To most people (people who’ve bothered to think of it at all), working in an archive seems like a pretty bloodless affair. And they’re right, for the most part. In general, archivists have what professional recording musicians call a “studio tan.” Too much florescence and climate control. They rarely look like rock-climbers—or tennis players. Scholars like me, who haunt the archives, hunting for those crumbs of detail that will anchor our footnotes, come across much the same. We arrive in the morning with a thermos of coffee and leave with a mole-eyed squint into the late-afternoon sunlight. Once in a while, though, you come across something in an archive that looks like it came from a crime lab
Case in point—a digital offering from the collections of the Colorado Historical Society. It is blandly labeled in achiviese:
“Object Name: Flag. Maker: U.S. Army. Description: This flag is manufactured from a square piece of white muslin. It has been stenciled across one side in black.”
Yet the old fashioned paper finding aid, produced in 1967 by a Denver history grad student for course credit, reveals startling details missing from the on-line description. The rust-colored blotches that lend the flag a map-like appearance— Rorschach islands in a “friendly” prairie nation—are in fact bloodstains. The innocuous white space in the right middle ground, a bullet hole.
Colorado Historical Society
Aside from being awful, this archival object begs a backstory.
Initially, all that appears in the finding aid are interpretations without context: blood and bullets. There is no dating of the flag, nor is there any provenance offered. A little digging in the historical record reveals that banners like this were given to Spotted Tail, a leader of the Brule Sioux, in 1867 when he demanded the right to hunt outside of the boundaries established by the US government. The Commissioners of Indian Affairs at the time instructed the Superintendent of the area to distribute these banners as signs of safe passage.
An August 1867 article in the New York Times describes the calvary arriving to deliver the flags in scene worthy of a John Ford western: “as they galloped away over the prairie, with their bright rifle-barrels, gay trappings and white flags glistening in the sun, they reminded one of a troop of cavaliers of olden time, starting out on some good mission.” At this point, the Superintendent “gave Spotted Tail and all the principal chiefs a pass similar to those given to the messengers, and had printed on their white flags, in large letters, ‘Spotted Tail’s Friendly Band.”
Somewhere between it presence at this chivalric meeting and its arrival to the archive, this flag witnessed something horrendous. We just don’t quite know what.
The story of the Spotted Tail Band’s banner is not an anomaly. The Colorado Historical Society Archive contains a microfilm reproduction of another object that bears the scars of a Native American’s deadly encounter with the U. S. Army.
On January 22, 1879, a group of Cheyenne warriors who had escaped from imprisonment at Fort Robinson, NE were cornered in a dry creek bed along the present-day Nebraska/South Dakota border. The leader of the group, Little Fingernail, arranged the some 18 men and 14 women and children with him into protective positions against the banks of the creek. Capt. Henry Wessells, who had been pursuing Little Fingernail’s band, ordered his four companies of 150 soldiers to attack. Infantrymen charged up to the creek bank edge and poured hundreds of rounds into the encampment. An officer later described the scene in a letter to a friend:
Four troops of thr 3rd cavalry, “A”, “B”, “F”, and “H” comanded by Captain Wessells . . . surrounded the hostiles and charged upon them killing all the bucks and unfortunately in the melee, some women and children.
Amidst the carnage, something caught this officer’s eye: “I saw an Indian with [a] book pressed down between his naked skin and a a strap around his waist; another strap went between the middle of the back and around his shoulder. I turned to Private Leslie of H troop, who was near me and said, ‘I want that book if we come out all right.”
He got his book.
Little Fingernail manuscript (1879) mss 1006. Colorado HIstorical Society.
When the smoke cleared, the people in the ravine were dead. The aftermath was pro forma looting: “the dead Indians being pulled out of the rifle pit, they drew out finally my Indian with the book, apparently dead; the book was injured to the extent of a carbine ball through it and was more or less covered with fresh blood.”
The officer who claimed this book as war booty believed it was the same one he had seen a few years before, at Ft. Robinson, Nebraska during the winter of ’75, ’79. He tried to get the book then, but its author “refused to part with it for any price.” In a brutal twist of fate, he got it after all.
The microfilm images show a business ledger that has been turned horizontal and illustrated with narrative colored pencil drawings depicting Little Fingernail in battle. The rifle ball has done considerable damage to the book, passing all the way through. Many pages were nearly washed out by the warrior’s bleeding.
The backstory provided by the Army officer’s letter still leaves many unanswered questions. Why was Little Fingernail carrying the book into battle? Was it a common practice? Where did he get the ledger in the first place? What stories does it tell? Are any of his relative still living, Cheyenne people who might not know their relation’s life story lies in a vault in a library, still blotted with his blood?
Like the letter from Kills Enemy Alone, taken from a body at the Wounded Knee massacre, Little Fingernail’s book seems somehow incomplete. Its final pages unadorned by the last heroic efforts of its author to protect his band, the book is suspended in history like an undelivered letter.
