On Monday morning, Ben American Horse and his wife Julia, also known as White Cow Woman, sat with the other tribal elders in the waiting area of the new Rapid City Municipal Airport. Despite the radiators ticking away under the windows and in the corner of the room, cold air emanated from the north-facing glass or blew across the asphalt tile floor when the gate attendant opened the door to step out and check on the plane.[1]

American Horse and his wife had never flown in an airplane before. None of his Lakota companions had. But American Horse was no stranger to travel. As a boy he took the train from South Dakota to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1892. At Carlisle as an All-American on Pop Warner’s famous football team, he traveled to places like Washington, DC to play. After Graduating in 1894, he joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, and in 1906 he and other Lakota sailed to Europe to perform.[2] Even after he returned to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where he worked as a policeman, American Horse occasionally traveled to Washington, DC to testify before Congress as president of the Sioux Treaty Council.

As he waited, American Horse could hear the group’s handler, a local artist and Lakota-speaker hired by the Hollywood producers to organize this trip, talking to a reporter from the Rapid City Journal. The man noted that none of his traveling companions seemed concerned about their first trip in an airplane, but he joked that he was worried about what he would do if one or another of them got “panicky” at 20,000 feet.[3]

The reporter’s story about a group of Native elders was unlikely to make the front page of the newspaper. In Korea, American and U.N. forces were engaged in heavy fighting with the communists near Wonju south of Seoul. Congress, the White House, and the United Nations were all arguing over next steps in the war.[4] As an active Republican who had attended the party’s national convention in Chicago in 1944, American Horse had no sympathy for the communists in Korea. Nevertheless, the war unsettled him, especially when he thought of the young men he knew from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation who were in the thick of the fight.[5]

All of the Native men traveling with American Horse that morning had experienced war, though for most of them it had been deep in their childhood. John Sitting Bull, Jr., the 91-year old son of the famous Hunkpapa chief, was a teenager at the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Ben Black Elk was the son of the famous spiritual leader Nicholas Black Elk, who had also fought against Custer. Meanwhile, Howard Bad Bear was an 80-year old survivor of the Wounded Knee massacre. The women traveling with them—White Cow Woman, Pretty Leaf Woman, and Black Elk’s 25-year old daughter, Olivia—understood the burdens of this history, but they were also caught up in the nation’s collective effort to romanticize the violence and oppression that it reflected.[6]

The group was beginning a month-long tour of American cities in the East to promote the movie “Tomahawk:  The Glory Story of the Great Sioux Indian Uprising.” American Horse and his friends had played bit parts in the film, but they would play a bigger role in promoting it. This morning they were on their way to Chicago for the film’s official premiere on Thursday.

As the group sat in the waiting area, they could hear the hum of the waist-high, red Coca-Cola vending machine and the overhead fluorescent lights as well as the wind buffeting the windows.[7] For the gate agent, the wind posed a problem. The new Rapid City Municipal Airport had opened for business only five months earlier, but in an effort to economize, city officials had paid for the creation of only one poorly drained, dirt runway. As a result, the winds had to be blowing in the right direction for the Western Air Lines DC-3 prop planes to take off and land. Already Western Air Lines had notified city officials that they might have to terminate service to Rapid City because the airport failed to meet the newest safety standards promulgated by the Federal Aviation Administration. Having exhausted the $300,000 budget that voters had approved for the new facility, the city commission was scrambling to figure out how to pay for these improvements.

In the meantime, passengers and crews waited for favorable winds.

On that Monday morning, American Horse and his companions were eventually able to board the flight and take off. American Horse later noted that they traveled “a rough road” through the air at other points on the tour, but that first flight was apparently uneventful.[8] The aging Lakota leader undoubtedly marveled at the views of the snow-covered prairie below as the plane turned east over the Badlands with the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation visible to the south.

