Little Chief

[jinlian]

According to Richard Hardoff, Little Chief was a Southern (probably Northern - edited on December 9th, 15.41 ) Cheyenne leader, of a Dog Soldier band. Born around 1826 noted for his ability as a speaker, he negotiated his band's surrender in the winter of 1877. According to A. and V. Maddux (In Dull Knife's Wake), Little Chief married Twin Woman, widow of Lame White Man and was John Stands In Timber's stepfather.
In 1878 he led a delegation to Washington to ask- without success - the moving of his people to Dakota territory.
Little Chief's and his band were on their way to Darlington, Indian Territory in 1878 when news of the Northern Cheyenne's escape to North broke - he and his band were therefore imprisoned for a while to prevent them joining Dull Knife and Little Wolf's people. In the end, they managed to reach their destination in December and stayed there until Little Chief's band in 1881 was grant permission to reach Pine Ridge and join Red Cloud's people. Agent McGillycuddy (see J. McGillycuddy McGillycuddy, agent), suspecting Little Chief and Red Cloud of "plotting" together against him, forbade the Cheyenne leader to settle near Red Cloud's camp and forced him to move to Wolf Creek..
In 1888, Little Chief was one of the Pine Ridge Cheyenne leader who signed the Crook commission's land agreement. He stayed in Pine Ridge until 1891, when finally moved with his band to Montana, in the Northern Cheyenne reservation (apparently because after the Wounded Knee massacre, most Lakotas resented the Cheyenne for providing scouts to the army) where he settled in the Tongue River area, together with Two Moons' and Little Wolf's bands.
Little Chief died near Birney in 1906.

I read somewhere about his being half-Lakota, but couldn't find any accurate information about this. Maybe somebody could fill the gaps?...

Here are some photographs of Little Chief:

1878, by C. Bell





1891, in the aftermath of Wounded Knee:

With J. H. Cook



With Oglala boarding school teacher Emma Sickels



In 1895, by Dinwidddie

[charlie]

Hi Jinlian. There is another famous Southern Cheyenne called Little Chief.
He was photographed in a 1851 delegation together White Antelope and Alights on a Cloud. In that image, he is often exchanged with famous chief Roman Nose.
Father De Smet also called him Red Skin. I think that he died in 1852.
Other infos about him? Thanks.

[jinlian]

Hi Charlie,

I knew about that photograph (think it has been posted somewhere on the main site) but honestly, I've so little information about Little Chief (the one I referred in the first posting ) that I found impossible even speculate about a family relationship with the "other" Little Chief. Maybe someone will add more...

By the way, I have his Cheyenne name as "Haahke'eveho" - is this the correct form?

[Dietmar]

We have to be careful with all the Little Chiefs... there were several men of that name. The Cheyenne in the first four photos is indeed the Cheyenne leader who was closely associated with the Oglala. The Dinwiddie portraits show a different man, who was a Southern Cheyenne.

[jinlian]

See? That wouldn't have happened, had he been called John Smith...

Jokes apart, sorry for the misposting of the last two photos. I guess it was the similar profile of the two men and their being of similar age to get me in the wrong direction. I don't think however the man in the Dinwiddie photos is the Little Chief (Southern Cheyenne too - by the way, all the sources I've got identified the Cheyenne/Oglala Little Chief as a Southern Cheyenne too) who was imprisoned at Fort Marion in 1874 at the age of 21; this would make him 42 in 1895 (when Dinwiddie took the portraits) and the man photographed looks much older than that.

Coming back to this thread original namesake, I wonder if there was some kind of association/kinship with his family and Red Cloud's tiyospaye, considering the insistence put by Ms. McGillycuddy in stressing the two chiefs' closeness...

[ephriam]

I think the Little Chief and his band who lived among the Oglala were Northern Cheyenne, not southern, despite Hardorff. Can anyone confirm? I will look through my file on him.

ephriam

[jinlian]

Hi Ephriam,

I've found two other sources on Little Chief being a Northern Cheyenne - J.H. Monnett Tell them we are going home and D. J. Berthrong The Cheyenne and Arapaho Ordeal . Sorry, I usually give Hardoff a great credit, but probably this time he got trapped in the intricacies of Native names too. I've added a note on my first posting - Diane, Dietmar, can you move the thread to the Northern Cheyenne section, please?

By the way, this is a nice print (Remington I think)

[Dietmar]

Father P. Powell has him as a Northerner, too. He led an independent band of Lakota/Cheyenne people. It is unclear if he was one of the Council Chiefs of the Cheyenne at all:

Little Chief, who was half Cheyenne and half Lakota, had a band of his own which often camped with the Ohmeseheso. However, it is not certain that he was chosen to be one of the Council of the Forty-four.
(People of the Sacred Mountain, page 923)

Little Chief was als known to his people by the names Red Nose and Cross Necklace.

Here are some more photos of him:


Little Chief by Christian Barthelmess (also printed by L.A. Huffman)


another Barthelmess portrait of Little Chief


Little Chief with white men


Little Chief (close-up)


Little Chief by Bogardus, New York

[grahamew]

Remington did indeed provide illustrations for Miles' book, but he wasn't the sole artist and this looks like the work of one of the others.

[jinlian]

Wonderful photographs! Back to Little Chief, I'd really like to know more about his and his band's activity in the 1881-91 period.

[grahamew]

Little Chief by Burbank (1899?). Interesting to see how he seems to have worn the pectoral cross down through the years.

[jinlian]

Little Chief as remembered by Burbank:

"One day while I was painting the portrait of White Bull, the Cheyenne, another Indian came into the room waving a tomahawk threateningly. He was chattering in an Indian tongue, and I asked Dave Big Man, who was an interpreter, what the newcomer was saying to White Bull. "Put this painter out of the room," he translated. "Your life will go with the picture. Don't sit for him." Dave Big Man added that the Indian was Chief Little Chief, the orator of the Cheyennes and a great friend of General Miles.

The tomahawk that Little Chief was waving had twelve notches, each one denoting a soldier he had killed.

After he had departed I asked where Little Chief lived, and next day I set out for his tepee which was about two miles from the studio. I found only his wife and children at home and did the best I could to make friends with them by giving them candy, money, and tobacco. Shortly Chief Little Chief returned. He was very hostile and asked, with a scowl, why I was there. Then noting that his wife and children were, happily occupied with the candy, his attitude changed at once. Diving into his tepee he returned with a large pocketbook filled with old letters, much soiled from handling. I read them all and made comments on them. Most of them were written by prominent people, including General Miles who concluded one letter with, "Be good to this old Indian."

I spent an hour or so with Little Chief and his family but said nothing about painting his portrait. They were all cordial when I shook hands with them and left. Early next morning, to my great surprise, Little Chief came into my studio ready to pose for his portrait.

Little Chief was a good model but an inveterate cigarette smoker. I thought I would try to smoke him out, so I hired another Indian to roll a good-sized pile of cigarettes and hand Little Chief a fresh one as rapidly as he finished the one he was smoking. Little Chief puffed steadily without pause until he had consumed ten cigarettes. Then he said suddenly, "No more." After that he smoked no more while posing for me.

Little Chief was a natural orator and story teller. While he was posing, Indians would come into the studio to listen to his stories of the feats of the Cheyennes when he was a boy. One day his audience seemed especially interested in what he was saying. My curiosity got the better of me and I asked Dave Big Man what Little Chief was talking about. Dave Big Man hesitated to tell me, saying he did not want to repeat the things Little Chief was saying. I persisted and finally he explained that Little Chief was telling the other Indians that he wanted to die killing a white man. He wanted it to be a fight to the death for both of them.

