Flying Hawk was an important Native American as white settlers moved across the western US in the latter half of the 19thcentury. He met 10 US presidents and later became part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West troupe. Alec Marsh explains.

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He fought at Custer’s Last Stand and counted the warrior Crazy Horse as a close friend, as well as his cousin. He met ten US Presidents and ranked Teddy Roosevelt above them all. He was present at the death of Sitting Bull in 1890 and attended the massacre of Wounded Knee. He then travelled the world as a star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West troupe.

And before dying at 77 in 1931, Chief Flying Hawk also acted as translator for the writer John Neihardt, thereby helping him to create a seminal work in Native American culture, Black Elk Speaks. More than this, Flying Hawk also produced his own history of America, finally published in 1946, ‘so that the young people would know the truth. The white man’s books about it did not tell the truth’.

So if you haven’t already, I believe it is high time you acquainted yourself with the Native American chief, Flying Hawk, a renaissance man who was a leader, an educator and warrior in equal measure. The son of Chief Black Fox of the Oglala Lakota – a leader who lived for decades with an arrow lodged in the back of his sky before dying in his eighties, Flying Hawk was born in 1854 at a time when the Sioux’s traditional way of life was still largely unaffected by white men.

The buffalo herds upon which the Sioux’s civilization depended still roamed abundantly across the great plains of the West. And when European-Americans did come, they came to trade – not to necessarily to live, or to dominate. That, however, was all about to change.

But as a result Flying Hawk grew up in a way that would have been familiar to those who had gone before him: learning the art of warfare by fighting skirmishes against rival tribes – the Crow and Piegan. He took part in his first battle aged ten, against soldiers protecting a wagon train. ‘I do not know how many we killed of the soldiers, but they killed four of us,’ he would say later. ‘After that we had a good many battles, but I did not take any scalps for a good while. I cannot tell how many I killed when a young man.’

Red Cloud’s war

More fighting was to follow. Just two years later, in 1866, armed conflict broke out between the Sioux and the US, over the latter’s decision to build forts along the Bozeman Trail, a road through the Powder River country in modern day Wyoming and Montana – land belonging to the Sioux and a prime hunting ground. What followed – known as Red Cloud’s War – was a two year guerrilla conflict in which the Native Americans, led by another Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud, were able to outwit and outmaneuver their better-armed opponents. In December 1866, Crazy Horse, who would come to world’s attention for his part in defeating Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn ten years later, commanded a small party of warriors to lure out a large body of soldiers from one of the forts – leading them into a deadly ambush. The Fetterman Fight or Massacre, left 81 men under the command of Captain William J Fetterman dead and was the biggest military defeat suffered by the United States at the hands of the Plains Indians until Custer’s Last Stand in 1876. Red Cloud’s war concluded in victory for Sioux with a peace treaty signed 1868 at Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming. It is still recognized as an international treaty in law today.

Moreover its an international treaty which the United States breached in 1876 with the invasion of the Black Hills, the Sioux’s last great hunting ground, following the discovery of gold there in 1874.

The Sioux, now led by Sitting Bull, Flying Hawk’s uncle, and Crazy Horse, fought back: and so began the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. Red Cloud, whom Flying Hawk described as ‘the Red Man’s George Washington’, had been to Washington and New York after the peace of 1868 and now knew what the Native Americans were up against. He did not join the call to arms in 1876. Flying Hawk was there every step of the way.

Custer’s last stand

The defining moment of this war was the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876, where Flying Hawk fought alongside Crazy Horse, the architect of the victory. In his graphic account of the battle he described how it began with the US cavalry firing on their village, and how the Native Americans quickly had the soldiers on the back foot. ‘When we got them surrounded the fight was over in one hour,’ Flying Hawk recalled. ‘There was so much dust we could not see much, but the Indians rode around and yelled the war-whoop and shot into the soldiers as fast as they could until they were all dead. One soldier was running away to the east but Crazy Horse saw him and jumped on his pony and went after him. He got him about half a mile from the place where the other soldiers were lying dead.’

He added: ‘It was a big fight; the soldiers got what they deserved this time. No good soldiers would shoot into the Indian’s tepee where there were women and children. These soldiers did, and we fought for our women and children. White men would do the same.’

Despite the victory the chiefs quickly realized that the game was up: Washington put the Sioux reservations under the authority of General Sherman and all Native Americans were henceforth to be treated as prisoners of war. Those that were off their reservation would be treated as hostiles. Rather than submit to this, Sitting Bull led his band to Canada; Crazy Horse was killed in a scuffle after handing himself over at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. ‘He was honored by his own people and respected by his enemies,’ said Flying Hawk. ‘Though they hunted and persecuted him, they murdered him because they could not conquer him.’ The murder of Crazy Horse proved to the harbinger of the treatment that Sitting Bull would receive 13 years later on his return from Canada.

By this point the Great Sioux Reservation had been broken into five reserves occupying perhaps half the original land promised to them, having been appropriated for white settlers by the US government. In 1890 the Ghost Dance, a religious movement swept across the hungry and cold Sioux people, prompting fears of an uprising among the authorities. Once again Flying Hawk was close to the action: his brother Kicking Bear, a holy man and chief, was a leading figure of the movement, and Flying Hawk was among the first to witness the results of the massacre at Wounded Knee, when soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry machine-gunned more than 200 mainly Sioux women and children camped in the winter snow outside the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Flying Hawk described seeing the bodies of women and children lying under a blanket of snow – and asserted that the attack was retaliation for the ‘Custer affair’ 13 years before.

Extermination of the buffalo

By now the way of life that he had grown up with was gone – including the last great herds of the buffalo, wiped out by the mid-1880s. The whites, Flying Hawk claimed, ‘could not fight them fairly and win’.

And then, having lived through all of this calamity and change, in the years that followed, Flying Hawk turned to show business. Following in the footsteps of Sitting Bull and Red Cloud, he joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1898 and while it is said he initially chafed at being asked to perform the displays of the battles he had taken part in, he soon made peace with the life on the stage. Not only was there was money in it, but the shows celebrated performers like him; it also allowed them to communicate something of their way of life to the outside world. Flying Hawk spent the next three decades ‘Wild Westing’, as it was known, touring the US and Europe with Colonel William Cody’s show and later joining the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch show and Sells Floto circus. He finally retired from touring in 1930, the year before he died. That was also year he acted as an interpreter for the writer and ethnographer John G. Neihardt in his interviews with the Oglala medicine man Black Elk, which remains a powerful and important testimony to this day.

Flying Hawk also toured schools speaking about Native American history, which became part of his effort to tell the story of his people from the Native American perspective. This he achieved most comprehensively through a series of interviews with his friend Major Israel McCreight, becoming Firewater and Forked Tongues – A Sioux Chief Interprets US History, published in 1946 under McCreight’s name. When each age was finished, McCreight would read it to Flying Hawk who would apply his thumbprint approving the pages individually.

In a foreword to Firewater, Ohitika, or Benjamin Brave, ‘a member of the Sioux tribe’, who tells us that his grandfather fought at the Little Bighorn, says this of Flying Hawk: ‘Perhaps no other Indian of his day was better qualified to furnish reliable data covering the period of the great Sioux war, beginning with the ruthless exploitation by rum-sellers, prospectors and adventurers, of their homes and hunting grounds pledged to them forever by sacred treaty with the Government, and ending in the deplorable massacre of Wounded Knee.’ Quite possibly.

Certainly Flying Hawk was at the center of the action, and somehow lived to tell the bloody tale, which he did. He also inspired those he met and remained unequivocal about what he witnessed. ‘Nowhere in the history of mankind is there to be found a parallel,’ Flying Hawk said, ‘nothing so cruel, un-American and wholly inhuman. Cortez in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru carried on their wars of extermination in the name of religion... But the white man had no justification for this ruthless campaigns against the red race.’