Joe Medicine Crow: The Last American Indian War Chief

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Joe Medicine Crow was born in October 1913 on the Crow Indian Reservation outside Lodge Grass, Montana, to Amy Yellowtail and Leo Medicine Crow. His name translated High Bird. Crow society was matrilinear. This meant that property and hereditary rank passed through your mom. Regardless, his father Leo Medicine Crow was a respected war chief himself. 

Hard Core History

Joe was raised, for the most part, by his maternal step-grandfather, a respected Indian warrior named White Man Runs Him or simply Yellowtail. In the early 1900s, the American West was still littered with veterans of the Indian Wars. White Man Runs Him had served as a scout for General George Armstrong Custer and his 7^th Cavalry. He had been an eyewitness to the bloody 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn.

As Joe was coming of age, he was mesmerized by war stories from his step-grandfather. Joe’s son later said of his father, “His Grandfather Yellowtail trained him in the old warrior ways. In wintertime, they chopped a hole in the ice and took a refreshing morning plunge. Then Yellowtail told him to run a hundred yards in the snow barefoot. In summer and fall, Dad learned hunting and tracking skills. My father was raised as a farm boy, rancher, outdoorsman, hunter, cowboy, jockey, and exercise boy — he was an all-round man.”

Education Of Medicine Crow

Joe was a smart kid, but he had not been raised speaking English. On his first day in formal school, he developed a bad case of hiccups and was unable to pronounce “excuse me” to the teacher’s satisfaction. This bought him a timeout in the sandbox playing with blocks while wearing a dunce cap. However, once he mastered the language, Joe thrived academically.

Joe pitched for the school baseball team and excelled in throwing the javelin. By the time he finished high school, he had mastered six musical instruments—the clarinet, saxophone, flute, accordion, piano, and Indian hand drum. In short order, Joe had absorbed all his high school had to offer.

Next-Level Learning

In 1929, while in the 8^th grade, Joe began taking classes at the Bacone College of Muskogee, Oklahoma. He earned his Associate of Arts degree in 1936 and his bachelor’s two years later. The following year, Joe earned his master’s degree in anthropology from USC in Los Angeles. As I said, Joe was a pretty quick kid.

Joe was the second member of his extended tribe to go to college and the first to earn a post-graduate degree. His Master’s thesis, The Effects of European Culture Contact upon the Economic, Social, and Religious Life of the Crow Indians, was widely read. By 1941 he had completed the coursework for his PhD but had not had an opportunity to defend his thesis. It turned out Adolph Hitler had other plans. Now, hold that thought…

Joe Medicine Crow Foundations

The Crow tribe of Plains Indians historically lived in the Yellowstone River valley. They allied with the United States against the Cheyenne and the Sioux. The Crow enjoyed a distinctively unique language. 

Like all of humanity, the history of the American Indians is characterized and punctuated by war, domination, and wanton slaughter. The earliest origins of the Crow people can be traced back to an area around Lake Erie in modern-day Ohio. Organized attacks by their neighbors pushed the Crow into Manitoba and then North Dakota.

Allegiances came and went. The Crow allied with the Kiowa and Plains Apache as it suited them, driving the Shoshone westward to seize their territory by force. Once settled into the Yellowstone River valley, the Crow fractionated into four distinct entities.

Communities

The Crow adapted well to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Their four groups included the Mountain Crow, the River Crow, Kicked in the Bellies, and Beaver Dries Its Fur. I have no idea the significance of those terms, but I find them fascinating.

Beginning around 1730, the Crow, along with most all Plains Indians, organized their culture around the horse and buffalo hunting. Buffalo provided sustenance, clothing, and shelter. The Indians burned their dried excrement for heat. As did they all, the Crow stole horses and raided their neighbors to attain local advantage.

Crow Tribal Allegiances

In the 1850s, a young man named Plenty Coups had a vision wherein he predicted that the incoming white men would eventually become the dominant force in their world. Plenty Coups later grew up to become the greatest Crow chief in the tribe’s history. He espoused that, were the Crow to retain any of their lands, they would have to remain on good terms with the encroaching white men.