Being young and foolish, I decided to have some fun with the old Cheyenne chief. I turned to Dave Big Man. "Tell Little Chief that I want to die that way myself," I said. Little Chief looked at me in surprise. "Why do you want to die?" he asked, puzzled. I told Dave Big Man to tell him that I was many hundreds of miles away from my family, that I had seen many hard times, that often I slept in barns, box cars, or depots, with only my overcoat for a cover. I said that I wanted to fight Chief Little Chief because he had told the other Indians that I was bad medicine and that they should not pose for me. "I don't want to fight you," Little Chief replied through the interpreter. "You are kind to us. You pay us well for sitting for our pictures. You have been kind to my wife and children." I listened attentively and then told Dave Big Man to explain that I was in earnest but that I did not want to fight with old-fashioned weapons like the bow and arrow or tomahawk but preferred to shoot it out with revolvers at a distance of ten feet. I suggested that in this way we both would be sure to be slain. When I finished with my bravado speech I rose from my stool, put away my palette and brushes, and removed my coat. I said that I was ready. Little Chief and the other Indians were astounded. "No," he said, "I will not fight you." If he had accepted my challenge I think every hair on my head would have turned white right there. The news spread like wildfire over the reservation. My studio was soon filled with young Cheyennes who wanted to see the white artist who wanted to fight Little Chief with six-shooters. "Many-Brushes is a brave man," they said. They little knew that I was shaking in my boots. But after that I enjoyed special status among the Cheyennes."

[grahamew]

Crazy (and lucky) guy!

[Gary]

There is some information about the Northern Cheyenne Little Chief in one of the links from the home page. Go to Oglala and look under the heading Black Twin. There you will see some notes by Kingsley Bray that were originally posted on the LBHA message boards. He deduces that Little Chief was half Cheyenne/half Lakota and a brother of Black Twin, White Twin and the younger No Water. On looking into this further, I think that he is right.

I hope to post further details on Black Twin and the No Water family on the Oglala thread shortly. In the meantime, I have been trying to dig up further information on Little Chief.

One of the problems is that, as Dietmar has mentioned, there were several Little Chiefs and Hardorff is not the only writer who confuses them.

Kingsley speculates that Little Chief was born about 1823, making him a little older than Black Twin and White Twin (No Water was the youngest brother). I think that this is probably correct.

Little Chief surrendered to General Miles in 1877 and, after acting as a scout for the army, was eventually sent to Indian Territory with his people. He did not join the Dull Knife/Little Wolf exodus north in 1878, but continuously petitioned for his people to be able to return to the north (as promised by Miles). He made two trips to Washington in support of these efforts.

Eventually, Little Chief and his band were allowed to return to the north in 1881, although they were kept at Pine Ridge and not allowed to join the other Northern Cheyennes on the Tongue River until 1891.

The following is from SIRIS:

"Daniel Little Chief, a.k.a. Wuxpais (?-1906), was a Northern Cheyenne warrior whose band of Cheyenne were sent south to the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation in Indian Territory after their surrender, travelling there between 1878-1879. In 1881 this band moved north to the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota. In 1891 Daniel Little Chief inherited the role of head chief from his father and remained in South Dakota until his death in 1906. For more information see "American Indian Painters: A Biographical Dictionary" by Jeanne Snodgrass 1968, New York: Museum of the American Indian".

Hoig gives Little Chief's Indian name as Kuc-kun-ni-wi. This would not therefore seem to be "our" Little Chief, although it may be his son. Other information that I have gathered suggests that Little Chief remained active after 1891, so how Daniel Little Chief fits into the story is a bit of a puzzle.

John Stands in Timber refers to Little Chief as being half Lakota.

One of the Northern Cheyennes consulted by Hobel in the 1930s was called Little Chief. I suspect that he was the son of this little Chief (but presumably not Daniel, who is described in the SIRIS excerpt as having died in 1906).

The Southern Cheyenne Little Chief was quite a bit younger (born about 1854) and was a prisoner at Fort Marion from 1875 to 1878. His father may have been the older Little Chief who went to Washington in 1851 with White Antelope and Alight-on-the Cloud. There is a famous picture of the three of them and this Little Chief is sometimes wrongly identified as Roman Nose.

I am still digging into this and any further information and sources would be appreciated.

[Gary]

The Southern Cheyenne Little Chief (the Fort Marion prisoner) had the name Koweonarre and does not therfore seem to have been the person referred to as Danile Little Chief.