I received this great book for Christmas. Who says there is nothing new to be found about the Indian wars? The title is misleading. This is a ledger book was recovered in the Lakota campsite by one of Gibbons soldiers at LBH. The soldier gave it to a Chicago newspaper reporter who had it leather bound and stamped with the title:Autobiography of Half Moon. There was no such warrior. The ledger passed through the hands of several collectors until one gave it in his estate to the Peabody Museum at Harvard in 1930. It was forgotten until a few years ago when a librarian re-discovered it. Ethnologists and Anthropologists at Harvard under Dr. Castle McLaughlin along with Lakota scholars determined the ledger contains color drawings of six different artists whose names cannot be determined but suspicion is that one of them was Hump/High Backbone (Miniconjou). By analyzing the drawings together in comparison with documentary historical records, including some of my own ramblings, they determined the more than fifty colored drawings illustrate Lakota remembrances of Red Clouds War and the Fetterman Fight! The physical ledger has some Anglo writing in it and has been determined to have been taken from a wagon train on the Bozeman Trail in summer, 1866. This is new stuff! I only hope the University of Oklahoma Press can negotiate with Harvard to let us use a couple of these plates with minimal cost in my new book. The ledger is currently in an exhibit about its history at the Peabody Museum at Harvard.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 00:01:57 +0000
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