Across The Fence: Amos Bad Heart Bull

The recording and preservation of history is usually a painstaking and meticulous endeavor involving careful documentation of events and guarded safekeeping of records to insure its availability for future generations. Too often some of the most interesting and personal aspects of historical events and day-to-day living are lost in forgotten diaries, untold stories and sometimes accidental or even deliberate disposal. Oftentimes it is by mere happenstance that important historical documents are discovered and a previously unknown page of history is turned to full view.

The story of Amos Bad Heart Bull's historical record of the Oglala Sioux is one of those nearly lost pages.

Wanbli Waphaha (Eagle Bonnet) was born in the Oglala camp of the Soreback Band. Though his birth is not recorded by month, day and year the family stories tell that he was about eight years of age when the soldiers under the command of General George Armstrong Custer attacked his village on the Little Bighorn River. Wanbli Waphaha's father, Thathanka Chantesica (Bad Heart Bull), was the brother of the Oglala headman, He Dog and Crazy Horse and the nephew of chief Red Cloud. Although the young man's relatives were honored Oglala warriors, Eagle Bonnet was more inclined to follow in his father's footsteps. His father, Bad Heart Bull, was the tribal historian and kept pictographic records of the tribes history. The stories of the major events of each year were recorded in pictographs on buffalo hides. These records were known as winter counts and were important for the preservation of tribal history. The pictorial representations of the most significant events provided the visual 'cue' that supported the oral telling of those important happenings.

By the time young Eagle Bonnet had come of age, when traditionally he might have taken the path of a warrior, the Sioux had been largely defeated and were mostly confined to reservations. After The Great Sioux War of 1876, the Bad Heart Bull family had surrendered in mid-April at the Red Cloud Agency.

In the following weeks, Crazy Horse finally agreed to surrender and was brought in to the agency. Less than six months after the surrender of Crazy Horse, the great Sioux leader was killed and the Bad Heart Bull family, along with many other Sioux families, fled to the nearby Spotted Tail Agency and eventually joined Sitting Bull and his people in Canada.

Although free from the pressure of the U.S. Army to force all tribes onto reservations, Sitting Bull's followers were unable to survive the lack of food and the inadequate supplies in Canada. And so, in 1880 the Bad Heart Bull family and other Oglala Lakota bands left Canada and surrendered themselves at Fort Keogh.

From Fort Keogh, the Bad Heart's were transferred to the Standing Rock Reservation in 1881 and in the spring that followed they were again moved to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation where they joined the rest of the Oglala.

At Pine Ridge, young Eagle Bonnet pursued his interest in the history of the Oglala and began to make the drawings that showed the traditions and lifestyle of his people. Eagle Bonnet listened to the stories of the people and also drew pictures depicting events that he had not personally witnessed, but could accurately portray from the detailed telling of events by those who had witnessed them. In time, as his father before him, Eagle Bonnet became the tribal historian.

In 1890-91 Eagle Bonnet was in his early twenties and enlisted with the U.S Army as an Indian scout. He enlisted under the name Amos Eagle Lance, B. H. Bull and served with his uncle, Grant Short Bull, at Fort Robinson. It was during this time that Amos Eagle Lance learned the English language and became know as Amos Bad Heart Bull. While stationed at Fort Robinson Amos purchased a ledger book from a clothing store in Crawford and used this book for a series of pictures of the Lakota ways. He was the first among his tribe to record the Native American pictography techniques to the medium of paper.

After returning to Pine Ridge Amos Bad Heart Bull filled his ledger with more than 400 stunning pictographs. He made his living as a rancher and honed his craft as artist while he fulfilled his role of tribal historian for the Oglala Lakota. He married and had one child, a daughter who they named Victoria. In 1909, at four months old, the child died. Shortly thereafter his wife died and in 1913 Amos Bad Heart Bull, then in his early 50s, also died. His extraordinary ledger, containing hundreds of elaborately detailed and colorful pictographs was given to his sister Pretty Cloud.

Hartley Burr Alexander was born in Lincoln in 1873. His father, George Sherman, was a Methodist minister and pioneer Nebraska newspaper editor. His stepmother, Susan Godding, a teacher from Friends College in Providence, Rhode Island instilled in young Hartley a love of art, music and language. As a Syracuse, Neb. high school student in 1890, young Hartley was deeply affected by the massacre at Wounded Knee. His exposure to the ways of the native peoples instilled in him a lifelong interest in Native religion and spirituality and led him to continued studies of the Native peoples. Hartley attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and after achieving his doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University he returned to the University of Nebraska as professor of philosophy in 1908.

Helen Heather Blish lived with her parents at the Pine Ridge Reservation in southern South Dakota. Her father was an employee of the Department of the Interior, Indian Bureau and worked with the Santee Sioux, Oglala Sioux and the Yankton Sioux.

In 1919, Helen was a junior at the University of Nebraska when she contracted the second strain of the deadly Spanish Flu. She had to quit her studies and return home to the Pine Ridge Reservation to recuperate. While recovering, influenced by her philosophy professor, Hartley Alexander, Helen began to research the abundance of Native history available on the reservation.

Helen returned to the University in 1920, graduated in 1922 and took her first teaching position as high school English teacher in Gordon, Nebraska. While in Gordon, Miss Blish continued her research of Native history and learned of the Ledger drawings of Amos Bad Heart Bull. In 1927 Helen began her graduate work and, for her master's thesis, researched and documented "The Amos Bad Heart Buffalo Manuscript: A Native Pictographic Historical Record of the Oglala Dakotas."

Miss Blish established a trusted friendship with Amos Bad Heart Bull's sister, Pretty Cloud and was allowed to take the ledger drawings of her brother back to the University for study. While there, each of the drawings was photographed and included in the completed thesis. Detailed color copies were made of many of Amos's drawings and Professor Alexander published them in a 1938 book entitled "Sioux Indian Paintings." An original printing of this book has recently come up for sale at $6,000.

Miss Blish completed her thesis in 1928 and in 1934 submitted her work to the Carnegie Institution, where the original photographs of Amos Bad Heart Bull's drawings and written descriptions still remain.

In the 1959 the University of Nebraska decided to publish Miss Blish's work from 1934. Rather than using photographic copies of Bad Heart Bull's drawings, the University hoped to be able to assemble full color copies of all of the more than 400 pictographs. Unfortunately, Amos's sister had died in 1947 and the ledger, full of the drawings that her brother had given to her, had been buried with Pretty Cloud. The University requested permission from the heirs to disinter the ledger long enough for color copies to be made. Not surprisingly, the family refused saying: "When that document was buried with my aunt, it was a treasured thing to her... [It] is and was the belief on the part of my folks that when that was buried it was intended to be buried. [I] cannot sway or budge one inch away from their conviction."

Fortunately, there were the photographs that Professor Alexander had taken which included 32 hand colored reproductions. These photographs along with the narrative written by Amos Bad Heart Bull and corroborated by Amos's ancestors, to Miss Blish, are included in The University of Nebraska's publication of "A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux."

The year before Nebraska author Mari Sandoz died of cancer, she was asked to write the introduction for this remarkable volume of Sioux history. Miss Sandoz ends her introduction with these words: "Without doubt the Amos Bad Heart Bull picture history is the most comprehensive, the finest statement as art and as report of the North American Indian so far discovered anywhere."

This volume of work is truly magnificent. Amos Bad Heart Bull's drawings are beautifully done and each picture is artistically alive with action. From Sioux ceremonies to 4th of July parades, detailed renderings of the Little Big Horn fight, Crow and Sioux intertribal battles and Wounded Knee, Amos Bad Heart Bull recorded it all and we are fortunate that his work was preserved.

M. Timothy Nolting is an award winning Nebraska columnist and freelance writer. To contact Tim, email; [email protected]