Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior by Peter Nabokov (review)

Reviews Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior. By Peter Nabokov. Based on a Field Manuscript Prepared by William Wildschut for the Museum of the American Indian. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966. 224 pages, 27 photographs, 2 maps. $5.95.) This is the autobiography of a Crow warrior, 1847-1923, taken down by a Dutch-born businessman, William Wildschut of Billings, Montana, shortly before Two Leggings died. For almost half a century the long manuscript lay in the files of the Museum of the American Indian, New York. Then in 1962 Peter Nabokov, a research associate of the museum, began his work of rewriting, editing, and annotating it. If his formal Introduction to the book seems too long, and his introductory comments to each chapter sometimes redundantly explanatory, they place Two Leggings and the Crows in his­ torical perspective; and his drastic editing down of the manuscript results in a narrative for which we should all be grateful. With a Foreword by John C. Ewers, Senior Research Anthropologist of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the book is presented under imposing auspices that illus­ trate our belated and unaccountable interest in one who, not long ago, could only have been dismissed with the comment, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Crow country was the high northern plains of the upper Missouri in what is now Montana and Wyoming. The time bridges the years when the Crows were a free and independent nation hunting buffalo and making raids on neighboring tribes, and their final confinement in 1884 to their present Reser­ vation whose government agency is but one mile from the site of the Custer Massacre on the Little Bighorn. Two Leggings’ recorded memories end just four years after that. “There is nothing more to tell.” The traditional Crow way of life which he had lived to the full, the indigenous American Indian life pattern before the coming of the whites, had been forever broken. It is this pattern which he describes with such searing detail — the daily life of a Crow boy’s rise to manhood as a warrior — that constitutes the rich texture of Mr. Nabokov’s book. It compliments in a negative way the great classic, Black Elk Speaks, 64 Western American Literature by John G. Niehardt, the autobiography of an Oglala Sioux whose spiritual vision made him an acknowledged holy man of his people. Among almost all American Indians, secular tribal leadership was estab­ lished only by religious sanction. A man would withdraw into solitude to fast and pray for a vision or dream during which he would be visited by a spirit-person who thereafter became his sacred protector and imbued him with transcendental power to achieve his aims. This power, called orenda, maxpe, and other names among the many tribes, was commonly known as “medicine.” And all objects associated with the vision, no matter how trivial — a rock, feather, tooth or claw, were gathered into a medicine bundle which he always carried. Black Elk received his Great Vision when only a child; a vision of such extraordinary beauty, intricate symbolism, and depth of meaning that it stands unique in all the literature of the metaphysical. Because of it Black Elk attained tribal status as a seer and leader. Two Leggings shows us the other side of the coin. From boyhood he was obsessed with the desire to become a “pipeholder” or medicine man, and then a chief. Step by step he began his climb up the ladder toward success: accompanying war parties as a menial helper, becoming a scout, leading raiding parties as a recognized warrior of growing renown. But to become a pipeholder it was necessary for him to experience a significant vision which other established pipeholders would accept. Then only could he be entrusted while leading a war party to pass around his pipe and learn from his medi­ cine bundle where to lead his men and how to act. Two Leggings fasted and prayed time after time. He received many songs, visions and dreams, in one of which he saw the face of the woman he was to marry and whom years after he had other...