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Memoirs of a White Crow Indian
Tom Leforge was a legend in his time. Interpreter and scout, he lived among the Crow Indians, as a Crow, for decades. If not for a broken collar bone, Leforge would have been with the six Crow scouts that accompanied General George Armstrong Custer to the Little Bighorn. Instead, he watched from a hospital wagon as the troops marched off to their destiny. Days later, he interpreted Crow scout Curly's account of the battle for Lt. James Bradley of General John Gibbon's Montana column. This is one of the most important memoirs of early Montana and the Indian Wars. Compiled by Leforge's friend, Dr. Thomas Marquis, this is a modest, self-deprecating, and often humorous account of a white man who was fully accepted into Indian life. Leforge's observations on Crow culture and the vanishing way of life that he was a part of is fascinating and detailed. Though he left the tribe for two decades to live among whites, he returned to the Crow reservation in his later years as the place where he felt most comfortable. Every memoir of the American West provides us with another view of a time that changed the country forever.
225 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1974
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 27, 2020
Why this book: While visiting the Little Big Horn Battlefield, I visited a souvenir and curios shop run by the Crow Indian Agency (the Battlefield is on the Crow Indian reservation) and there was a motherland of great books about Native Americans in America. This one caught my eye and I bought it.
Summary in 5 sentences: Thomas Leforge grew up in a white family that moved from Ohio to Montana in the late 1850s/early 1860s, where young Thomas grew up with many close friends in the Crow Indian village that was near where his family lived. The more he engaged with them, the more at home he was with them, so in addition to his white biological family, he became part of a Crow family and part of the Crow tribe. He continued to go back and forth between the two worlds, serving as an interpreter, working for whites as well as gaining status as a full fledged Crow Indian warrior within the tribe. He eventually had a Crow wife and family, and when his wife died, he married the widow of his best friend, a Crow scout who was killed while supporting Custer at Little Big Horn. Eventually he chose to go back into white society as a business man and entrepreneur where he worked in Colorado, Seattle, eventually also the Alaskan gold rush in Nome, made and lost a fair amount of money, had two more white wives and families before finally returning to live out his final years with the Crow, where he felt most at home.
My impressions: I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was fascinated by the stories he told, the rich and varied life he described, looking back on it as an older man in his 70s. His story was written down and published by Dr Thomas Marquis a friend and doctor for the Crow Indians in the 1920s, who says at the outset of the book, that after dozens of interviews and visits with Thomas Leforge “Horse Rider,” all Marquis did was “merely arranging his tales into consecutive order and clothing them in suitable verbal dress.” The book was published in 1928, three years before Leforge himself died in 1931 at the age of 81.
The book has a very valuable introduction written by Joseph Medicine Crow and Herman Viola provides which was copyrighted in 1974 which provides excellent context for these memoir. Medicine Crow had known Leforge as a child, was actually related to him by marriage, and grew up with some of the people in Leforge’s stories, and he shares some of his experiences with Leforge himself. He and Viola (an eminent Smithsonian anthropologist) fact checked much of what he recalled and found that with the exception of a few insignificant details, Leforge was accurate in the stories he recounted and of the descriptions he gave of life in a Crow Indian village.
The first nearly 300 hundred pages are Leforge’s early life story and his life as Horse Rider – the name the Crows gave him – with the Crows tribe, and includes chapters entitled “Life in the Lodges of the Crows” and “Old Crow Indian Customs and beliefs,” which include fascinating insights into the daily life and cultural practices of the Crows, told from the sympathetic perspective of someone who also knew white culture well.
There is also an entire chapter on his role in the campaign of 1876 against the Sioux which included Custer’s Battle of Little Big Horn. He also has a separate chapter on his active participation as scout and interpreter in the US Army’s post-Little Big Horn campaign against Sitting Bull and the Cheyenne and Sioux, though he doesn’t mention Wounded Knee at all. The last 25 or so pages of the book are a brief synopsis of the final 40 or so years of his life, when he re-engaged in white culture, his various successful and not-so-successful business ventures in the Northwest and Alaska, and his final return to his roots with the Crow to live out the final years of his life, and during which he recounted his life story to Dr Marquis.
A fascinating and fun book to read to gain insights into this key aspect of American culture. His stories provide thought-provoking insights into Native American culture, within the context of a rich and varied life story told by a very interesting and adventurous man.
To read the rest of my review, go to: https://bobsbeenreading.wordpress.com...
Summary in 5 sentences: Thomas Leforge grew up in a white family that moved from Ohio to Montana in the late 1850s/early 1860s, where young Thomas grew up with many close friends in the Crow Indian village that was near where his family lived. The more he engaged with them, the more at home he was with them, so in addition to his white biological family, he became part of a Crow family and part of the Crow tribe. He continued to go back and forth between the two worlds, serving as an interpreter, working for whites as well as gaining status as a full fledged Crow Indian warrior within the tribe. He eventually had a Crow wife and family, and when his wife died, he married the widow of his best friend, a Crow scout who was killed while supporting Custer at Little Big Horn. Eventually he chose to go back into white society as a business man and entrepreneur where he worked in Colorado, Seattle, eventually also the Alaskan gold rush in Nome, made and lost a fair amount of money, had two more white wives and families before finally returning to live out his final years with the Crow, where he felt most at home.
My impressions: I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was fascinated by the stories he told, the rich and varied life he described, looking back on it as an older man in his 70s. His story was written down and published by Dr Thomas Marquis a friend and doctor for the Crow Indians in the 1920s, who says at the outset of the book, that after dozens of interviews and visits with Thomas Leforge “Horse Rider,” all Marquis did was “merely arranging his tales into consecutive order and clothing them in suitable verbal dress.” The book was published in 1928, three years before Leforge himself died in 1931 at the age of 81.
