The Most Fascinating Historical Figure One Encounters on Highway 83 Is Spotted Tail

Credit: Library of Congress

As an author, when I sit down to write a book-length piece of nonfiction, I normally have a point I want to make.

I don’t think when I first had the idea to start what would ultimately be a three-part series: The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83, also known as The Highway 83 Chronicles, that I had some overarching theme in mind.

I just thought it would be a fun project to research and write. But that certainly changed as I began the process.

Assign 100 authors to write a hybrid travel-history book about the stories and people they discover along Highway 83 and you would end up with 100 different books. That is because we would all be personally drawn to different stories.

And one story I have been drawn to for a number of years is that of Chief Spotted Tail of the Brulé Lakotas.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in this book is to at least raise a little awareness about Sinte Gleska, as he is known in the Lakota language. In my mind, he is one of the most fascinating and complex historical figures of the 19^th Century “Old West” era.

But few know of him. Why?

Take a poll of the public and ask respondents to name five famous Native Americans. One could probably predict the responses: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Pocahontas would probably be the top four, with number five up for grabs. (Cochise, Red Cloud or Chief Joseph might make the cut.) I doubt Spotted Tail would be on the list even if it were expanded to 10, or more.

We associate all but one of these figures with resistance to the American expansion in the West. They were so-called “war chiefs.”

Spotted Tail was not one of them. I won’t recount the early days of his life. That is in the book, but I will mention that as a young man he came to the realization long before his contemporaries that the plains tribes would ultimately not win a straight ahead war with the tidal wave of white men coming from the East. When his Oglala Lakota rival Red Cloud fought a successful guerilla war on the Bozeman Trail in 1868, he sat that conflict out. He was nowhere near the Battle of Greasy Grass, or “Custer’s Last Stand” in 1876.

He knew such conflicts would get his people nowhere.

Yet he had many other kinds of battles with the U.S. government. He was a tough negotiator, and wanted the best outcome for his people. These were “wars of wills,” not with weapons. And he mostly came out on top.

Americans always wished Native American nations had an ultimate leader, like our own president — someone who spoke for all of the tribes and could make decisions. But that wasn’t normally how these societies worked. It was more about consensus among many chiefs.

Spotted Tail took on this role, though. He went to Washington to negotiate, and could at least speak for the Brulé Lakotas, although it was only one of seven different Lakota, or Teton Sioux, tribes.

He was no pushover.

Highway 83 bisects the Rosebud Reservation. The Highway 83 Chronicles project gave me a chance to do something I had wanted to do for many years: tell Spotted Tail’s story. In the final section of The Last American Highway, I seek to answer the question of how the reservation and the Brulés ended up where they are today.

The story is telling. For several years, the agency was located along the banks of the Missouri, where it was more convenient for the government to deliver supplies. Spotted Tail hated this spot. Firewood and game — once plentiful along its banks — had been depleted. It was easy for whiskey bootleggers to ply their trade there. And such rivers were also a conveyance of diseases. The bureaucrats kept stalling a planned move away from the river.

Spotted Tail pulled up the stakes and moved everyone to where the town of Rosebud is today without the U.S. government’s approving the site. Not all the Brulés wanted to leave the Missouri, though. So he had his loyal men strong arm the others into accompanying them. He had become the autocrat the Americans wanted him to be. This created rivalries and jealousies in others, which led to his demise.

A marker honors the life of Spotted Tail along U.S. 83 in Mission, S.D.

In a story not recounted in my book, Spotted Tail was asked to send some of his children to the Carlyle School in Pennsylvania so they could receive an education, At first, he thought that a white man’s school would be beneficial. After a trip to Washington, D.C., he stopped to visit. What he saw shocked him. The purpose of the school was to transform Indian children into whites, not to provide them with an education. Children who resisted were treated cruelly. It was brainwashing. He yanked his kids out of the institution and brought them back to Rosebud despite the angry denunciations from the school’s supporters.

Spotted Tail had in fact been fighting to preserve Lakota traditions and walking a fine line between the two cultures for years.

The American Indian Movement and its sympathizers in the 1970s had disdain for Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, who, after the Bozeman war, had come to the same hard conclusions about resisting the U.S. government. They were called “treaty chiefs.” Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were right and those two men were white lackeys in AIM’s book. (Leonard Crow Dog, one of the movement’s spiritual leaders, was a descendant of the man who murdered Spotted Tail.)

I admire Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. But I admire Red Could and Spotted Tail equally as men who whose peoples were put in a terrible situation. They guided them as best they could in a time of traumatic upheaval in their society and resisted in their own ways.

Was Spotted Tail some kind of saint or the Native American equivalent of Gandhi?

Certainly not. Ask the Pawnees if he was a “man of peace.” He waged war against them every chance he had. There are no Pawnees left in Nebraska. They moved to Oklahoma, and part of the blame lies with Spotted Tail.

Spotted Tail’s life ends in the Rosebud chapter of The Last American Highway: The Dakotas, but not his story. There’s much more about him in the Nebraska-Kansas book coming out next year.

Finally, a plea. Most of this information on the life and death of Spotted Tail is derived from one book: Spotted Tail’s Folk by George Hyde, which was published in 1961. The world needs an updated biography on this fascinating man. I’m hoping a historian or author reads this column and takes on this challenge.

Stew Magnuson is the author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, and  The Last American Highway: Nebraska Kansas Oklahoma edition. Both are available online or in museums, bookstores and gift shops on Hwy 83.
To join the Fans of U.S. Route 83 group on Facebook, CLICK HERE. And check out the U.S. Route 83 Travel page at www.usroute83.com.  Contact Stew Magnuson at stewmag (a) yahoo.com

The Story of Bob Barker, the Rosebud Reservation and Highway 83

Mission, S.D, 1940. By John Vachon. LOC

As a chronicler of all things to do with Highway 83, I have a fairly good list of all the famous folks who came from the towns or cities along its 1,885 miles.

