, Black Elk Speaks, appeared in 1932. Reprinted many times, the work was widely circulated and read by the general public. The positive aspect of his decision to go public was that his story offered an understanding of the history of his people and the sense of hope for the future not only of the Lakotas, but for all mankind.
———Black Elk's vision eventually became a message to the Lakota Nation — a warning that, should the Lakota people cross over into total assimilation and acculturation, they would lose their rich traditions and cease to exist as a unique nation. This message was evident in his final words, arranged by Neihardt but spoken by Black Elk: "There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."
———As an elder, Black Elk entertained the general public in the summer months by reenacting the traditional Lakota life at Duhamel's Sioux Indian Pageant in the Black Hills. This was his means to informing them of Lakota history and also of earning money during the Great Depression. The remainder of his time was spent with his family and friends on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where he often served as guest speaker at various gatherings.
———The passage of an Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978 lifted the fear of federal prosecution and allowed the Lakota Nation free expression and open practice of its centuries-old religion. The combination of this legislation and the popularity of Black Elk's teaching created a renaissance of Lakota spirituality. This new movement has resulted in decreased membership in Christian faiths and declined attendance of Lakotas at Christian services across the reservation. In attempts to maintain and gain membership, some Christian churches have incorporated minimal Lakota traditions, but the move toward true Lakota traditional spirituality has continued to grow, particularly across the younger generation.
———The movement of current generations of Lakota people, inspired by Black Elk's words, is in reverse the process that, within a century, transformed their culture. The first step toward the regeneration of the culture has involved a psychological healing from a country of oppression, in addition to a relearning of Lakota identity. Black Elk's warnings about eventual genocide have been heeded.
———Black Elk's legacy is that of courage and inspiration to the Lakota Nation. He provided leadership in the acceptance of Christianity for a peaceful coexistence with the dominant society while simultaneously remaining a Lakota traditionalist at heart.
———Black Elk lived through a trying and tumultuous period of Lakota history. One can change the appearance of a man and have him act in a prescribed manner in the shadows of oppression, but one cannot change the thousands of years of ingrained, culturally fostered spirituality that can be found only in a man's heart and mind.
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KAREN D. LONE HILL (Oglala Lakota)
Oglala Lakota College
Kyle, South Dakota

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BLACK HAWK MATAIMESHEKIAKIAK)
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(1767-1838)

Sauk war leader and spokesman
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Born at Saukenuk, the largest Sauk village, near the mouth of the Rock River in northwestern Illinois, Black Hawk grew to manhood at a time of great change for the tribal people in the upper Mississippi Valley. British victory in the Seven Years' War had ousted France from North America, but French traders remained active among the Mississippi Valley peoples as they and the British and Spanish competed for Indian trade and alliances. By 1804 the Spanish had left Louisiana and the British retreated into Canada, leaving many northern tribes at the mercy of the Americans. During his adult life, Black Hawk watched with great impatience and anger as the Sauks had their economy weakened, their mobility limited, and their lands taken by the advancing United States. In the face of these fundamental shifts he spoke for Sauk traditions; he opposed the pioneers and rejected their claims to tribal lands. His unbending resistance eventually brought disaster to his followers. Nevertheless, his life exemplified traditional Sauk values. A village war leader who hoped for better times, he helped to foster resistance to unavoidable, if painful, changes in tribal life.
———In a world of rapidly changing political and economic allegiances, the Sauks suffered a continuing decline in their standard of living. As pioneers hurried west into the Mississippi Valley and south of the Great Lakes, Indians in these regions faced continuing pressures to cede part or all their land holdings. The same population pressures forced more competition among neighboring tribes as they strove to maintain their hunting, trapping, gathering, and farming subsistence cycles. When available game diminished, the villagers had few options. They could travel farther from home to hunt, or shift to other economic activities. The Illinois Sauks rejected the latter option, and, as a result, their hunting parties met spirited resistance from the Cherokees in the south and the Osages to the west.
———Young Black Hawk developed his skills as a warrior and leader during the late eighteenth century as the Sauks and their allies the Mesquakies (Fox) carried out repeated raids against neighboring tribes. (Before Black Hawk reached adulthood, his father died while fighting against the Cherokees.) Nevertheless, the Sauks engaged in diplomacy as well as warfare. Until 1804, when Americans supplanted the Spanish at St. Louis, Black Hawk looked upon the Spanish as friends and allies. He felt the same way about the British. As late as 1820s, large groups of Sauks traveled north and east to the Canadian post at Malden, just across the border from Detroit, to receive annual presents and assurances of English goodwill.
———The Americans were different. From the first Sauk contacts with federal officials, Sauk leaders felt threatened or dissatisfied. To them the Americans seemed to favor their Osage enemies and to ignore or look down upon the eastern tribes The perception led to violence, and in 1804 the Indians killed several settlers. The pioneers demanded that the Sauks be punished, and when a small delegation of tribal village leaders visited St. Louis in 1804, federal officials there persuaded them to sign a treaty ceding the tribal lands east of the Mississippi River. For nearly three decades, that agreement brought continuing friction and misunderstanding between the tribe and the United States. It was a direct cause of the Black Hawk War.
———It took some years for the main body of Sauks to learn about the 1804 treaty, and from the start the majority of villagers rejected it because it had not been ratified. While not a political leader, Black Hawk spoke against the treaty repeatedly. As a mature adult he came to see all actions by the Americans as suspect and as aimed at harming or disrupting Sauk life. An outspoken translationalist, he rejected payments of treaty annuities from U.S. officials. His world centered in the village of Saukenuk. It was there that he had grown to manhood, participated in the annual ceremonies, and recounted his victories over tribal enemies. It was also the burial place of his friends and family members. At the outbreak of the War of 1812 the forty-five-year-old warrior urged his tribesmen to join the British and fight American expansion.
———During the war Black Hawk led hundreds of Sauk warriors east to Detroit, where they had campaigned with the British in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. By late 1813 the warriors had returned home only to learn that the village elders had chosen young Keokuk as the war leader for the community. Much of Black Hawk's consternation, Keokuk's superior oratorical and political skills allowed him to dominate Sauk affairs for the next several decades. While Keokuk stood at center stage, the older and more experienced Black Hawk led a successful attack on American shipping on the Mississippi. In May 1814 the warrior defeated a force of over four hundred soldiers and militiamen commanded by Major Zachary Taylor, who had been sent north to punish the Sauks for their anti-American acts.
———In 1816 Sauk and Mesquakie leaders signed treaties ending hostilities. From then until the late 1820s the villagers continued their precarious occupation of the Mississippi Valley in the face of ever-increasing numbers of settlers. By 1831 Black Hawk had come to be reorganized as the spokesman for a motley grouping of Sauks, Mesquakies, and other Indians who continued to refuse to migrate west beyond the Mississippi.
———The following year Black Hawk led the so-called British Band east across the Mississippi into Illinois. He and his followers hoped to establish a new village and begin farming again. This action set off loud protests from pioneers and politicians, and President Andrew Jackson ordered federal troops into action. By late April 1832, American regulars and Illinois militiamen began chasing the Indians up the Rock River valley into southern Wisconsin and then west toward the Mississippi. They overtook the exhausted band at the mouth of the Bad Axe River, slaughtering many of them. This crushing defeat persuaded other midwestern tribes to accept removal to the West and ended Black Hawk's public career. After being imprisoned in Virginia for some months, he was sent back to his tribe in disgrace. He died in 1838.
———Black Hawk's career illustrates the divisions within tribal and village groups as they sought to deal effectively with the United States. Some leaders reorganized the need for accommodations with the powerful Americans. Others rejected such action, turning to native religion and even denial in hopes of retaining traditional practices and locations. Black Hawk provided a powerful symbol of cultural pride for the Sauks and Mesquakies during an era of constant disruption and hardship. He based his actions on Sauk practices and beliefs, but by 1832 the crush of frontier settlement had made such ideas impossible to maintain.
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ROGER L NICHOLS
University of Arizona
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users.multipro.com/whitedove/encyclopedia/black-hawk-makataimeshekiakiak-1767-1838.html