The Battle of the Little Big Horn and the defeat of General George Armstrong Custer in 1876 by the Cheyenne and Sioux took place on the Crow Indian Reservation. However, this sparked the subsequent Great Sioux War that saw the defeat of the Lakota Sioux and their Cheyenne allies. Crow warriors actively served with US Army forces during this war. Joe Medicine Crow came from a people of warriors.

Tradition

The Plains Indians had a highly refined hierarchy. According to the Crow tradition, there were four requirements for a warrior to be designated a war chief. One must lead a successful war party, touch an enemy soldier without actually killing him (called counting coup in the vernacular), disarm an enemy soldier, and capture an enemy’s horse.

As did so many of his generation, when the United States went to war, Joe Medicine Crow answered the call. The small-statured Native American soon found himself serving as a scout with the 103d Infantry Division during the assault across France in 1944. In this capacity, Medicine Crow once led a seven-man team through withering artillery fire to breach German defensive positions on the Siegfried Line with explosives.

A Traditional Indian Fights Modern War

Whenever he went into battle, Medicine Crow wore his war paint. This consisted of two red stripes down his arms that were not visible underneath his uniform. He also kept a sacred yellow-painted eagle feather tucked inside his helmet. The feather had been a formal gift from a “Sun Dance” medical man prior to his deployment overseas. It was in this configuration while covertly creeping through a contested French village that Medicine Crow rounded a corner and came face-to-face with a strapping German Landser much larger than he.

Both men were surprised. However, for reasons lost to history, Medicine Crow did not shoot the man. Perhaps he was trying to remain stealthy in an enemy-held area. Instead, he reflexively kicked the big German in the balls, causing him to drop his rifle. Joe then dove on the enemy soldier, wrapping his fingers vise-like around the man’s throat.

As the German soldier’s eyes rolled back in his head he called out, “Mama, Mama!” This touched something primal in Medicine Crow’s heart. He later told his son Ronald, “I let go of him and got my rifle back and he became my prisoner. We sat down, away from all the shouting and fighting, and I shared a cigarette with him.”

Horse Thievery

Another time, Medicine Crow infiltrated a Waffen SS encampment. Despite fighting a mechanized war, much of the German military machine remained dependent upon horses until the armistice. Before his commander could launch an assault against the SS position, Joe volunteered to liberate their horses. Improvising a bridle just as his ancestors might, Joe mounted one of the animals bareback and then herded a further fifty to freedom. Once he was clear, his commander launched an artillery barrage that caused the German troops to surrender. As he rode into the distance, the short Indian warrior sang a traditional Crow honor song.

If you’re keeping track, that operation checked the last of the four boxes. Joe Medicine Crow led a war party, counted coup, disarmed an enemy soldier, and took an opponent’s horses. By the time Joe came home from Europe, he was a full-fledged Crow war chief, the last of his breed.

A Veteran’s Story

Upon his return from Europe, Medicine Crow took a job as tribal historian and anthropologist. Beginning in 1951, he began working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. His historical scholarship and advocacy for Native Americans was widely respected. In 1999 he addressed the United Nations.

Medicine Crow became a regular speaker at the Little Big Horn College as well as the Little Big Horn Battlefield Museum. Having put his oral history to paper, his script of the Little Big Horn fight guided the reenactment on the battlefield every year beginning in 1965. He was also a widely published author.

Medicine Crow’s works included Crow Migration Story, Medicine Crow, the Handbook of the Crow Indians Law and Treaties, Crow Indian Buffalo Jump Techniques, and From the Heart of Crow Country. He also penned a children’s book called Brave Wolf and the Thunderbird.

The Rest of the Medicine Crow Story

Joe Medicine Crow was eventually granted three different honorary doctorates. His military decorations included the Bronze Star, the French Legion of Honor Chevalier Medal, and the Combat Infantryman Badge. In 2009, President Obama awarded Medicine Crow with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. At the awards ceremony, the President referred to Medicine Crow as bacheitche, or a “good man,” in his native Crow language. There’s a lot about which Obama and I disagreed, but that was pretty classy.

READ MORE: Human Nature, Assault Weapons, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee

Joe Medicine Crow continued to write and deliver historical lectures, usually in native regalia, all the way up to his death in 2016 at the ripe age of 102. He left behind a son, two daughters, and a stepdaughter. Joe Medicine Crow, the last of the Crow war chiefs, indeed lived a warrior’s life.

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