Two days later, in full regalia, American Horse and his companions trudged through the snow in Chicago to get to the Stevens Hotel for a press conference. He and Howard Bad Bear were no strangers to these kinds of events. As actors in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at the turn of the century, they had learned to perform their Native identities to entertain large crowds of Europeans and Non-Native Americans.[9]

For the press conference that day, the South Dakota visitors posed for photographs. Then they joined several of the movie’s stars, including Van Heflin and Yvonne de Carlo, for the premiere, laughing when they recognized themselves or their friends in the movie.[10] Afterwards, they were besieged by autograph seekers, a phenomenon that would follow them throughout their multi-city tour. [11]

“Tomahawk” was not the first movie made in the Black Hills to exploit viewers’ fascination with Native Americans and the American West. In 1912, only two decades after the Wounded Knee massacre, Buffalo Bill Cody hired a movie crew and used members of his show to recreate the scene at Wounded Knee.[12] Other movies had followed, but “Tomahawk” was special. It was one of a handful of movies made between 1925 and 1951 that depicted Native Americans from a sympathetic perspective. As Ben Black Elk told reporters, it was “the first film I know of where the Indian is shown as an Indian ought to be shown. All the other pictures depict the red man running around killing women and children and scalping old men. We don’t have it too easy even now. But thank goodness, in spite of the white man, the Indian has not forgotten how to keep alive.”[13]

Critics were not kind to the film. Although the movie offered the local tourism industry in the Black Hills a way to advertise the region and further link it with the romantic myth of the American West, a local critic who got to see a sneak preview at the Rapid City Air Force Base noted that the film “wanders through a series of poorly connected sequences which do little to enlighten the audience on the story of Jim Bridger and the betrayal of the Sioux by the whites in Wyoming territory.” Histrionic scenes combined with dull performances by the movie’s white stars playing Native Americans contributed to the reviewer’s disappointment. The Technicolor cinematography, however, depicting the beauty of the Black Hills and the Badlands was probably worth the price of admission. And for the Saturday matinee crowds of children, there was “lots of ridin’ and shootin.’”[14]

American Horse and his companions undoubtedly heard about the reviews, but they were focused on the next steps in their journey. Traveling by plane and train, they went to Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburg, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Providence. In Detroit, Sitting Bull enjoyed a visit with his nephew, John B. Sitting Bull, who worked for the Ford Motor Company.[15] In New York, the group appeared at the Loew’s State Theater for the Saturday and Sunday matinees. They offered displays of native handicrafts, met with a troop of Boy Scouts, and passed out “Lucky Indian” key chains to the first 500 children.[16] In several cities, the group visited the studios of the local television station, and their images flickered on the black and white screens of viewers at home.

Two cities proved to be especially pivotal for the tour. American Horse had been to the nation’s capital many times. When he was at Carlisle, the football team had played against the  Georgetown Hoyas. As an adult, he had come to Washington, D.C. a number of times to lobby on behalf of the Lakota people. In 1934, when the government tried to get tribes to adopt constitutions, American Horse led the opposition to the charter proposed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.[17] American Horse had also become active in the Republican Party. In 1944, he attended the national convention in Chicago wearing his buckskins and a feathered bonnet.[18]

On this trip, American Horse and the others were met by Senator Karl Mundt as they descended the airstairs to the tarmac in their regalia.[19] They posed for more pictures and visited the office of newly elected Congressman E.Y. Berry, who had lived most of his life on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, where Sitting Bull had been killed. Berry posed with the group wearing a feather bonnet.[20]

Everywhere he went, Non-Natives referred to American Horse as “chief,” a word they borrowed from dime novels and Western movies and associated with an image of Native Americans that was fixed and romanticized in the distant past. At times, this misconception created problems for American Horse and his companions because in the real world he represented the Medicine Root District in the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council and had both a cultural and political responsibility to speak on behalf of his community.  

In Washington, the group had lunch in the Vandenberg room of the Capitol where they were joined by various senators and representatives, many of whom were focused on the fate of American troops fighting on the Korean peninsula. After most of the group had finished their lunch, White Cow Woman stood and spoke in Lakota and Ben Black Elk translated. She talked of the poverty on the reservation and the misery among the Native Americans on Pine Ridge. Her own family survived on $540 a year ($5,643.28 in 2021 dollars)—$40 a month from her husband’s pension as a reservation police officer and $80 a year from rental of her allotted pasture lands. Implicit in her speech was an appeal to the assembled legislators to honor the treaty obligations of the American people and address the urgent needs of the Lakota people.[21]

American Horse also pushed back against non-Native efforts to celebrate Native culture as part of the melting pot of America while denying the very real legal and political claims of Native people. At one point on the trip, he suggested that the United Nations should recognize the Sioux as a sovereign nation and admit the tribe as a member of the world body.[22]

Despite the seriousness of their appeals, the group from Pine Ridge maintained their sense of humor. Visiting the empty Senate chamber, American Horse sat in the chair of the vice president of the United States, surveyed the empty seats, and then quipped, “I am vice president now; what can I do for you poor Indians?”[23]

After the lunch, on the east steps of the nation’s capitol, the 91-year old Sitting Bull danced as drummers played and sang.[24]

In Washington, American Horse attended the Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day celebration held in the red brick Uline Arena in back of Union Station. With members of the Grand Old Party hoping that 1952 would be their year to finally break the Democratic lock on the presidency, speakers railed against the policies of the Truman administration and fed the nation’s Cold War fears of the Soviet Union and communism. Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy blasted Truman’s “Fair Deal” as a “sellout to Communism at home.” When American Horse took to the stage in his full regalia, his thick glasses covering his eyes, the 12,000 attendees went wild. [25]

“We red men have had too much New Deal red tape,” he said. Undoubtedly referring to the recently concluded perjury trial of accused-spy Alger Hiss, he exhorted the president to “kick out Joe’s Stalin’s Red men who have sneaked into our teepee.”[26]

From Washington, the tour continued to Boston where the group attracted weekend crowds to the Jordan March department store.[27] The Boston Globe ran a heroic profile picture of the aging American Horse and White Cow Woman with a caption that described them as “100 Percent Americans.”[28]

In Boston, however, American Horse’s ability to dissent was put to the test. At a press conference, the Korean War once again loomed in the background. Noting that his son-in-law had lost his legs and arms fighting in World War II and his nephew had been wounded in Korea, American Horse told reporters that Native servicemen were making great sacrifices on behalf of the nation, but their rights as citizens were not being protected at home. Benefits extended through the GI Bill of Rights were being denied to Native ex-servicemen who could not get loans to build homes on their tribal lands. Until these issues were resolved, American Horse suggested, Native soldiers should be returned home.[29]

Unbeknown to American Horse, the Communist Party’s Daily Worker picked up on his remarks and published an article highlighting the chief’s comments about Native American servicemen. The newspaper suggested that American Horse had called on the United States to pull out of Korea entirely. The article came to light when American Horse and his companions landed back in Rapid City almost a month after they had departed. A Rapid City Journal reporter confronted him over the story.

Keeping his frustration in check, American Horse noted that 1,500 Native people on the Pine Ridge Reservation had served in World War II, three-quarters of them as volunteers. [30] Though he did not say it, he was also aware that many Native men were fighting and dying in Korea.[31] He denied suggesting that the United States should abandon the fight against the communists in North Korea.

Then, as if to underscore all these points, with a chuckle belying his own recognition of the irony in what he was about to say, he told the reporter, “I’m no Red!”

---

[1] Description based on pictures used in the Brezina Construction advertisement in the Rapid City Journal, August 26, 1950, 3.

[2] American Horse was born in 1875. He married Julia American Horse. In the fall of 1905, Julia gave birth to a son, Ben American Horse, Jr. in New York, while Ben was working for Pawnee Bills Show at Brighton Beach. The child died seven months later of broncho-pneumonia. (Ancestry) American Horse was about 31 years old when he returned from Antwerp, Belgium on board the Zeeland. https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=7488&h=4013537071&tid=&pid=&queryId=e88d9120d5667ce67f1f9f31c63694e6&usePUB=true&_phsrc=gyn607&_phstart=successSource

[3] “Indians Fly Away to Ballyhoo Hills Movie,” Rapid City Journal, January 22, 1951, 3.