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EASTMAN, CHARLES ALEXANDER (HAKADAH 'THE PITIFUL LAST CHILD"; OHIYESA "THE WINNER")
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(1858-1939)

Wahpeton and Mdewakanton Dakota (Sioux) medical doctor, government employee (agency physician, surnames translator, U.S. Indian inspector), writer, lecturer, and reformer."
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Charles Alexander Eastman's mother died several months after his birth, which resulted in a childhood name, Hakadah, "Pitiful Last" (child); at age four he was given the name Ohiyesa "The Winner," in honor of his village's having won a lacrosse game with a neighboring village. He was raised by his paternal grandmother, and during the Minnesota Dakota conflict of 1862, she fled with him and others along with the headman Standing Buffalo onto the prairies of the Dakota Territory and eventually into Canada. Ten years later his father, Jacob Many Lightings Eastman, who had been presumed killed in the conflict, brought him to his homestead at Flandreau, South Dakota, and started him on the road to Euro-American learning by sending him to Santee Normal School. It was there that Ohiyesa adopted the name Charles Alexander Eastman, the Eastman coming from his father, who had taken the surname of his deceased wife's father, the military officer and artist Seth Eastman. Eastman went on to the preparatory school of Knox College, then to Kimball Union Academy and to Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1886, he graduated from the medical school of Boston College in 1889.
———Eastman's educational achievements attracted the attention of the reformers who favored an Indian policy dedicated to the incorporation of Indians into American society. Eastman sought a position as an agency physician with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and was assigned to the Pine Ridge Agency in the fall of 1889. He arrived amid the Ghost Dance revitalization movement that authorities were calling an "uprising" and that ended tragically in the Wounded Knee massacre the following year. Eastman was the first physician to reach the killing field, and the experience affected him deeply. During the first weeks he also met and subsequently married the young reformer Elaine Goodale, who at the time they met was the Superintendent of Indian Education for the reservations within the Dakota Territory.
———Eastman began his literary career when his wife urged him to write stories of his childhood for his own children. He later sent the stories to St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks. His writings became popular with adults as well, and this success convinced him to write a range of books and to become a lecturer on the Chatauqua circuits. Indian Boyhood (1902) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916) make up his autobiographical works. His stories for children include Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), Old Indian Days (1907), Wigwam Evenings (1909), Indian Child Life (1913), Indian Scout Talks (1914), and Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918). His philosophical works include The Soul of the Indian (1911) and The Indian Today (1915).
———Having become increasingly disillusioned with the U.S. Indian Service, Eastman left Pine Ridge in 1893. Later, after several years of private medical practice in St. Paul, Minnesota, he became an organizer of YMCA chapters on reservations and reserves in the United States and Canada. By 1898 he had joined his brother, the Reverend John Eastman, as a lobbyist for the restoration of Santee Sioux treaty rights; he also became briefly associated with Carlisle Indian Industrial School. In 1900 he was appointed a physician at the Crow Creek Agency in South Dakota. Three years later he left that position and was engaged on a contract basis to translate surnames for the Dakota and Lakota Sioux agencies. He carried out this task while continuing his literary pursuits and public presentation. By 1910 he was seeking to renew himself and reconnect with his childhood by arranging to spend a summer traveling among Indian peoples in northern Minnesota and southern Ontario. He returned from this journey to write The Soul of the Indian. At this time, Charles and his wife acquired property in southern New Hampshire and began a summer camp for girls. In the off-seasons, when he was not on lecture tours, Eastman spent time at the camp. In 1923 he accepted a three-year appointment as a U.S. Indian inspector. He was by that time considered one of the foremost educated Indians; he was active in the Society of American Indians, was an appointee to the Committee of One Hundred to advise the Coolidge administration on Indian policy, and was a national spokesperson for Indian concerns and aspirations. From that point until his death in 1939 Eastman lived in Detroit, advising hobbyist groups and telling his stories to interested audiences.
———Eastman's life was remarkable because of the transformation he made from one way of life to another. He translated significant Indian ideas and values for the larger population. After having written first for children, the weight of his many frustrating life experiences passed him into explaining the contributions Indians had made. In the process, he became a public figure and educator. By the 1930s Eastman, who had been considered by many early reformers to be a testament to acculturation, had become a romantic and was considered completely out of step with the New Deal reform program of Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier. Late in his life, some felt Eastman had become a folksy caricature playing to popular stereotypes. His writings remain his most important contributions, however, while the contextual details of his life demonstrate that non-Indian reformers' programs were never easy for Indians to live.
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DAVID REED MILLER
Saskatchewan Indian Federated College
University of Regina

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BURNETTE, BOB (ROBERT PHILLIP BURNETTE)
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1926-84)

Sicangu (Brulé) Sioux political leader
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Known nationally from the 1950s to the 1980s as a political fighter for Indian civil rights and tribal self-determination, Robert Phillip Burnette was born in Rosebud South Dakota, on January 26, 1926. His parents Grover and Winnie Rogers Burnette, were members of a family of Sioux ranchers and farmers in the White River area of Rosebud Reservation.
———Political activism came almost naturally to Burnette. His grandfather and father had both been prominent in reservation politics, representing their districts on the tribal council, and had also been active in Democratic Party politics in the state and national levels. One of Burnette's earliest memories was of his own campaigning at the Rosebud Boarding School when he was eight years old, opposing the tribe's acceptance of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 because it withheld from Indians the right of self-government.
———Burnette received all his formal education at the Rosebud Boarding School. In 1943, when he was seventeen years old, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served with an antiaircraft unit in the Pacific. During World War II, he saw San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other off-reservation places for the first time, observing the better material standards of living enjoyed by non-Indians and persuading himself that after the war the government would see to it that Indians on reservations also had a better life.
———Yet when he returned to Rosebud in 1946, he found things the same, or even worse. At first he joined his father in farming and ranching, and in 1947 he married Bernice E. Briggs of the Rosebud Reservation community of Okreek, with whom he eventually had nine children. But anti-Indian prejudice, discrimination, and the policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs still presented everyday problems for the Sioux people. Earlier, government allotment policies — which resulted in the breaking up of Sioux cattle associations, whose members had grazed their stock in common on tribal lands — had forced Indian ranchers to confine their cattle to their own small allotments. This change had driven many Sioux out of ranching and had caused others, including Burnette's family, to curtail their operations and rent grazing lands from others.
———Now there were new problems. Pressed by whites who wanted the Indians' lands, the termination-minded Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1950 raised the Indian ranchers' rents and adopted other policies designed to force the Sioux to sell or lease their allotted lands to the whites. The economic squeeze and the loss of reservation lands to white angered Burnette, who blamed much of what was happening on collision between corrupt tribal officials and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1952, after a hard-fought campaign, he won election to the Rosebud Tribal Council, representing the reservation's Swift Bear community. Two years later, at the age of twenty-eight, his dynamism and commitment to reform led to his election as tribal president. He served in that capacity for eight years, being reelected in 1956, 1958, and 1960.
———By the late 1950s he had won widespread attention as a combative Indian leader, representing his tribe in national and regional Indian organizations, helping organize Indian intertribal councils in Arizona and California, and gaining support for Indian causes from many prominent non-Indians who in time would include the philanthropist Doris Duke, John and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1961, backed by a hreform faction of tribal leaders and believing that he could better serve his people by working on the national level, he resigned from the presidency of his tribe and assumed the duties and responsibilities of executive director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in Washington, D.C.
———There, working with legislators on Capitol Hill and the Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and other government officials, he struggled to bring about reforms at all levels of Indian affairs. Many of the causes for which he fought, including self-determination and an Indian civil rights act (one finally passed in 1968, though it was largely nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez decision), were aimed at ending collusion on reservations between dictorial government agents and corrupt tribal officials, and inevitably Burnette's championing of these causes made him powerful enemies as well as friends.
———Meanwhile, conditions among his own people on the Rosebud Reservation had continued to concern him, and in 1964, feuding with Cato Valandra, his successor as tribal president, he retired from his position with the NCAI and returned to his people. In the following two decades, he continued to battle for self-determination, sovereignty, and other Indian causes both on the national scene and on his reservation. Backed largely by young Indians, as well as by elders, full bloods, and other traditionalists, he ran repeatedly for the tribal presidency, losing several times through what he charged were fraudulent actions by his opponents, but winning in 1974. At the same time, he played leading roles, sometimes as a mediator and advocate of nonviolence, in some of the historic Indian activist events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the takeover of the Bureau of Indian affairs building in Washington D.C., and the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee. Documenting the Indians' struggles, he published The Tortured Americans in 1971 and coauthored The Road to Wounded Knee in 1974.
———Burnette's last years were marked by bitter political fights seeming from his attempts to gain independent tribal judiciary at Rosebud that would enable Indians to rein in the powers of corrupt tribal officers. Trumped-up charges of misconduct in office were leveled against him, and he was denied the right to work office again. He fought the charges and was cleared by the tribal court. But it was too late. On September 12, 1984, preparing once again to run for president of his tribe, he died of heart failure.
———In a time of great change in the relations between Indians and the rest of the American people, Burnette's significance by the crusading role he played in Washington and among non-Indians, as well as Indian, friends and supporters that helped to turn public opinion on the federal government away from the 1950s policy of terminating reservations and, by the 1970s, toward one of recognizing the Indians' right of sovereignty and self-determination. A memorial card printed for his funeral read, "One man, with the courage of his convictions, is a majority" — a sentiment that to many reflected his qualities of perseverance and committment.
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ALVIN M. JOSEPH, JR.
Greenwich, Connecticut
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CLOUD, HENRY ROE (Wa-Na-Xi-Lay Hunkah)
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(1884-1950)

Nebraska Winnebago educator, political leader, and Indian Service employee
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Wa-Na-Xi-Lay Hunkah was born on December 28, 1884, along the Missouri River on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska. He was given his name Henry Clarence Cloud by educators at the Genoa, Nebraska, government boarding school, who found his Indian name too cumbersome. Cloud later transferred to the Santee Normal Training School, a mission-run Indian school on the nearby Santee Indian Reservation. At Santee, which was primarily a vocational high school, Cloud trained as a printer and blacksmith. At the Santee school, Cloud also converted to Christianity, a commitment that continued and was a major force throughout his life. At the urging of one of his teachers at Santee, Cloud applied and was accepted at Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Massachusetts. Mount Hermon served as a college preparatory school, and many of its graduates went on to Ivy League schools. Cloud graduated in the summer of 1906 as salutatorian of his class, and entered Yale University that fall.
———In the spring of 1907, Cloud met the missionaries Walter and Mary Roe when they came to speak at Yale. The Roe family was actively involved in missionary activities among the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian tribes at Colony, Oklahoma. Cloud, as a sign of respect and affection for this couple and especially for Mary Roe, soon began using "Roe" as a middle name. During summer vacations, Cloud joined the couple in their missionary efforts at Colony and, at Cloud's urging, on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska.
———By the time Cloud graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and philosophy in 1910, he was gaining national exposure. Cloud played an active role in the famous Lake Mohonk Conferences and in 1910 was one of the keynote speakers. Cloud also became a strong advocate for the return and the allotment of the Apache prisoners held at Fort Sill, a cause that he helped lead until the remnants of the tribe were freed in 1913.
———After Yale, Cloud continued his education. He attended Oberlin College in Ohio for a year and then attended Suburn Theological Seminary in New York State, where he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1913. While doing his seminary work, Cloud had also undertaken graduate studies at Yale, receiving a master's degree in anthropology from that school in 1912.
———Cloud added to his national reputation by becoming one of the early members of the Society of American Indians, a Pan-Indian reform group founded in 1911. Cloud held several offices in the SAI and participated in most of its annual conferences until 1920. At the 1914 SAI conference in Madison, Wisconsin, Cloud met Elizabeth Bender, a Minnesota Ojibwa who had attended Hampton Institute and was also active in SAI affairs. Bender was the sister of Charles "Chief" Bender of baseball fame. Cloud and Bender were married on June 12, 1916, and had five children: Elizabeth Marion (1917-91), Anne Woesha (1918-73), Lillian Alberta (1920-57), Romana Clark (1922-72), and Henry Roe Cloud II (1926-29).
———After seminary, Cloud focused more and more on the development of his own school for Indian youth. Cloud started working with the Roes on plans for the school as early as 1908, and between 1913 and 1915 he identified potential sponsors, board members, and sites for the school. In the fall of 1915, the Roe Indian Institution, so named to honor Walter Roe, but later remained the American Indian Institute, opened in Wichita, Kansas. Cloud's goal was to run a "Mr. Hermon of the West" to prepare Indian men for college. Cloud acted as president, chief fund-raiser, teacher, principal, and in many other capacities during the sixteen years he ran the school. Leading the only Indian-run high school in the country only added to Cloud's growing national reputation.
———In 1914 and 1915, Cloud investigated the Indian school system for the Phelps-Stokes Fund, a New York-based philanthropic organization devoted to improving minority educational opportunities. Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work chose Cloud to be one of the "Committee of 100," a group that was formed in 1923 to advise the administration on Indian affairs. In 1926, Lewis M. Mariam picked Cloud to be one of the principal investigators for the Mariam Commission, which sponsored the now-famous survey for the Institute for Government Research on the conditions of the Indian tribes and field administration. This investigation led to the publication of The Problem of Indian Administration in 1928. As a result of his role in the American Indian Institute, and his vital writing and public-speaking career, Cloud received wide recognition from both Indians and whites as an expert on Indian affairs, especially in the area of Indian education.
———Cloud began his almost twenty-year career in government in late August 1931 as a field representative at large, with duties relating to Indian education. Cloud's appointment was widely covered in the press, and it was reported that he was the first Native American to fill the post of field agent in the Indian Service. Cloud's duties in his early years of government service ranged far beyond Indian education as he conducted investigations at Indian agencies around the country. By 1933, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier appointed Cloud superintendent of the Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kansas, perhaps the most visible and prestigious position in Indian education.
———Cloud had served at Haskell for less than one year when Collier asked him to help lead the fight for the acceptance of the Wheeler-Howard Act. Cloud traveled and spoke widely among the Indians, especially those of North and South Dakota, garnering support for the bill and later helping tribes organize under its provisions. In recognition of Cloud's prominence, in 1935 the Indian Council Fire chose Cloud to receive honor in 1939, Cloud accepted the position of superintendent of the Umatilla Agency near Pendleton, Oregon. Cloud was a strong advocate for the tribes assigned to his agency, fighting for increased New Deal dollars and helping the tribes prepare for the many changes that the huge hydropower dams along the Columbia River would bring to these salmon-fishing people. In 1948 Cloud was reassigned to the Portland-area office of the BIA, where he was given the task of untangling the heirship records of the Grande Ronde-Siletz Agency as part of an Indian Claims Commission settlement. Cloud died on February 9, 1950, in Siletz, Oregon.
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JASON TETZLOFF
Western Washington University

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COOLIDGE, SHERMAN (Runs-on-Top)
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(1862-1932)

Native American leader and minister.
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Every now and then an individual of remarkable accomplishments and unique experience is forgotten as history is recorded. Such is the case with Sherman Coolidge. Coolidge's life is a story of irony and contrast that unfolded during a critical period for American Indian populations.
———Runs-On-Top, later to be known as Sherman Coolidge, was born in 1862 near Goose Creek, in the Wind River Country of Wyoming. His parents, Banasda (Big Heart) and Ba-ahnoce (Turtle Woman), were Arapahos. The Arapahos were almost continually at war with the Shoshones and Bannocks while also being involved in conflicts with federal troops. When Runs-on-Top was ten years old, his father was killed by a war party of Bannocks who were attempting to steal horses. Runs-on-Top, his younger brother, and his mother escaped by crawling under their tipi cover and hiding in the brush until the fight was over.
———In the spring of 1870, the Arapahos were attacked by a large contingent of Shoshones and Bannocks near the present site of Lander, Wyoming. Runs-on-Top and his younger brother were taken captive during the raid, but their mother escaped. Eventually, the boys were given to American troops by the Shoshones and Bannocks. Their mother, after learning where the boys were, decided to leave them in the care of the military for their safety. The two youngsters remained with the army at Camp Brown, Wyoming, and were taken in by military families. The younger brother, Little One-Who-Dies-and-Lives Again, was cared for by Captain Laribee and renamed Philip Sheridan, after the famous general. Runs-on-Top was befriended by the Camp Brown surgeon, Dr. Shapleigh, and was renamed for William Tecumseh Sherman. Young William Sherman caught the eye of Captain and Mrs. Charles A. Coolidge, who were childless, and in late 1870 the pair adopted him. William Sherman became Sherman Coolidge.
———Coolidge was treated well by his foster parents, who encouraged his education and rapid assumption of white ways. Over time, the boy began to mirror the dress, habits, and manners of white children from fine families. At the age of nine, he was baptized by the Episcopal bishop, the Reverend Southgate, and was enrolled at the Shattuck Military School in Faribault, Minnesota. An exemplary student, he consistently ranked the upper quarter of his class.
———As Coolidge grew, his memories of his early life among the Arapahos faded. His foster parents encouraged him to perform to the best of his abilities and to strive for perfection. The Coolidges knew that segments of the white community would resent Sherman because of his Indian ancestry, but they hoped that a good education would enable him to overcome these prejudices. Ironically, Sherman accompanied his adoptive father west in 1876 while Captain Coolidge was involved in campaigns against the Sioux. It was during that same year that Sherman began to consider becoming a missionary among the western tribes. Initially the Coolidges tried to discourage him, but they eventually enrolled him in the Seabury Divinity School, near Chicago. In 1884, Coolidge graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree and later that same year was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church by Henry B. Whipple. Shortly thereafter, Coolidge proceeded to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming to undertake his first church assignment.
———The Wind River Reservation was originally established for the Shoshones. Later the Arapahos were placed on the reservation with their old adversaries, and the two groups occupied opposite ends of the reserve. Upon his arrival at Wind River, Sherman was greeted by his mother, Ba-ahnoce, who had learned of his impending return from a local missionary. After so many years of separation, Coolidge felt somewhat alienated from his mother, but the two maintained cordial relations and he eventually persuaded her to convert to Christianity. During his first years at Wind River, Coolidge worked as a mediator between the tribal factions and helped secure a tentative peace between the groups.
———In 1887, Coolidge enrolled at Hobart College in Geneva, New York, to continue his theological studies. He completed his courses in 1889 and was ordained to the priesthood before returning to Wind River Agency. Back in Wyoming, he ministered to the needs of Indians and whites alike and traveled extensively to perform services for outlying communities. While Coolidge was engaged in his church work, he met Grace Wetherbee, the daughter of an affluent New York City couple, who was visiting an old school friend. Grace was also interested in church work, and the two began a long-term relationship that would culminate in their marriage in October 1902. Numerous people had counseled against the mixed-race marriage. Yet when an announcement of the marriage appeared in the New York, headlines "Indian Husband Approved," the opening line read: "Father of Miss Wetherbee who married Arapaho, gave full consent."
———Grace Coolidge worked hand in hand with her husband as he ministered to the needs of the Wind River community. She began to write about her experiences on the reservation, and many of these stories were published in Collier's Weekly and the Outlook. Sherman worked diligently on behalf of American Indians and in 1911 became one of the founding members of the Society of American Indians. The society was the first prominent Indian-controlled rights organization in the country, and Sherman remained an influential figure in the group for a number of years. Grace's writing led to the publication of Teepee Neighbors in 1917, a collection of touching vignettes of life on the Wind River Reservation in the early nineteenth century. The Coolidges raised two daughters, Sarah and Rose, and adopted a number of Indian children. Sometime after World War I Sherman transferred to Colorado Springs, Colorado, and served in churches in that state. He died on January 24, 1932, and Grace died five years later, in 1937.
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GEORGE L. CORNWELL (Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa)
Michigan State University

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COPWAY, GEORGE (Kahgegagahbowh "First Standing")
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(1818-69)

