1970s CROW INDIAN CHIEF WHITE MAN RUNS HIM LARGE PHOTO SIGNED ELSA SPEARS BYRON

Description

Stunningly beautiful, original ca1970 Large Format Portrait Photograph of Native American Crow Indian Chief and Scout with George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn Mahr-Itah-Thee-Dah-Ka-Roosh (White Man Runs Him – also known as White Buffalo That Turns Around) taken in 1926 at the gathering on the 50th anniversary of the Battle by acclaimed western photographer Elsa Spear Byron. The Image was printed from Byron’s original negative and is hand signed by the photographer at the lower right hand corner.
This striking Portrait Photo measures approx. 11” by 15” and is professionally double matted and ready for framing and display (matted display measures 14 3/4” by 19 1/2”). The Photograph is a near full figure portrait of White Man Runs him dressed in full eagle feather headdress and traditional regalia. He is seated on a blanket in front of a tepee and appears to be speaking. The Photograph is hand signed in silver ink by the photographer simply “Elsa” with an upward pointed arrow and a copyright mark.
This wonderful, Portrait of a George Armstrong Custer’s Crow Scout White Man Runs Him is in excellent++ condition. The Image exhibits sharp focus, strong contrast and rich warm tonality. The Photo is clean and crisp and the signature of the photographer dark and bold although shaky (Byron was likely over 80 years old when she signed this Photo).
A stunningly beautiful and original, Large Format Portrait Photograph of Native American Crow Indian Chief and Scout with George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn Mahr-Itah-Thee-Dah-Ka-Roosh (White Man Runs Him) taken in 1926 by Elsa Spear Byron and a fantastic addition to any collection!!!
Be sure to check out this seller’s other auctions for a number of 19th and 20th century Native American Indian Photographs which are also being offered for sale this week on eBay!!
White Man Runs Him (Mahr-Itah-Thee-Dah-Ka-Roosh; c. 1858 – June 2, 1929)> was a Crow scout serving with George Armstrong Custer's 1876 expedition against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne that culminated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Also known as White Buffalo That Turns Around, he was born into the Big Lodge Clan of the Crow Nation, the son of Bull Chief and Offers Her Red Cloth. At the age of about 18, he volunteered to serve as a scout with the United States Army on April 10, 1876, in its campaign against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne, traditional enemies of the Crow. White Man Runs Him "enlisted on April 10, 1876 at the Crow Agency, Montana Territory, for six months in the 7th United States Infantry." On June 21, 1876, he was transferred to Custer's Seventh U.S. Cavalry as part of a contingent of six Crow warrior/scouts, including Goes Ahead, Curly, Hairy Moccasin, White Swan, and Half Yellow Face, the leader of the scouts. He scouted for Lt. Charles Varnum's column in the days preceding the battle. In the early morning hours of June 25, 1876, he and other Crow scouts accompanied Varnum and Custer to the Crow's Nest, a high point on the Little Bighorn/Rosebud Creek divide, from which the Little Bighorn valley could be viewed at a distance of about seventeen air miles. The scouts could see indications of a large horse herd and the smoke of many morning fires, though the encampment itself was hidden from view on the valley floor. The Crow scouts advised Custer that the encampment was very large. Custer prepared to attack, however. Custer was concerned that during the morning of June 25, Sioux/Cheyenne warriors had detected the presence of his 650-man force, and if he did not promptly attack, the villagers would scatter, thus denying the army the confrontation it sought with the Sioux/Cheyenne forces.