That comes to some 122 communities — depending on how you count them — so there are bound to be a few well-known actors, singers, athletes, politicians and war heroes hailing from these towns.

Some were born in a Highway 83 community but left at a young age, and probably have no emotional connection or memories about their birthplaces. Some were born and raised along the road, and lived there until they left to find their fame and fortune. Some were not born there, but spent formative years in these towns.

Such is the case with game show host and animal rights activist Bob Barker.

I only very recently discovered that Barker spent his childhood in Mission, South Dakota.

So I dutifully noted this on my calendar, and when his 90^th birthday rolled around on Dec. 12, I wished him Happy Birthday on my Fans of U.S. Route 83 Facebook page, and noted that he was also one-eighth Lakota, which was stated on his Wikipedia page. 

This generated a lot of comments, especially on the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Facebook page, where I shared the posting. Some claimed that Barker was lying about being one-eighth Lakota.

People are right to question the accuracy of Wikipedia entries, although in my opinion, it has gotten better over the years.

But this got me to thinking.

Did Bob Barker ever write his memoirs? The answer was “yes.” Then, the next question, did my local library have a copy? The answer to that was also “yes,” and it wasn’t checked out. So I stopped by there on the way home from work the day of his birthday and grabbed a copy.

Priceless Memories, by Bob Barker, published in 2009, actually had quite a bit of it devoted to

Barker’s childhood spent in Mission, and a few other surprising connections to Highway 83 as well.

His mother, a schoolteacher, met his father Byron Barker, who was one-quarter Lakota, in White River, South Dakota, which is a Route 83 town just north of Rosebud.

His father got into the trade of stringing up power lines as the nation was expanding its electrical grids, so the young couple moved from town to town. Bob Barker was born in Washington state, Dec. 12, 1923.

Another connection: His father briefly worked in the Highway 83 terminus town of Brownsville, Texas. Barker was very young, but he has a strong memory of his time there when his parents took him out to the airfield to see Charles Lindberg.

When Bob was six, and the family was living in Missouri, Byron Barker passed away as a result of a work injury. This was in the Great Depression, and his mother couldn’t find work. Byron’s brother, who was living in Mission, secured a teaching job for her there.

That is how Bob Barker ended up on the Rosebud Reservation, spending nearly eight years of his childhood there during the worst of the Dust Bowl years and Great Depression.

According to the memoir, Barker has many fond memories of living in Mission. He went to a two-room school house which was about three-quarters white, and about one-quarter Lakota. Most of the Lakota students went to the nearby boarding school.

He played with kids of both races, and never felt any prejudice. This jives with interviews I have done over the years with adults who attended mixed white-Indian elementary schools as children. (The prejudice comes in the higher grades.)

One tidbit from the book is how his buddies would jump off the bridge from the road south of town into the creek during the summer to cool off. This is the road that would become U.S. Route 83.

Barker’s mother eventually married Louis Valandra, also a member of the tribe. They soon moved back to Missouri after Barker completed eighth-grade. Bob has a half-brother Kent, who would be one-quarter Lakota.

Some on Facebook whose families are connected to Barker/Valandra families said Bob Barker does not have any Indian blood, and he was lying about being one-eighth Lakota.
Well, all autobiographies must be taken with a grain of salt for reasons I don’t have to go into here. People leave out inconvenient facts, or embellish their lives.

However, someone on Wikipedia posted the 1930 Rosebud Indian Census. It denotes Bob Barker at age seven as being “Sioux” along with his father and other members of the Barker family. So being part Lakota was clearly something Bob Barker had been told by his family from a young age. It’s not something he is making up.

Blood quantum is an important issue among Native Americans.

Today, it means qualifying for certain benefits, and maybe even sharing in the proceeds of casinos.

Many over the last few decades when it became fashionable claimed to be Indians, but weren’t. These are the so-called “wannabes.” That certainly wasn’t the case in the 1930s when race mixing was not so acceptable. The Barker family in 1930 identified themselves as “Sioux.” Barker doesn’t mention in his autobiography which of his paternal grandparents were Lakota. Someone with access to the tribal records could probably settle the matter.

Reading between the lines, it is hard to see Barker as a “wannabe.”

While he has fond memories of his time in Mission, he doesn’t mention the name of the tribe, returning to the town to visit since he left, or share any stories about Indian culture such as attending powwows.

It is possible he didn’t encounter much of in the way of ceremonies as a child back then. Policies in the 1930s were to suppress Native American culture and languages. Or maybe he just didn’t write about them.

I’ve known people who were one-sixteenth Lakota, who embraced that part of their heritage, and others with as much Indian blood who didn’t give a hang about it. It’s more to do with attitude than blood quantum.

I don’t normally read game show host autobiographies (okay, I never have and may never read one again) but this one opened up a small window about life in a Highway 83 town — Mission, South Dakota — during the depths of the Depression and Dust Bowl years. So it was well worth seeking out.

Stew Magnuson is the author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, and  The Last American Highway: Nebraska Kansas Oklahoma edition. Both are available online or in museums, bookstores and gift shops on Hwy 83, including Soldier Woman Gallery in Mission, SD, and Plains Trading in Valentine, NE.
 

To join the Fans of U.S. Route 83 group on Facebook, CLICK HERE. And check out the U.S. Route 83 Travel page at www.usroute83.com.  Contact Stew Magnuson at stewmag (a) yahoo.com