by Greg Mayer

This past Sunday, Joseph Medicine Crow, the last war chief of the Crow Nation, died at the age of 102 in Billings, Montana. His passing has been widely noted in the media, and one of the tributes I heard on Monday noted that his life and exploits ‘spanned centuries’. This might seem something obvious to say of a centenarian, but in fact he linked not just the 20th and 21st centuries, but also the 19th: raised in the traditional manner by Crow elders, he grew up steeped in the ways of the warrior culture of the second half of the 19th century, and may well have been the last living person whose knowledge of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (aka Custer’s Last Stand) came from intimate contact with participants in the battle.

His grandfather was a Crow war chief, and his step-grandfather was the famed Crow warrior White Man Runs Him, who fought with Custer at the Little Bighorn. (This might at first seem paradoxical, but the Crow were traditional enemies of the Sioux, and generally fought with the U.S. Army against the Sioux.) He became a war chief because, while serving in the U.S. Army in Europe in World War II, he achieved all the deeds required for a Crow to be esteemed a war chief: he led a war party, he touched a living enemy in combat, disarmed an enemy in combat, and stole enemy horses. The last deed is a very improbable event in modern warfare, and, unless Crow rules change, why it is unlikely there will be another war chief. The stories are best told by Medicine Crow himself, in the following clip from Ken Burns’ film series, The War; but I must mention the most moving part. Having vanquished a German soldier in hand to hand combat, Medicine Crow was about to kill him by choking, when the German uttered what would have been his last words, “mama, mama”. “That word, ‘mama’,” said Medicine Crow, “opened my ears”; he let the German go.

But Medicine Crow was not just a warrior. He was an historian and anthropologist of academic note, studying at Linville College and the University of Southern California. He became the tribal historian, participating in many activities associated with the historic interpretation and commemoration of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2009.

Being interested in American history, and having read several books on the Battle of the Little Bighorn last winter, I am somewhat chagrined to admit that I did not know of Joseph Medicine Crow until his passing. In addition to White Man Runs Him, who was family, he also knew the Custer scout Hairy Moccasin, and the most famous of the Indians who accompanied Custer, Curley (Ashishishe). The scouts with Custer, while enlisted in the Army, were not required to participate in the fighting (although they often, by choice or force of circumstances, did so). As they approached what would become the battlefield, Custer’s Crow scouts were released by Mitch Boyer, his half French, half Sioux, guide and interpreter. Curley, however, stayed longer with the soldiers, and witnessed the opening of the fighting on the Custer battlefield. White Man Runs Him and the others headed back along the trail, and soon joined into fighting alongside the remainder of the 7th Cavalry (the group commanded by Marcus Reno that survived).

Curley had long been lauded as the only survivor of that part of the 7th Cavalry that rode with Custer, but later was discredited, even by other Crows. John Gray, in his masterful Custer’s Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed, has through careful analysis been able to make sense of the varying accounts, and has shown that Curley’s account was truthful and consistent– he was not in the battle, but stayed with Custer long enough to see its early stages and Custer’s opening disposition of his men. (Most of Curley’s reports have been gathered together by Graham [1953]).

Gray’s book, half of which is a fascinating biography of Mitch Boyer, is also a marvel of historical detective work, finding an unlikely number of contemporaneous documents, and also showing how difficult the history of that time and place can be to unravel. Up until at least the early part of the 20th century, few Indian warriors spoke English, even fewer soldiers spoke an Indian language, and translated accounts often passed through interpreters with a point of view. Careful historical analysis can help pierce the fog of incomprehension; and so, too, could fluently bilingual historians like Joseph Medicine Crow.

Graham, W.A. 1953. The Custer Myth: A Source Book of Custeriana. Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, Pa.

Gray, J.S. 1993. Custer’s Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Philbrick, N. 2010. The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Viking Penguin, New York.

Scott, D.D. 2013. Uncovering History: Archaeological Investigations at the Little Bighorn. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Utley, R.S. 2001. Custer: Cavalier in Buckskin. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.