Mourning a Tragedy

Remember Wounded Knee, the massacre that ended the Indian Wars.

On December 29, 1890, the 7th U.S. Cavalry killed about 300 unarmed members of the Miniconjou band of the Lakota Nation at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The victims included their chief Spotted Elk (or Big Foot, as the soldiers called him) and women and children.

In honor of those slain, we feature a portrait of an earlier Miniconjou chief, One Horn or Ha-won-je-tah, painted by George Catlin at Fort Pierre, South Dakota. Catlin made several trips to the Great Plains in the 1830s to document native peoples and customs. He later created an Indian Gallery that included his paintings and tribal artifacts.

Catlin described this imposing sitter as follows:

"[One Horn was] a middle-aged man, of middling stature, with a noble countenance, and a figure almost equalling the Apollo, and I painted his portrait.… [He] has risen rapidly to the highest honours in the tribe, from his own extraordinary merits, even at so early an age. He told me he took the name of 'One Horn' (or shell) from a simple small shell that was hanging on his neck, which descended to him from his father, and which, he said, he valued more than anything he possessed; affording a striking instance of the living affection which these people often cherish for the dead.… His costume was a very handsome one, and will have a place in my Indian Gallery by the side of his picture. It is made of elk skins beautifully dressed, and fringed with a profusion of porcupine quills and scalp-locks; and his hair, which is very long and profuse, divided into two parts, and lifted up and crossed, over the top of his head, with a simple tie, giving it somewhat the appearance of a Turkish turban.

"This extraordinary man, before he was raised to the dignity of chief, was the renowned of his tribe for his athletic achievements. In the chase he was foremost; he could run down a buffalo, which he often had done, on his own legs, and drive his arrow to the heart. He was the fleetest in the tribe; and in the races he had run, he had always taken the prize."

Source: William H. Truettner. The Natural Man Observed: A Study of Catlin's Indian Gallery (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution Press in cooperation with the Amon Carter Museum and The National Collection of Fine Arts, 1979).

Pictured: George Catlin, 1796–1872, One Horn, head chief of the Miniconjou tribe, 1832, oil, 29 x 24 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr.