Post by jinlian on Mar 19, 2009 10:30:19 GMT -5
I was re-reading the data on White Swan posted on the main site (http://www.american-tribes.com/Crow/BIO/WhiteSwan.htm) and I'm opening this thread to add some additional information and asking for other.
According to the 1885 census, White Swan (here registered as "White Goose" , Minatehash ) was born in 1850 (while the 1900 census has him born in 1852) and is listed as living with a widowed aunt named Strikes By The Side Of The Water (who was, incidentally, mother of the other famous Custer scout Curley, which would make Curley and White Swan cousins) and a ten year old niece named Sits by The Hole. Thus would confirm the statement in White Swan's army pension file, in which it is said that his wife died in 1873 and he never remarried. In the 1900 census, White Swan/Goose is listed as "widowed" and only member of his household. The only other relative of White Swan was a half-sister (on father's side, therefore belonging to another clan) named Sage Woman.
According to Custer's Arikara scout Young Hawk, White Swan had another name, "Strikes Enemy".
Does anyone know which clan and warrior society White Swan belonged to? Considering that his aunt was Curley's "mother" (which, in Crow kinship terms, could be the actual mother or a maternal aunt), White Swan should have belonged to Curley's clan (which one?)
White Swan died on August 12 1904. Even if some texts say that he's buried in the LBH battlefield area, there's no mark or grave there. More probably, he was buried in a traditional scaffold. As far as I know, he hasn't any direct descendant, unless one believes the story told to Joe Medicine Crow by a "white boy" in 1933 or so (H. Viola Little Bighorn Remembered: The Untold Indian Story of Custer's Last Stand) according to whom White Swan had a son from a clandestine relationship with a white nurse in a St. Louis hospital while recovering from the wounds received while fighting at LBH with Reno's troops. By the way, while some sources report White Swan being tended in a military hospital, I haven't found any reference about this particular hospital being in St. Louis.
According to military rolls, White Swan enlisted three times as army scout (2 in 1876 and 1 in 1877) - I don't know if he participated in the Nez-Percé campaign (among White Swan's own paintings, there's one showing him killing a Nez-Percé, but there are no signs of this happening during that campaign i.e. there's no symbol of the US army or images of white soldiers), but I wondered how a man as severely crippled as White Swan was (he had lost the lower half of his right hand, had his wrist deformed because of a badly fixed fracture and a permanent limp caused by a bullet in his thigh, not to mention the fact that his hearing was irreversably damaged and he was completely deaf by the end of the 1880s) was supposed to serve in the army.
Here are some more photographs of White Swan:
Four ones taken by Fred Miller between 1898 and 1904:
White Swan, between 1890 and 1900 (this has already been posted, I'm attaching it in bigger size - it's interesting to see two non-Crow paraphernalia, i.e. the bear-claw necklace and the stone war-club)
As above:
White Swan (on the right) and Curley:
A White Swan portrait by E. Seton (1897):
According to the 1885 census, White Swan (here registered as "White Goose" , Minatehash ) was born in 1850 (while the 1900 census has him born in 1852) and is listed as living with a widowed aunt named Strikes By The Side Of The Water (who was, incidentally, mother of the other famous Custer scout Curley, which would make Curley and White Swan cousins) and a ten year old niece named Sits by The Hole. Thus would confirm the statement in White Swan's army pension file, in which it is said that his wife died in 1873 and he never remarried. In the 1900 census, White Swan/Goose is listed as "widowed" and only member of his household. The only other relative of White Swan was a half-sister (on father's side, therefore belonging to another clan) named Sage Woman.
According to Custer's Arikara scout Young Hawk, White Swan had another name, "Strikes Enemy".
Does anyone know which clan and warrior society White Swan belonged to? Considering that his aunt was Curley's "mother" (which, in Crow kinship terms, could be the actual mother or a maternal aunt), White Swan should have belonged to Curley's clan (which one?)
White Swan died on August 12 1904. Even if some texts say that he's buried in the LBH battlefield area, there's no mark or grave there. More probably, he was buried in a traditional scaffold. As far as I know, he hasn't any direct descendant, unless one believes the story told to Joe Medicine Crow by a "white boy" in 1933 or so (H. Viola Little Bighorn Remembered: The Untold Indian Story of Custer's Last Stand) according to whom White Swan had a son from a clandestine relationship with a white nurse in a St. Louis hospital while recovering from the wounds received while fighting at LBH with Reno's troops. By the way, while some sources report White Swan being tended in a military hospital, I haven't found any reference about this particular hospital being in St. Louis.
According to military rolls, White Swan enlisted three times as army scout (2 in 1876 and 1 in 1877) - I don't know if he participated in the Nez-Percé campaign (among White Swan's own paintings, there's one showing him killing a Nez-Percé, but there are no signs of this happening during that campaign i.e. there's no symbol of the US army or images of white soldiers), but I wondered how a man as severely crippled as White Swan was (he had lost the lower half of his right hand, had his wrist deformed because of a badly fixed fracture and a permanent limp caused by a bullet in his thigh, not to mention the fact that his hearing was irreversably damaged and he was completely deaf by the end of the 1880s) was supposed to serve in the army.
Here are some more photographs of White Swan:
Four ones taken by Fred Miller between 1898 and 1904:
White Swan, between 1890 and 1900 (this has already been posted, I'm attaching it in bigger size - it's interesting to see two non-Crow paraphernalia, i.e. the bear-claw necklace and the stone war-club)
As above:
White Swan (on the right) and Curley:
A White Swan portrait by E. Seton (1897):
. Here's another photograph of White Swan (by Curtis?)
, but IMHO, White Swan had something more than other more physically endowed Apsalooke - in other words, I can spend much more time looking at White Swan's photographs than at Curley's or Hail Stone's (two guys that would put to shame almost all of today's Hollywood male stars 
). Probably, it's just a subjective perception of this particular individual's charisma.
