May 19, 2022
Volume 52 - No. 20
Compiled by lyle e davis
This is an excerpt from Bruce Brown’s revolutionary collection of eye-witness accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, ‘100 Voices from the Little Bighorn,’ the largest and most complete collection of eye-witness accounts of the battle ever assembled.
White Cow Bull’s story is from a battlefield interview with David Humphreys Miller in 1937. The old man sat cross-legged in the The Paper - 760.747.7119
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Montana sun, posing for me with his gaunt shoulders draped in an ancient trade cloth blanket, gnarled fingers clutching a cottonwood cane. It was hard to imagine that his scraggly hands had once been dexterous with firearms, or that his watery eyes, with bluish, washed out irises, had been among the keenest of any warrior's who had fought in the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
We were camped that August day in 1937 at the Crow Fair. His name was Joseph White Cow Bull. An Oglala Sioux from Pine Ridge Indian
Reservation in South Dakota, he had come to have a last look at the battlefield before he died.
His name seemed somewhat anomalous in combining the bovine sexes. It made better sense in Sioux that it did in English. "Ptebloka Ska" indicated a male of the white man's semidomesticated longhorn cattle, which some interpreter, lacking fluency in English, had evidently mistranslated. White Cow Bull, I learned, had earned the name at age fourteen by shooting a stray longhorn bull with a single arrow.
Joseph White Cow Bull Continued on Page 2
My first portrait sketch of him completed, I loaded the old man in my car and headed south out of camp on U. S. Highway 87, bypassing the entrance to Custer Battlefield and National Cemetery so he could first see the site of the great Indian village where he had camped sixty two years earlier. I realized that time and cultivation by the semiagricultural Crow must have caused considerable changes in the look of the land. White Cow Bull nonetheless soon managed to point out where the wide camp circles, each a half mile in diameter, had sprawled along the