Distinctly Montana Magazine

55 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m Just feet from the place where the mortally wounded Noisy Walking had been found lay a Southern Cheyenne warrior chief named Lame White Man, or Bearded Man in the Sioux lan- guage. He was 37 to 39 at the time of the battle— relatively old for a warrior—and was regarded as a tribal or a war chief of the Cheyennes. As a young man of about 25, he had been present at the Chivington Massacre of Sand Creek in Colo- rado and survived before moving and joining the Northern Cheyenne. A soldier of renown, he was the leader of the Elk Society. He was married to Twin Woman, with whom he had two children. Her brother, Tall Bull, would be the one to retrieve Lame White Man's body. Lame White Man emerged from a ritual sweat bath when the attack by Reno's men began. Witnesses said he emerged from his sweat and charged into the fray wearing only a blanket and moccasins, gripping his rifle in his hands. His hair, they said, was not braided in the traditional fashion, but was worn loose, as if he had not had time to prepare. In the next few frantic minutes he would lead a charge on Calhoun Hill, routing the enemy sol- diers to their final stand at Custer Hill. In a 1906 interview with Eli S. Ricker, Lakota war- rior Respects Nothing remembered "[o]ne Indian dashed right through the soldiers at Custer Hill on horseback." "I have forgotten whether he said this Indian was killed," Ricker wrote, "but I think he said he was killed." The warrior described was Lame White Man. Wooden Leg's account is unequivo- cal: "We knew he had gone with the young men in their charge upon the soldiers there." In Wind on the Buffalo Grass: The Indians' Own Account of the Battle of the Little Big Horn Riv- er & the Death of their Life on the Plains, author/ editor Leslie Tillett reports that Kate Bighead, a Cheyenne woman and the aunt of Noisy Walking, saw the "white men dismounted" to "hide along a second ridge." There were "hundreds" of Sioux and Cheyenne "surrounding this sec- ond ridge. One of the bravest Cheyenne warriors, Chief Lame White Man, was lead- ing them." His body was found on the west slope of Custer Hill. Historian Rich- ard G. Hardorff writes that "Examination of the remains revealed a gunshot wound in the right breast, the bullet having exited from the back. The scalplock was removed, and the trunk showed addi- tional mutilation from repeated stabbings." Someone (perhaps Standing Bear, ac- cording to Black Elk Speaks, or perhaps, ac- cording to an interview with Stands in Timber in 1956, Little Crow, brother of Chief Hump) had mistaken him for one of Custer's Arikara scouts and taken his scalp. Taken in this context, maybe the reason for Lame White Man's hair being down wasn't haste at all. Another of Hardorff's footnotes: "It should also be noted that among the Lakotas the practice of wearing one's hair loose in combat signified that the wearer was prepared to fight to the death." Is it possible that Walter Campbell/Stanley Vestal 1 had heard a sentence with the words "throwing lives away" and assumed White Bull his hair was worn loose AS IF HE HAD NOT HAD TIME TO PREPARE 1 Or is the error Hardorff's and not Campbell's? Hardorff says the quote about "throwing" Lame White Man's "life away" appears in Box 105, Note- book 5 of the Campbell collection at the University of Oklahoma. Kindly, helpful archivists have sent scans of those files, but we were unable to find it (though we did find Mustache mentioned in White Bull's list of Indian casualties in Notebook 24 of Box 105). Even so, the specificity of the "throw- ing" phrase suggests that White Bull did say it, and that somewhere between his mouth and Hardorff's pen, it was (mis)interpreted as a wasted life. Cheyenne Lame White Man

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