Image: Warrior on Horseback: Colored Drawing by Amos Bad Heart Bull, Wikimedia Commons
Amos Bad Heart Bull (bison bull with the bad heart[1]), also Amos Bad Heart Buffalo, sometimes Eagle Bonnet and Eagle Lance, Indian name Tatanka Chante Shicha, (* 1869 in the plains of what would later become Nebraska; † August 3, 1913 in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota) was a painter and historian of the Oglala Lakota Sioux. 407 pictures, drawn and painted on paper in the so-called Ledger Art, have been handed down as reproductions, in which he depicted events in the life of his people during the 19th century and the first reservation period. To secure his livelihood, Amos Bad Heart Bull was, among other things, a scout in the US Army and a cattle rancher.
Crazy Horse family in the Battle of Little Bighorn: Following a vision, the chief spread dust on his body before each fight, which was supposed to make him invulnerable; this is what Amos Bad Heart Bull probably wanted to indicate with the dots. Amos Bad Heart Bull's family belonged to the Soreback Band led by He Dog (Shunka Bloka), a division of the Oglala camp circle, of which there were seven in total. His father Bad Heart Bull Sr., brother of He Dog and nephew of Red Cloud (Maxpiya Luta), was an Oglala historian who recorded the most diverse events in tribal life on a buffalo hide every year. These pictographic representations were called winter counts and were of the utmost importance for the Indians' experience of the world. Amos Bad Heart Bull's mother was called Red Blanket (Tasina Luta Win) and also Edith Bad Heart Bull.
When the great persecution by US troops began after the Battle of Little Bighorn to force the still free Lakota to live in the Great Sioux Reservation, the Soreback Band surrendered in Fort Robinson on May 6, 1877, in the entourage of Crazy Horse (Tashunka Witko) and was settled at the Red Cloud Agency. At the end of the year they fled to Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotanka) in Canada. After living conditions there had deteriorated more and more, the Soreback Band returned to the United States in 1880, surrendered at Fort Keogh in Montana and settled at the Standing Rock Agency. When the Great Sioux Reservation was divided into seven reservations in 1889, they moved to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Amos' personal experiences and deeds from this time are not known.
Career
In 1890, Amos Bad Heart Bull was a scout in the US Army and stationed at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. At some point in the nearby prairie town of Crawford, he bought a so-called ledger book in a clothing store, which was filled with his pictures over the following years. Amos Bad Heart Bull was not the first Indian to work in the ledger style, but he was the first in his tribe to use paper as a medium. During his military service, he learned English and some of the textual explanations on his sheets of paper can be read in this language.
From around 1892, Amos Bad Heart Bull lived and worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He was there — at times — with the Indian police and also worked as a rancher. He married and had a daughter (Victoria), who only lived for a few months. His wife, whose name is unknown, died around 1910.
(Left image: Self-portrait of Amos Bad Heart Bull as a cowboy (1900) Wikipedia)
During his years in Pine Ridge, Amos Bad Heart Bull drew and painted in his ledger, which comprised 300 pages, to which he added more, ultimately over 400 pictures that tell of the social life of the Sioux and their last battles (Battle of Rosebud Creek, Battle of Little Bighorn) on the prairie.
Through his work, which was certainly often presented on various occasions, Amos Bad Heart Bull was quite well known among the Oglala and certainly also among the other Lakota tribes. And so the American painter and ethnographer Frederick Weygold (1870–1941) heard about him in the summer of 1909 during a visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation and noted in a note Tatanka Chante Shicha, Bad Heart Bull, a good painter.[2] The two men probably did not meet in person, otherwise the note would certainly have been a little longer and in the series of photos that Weygold took of the land and people in Pine Ridge at the time, he would certainly have photographed Amos Bad Heart Bull, but this apparently did not happen.
After the death of Amos Bad Heart Bull in August 1913, his sister Fanny Bad Heart Bull, also known as Pretty Cloud, inherited his book with all its pages.
Addendum
The American teacher and ethnologist Helen Heather Blish (1898–1941), who studied at the University of Nebraska under Hartley Burr Alexander (1873–1939), preserved the work of Amos Bad Heart Bull for posterity. Between 1927 and 1940, she borrowed Fanny Bad Heart Bull's book many times and took black-and-white photographs of the images, 30 of which were then colored in some form. Helen Heather Blish used the images for her master's thesis A Native Pictographic Historical Record of the Oglala Dakota, which was also published as a book, where Amos Bad Heart Bull is named as co-author. — When Fanny Bad Heart Bull died in 1947, the book was added to her grave at her request. The University of Nebraska's request in 1959 to recover the book in order to photograph the images again was rejected by her relatives.
Link to Original Wikipedia Article in German
Reference Literature
Marc C. Carnes: American National Biography: Supplement 2, Oxford University Press, New York 2005
Richard Hook: Warriors at the Little Bighorn 1876, Osprey Publishing Ltd., Oxford 2004
Arnold Krupat: Native American Studies, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2002
G. Malcolm Lewis: Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1998
Richard G. Hardorff (ed.): Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight: New Sources of Indians-Military History, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1997
Russel Freedman: The Life and Death of Crazy Horse. Drawings by Amos Bad Heart Bull, Holiday House, New York 1996
Amos Bad Heart Bull, Helen Heather Blish: A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1967
Wolfgang Haberland, Frederick Weygold: I, Dakota - Pine Ridge Reservation 1909, Verlag Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-496-01038-X
