White Buffalo

White Buffalo (c. 1862- June 1929) was a chief of the Northern Cheyenne. He was born in Montana Territory to the Northern Cheyenne tribe but was forced with most of his tribe to remove to Indian Territory (now the State of Oklahoma). He lived most of his life on the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation in Indian Territory and then Oklahoma. He graduated in 1884 as one of the early attendees of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, one of 249 students from his tribe to attend that school over the years of its operation. He returned to the Darlington Agency in Oklahoma after his schooling, and during his twenties, he was an Indian scout in the detachment of scouts headed by Edward W Casey. When he was 40, he was the victim of a deliberate libel of murder by a Wichita newspaper writer, W. R. Draper, in 1902, which saw Draper arrested and arraigned for the libel case. Prior to the perpetration of this libel, White Buffalo had risen to chief status for his tribe. This status is evidenced by his portrait, taken by Frank Rinehart, official photographer at the 1898 Indian Congress held in Omaha, Nebraska. That Congress was held in conjunction with the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition and was attended by 500 tribal members from 35 different tribes. Rinehart took a series of photographs of the chiefs of the various tribes during that Indian Congress, labeling White Buffalo as one of the chiefs. In 1929, he was listed in numerous newspapers as the head of a delegation of 108 Oklahoma Indians from 23 tribes who traveled to Washington, DC, to escort Charles Curtis, of Indian blood, to his inauguration as Vice President of the United States. White Buffalo was married to Medicine Woman, a widowed full blood Northern Cheyenne, and at that time in 1910, they had 3 surviving sons of seven children total. He died in late June 1929, and is buried in the Indian Mission Church on the reservation. He was survived by his wife and children. Early life White Buffalo was born in Montana as were his parents, according to the 1910 U. S. Federal Census records. The Cheyenne were wide-ranging in their hunting grounds, ranging from Montana to Texas. After the Medicine Lodge Treaty in 1867, in which the U. S. proposed first a reservation in Kansa then one in Indian Territory, most of the Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho were forced to move south to the Indian agency near Fort Supply in present-day Oklahoma.