[4] “Allies Stab Back Into Rail Center,” Rapid City Journal, January 21, 1951, 1.

[5] https://www.archives.gov/files/research/military/korean-war/casualty-lists/sd-alpha.pdf. One press story said that Sitting Bull’s grandson, Charles Walking Bull, Jr., had recently been killed in action in Korea. But his name is not on this official list of servicemen killed in the Korean War.

[6] “Son of Sitting Bull Among Sioux Indians Here for Film Debut,” Chicago Tribune, January 24, 1951, 6. See also, Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of An American Visionary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 468.

[7] Description based on pictures used in the Brezina Construction advertisement in the Rapid City Journal, August 26, 1950, 3.

[8] “Chief in Jocular Mood,” Pittsburgh Press, February 9, 1951, 32.

[9] Monika Siebert, Indians Playing Indian: Multiculturalism and Contemporary Indigenous Art in North America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 12.

[10] Mae Tinee, “Indians Whoop It Up Here at Film Premiere,” Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1951, 155.

[11] Bob Lee, “Sioux Chieftain Blasts Daily Worker Reporter,” Rapid City Journal, February 20, 1951, 3.

[12] Bob Lee uncovered this information in his research for the Rapid City Journal. “Hills Mecca for Movies,” Rapid City Journal, March 30, 1969, 33.

[13] Harman W. Nichols, “Ben Black Elk Knows Thing or 2,” Columbus Republic, January 31, 1951, 3.

[14] “No ‘Oscars’ Sighted By Critics for ‘Tomahawk,” Rapid City Journal, January 22, 1951, 3.

[15] “Kinsman on Indian Visit,” Detroit Free Press, February 8, 1951, 19.

[16] “Injun Key Chains for 500 Children at Loew’s State,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 15, 1951, 5. See also “South Bergen Scouts Meet Indians at Show,” Passaic Herald News, February 19, 1951, 13.

[17] Akim D. Reinhardt, Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics From the IRA to Wounded Knee (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007), 96-97. See also, Kenneth R. Philip, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 165.

[18] “6 G.O.P Delegates Pass Out From Heat,” Joplin Globe, June 27, 1944, 5.

[19] Photo and caption, Sheridan County Star, February 15, 1951, 5.

[20] “Indians Go to Washington,” Rapid City Journal, February 1, 1951, 1.

[21] Dillon Graham, “Chief Sitting Bull’s Son Does War Dance on Capitol Steps,” Rapid City Journal, February 9, 1951, 4.

[22] “Chief of Sioux Wants G.I.’s Brought Home,” Boston Globe, February 2, 1951, 28.

[23] Bob Lee, “Sioux Chieftain Blasts Daily Worker Reporter,” Rapid City Journal, February 20, 1951, 3.

[24] Dillon Graham, “Chief Sitting Bull’s Son Does War Dance on Capitol Steps,” Rapid City Journal, February 9, 1951, 4.

[25] Red Republican Becomes Red Hero,” LIFE magazine, February 19, 1951, 36.

[26] Red Republican Becomes Red Hero,” LIFE magazine, February 19, 1951, 36.

[27] Display advertisement, Boston Globe, February 1, 1951, 9.

[28] “Chief of Sioux Wants G.I.’s Brought Home,” Boston Globe, February 2, 1951, 28.

[29] Bob Lee, “Sioux Chieftain Blasts Daily Worker Reporter,” Rapid City Journal, February 20, 1951, 3.

[30] Bob Lee, “Sioux Chieftain Blasts Daily Worker Reporter,” Rapid City Journal, February 20, 1951, 3.

[31] https://www.archives.gov/files/research/military/korean-war/casualty-lists/sd-alpha.pdf. One press story said that Sitting Bull’s grandson, Charles Walking Bull, Jr., had recently been killed in action in Korea. But his name is not on this official list of servicemen killed in the Korean War.