Pretty Nose | |
|---|---|
 Pretty Nose in 1879, with woven cloth belt and buffalo robe | |
| Born | c. 1851 [1] |
| Died | after 1952 |
| Nationality | Arapaho |
| Known for | Participation in the Battle of the Little Bighorn |
| Relatives | Mark Soldier Wolf (descendant) |
Pretty Nose (b. c. 1851 - after 1952) was an Arapaho woman who participated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. She lived to be at least 101 years old and reportedly became a war chief. [1] [2] [3]
Pretty Nose was Arapaho, though in some sources she is referred to as Cheyenne. [4] She was identified as Arapaho on the basis of her red, black and white beaded cuffs. [1] [upper-alpha 1]
Pretty Nose took part in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 with a combined Cheyenne/Arapaho detachment. [5]
Pretty Nose's descendant, Mark Soldier Wolf, became an Arapaho tribal elder who served in the US Marine Corps during the Korean War. She witnessed his return to the Wind River Indian Reservation in 1952, at the age of 101. At the time he reported her wearing cuffs that he said indicated she was a war chief. [1]
Pretty Nose was portrayed in the 2017 novel The Vengeance of Mothers: The Journals of Margaret Kelly & Molly McGill by Jim Fergus. [6] [7] [8] [9]
A photograph taken by Laton Alton Huffman c. 1880 shows Pretty Nose with a young woman named Spotted Fawn. [10] One source from the Montana Memory Project implies that they were sisters. [11] She appeared in several of silver prints by Huffman, and they are now part of the collection of the Princeton Library. [12] Her photo is featured on the cover of The Spirit of Indian Women magazine. [13]
The Crow, whose autonym is Apsáalooke, also spelled Absaroka, are Native Americans living primarily in southern Montana. Today, the Crow people have a federally recognized tribe, the Crow Tribe of Montana, with an Indian reservation, the Crow Indian Reservation, located in the south-central part of the state.
The Arapaho are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota.
The Cheyenne are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. The Cheyenne comprise two Native American tribes, the Só'taeo'o or Só'taétaneo'o and the Tsétsêhéstâhese ; the tribes merged in the early 19th century. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma, and the Northern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana. The Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family.
Red Cloud's War was an armed conflict between an alliance of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho peoples against the United States and the Crow Nation that took place in the Wyoming and Montana territories from 1866 to 1868. The war was fought over control of the western Powder River Country in present day north-central Wyoming and Montana.
Crazy Horse was a Lakota war leader of the Oglala band in the 19th century. He took up arms against the United States federal government to fight against encroachment by White American settlers on Native American territory and to preserve the traditional way of life of the Lakota people. His participation in several famous battles of the Black Hills War on the northern Great Plains, among them the Fetterman Fight in 1866, in which he acted as a decoy, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, in which he led a war party to victory, earned him great respect from both his enemies and his own people.
The Powder River Expedition of 1865 also known as the Powder River War or Powder River Invasion, was a large and far-flung military operation of the United States Army against the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians in Montana Territory and Dakota Territory. Although soldiers destroyed one Arapaho village and established Fort Connor to protect gold miners on the Bozeman Trail, the expedition is considered a failure because it failed to defeat or intimidate the Indians.
The Dull Knife Fight, or the Battle on the Red Fork, part of the Great Sioux War of 1876, was fought on November 25, 1876, in present-day Johnson County, Wyoming between soldiers and scouts of the United States Army and warriors of the Northern Cheyenne. The battle essentially ended the Northern Cheyennes' ability to continue the fight for their freedom on the Great Plains.
Goes Ahead was a Crow scout for George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry during the 1876 campaign against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. He was a survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and his accounts of the battle are valued by modern historians.
Minnie Hollow Wood was a Lakota woman who earned the right to wear a war bonnet because of her valor in combat against the U.S. Cavalry at the Battle of Little Big Horn. At one time, she was the only woman in her tribe entitled to wear a war bonnet.
