Spotted Tail

"We'd like to see that land back," said Rosebud Sioux Chief John Spotted Tail during a 2018 speech at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

Last fall, Weiden published an award-winning middle-school biography of Chief Spotted Tail, a peace-loving Lakota chief who refused to fight in an 1860s Indian war against the U.S.

It was the prosecution of Spotted Tail’s murderer, and the ensuing jurisdictional battle between the Lakota and the federal government, that led to the passage of the Major Crimes Act in 1885, which to this day limits Native people from prosecuting serious felonies on their own lands.

Besides assering an earlier start to Ogallala’s trailhead period, he said, it suggests the Texas Trail supplied not only eastern markets but also the Oglala and Brulé Lakota bands being supplied by federal cattle buyers at the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies in northern Nebraska.

Spotted Tail was a strong and tall man, a powerful warrior.