INDIAN SWORDS
121
FIG. 34 (left):
Handachi katana. Blade,
17th–18th century.
Scabbard and mountings,
19th century.
Steel, iron, bronze, wood, silk,
lacquer. L: 68.8 cm (blade only).
Courtesy Lempertz, Cologne.
Photo: Studio Fuis, Cologne.
This handachi-mounted katana is
similar in many ways to those that
appear in the Red Cloud image
(fi gs. 1 and 21) and the Dog Child
one (fi gs. 2 and 35). A sword with
comparable mountings also is visible
in the Brady image of the Japanese
delegation from 1860 (see fi g. 23,
front fi gure third from the left).
FIG. 35 (right):
Dog Child, a North-West
Mounted Police scout,
and his wife, The Only
Handsome Woman,
members of the Blackfoot
Nation, by Norman Caple
and/or Richard Henry
Trueman. Gleichen, Alberta,
c. 1890–1894.
See fi g. 2 for details.
added to record for object E14171).
12. Such cases are rare, but this is not the only instance in which researchers
have identifi ed items present in collections today that had long been
thought (and were recorded in collection records) to have been
“condemned” (i.e., deaccessioned or withdrawn, then discarded). The
sword photographed with the manikin in 1873 has not yet been found in
the collections.
13. The son of Lone Man and Walks As She Thinks, he was born in 1822 in
the Bad Face (Ite Sica) band of Oglala. A leading fi gure of early Lakota
resistance to White encroachment, Red Cloud is credited with winning the
only successful Indian war against the United States, thus leading to the
closing of the Bozeman Trail and its military forts. Shortly thereafter he
joined, albeit reluctantly, other Lakota chiefs and headmen in the signing
of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. This historic treaty created the unifi ed
Great Sioux Reservation in western Dakota Territory, recognized the Sioux as
legitimate owners of the Black Hills, and established agencies for the regular
distribution of government annuities to the signatory tribes. The Oglala
chief eventually settled at his own Red Cloud Agency near Camp Robinson,
northwestern Nebraska, and in 1878 he relocated to the current Pine Ridge
Reservation, South Dakota. He lived there through the diffi cult times of
adjustment to reservation life, often in open confrontation with corrupted
Indian agents, and endured the tragedy of Wounded Knee in 1890. By then,
he had acquired international notoriety and legendary status among the
Indians. Red Cloud died blind at Pine Ridge in 1909 at age eighty-seven and
was buried in the local Holy Rosary Mission Cemetery. Of the four major
Lakota chiefs of his time—the others were Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Spotted
Tail—only Red Cloud died of natural causes, the other three having all died
violent deaths.
14. These are now in the Denver Public Library, Western History Collection,
and in the collections of the Nebraska Historical Society and the
Smithsonian.
15. Quoting that description here at length: “There is no question that the