Buffalo Calf Road Woman, or Brave Woman, was a Northern Cheyenne woman who saved her wounded warrior brother, Chief Comes in Sight, in the Battle of the Rosebud in June 1876. Her rescue helped rally the Cheyenne warriors to win the battle. She fought next to her husband in the Battle of the Little Bighorn nine days later. In 2005, Northern Cheyenne storytellers broke more than 100 years of silence about the battle, and they credited Buffalo Calf Road Woman with striking the blow that knocked Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer off his horse before he died.
Spotted Tail was a Sichangu Lakota tribal chief. Famed as a great warrior since his youth, warring on Ute, Pawnee and Absaroke (“Crow”), and having taken a leading part in the Grattan Massacre, he led his warriors in the Colorado and Platte River uprising after the massacre performed by John M. Chivington's Colorado Volunteers on the peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camping on Sand Creek, but declined to participate in Red Cloud's War.
Touch the Clouds was a chief of the Minneconjou Teton Lakota known for his bravery and skill in battle, physical strength and diplomacy in counsel. The youngest son of Lone Horn, he was brother to Spotted Elk, Frog, and Roman Nose. There is evidence suggesting that he was a cousin to Crazy Horse.
Jim Fergus is an American author. He has a degree in English from Colorado College and has worked as a tennis teacher and full-time freelance writer. His first novel was One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, which won the 1999 Fiction of the Year Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association and sold over one million copies in the United States. The French translation was on the French bestseller list for 57 weeks and has sold over 400,000 copies in that country.
The Great Sioux War of 1876, also known as the Black Hills War, was a series of battles and negotiations that occurred in 1876 and 1877 in an alliance of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne against the United States. The cause of the war was the desire of the US government to obtain ownership of the Black Hills. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, settlers began to encroach onto Native American lands, and the Sioux and the Cheyenne refused to cede ownership. Traditionally, American military and historians place the Lakota at the center of the story, especially because of their numbers, but some Native Americans believe the Cheyenne were the primary target of the American campaign.
Ledger art is narrative drawing or painting on paper or cloth, predominantly practiced by Plains Indian, but also from the Plateau and Great Basin. Ledger art flourished primarily from the 1860s to the 1920s. A revival of ledger art began in the 1960s and 1970s. The term comes from the accounting ledger books that were a common source of paper for Plains Indians during the late 19th century.
The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes are a united, federally recognized tribe of Southern Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne people in western Oklahoma.
Mark Soldier Wolf was an Arapaho tribal elder and storyteller.
Henrietta Mann is a Native American academic and activist. She was one of the designers of the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Montana and Haskell Indian Nations University's Native American studies programs. In 2000 she became the first American Indian to hold the endowed chair of Native American studies at Montana State University and was honored with the Montana Governor's Humanities Award. She retired in 2004 and became a special advisor to the president of Montana State University.
Black Bear was an Arapaho leader into the 1860s when the Northern Arapaho, like other Native American tribes, were prevented from ranging through their traditional hunting grounds due to settlement by European-Americans who came west during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush. Conflicts erupted over land and trails used by settlers and miners. A watershed event was the Sand Creek massacre of 1864. This led to the Northern Arapaho joining with other tribes to prevent settlement in their traditional lands. In 1865, Black Bear's village was attacked during the Battle of the Tongue River. People died, lodges were set on fire, and food was ruined, all of which made it difficult for them to survive as a unit. He died during an ambush by white settlers on April 8, 1870, in the Wild Wind Valley of present-day Wyoming.
Margaret Poisal was "the only woman who was an official witness, interpreter, and consultant at many meetings and treaty councils held along or in close proximity to the Santa Fe Trail." The daughter of French Canadian trapper John Poisal and Arapaho Snake Woman, Poisal was educated at a convent school. She married Thomas Fitzpatrick, an Indian agent, and they worked together negotiating peace between Native American tribes and the United States government. After Fitzpatrick died, Poisal continued to work as an interpreter and peacemaker.
Pretty Nose fought with the Cheyenne/Arapaho detachment (at Little Bighorn)