According to White Man Runs Him's own accounts, after sending Major Marcus Reno's column to attack the settlement first, Custer headed down Medicine Trail Creek to engage the Sioux and Cheyenne. White Man Runs Him recounts that he and the other Crow scouts intended to follow Custer down into battle, but that their chief scout, Mitch Boyer, ordered them to rejoin the pack train instead. Another, more colorful version of the story relates that the Crow scouts were convinced they were about to die in battle against such a large force of Sioux, so they took off their uniforms and donned Crow war clothing. When Custer demanded to know why, they responded that they wished to die as warriors rather than soldiers. Custer was angered by what he perceived as fatalism and relieved them from further service about an hour before engaging in the final battle. White Man Runs Him retired to a ridge along with Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, and Strikes That Bear (an Arikara scout) to join Major Reno. They were engaged briefly in battle, but survived the engagement. He then joined Colonel John Gibbon's column.
After the battle, he lived on the Crow reservation near Lodge Grass, Montana. He was the stepgrandfather of Joe Medicine Crow, a Crow tribal historian who used his grandfather's stories as a basis for his later histories of the battle, and grandfather to Pauline Small, the first woman elected to office in the Crow Tribe of Indians. His status as a Little Big Horn survivor made him a minor celebrity late in life, and he even made a cameo appearance in the 1927 Hollywood movie Red Raiders. White Man Runs Him lived the remainder of his life on the Crow Reservation in the Big Horn Valley region of Montana, just a few miles from the site of the famous battle. He died there in 1929.
Elsa Spear Byron (1896 in Big Horn, Wyoming – 1992)
was a first-generation Wyomingite and was born in 1896. Elsa and her two brothers and sister grew up on a ranch that eventually expanded to include millions of acres of land, most of it leased from the government. When Elsa was two, her father and his family formed the Spear Brothers Cattle Company, which leased over a million acres of Crow Indian Reservation land in Montana along with a number of ranches along the Powder River and Clearmont. "They ran 57,000 head of cattle although the company only owned 36,000 head," she said. The rest were leased. Elsa and her siblings grew up in the saddle. The Spear sisters rode sidesaddle and went along on cattle roundups. When the severe drought of the early 1920s nearly destroyed the northern Wyoming cattle business, her father built a "dude camp", she said. The Spear-O-Wigwam is still operating in the Big Horn National Forest.
Elsa graduated from high school in 191 and she attended the National School for Domestic Arts and Sciences in Washington, D.C. There she studied the theory and practice of cooking "and all kinds of fancy work in sewing and millinery." But her main interest was photography. Two years later she married Harold Edwards of Colorado, an office manager for the Sheridan County Electric Company. They built a house in Sheridan and Elsa took pictures of her children as they were growing up. She had been interested in photography since her mother bought a plate camera in 1900. The pack trips to her father's Spear-O-Wigwam provided the petite photographer with endless picture taking opportunities. She made sixteen annual pack trips of two weeks' duration while her daughters were growing up, "and that's how I got my pictures from all over the mountains," she said. During one of the pack trips, "some dudes" named one of the Big Horn Mountain lakes for her, which is still recorded on Wyoming maps.
When she returned home, she enlarged her pictures in her kitchen where she had cut a trapdoor in the ceiling to raise the head of the enlarger high enough to make huge prints by projecting them on the floor. Some of her photos include the Cheyenne Indian survivors of the Custer Battlefield, whom she photographed in 1926 on the battle's 50th anniversary. Among the Indians who posed for her at the battle site were Red Cloud, grandson of the famous warrior, and Plenty Coups, a Crow chief. She also photographed many Crow Fairs from 1911 to the 1950s. One of her pictures was enlarged to eight feet in length in Denver and used as background for an Indian camp display in the Cheyenne museum. Before the advent of color photographs, Byron tinted black and white pictures with oils and sold many of them to a number of outlets, including the Northern Pacific and Burlington Railroads. "My biggest thrill", she said, "was walking up the street in Chicago and seeing four of my big pictures framed in the window of the Northern Pacific office on Jackson Boulevard during the 1930s. "They did a lot of advertising and used a lot of my 20 x 30 inch pictures to try to get the dudes to come out here." The Big Horn Mountains' Lake Elsa got its name from Elsa Spear Byron.
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