An unrecorded handbill telling episodes from the life of Sicangu or Brulé Lakota leader Spotted Tail (1823-1881), illustrated with two photographs by David Francis Barry (1854-1934), described in the text as “Photographer of Noted Indians”. The second illustration is a self portrait of Barry alongside the equally famous Lakota chief Rain-in-the-Face.
Possibly produced as an accompanying piece of literature to promote Barry’s popular photographs, the handbill tells of Spotted Tail’s romantic entanglements ultimately leading to his death. First it recounts the duel between Spotted Tail and Running Bear for the hand of Appearing Day. Spotted Tail was the winner, and the two were married. However she died and “he fell in love with a married woman, the wife of a cripple named Medicine Bear. She favored his attentions and went with him. Crow Dog, a friend of Medicine Bear, took the matter up. He met Spotted Tail riding along the trail in a waggon on August 5th, 1881, and shot him dead. He was tried and convicted in Federal court, but later they found they had no authority to try him so he was set free.”
It’s interested that given Spotted Tail’s storied life as statesman, warrior, prisoner of war, and interpreter, he would be remembered here only by this gossipy tale of romantic rivalry. A veteran of the Grattan Massacre, the eponymous Spotted Tail’s War and a witness to Red Cloud’s War, he was a key figures of the Great Plains Wars of the nineteenth century.
Barry moved to Yankton in Dakota Territory in 1878 to join the photographic studio of Orlando Scott Goff. Barry travelled widely through the Plaines regions, taking many portaits of Lakota people, by whom he was given the name “Little Shadow Catcher”. This handbill dates after his 1890 move back to Wisconsin, where he ran a successful gallery selling prints of his photographs.
No copies traces through OCLC.