Mississauga Ojibwa writer and lecturer.
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With the publication of his autobiography, Life, History, and Travels (1847), George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh, "First Standing") became one of the best-known American writers of his day. Three more books, completed in 1850 and 1851, and his publication of a newspaper, Copway's American Indian, in 1851, gave the young man access to America's highest social and literary circles. He was one of the first North American Indians to have his writings published and widely read.
———In his autobiography Copway described his childhood on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in the Rice Lake area of Upper Canada, today's Ontario, from his birth 1818 to his departure as a Methodist Church worker in the Church's Lake Superior District. His parents had educated him in the Ojibwa tradition until their conversion to Methodism in the late 1820s. After they became Christians their son attended the mission school at Rice Lake.
———None of the details of Copway's early life, until he left for Lake Superior in 1834, can be verified by other sources. Regardless of the lack of confirming accounts, however, the story he tells in his autobiography rings true. The Ojibwas in Upper Canada did indeed have enormous challenges in the 1820s as a result of the influx of tens of thousands of British immigrants onto their hunting grounds. The newcomers inadvertently brought disease, and traders introduced an abundance of alcohol. The Ojibwas — of Missaugas, as the settlers called the Ojibwas on the north shore of Lake Ontario — suffered great population loss, and alcohol abuse became epidemic. After Missauga Christians led by Peter Jones, a bilingual and bicultural preacher from the Credit River, reached them in 1826 and 1827, many Rice Lake Mississaugas embraced Christianity.
———Copway gave special attention in his autobiography to his family's conversion. The common human values shared by the Indian and Christian faiths attracted his parents, as did the Methodists' abstention from alcohol. Visions and dreams played an important role in his family's and his own acceptance of Methodism. His later life indicates that his desire to achieve equality with the newcomers also motivated him to join the church.
———The new convert's two or three years at the Rice Lake Methodist school gave him enough knowledge of English to act as an Ojibwa interpreter for the nonnative missionaries. The bright young man moved quickly through the ranks in the Lake Superior District as his abilities in translating became well known. After three years an an interpreter, schoolteacher, and preacher, the Illinois Conference of the Methodist Church sent him and two other young Ojibwa converts to the Ebenezer Manual Labor School at Jacksonville, Illinois. Two years of study there prepared them for ordination.
———Copway's close contacts with nonnatives led him to adopt much of their outlook. As he wrote in his last book, Running Sketches of Men and Places (1851) "Man is the one from whom this world is made." He accepted many of the values of the larger society and distanced himself from those Native Americans spiritual beliefs that did not place human beings in the center of the universe.
———His marriage brought the Indian minister ever closer to the dominant society. On a short visit to Upper Canada in early 1840 he met Elizabeth Howell, a young Englishwoman whose family farmed in the Toronto area. They married in June 1840, just before Copway traveled to Minnesota to take up his first posting as an Indian missionary. But they would not spend long in the United States. When his nonnative Methodist colleagues declined to treat him as an equal he became frustrated and unhappy. Finally in 1842, he left the United States for the Upper Canada, where he served at the Ojibwa Methodist mission at Saugeen on Lake Huron.
———Finances proved the young native minister's undoing. he spent band funds freely, without always obtaining council approval to do so. In early 1846 two Upper Canadian bands, those of Saugeen and his own Rice Lake, accused him of embezzlement. As a result of the charges the Indian Department put him in jail, where he remained for several weeks. The Canadian Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church expelled him. Alienated and bitter, Copway and his family returned to the United States after his release from prison.
———In terms of his career, his expulsion from the Methodist Church proved a blessing in disguise, for it forced him into a new field of endeavor: he became a celebrated author and lecturer. How Copway succeeded in writing his life story while, in one observer's words "going from place to place, without much of steady employment, for 6 or 9 months, and perhaps more," remains a mystery. No doubt his well-educated wife helped. Curiously, his autobiography resembles the African slave narratives then available, as well as the works of writers of spiritual confessions. As one might expect, he makes no mention of his short stay in a Canadian jail, or of his expulsion from the Canadian Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church.
———Copway's Life, History, and Travels proved an instant success. It had gone through seven printings by the end of 1848. As the newly acclaimed author spoke well, a lecturing career opened up to him. Large numbers of Americans came to his lectures to see and hear "the noble Christian convert." New writing projects followed: his Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1850), the first history of a North American Indian nation in English by an Indian; and Running Sketches of Men and Places (1831), an account of his European travels in 1850. He also published an epic poem, The Ojibway Conquest (1850), alghough Julius Taylor Clark, a former Indian agent, later claimed to have written it. Apparently Clark gave the manuscript to Copway to publish on the understanding that Copway would use the money earned to promote the creation of an Indian territory west of the Mississippi.
———In May 31, 1851, issue of the Literary World, the magazine's editors, Evert and George Duyckinck, described George Copway as "a shrewd, wide-awake man, with a knowledge of the world which few of the white race could overmatch." Yet events would prove this assessment premature. Copway's inability to enlarge upon his writing themes and his constant need to solicit money caused his downfall. Within half a year after Duyckincks' reference, Copway was indeed overmatched. His newspaper folded, and gradually thereafter he lost his audience.
———Little is known about Copway's life after 1851. Scattered references exist to lectures he presented throughout the eastern United States (one was canceled in Boston in 1838 because of poor attendance). During the Civil War he worked as a recruiter of Canadian Indians for the Union Army. After the war in 1867, he surfaced as a rood doctor in Detroit. One year later he appeared in Canada, without his wife and infant daughter, at the Lake of Two Mountains (Oka) Reserve, just west of Montreal. There he declared himself a "pagan" eager to join the Roman Catholic Church. The one-time Methodist preacher, author, lecturer, and herbal doctor died at the Lake of Two Mountains Reserve early in 1869, just before his First Communion.
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DONALD B. SMITH
University of Calgary

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CORNPLANTER (KAIIONTWA'KON "By What One Plants")
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(1740?-1836)

