Women and Warriors of the Plains

by Dan Aadland

In 1906 there arrived at Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, a petite, teenage bride named Julia Tuell. With her school-master husband she would live among the Cheyennes, then briefly among the Sac and Fox tribe in Oklahoma and finally (for more than a decade) with the Lakota (Sioux) on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Realizing the fleeting beauty of Plains Indian culture, a beauty fading before her eyes, Julia chose for her constant companion an 8 x 10 Kodak camera and indelibly preserved on its glass plates the treasures in this book. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, warriors who had fought General Custer still lived. Women who had sheltered and nourished their children among the darkest days of Plains Indian life still survived. The most sacred religious ceremonies of the tribes, the Sun Dance and the Massaum, were still regularly practiced (when reservation officials allowed it). Julia Tuell understood that all facets of