Wooden Leg

Told with vigor and insight, this is the memorable story of Wooden Leg (1858–1940), one of sixteen hundred warriors of the Northern Cheyennes who fought with the Lakotas against Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Wooden Leg remembers the world of the Cheyennes before they were forced onto reservations. He tells of growing up on the Great Plains and learning how to be a Cheyenne man. We hear from him about Cheyenne courtship, camp life, spirituality, and hunting; of skirmishes with Crows, Pawnees, and Shoshones; and of the Cheyennes’ valiant but doomed resistance against the army of the United States. In particular, Wooden Leg recalls the fight against Custer at the Little Bighorn, a controversial and arresting recollection that stands as the first published Native account of that battle. As an old man in his seventies, Wooden Leg related the story of his life and the Little Bighorn battle in interviews with Thomas B. Marquis (1869–1935), formerly an agency physician for the Northern Cheyennes. Marquis checked and corroborated or corrected all points of importance with other Cheyennes. This edition features a new introduction by Richard Littlebear, president of Chief Dull Knife College and an enrolled member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation of Montana.

The Indian story of Custer’s last battle has never been told, except in a few fragmentary interviews that have been distorted into extravagant fiction. There were no white men survivors of that most thrilling of American frontier tragedies, so the veteran hostile red warriors have exclusive possession of the key to the mystery as to how it happened.The present author, sixty-one years old and a resident of Montana throughout the past forty-one years, decided in 1922 to apply himself at probing into this matter. He served a few months as agency physician for the Northern Cheyennes, a tribe allied with the Sioux in the annihilation of Custer. Since then, the investigator has been in close association with these Indians. He has learned the old-time plains Indian sign-talk to a degree enabling him to dispense with interpreters, except in rare instances. He has held out continual invitation for Custer-battle veteran warriors to visit his home, partake of his food and smoke his tobacco. After a long siege, they began to come. Later, they began to talk, but only a little. Still later, after they had found out that this ingratiating white man was not scheming to entrap them into fatal admissions, they told the whole story.