Seneca war chief and statesman.
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Cornplanter (Kaiiontwa'kon, "By What One Plants") was born at Canawagus on the Genesee River in present-day New York State around 1740. His father was an Albany trader named john Abeel or O'Bail, and Cornplanter was known to the English as John O'Bail or Captain O'Bail. His half brother Handsome Lake was an Iroquois Confederacy chief, as a nephew who was known as Blacksnake or Governor Blacksnake.
———During the American Revolution, Cornplanter was chosen at a gathering of warriors (along with the respected Seneca war chief Old Smoke) to lead the Iroquois warriors in support of the British. Cornplanter has at first vigorously opposed Iroquois participation in the war on either side and had admonished his warriors against fighting, starting, according to Governor Blacksnake, "war is war Death is the Death a fight is a hard business." Governor Blacksnake also stated that at the end of his speach Joseph Brant, the war chief of the Mohawk Valley Mohawks, who had earlier traveled to England to cement his ties to the Crown, accused Cornplanter of cowardice. Cornplanter eventually led the fighters against the Americans throughout the course of the war.
———Cornplanter was second in command of the Indian fighters at the Battle of Wyoming in June 1778. More than 300 Americans were killed in this action (and fewer than ten Indians and Rangers) while eight forts and a thousand dwellings were destroyed. On August 2, 1780, Cornplanter, Brant, Old Snake, and the Cayuga war chief Fish Carrier led about four hundred Indians and Tories on a scorched-earth campaign against the Canajoharie District in the Mohawk Valley. Approximately fifty to sixty prisoners were taken, while two forts and fifty-three houses were destroyed. Among the houses burned was that of John Abeel, who was captured and then recognized as Cornplanter's father. Cornplanter apologized intensely for burning his father's home and offered to take his father home to the Seneca country or, if he preferred, to send him back to his white family, Abeel chose the latter.
———In October 1780, Cornplanter was among the leaders in a series of attacks on forts and settlements in the Schoharie Valley in what is now eastern New York State. This action was in response to the Clinton-Sullivan campaign of the previous year that had resulted in the destruction of two hundred Iroquois houses and an estimated 150,000 bushels of grain in addition to some forty Iroquois dead and more than sixty captured. The counterattack prompted New York Governor George Clinton to comment that New York's western frontier was not at Schenctady.
———At the end of the Revolutionary War Cornplanter organized and led a delegation to Fort Stanwix, where in 1783 a treaty was negotiated between the United States and the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. While embraced by the United States, the treaty made such sweeping concessions of Iroquois land that, when presented to the government of the Confederacy, it was deemed unacceptable. The Six Nations Grand Council never ratified it. In a speech delivered to President Washington at Philadelphia, Cornplanter stated: "When our chiefs returned from the treaty at Fort Stanwix, and laid before our council what had been done there, our nation was surprised to hear how great a country you had compelled them to give up to you, without your paying to us any thing for it. . . . We asked each other what have we done to deserve such severe chastisement?" Cornplanter participated in a series of treaties in 1784, 1794, 1797, and 1802, all of which ceded large areas of Seneca territory to non-Indians. Because of these cessions he became extremely unpopular among his own people and at one point stated "[t]he Great God, and not man, has preserved the Cornplanter from the hands of his own nation."
———In 1790 Cornplanter and several other Seneca chiefs met with George Washington to protect the terms of the Fort Stanwix Treaty, stating "you demand from us a great country, as the price of that peace which you had offered us; as if our want of strength had destroyed our rights. . . . Where the terms dictated to us by your commissioners reasonable and Just?" The Senecas went on to say that there was no reason why further land cessions should be expected.
———Cornplanter subsequently became a faithful ally of the new United States and was probably influential in persuading George Washington to adopt treaty making as the preferred method of dealing with Indian tribes while urging fair and honest treatment of the Indians generally. Congress passed the 1790 Non-Intercourse Act with the intention of upholding President Washington's promises that the federal government would protect Indian lands against fraud and theft.
———On November 4, 1791, the United States suffered what was probably its worst military defeat at the hands of Indians; 620 soldiers under General Author St. Clair were killed in a complete rout by the Shawnees and their allies on the Ohio-Indiana border. Subsequent attempts to arrange peace negotiations with these Indians were not successful, and George Washington now turned to the Six Nations to act as an intermediaries. The following year Cornplanter, at considerable risk to his own life, led a Six Nations delegation to a meeting on the Glaize (now Auglaize) River in an effort to reach an accommodation with the victorious Shawnees on behalf of the United States. Cornplanter's delegation met with the Indian forces that had defeated General St. Clair and found them in a less than conciliatory mood. They treated Cornplanter and his delegation with contempt for what they saw as their subservience to the Americans and issued a demand that white settlers evacuate the lands they were occupying northwest of the Ohio River. Although he was not completely successful in this peace initiative, Cornplanter received a grant of one square mile of land from the State of Pennsylvania for his efforts for his assistance in dissuading the Iroquois Confederacy from joining the Shawnees in the fighting in Ohio.
———He was living on his "Cornplanter Grant" in June of 1799 when his half brother Handsome Lake, who was living in the same house, arose from a coma and announced he had experienced a vision. The two men continued to live there until 1803 when a dispute with Handsome Lake sent a latter to Coldspring on the Alegheny Reservation, where he embarked on his lifelong mission to revive the ancient ways and values while adapting to the new world of the reservation. Cornplanter continued to live on his Pennsylvania grant for the rest of his life.
———Cornplanter died on February 18, 1836, and was buried at the Cornplanter Grant. In 1984 the cemetery where he was buried was moved to higher ground to make way for the reservoir that would be created by construction of the nearby Kinzua Dam.
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JOHN C. MOHAWK (Seneca)
State University of New York at Buffalo
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CRAZY HORSE ([TASUNKE WITKO]; LIGHT HAIR AND CURLY, HIS HORSE STANDS IN SIGHT)
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(1840-77)

Oglala Lakota warrior and political leader.
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Crazy Horse! the name stirs the imagination and a sense that we should know who and what he was. Some of us may indeed know the legend surrounding the man, but not many know the flesh-and-blood, caring, thinking, feeling, human being that was Crazy Horse.
———He was of Oglala and Mniconju stock, born near Bear Butte, in the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota, in the Winter the Oglala Took One Hundred Horses from the Snakes (according to the winter count of the Bad Face Band of the Oglalas), or 1840.
———His father, the second Crazy Horse (his grandfather was the first) was Oglala Lakota and his mother, Rattling Blanket Woman was a Mniconju Lakota. As a boy he was known as Light Hair and Curly. In his Mid to late teens he was called His Horse Stands in Sight. It was probably before his twentieth year that he was given the name Crazy Horse, becoming the third, and the last, in his family to carry it.
———Crazy Horse is most often remembered as a warrior and leader of warriors, riding into battle with loose, waist-length hair flowing in the wind. While this is a true image, there were other sides to his identity: he was a son, a pupil, a brother, a loner, a husband, a thwarted lover, and a father. The way of the warrior was a social role preordained for males in traditional Lakota life. Young men, however, often sought a vision to clarify their specific paths and seek spiritual connection to help him with that path. Crazy Horse had such a vision as a boy. In it he saw a warrior mounted on a horse that changed colors, riding through hail and lightning, and through the arrows and bullets of enemies as his own people tried to hold him back. The vision revealed his destiny, giving him a clarity of purpose that few men or women in any culture have had.
———Two incidents during his boyhood helped formed his attitude about white people. They occurred about a year apart, and both involved the U.S. Army. In the first, in 1854, a brash young officer underestimated the resolve and fighting ability of Lakota warriors when he insisted that they return a diseased and abandoned cow they had captured. The confrontation set off an encounter that resulted in the deaths of an entire detachment of thirty soldiers. The second incident occurred when the army retaliated about a year later and wiped out most of an unsuspecting Lakota village, killing women and children as well as warriors. Both incidents taught Crazy Horse that white people could be cruel and were not to be trusted. It was a lesson he never forgot.
———As a warrior Crazy Horse earned recognition and many battle honors. In 1866, for example, his actions as a decoy leader helped to lure a contingent of eighty soldiers from Fort Phil Kearny (in what is now north-central Wyoming) into a trap set by Lakota and utter defeat by Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. That engagement was called the Battle of the Hundred in the Hands by the Lakotas, and the Fetterman Battle or the Fetterman Massacre by the whites. Because of such deeds Crazy Horse became a war leader by his mid-twenties, though he did not seek that role or its accompanying status.
———In Lakota tradition the people selected by consensus, basing their opinions on the qualities, virtues, and actions that set a person apart, Crazy Horse certainly set himself apart as a courageous warrior, and as a quiet, humble, caring man away from the warpath. In fact, he was one of the youngest Lakota men in memory to receive one of the highest honors and responsibilities according to males: the title of Shirtwearer.
———A shirtwearer was expected to be an ultimate provider and protector of his people and to lead an exemplary life as a role model. When Crazy Horse was caught trying to steal another man's wife, he was forced to give up his shirt and the role. But because of his considerable status as a warrior and war leader, the people continued to look to him for overall leadership — a fact that fomented jealousy among his rivals and may ultimately have lead to his death.
———Crazy Horse was a quiet, improspective, and very shy man. He dressed plenty and rarely spoke in public or participated in public ceremonies. He did not recount his war deeds, nor did he wear or display the symbols of achievement accruing to him because of those deeds. Such reticence was not the custom of Lakota warriors.
———He had three wives during the course of his life. The first was Black Buffalo Woman, whom he had loved since boyhood. Though she had married another, she left her husband (a privilege allowed in Lakota tradition) and eloped with Crazy Horse. But her jealous husband followed them and nearly killed Crazy Horse. Black Buffalo Woman finally returned to hr husband, mainly to avoid bloodshed among her own people. His second wife was Black Shawl. His third wife was Nelie Laravie (or Larrabee), given to him five months before his death. Of the three, only Black Shawl bore him a child, a daughter. Black Shawl was the wife with whom he lived through much of his adult life; she died in 1920. Their daughter, named They Are Afraid of Her, died at the age of three, probably of cholera.
———In 1876 Crazy Horse was the battlefield leader in two engagements considered by the U.S. Army to be among the most pivotal and important in what they termed "the Indian Wars." At the Battle of the Rosebud he and his forced fought General George Crook to a standstill. And eight days later on the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) River he led Lakotas and Cheyenne warriors again in a decisive victory against Lieutenant Colonel George Custer's Seventh Cavalry. Unfortunately, however, those victories served only to motivate the army to stop up its campaigns against the last free-roaming bands of Lakotas. In May of 1877 Crazy Horse's band indicated it would surrender. His was among the last of the Lakotas to come in.
———Crazy Horse intended to settle at one of the other agencies in Dakota Territory, but he was persuaded at the last minute to take his people to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, with the understanding that he would be allowed to have his own agency there. That never happened.
———Several months after his arrival at Fort Robinson, the commanding general attempted to take Crazy Horse into custody, because of rumors of Crazy Horse plotting against the government. Crazy Horse resisted the attempt and in the ensuing panic a guard stabbed him twice with a rifle-mounted bayonet. Crazy Horse died that night, September 5, 1877. He was thirty-six years old, the victim of his own stature and the jealousy and fear of lesser men. His life concluded with and symbolized the last years of the great buffalo hunting culture of the Lakotas.
———As a leader, Crazy Horse kept the interests of his people before him. He provided for them and protected them from harm. He signed no treaties, and he surrendered only because he did not want his followers to suffer depravation, cold, and hunger. Even in his dying moments he thought of his people. FOr all of those reasons, it is easy for the Lakota to remember him and say his name as if it were a prayer. Crazy Horse!
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JOSEPH M. MARSHALL III (Sicangu Lakota)
American Indian Nations Arts and Cultural Organization
Santa Fe, New Mexico

