True West Magazine
Their Courage Shaped a Nation
“Resting here until day breaks and shadows fall and darkness disappears is Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches” – Epitaph on Quanah Parker’s gravestone
On March 4, 1905, Comanche Chief Quanah Parker paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. With him in the parade of 35,000 were five other Indian leaders: Geronimo, Little Plume, American Horse, Hollow Horn Bear and Buckskin Charlie, representing the Apache, Blackfeet, Oglala, Brulé and Ute people, respectively.
Despite criticism from politicians and the press that six Indian leaders who once fought against the United States would be in the parade, the befeathered leaders rode with dignity and pride, and were greeted along the parade route with applause.
Three lost sons have returned home to the Wind River Reservation 135 years after they made the trek east to Pennsylvania, where they died and were buried. The repatriation of their remains in 2017 and 2018 came about through the efforts of their Northern Arapaho families, efforts detailed in the Wyoming Humanities-supported documentary
Home from School: The Children of Carlisle.
In early March 1881, Little Chief, Horse, and Little Plume boys aged fourteen, eleven, and nine left their Northern Arapaho families on the Wind River Reservation and traveled by train to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Little Chief’s father was Chief Sharp Nose, Little Plume’s father was Chief William Friday, and Horse’s father was Eagleman.
Return the National Parks to the Tribes David Treuer
Image above: Glacier National Park, in Montana, as seen from the Blackfeet Reservation, near Duck Lake.
This article was published online on April 12, 2021.
I. The End Result of Dirty Business
In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view,” he later wrote. “A peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears.” Many of those who have followed in Bunnell’s foot