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The Best White Man I Ever Met

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The Bone wars are best known for paleontologists hating each other, but today for a change I wanted to tell of a friendship that formed during the conflict. In 1872 Othniel C. Marsh wanted to search the Black Hills for fossils and at first encountered resistance from the local Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud, who suspected Marsh to be just another gold prospector.

However Marsh convinced Red Cloud the let him dig and later send all his findings to the natives, who found that there was indeed no gold among the stones. Impressed with Marsh honesty Red Cloud invited him to visit the native settlement where Marsh was outraged to see that the supplies provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs were mostly rotten. He promised Red Cloud to do something about it and once he returned east he started going public and even confronted US president Ulysses S. Grant about the bad situation. After enlisting several congressmen to investigate and writing a series of Newspaper articles Marsh finally achieved reforms within the Bureau and a significant improvement for the Natives.

Red Cloud was grateful and impressed that Marsh had kept his promise and supported his work whenever he was on his territory. In 1874 he even visited the Professor at Yale where this famous photograph was taken upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia…. Red Cloud donated a few items to Marsh collection that are still at the Peabody museum today (including the ceremonial pipe shown in this picture.) Their later correspondence suggests that the two men remained friends. Marsh earned the name “Big Bone Chief” and Red Cloud is recorded saying:

“I thought he would be like the other white men and go away and do nothing. But he kept his promise. Tell him I think he is the best white man I ever met.”

I obviously drew inspiration from the photography I mentioned, however I wanted to depict Red Cloud in his native attire (also because I am tired of drawing 19th century suits) and took inspiration from other pictures of Red Cloud (like this upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia…) as well as pictures of Oglala Lakota dress.

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Excellent story.