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COPWAY, GEORGE (Kahgegagahbowh "First Standing")
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(1818-69)

Mississauga Ojibwa writer and lecturer.
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With the publication of his autobiography, Life, History, and Travels (1847), George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh, "First Standing") became one of the best-known American writers of his day. Three more books, completed in 1850 and 1851, and his publication of a newspaper, Copway's American Indian, in 1851, gave the young man access to America's highest social and literary circles. He was one of the first North American Indians to have his writings published and widely read.
———In his autobiography Copway described his childhood on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in the Rice Lake area of Upper Canada, today's Ontario, from his birth 1818 to his departure as a Methodist Church worker in the Church's Lake Superior District. His parents had educated him in the Ojibwa tradition until their conversion to Methodism in the late 1820s. After they became Christians their son attended the mission school at Rice Lake.
———None of the details of Copway's early life, until he left for Lake Superior in 1834, can be verified by other sources. Regardless of the lack of confirming accounts, however, the story he tells in his autobiography rings true. The Ojibwas in Upper Canada did indeed have enormous challenges in the 1820s as a result of the influx of tens of thousands of British immigrants onto their hunting grounds. The newcomers inadvertently brought disease, and traders introduced an abundance of alcohol. The Ojibwas — of Missaugas, as the settlers called the Ojibwas on the north shore of Lake Ontario — suffered great population loss, and alcohol abuse became epidemic. After Missauga Christians led by Peter Jones, a bilingual and bicultural preacher from the Credit River, reached them in 1826 and 1827, many Rice Lake Mississaugas embraced Christianity.
———Copway gave special attention in his autobiography to his family's conversion. The common human values shared by the Indian and Christian faiths attracted his parents, as did the Methodists' abstention from alcohol. Visions and dreams played an important role in his family's and his own acceptance of Methodism. His later life indicates that his desire to achieve equality with the newcomers also motivated him to join the church.
———The new convert's two or three years at the Rice Lake Methodist school gave him enough knowledge of English to act as an Ojibwa interpreter for the nonnative missionaries. The bright young man moved quickly through the ranks in the Lake Superior District as his abilities in translating became well known. After three years an an interpreter, schoolteacher, and preacher, the Illinois Conference of the Methodist Church sent him and two other young Ojibwa converts to the Ebenezer Manual Labor School at Jacksonville, Illinois. Two years of study there prepared them for ordination.
———Copway's close contacts with nonnatives led him to adopt much of their outlook. As he wrote in his last book, Running Sketches of Men and Places (1851) "Man is the one from whom this world is made." He accepted many of the values of the larger society and distanced himself from those Native Americans spiritual beliefs that did not place human beings in the center of the universe.
———His marriage brought the Indian minister ever closer to the dominant society. On a short visit to Upper Canada in early 1840 he met Elizabeth Howell, a young Englishwoman whose family farmed in the Toronto area. They married in June 1840, just before Copway traveled to Minnesota to take up his first posting as an Indian missionary. But they would not spend long in the United States. When his nonnative Methodist colleagues declined to treat him as an equal he became frustrated and unhappy. Finally in 1842, he left the United States for the Upper Canada, where he served at the Ojibwa Methodist mission at Saugeen on Lake Huron.
———Finances proved the young native minister's undoing. he spent band funds freely, without always obtaining council approval to do so. In early 1846 two Upper Canadian bands, those of Saugeen and his own Rice Lake, accused him of embezzlement. As a result of the charges the Indian Department put him in jail, where he remained for several weeks. The Canadian Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church expelled him. Alienated and bitter, Copway and his family returned to the United States after his release from prison.
———In terms of his career, his expulsion from the Methodist Church proved a blessing in disguise, for it forced him into a new field of endeavor: he became a celebrated author and lecturer. How Copway succeeded in writing his life story while, in one observer's words "going from place to place, without much of steady employment, for 6 or 9 months, and perhaps more," remains a mystery. No doubt his well-educated wife helped. Curiously, his autobiography resembles the African slave narratives then available, as well as the works of writers of spiritual confessions. As one might expect, he makes no mention of his short stay in a Canadian jail, or of his expulsion from the Canadian Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church.
———Copway's Life, History, and Travels proved an instant success. It had gone through seven printings by the end of 1848. As the newly acclaimed author spoke well, a lecturing career opened up to him. Large numbers of Americans came to his lectures to see and hear "the noble Christian convert." New writing projects followed: his Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1850), the first history of a North American Indian nation in English by an Indian; and Running Sketches of Men and Places (1831), an account of his European travels in 1850. He also published an epic poem, The Ojibway Conquest (1850), alghough Julius Taylor Clark, a former Indian agent, later claimed to have written it. Apparently Clark gave the manuscript to Copway to publish on the understanding that Copway would use the money earned to promote the creation of an Indian territory west of the Mississippi.
———In May 31, 1851, issue of the Literary World, the magazine's editors, Evert and George Duyckinck, described George Copway as "a shrewd, wide-awake man, with a knowledge of the world which few of the white race could overmatch." Yet events would prove this assessment premature. Copway's inability to enlarge upon his writing themes and his constant need to solicit money caused his downfall. Within half a year after Duyckincks' reference, Copway was indeed overmatched. His newspaper folded, and gradually thereafter he lost his audience.
———Little is known about Copway's life after 1851. Scattered references exist to lectures he presented throughout the eastern United States (one was canceled in Boston in 1838 because of poor attendance). During the Civil War he worked as a recruiter of Canadian Indians for the Union Army. After the war in 1867, he surfaced as a rood doctor in Detroit. One year later he appeared in Canada, without his wife and infant daughter, at the Lake of Two Mountains (Oka) Reserve, just west of Montreal. There he declared himself a "pagan" eager to join the Roman Catholic Church. The one-time Methodist preacher, author, lecturer, and herbal doctor died at the Lake of Two Mountains Reserve early in 1869, just before his First Communion.
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DONALD B. SMITH
University of Calgary

[mdenney]

CURTIS, CHARLES
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(1860-1936)

Kaw attorney, congressman, senator, and vice president of the United States.
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Born in North Topeka, Kansas on January 25, 1860, Charles Curtis is the only person of documentable Indian blood quantum to be elected to the second-highest office of the land. On his maternal side he was one-eigth Kaw (or Kansa, as the tribe is known by Euro-Americans prior to 1850). Through the marriage of his great-great-grandfather to an Osage woman, he claimed a modest blood quantum of his tribe as well. Curtis's father was Orren Arms Curtis, a non-Indian who migrated to Kansas Territory from Indiana just prior to the Civil War.
———Following the untimely death of his quarter-blood mother, Ellen, in 1863, young Charles was placed to the home of his white grandmother, Permelia Hubbard Curtis. A stern person who insisted that the Methodist Church and the Republican Party were the keys to salvation, she exerted a considerable influence on Curtis's education. At age six Curtis went to live with his Indian grandmother, Julie Gonville Pappan, on the Kaw Reservation near Council Grove, Kansas, where he attended the French Mission School. But the removal of the Kaw to an Indian Territory reservation prompted his return, in 1868, to the home of his grandmother Curtis in North Topeka.
———While attending elementary school, the young mixed blood worked weekends as a hack driver and a produce peddler at the railroad station near his grandmother's hotel and bar in North Topeka. He also rode a s a jockey in Kansas, in Indian Territory, and in Texas during the summer months of 1869-75. Following high school he read law under the Topeka attorney Aderial H. Case, and at age twenty-one he was admitted to the Kansas bar. He married Anne E. Baird of Topeka on November 27, 1884, and they had three children Permelia, Harry, and Leona.
———According to the terms of the Kansas Treaty of 1825, Curtis's grandmother Pappan was granted a fee-simple 640-acre allotment on the north bank of the Kansas River in North Topeka. Most of this allotment was sold to land jobbers, but a forty-acre tract was willed to Curtis and his sister upon the death of their mother. Utilizing his legal expertise, Curtis turned those forty-acre inheritance into a profitable enterprise, and in later years proudly cited his business acumen as proof that the allotment of Indian reservations was a powerful instrument in the assimilation of Indian people.
———Curtis's formal political career began in 1885, when he was elected county attorney for Shawnee County; the county seat, Topeka, was also the state capital. Kansas had amended its constitution in favor of prohibition five years earlier, and the young attorney made the most of it. Contrary to the expectations of most Democrats and not of a new Republican, a zealous Curtis closed down most of the bootleg bars in the county, including those operating within the shadow of the state capitol. With his reputation thus established, Curtis was elected to Congress in 1892. According to William Allen White, who knew Curtis well, issues did not really bother the Kaw politician. His small talk of local affairs, family, and the weather was rendered all the more effective by his penetrating eyes, his engaging smile — and his Indianness, at a time when most whites nostalgically anticipated the demise of Indian America.
———Because he failed to move the Kaw Reservation to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) or take part in tribal affairs, the Indian Office removed Curtis's name from tribal membership in 1878. Yet as a member of committees dealing with tribal finances, Indian Territory legislation, and public lands — and, after 1903, as chairman of the House Committee on Indian Affairs — Congressman Curtis eagerly assumed a leadership role in the future of the American Indian. He sponsored the Curtis Act of 1989, which abolished tribal courts, established the legislative machinery for dissolution of the Five Civilized Tribes, and paved the way for Oklahoma statehood. He championed the rights of Indian orphans and women even as he advocated the interests of the oil, gas, and coal companies that were cheating tribal governments of their natural resources. And he played a personal role in the allotment of his own tribe, returning to tribal membership in time to share in a lecturative distribution for himself and his children in 1902.
———For his long hours and party dedication, including what one pundit termed as trinitarian support of the tariff, the GOP, and the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic), Curtis remained in the House until 1907, when he was selected to fill the unexpired term (1907-13) of Kansas senator R. Burton. Curtis was returned to the Senate by popular vote in 1914, where he served continuously until he became Hubert Hoover's vice president in 1929. In the Senate he headed the Rules Committee, served as party whip, and generally supported conservative farm policies, high tariffs, diplomatic isolation, veterans' benefits, prohibition, and the economic interests of the native state.
———Following the death of Henry Chabot Lodge in 1924, Curtis was selected majority leader of the Senate. It was his finest hour. Yet he soon cast forging eyes on the White House — seeing the President as, if nothing else, a reward for his tireless service to the GOP. But when Hoover won the nomination on the first ballot of the Republican Convention in Kansas City, Curtis had to satisfy himself with the number-two spot on the ticket.
———As vice president, Curtis called for improving the life of American Indians, yet he provided no details as to how this was to be accomplished. Ignoring a call for reform by John Collier, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Curtis cast his lot with assimilationist organizations such as the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts (over which he proudly served as honorary chairman), a group of southwest artists who attacked Collier's proposal for a national Indian Arts and Crafts Board on the grounds that it would lower the value of Indian products and stifle individual initiative.
———Frustrated with the routine duties of the vice presidency, Curtis grudgingly wielded the Senate gavel and busied himself by decorating his office with Indian artifacts and hosting hundreds of official dinners. He attended cabinet meetings, yet his advice was seldom sought; perhaps, as one critic noted, he had little to offer.
———The victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 ended Curtis's political career. Even his home state of Kansas went for FDR, a rejection that loomed large in his decision to establish his legal residence in the District of Columbia. He retained a nominal association with a law firm in Topeka, but after 1933 his main interest was the Washington law office he had established, where Republican stalwarts gathered to discuss the future of the party and of the nation. On February 8, 1936, Curtis was found dead of a heart attack in his Washington home. Following memorial services in Washington and Topeka, Curtis was interred in a North Topeka cemetery not far from where he had been born three-quarters of a century earlier.
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WILLIAM E. UNRAU
Wichita State University

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