The book has a very valuable introduction written by Joseph Medicine Crow and Herman Viola provides which was copyrighted in 1974 which provides excellent context for these memoir. Medicine Crow had known Leforge as a child, was actually related to him by marriage, and grew up with some of the people in Leforge’s stories, and he shares some of his experiences with Leforge himself. He and Viola (an eminent Smithsonian anthropologist) fact checked much of what he recalled and found that with the exception of a few insignificant details, Leforge was accurate in the stories he recounted and of the descriptions he gave of life in a Crow Indian village.
The first nearly 300 hundred pages are Leforge’s early life story and his life as Horse Rider – the name the Crows gave him – with the Crows tribe, and includes chapters entitled “Life in the Lodges of the Crows” and “Old Crow Indian Customs and beliefs,” which include fascinating insights into the daily life and cultural practices of the Crows, told from the sympathetic perspective of someone who also knew white culture well.
There is also an entire chapter on his role in the campaign of 1876 against the Sioux which included Custer’s Battle of Little Big Horn. He also has a separate chapter on his active participation as scout and interpreter in the US Army’s post-Little Big Horn campaign against Sitting Bull and the Cheyenne and Sioux, though he doesn’t mention Wounded Knee at all. The last 25 or so pages of the book are a brief synopsis of the final 40 or so years of his life, when he re-engaged in white culture, his various successful and not-so-successful business ventures in the Northwest and Alaska, and his final return to his roots with the Crow to live out the final years of his life, and during which he recounted his life story to Dr Marquis.
A fascinating and fun book to read to gain insights into this key aspect of American culture. His stories provide thought-provoking insights into Native American culture, within the context of a rich and varied life story told by a very interesting and adventurous man.
To read the rest of my review, go to: https://bobsbeenreading.wordpress.com...
April 12, 2016
This is not great literature, but I really liked it because it seemed honest and forthright and actually written the way I believe Thomas Leforge would have written it if he had done it himself.
Interesting tidbits:
Around the middle of the 1800's the term "bootlegger" was already in use. I had thought it began with Prohibition, but no. '...any unlawful peddlar of whisky to the Indians, was known as a "bootlegger," it being presumed that while he kept in general a law-abiding or pious aspect he always had a bottle or two of whisky concealed in his bootlegs.'
On one foray Thomas and his good friend Mitch Bouyer found a two-year old Indian girl with the body of her mother. "It bit, scratched, fought like a young tiger. It was starved to a pitiful, skeleton-like leanness. Its hands were like claws, its shrunken face resembled that of a sick monkey." I won't spoil the explanation of what happened to the child.
Thomas gives a detailed explanation of the way things were done in the Crow tribe and his relationship with both the Indians he lived with and the military for whom he worked as a scout for a number of years. He explains the ins and outs of having multiple wives, and at the end you learn what happened to them and the children they had borne. He traces the meaning and origin of the word Absaroka -- especially interesting to me as an aficionado of the Longmire series. He writes of responsible and caring Indian agents, the first I had heard about that. I was surprised to learn that when the Sioux killed cattle from a ranch or fort, they took only the tongues for meat, but were also very interested in having the yokes because the wood was from elsewhere and made excellent bows and arrows.
Interesting tidbits:
Around the middle of the 1800's the term "bootlegger" was already in use. I had thought it began with Prohibition, but no. '...any unlawful peddlar of whisky to the Indians, was known as a "bootlegger," it being presumed that while he kept in general a law-abiding or pious aspect he always had a bottle or two of whisky concealed in his bootlegs.'
On one foray Thomas and his good friend Mitch Bouyer found a two-year old Indian girl with the body of her mother. "It bit, scratched, fought like a young tiger. It was starved to a pitiful, skeleton-like leanness. Its hands were like claws, its shrunken face resembled that of a sick monkey." I won't spoil the explanation of what happened to the child.
Thomas gives a detailed explanation of the way things were done in the Crow tribe and his relationship with both the Indians he lived with and the military for whom he worked as a scout for a number of years. He explains the ins and outs of having multiple wives, and at the end you learn what happened to them and the children they had borne. He traces the meaning and origin of the word Absaroka -- especially interesting to me as an aficionado of the Longmire series. He writes of responsible and caring Indian agents, the first I had heard about that. I was surprised to learn that when the Sioux killed cattle from a ranch or fort, they took only the tongues for meat, but were also very interested in having the yokes because the wood was from elsewhere and made excellent bows and arrows.
August 19, 2009
This guy migrated from the east as a white man, then he married into, lived with, fought alongside, and became a Crow. His dual-citizenship makes gives this book a unique voice. I interlibrary-loaned this one, but I will probably buy it soon.
July 6, 2018
So Interesting
I loved this reading experience. It's truly all about history told through the living experience of one man. The descriptive writing is amazing considering the era in which it was written. You'll feel like you've right there on the prairie and in the Indian camps. This was a great learning experience as well. This story is one that should be required reading at some point in every school. This goes to show that an excellent story which is also well written is timeless. I loved it.
I loved this reading experience. It's truly all about history told through the living experience of one man. The descriptive writing is amazing considering the era in which it was written. You'll feel like you've right there on the prairie and in the Indian camps. This was a great learning experience as well. This story is one that should be required reading at some point in every school. This goes to show that an excellent story which is also well written is timeless. I loved it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews