My apologies if this makes anyone feel uncomfortable:
ll she wanted, at first, was her great-grandfather’s birth date.
Nobody in Lilla Pearl Asmund’s family knew, and she’s been trying to teach her nieces and nephews more about their history.
Lilla Pearl Asmund
Courtesy photo
A few months ago at her kitchen counter in Naples, Florida, she entered his name in her laptop, hoping to find a census record. But when she scrolled through the search results, she saw photos of sacred and ceremonial Oglala objects, heirlooms that had been separated from her family for more than a century.
And they were in downtown Lincoln.
“I thought, ‘What is this?’” she said. “I looked at the pictures, and I thought, ‘That’s him.’ I was sort of shocked. And when I kept scrolling through, I saw these items. It was like, ‘Wow.’”
Her mother’s grandfather was a cousin to Crazy Horse. Joseph High Eagle was a warrior in his youth; as a teenager, he had fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Later in life, he was considered a holy man on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, she said.
And sometime during the turn of the last century, a country doctor in northern Nebraska returned from his travels and unloaded his latest harvest — High Eagle’s eagle feather hand fan, two-piece clay pipe and beaded leggings.
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Dr. Charles F. Zimmerman added them to his growing collection, which filled every room in his Boyd County drugstore.
Three decades later, the 300-piece Zimmerman Collection — war bonnets, beaded bags, bows and arrows, hide scrapers, saddles and a skull — were carried across the state to Lincoln, displayed at the Historical Society’s museum on the first floor of the Capitol.
High Eagle’s items ultimately ended up at the museum’s new home at 15th and P streets, and then on History Nebraska’s website, and then — in October — on a computer screen in Florida.
And soon, they’ll be in his great-granddaughter’s hands.
The Arizona Republic: “High Eagle was a brave of 19 in the camp of Chief Crazy Horse June 25, 1876, when the Sioux swooped down on General Custer.”
The Los Angeles Times: “High Eagle, who had survived the Indian Wars, died in a white man’s invention. He was riding in a car which overturned last night.”
Joseph High Eagle, taken around 1890.
History Nebraska
The Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal: “The old Indian lived in a cabin near Red Shirt village where the sorrowful notes of the (women) keening could be heard today.”
At the time, he was one of three remaining Native survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a distinction that brought him a measure of fame.
He was invited to reunions and anniversaries at the battlefield. He met movie stars when they vacationed in the Black Hills. He had roles in several Westerns, including “Custer’s Last Stand” and “Tomahawk.”
Before that, he’d served as an interpreter, on the reservation and at an annual Wild West show near St. Louis.
The newspapers reported High Eagle was 94 when he died, but even he didn’t know when he was born, the Gordon Journal reported in 1953.
The writer of that story — the son of a government interpreter who’d been stationed on the Pine Ridge Reservation — described meeting High Eagle and another Bighorn warrior in 1900 as a boy, when the two would visit his parents, trading conversation for coffee.
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“I used to sit up into late hours just listening to their hair-raising, flesh-creeping stories of the two weather-beaten warriors,” he wrote.
In Florida, Asmund is trying to learn those stories, too.
She knows what she’s been told about her great-grandfather. That he was nearly blind toward the end of his life. That he was funny. That he spoke French. That he was married to Nellie. That he was a holy man, and gave the blessing at the dedication of the Crazy Horse Memorial.
And that he was a good man. “My grandmother loved him,” she said.
ll she wanted, at first, was her great-grandfather’s birth date.
Nobody in Lilla Pearl Asmund’s family knew, and she’s been trying to teach her nieces and nephews more about their history.
Lilla Pearl Asmund
Courtesy photo
A few months ago at her kitchen counter in Naples, Florida, she entered his name in her laptop, hoping to find a census record. But when she scrolled through the search results, she saw photos of sacred and ceremonial Oglala objects, heirlooms that had been separated from her family for more than a century.
And they were in downtown Lincoln.
“I thought, ‘What is this?’” she said. “I looked at the pictures, and I thought, ‘That’s him.’ I was sort of shocked. And when I kept scrolling through, I saw these items. It was like, ‘Wow.’”
Her mother’s grandfather was a cousin to Crazy Horse. Joseph High Eagle was a warrior in his youth; as a teenager, he had fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Later in life, he was considered a holy man on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, she said.
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And sometime during the turn of the last century, a country doctor in northern Nebraska returned from his travels and unloaded his latest harvest — High Eagle’s eagle feather hand fan, two-piece clay pipe and beaded leggings.
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Dr. Charles F. Zimmerman added them to his growing collection, which filled every room in his Boyd County drugstore.
Three decades later, the 300-piece Zimmerman Collection — war bonnets, beaded bags, bows and arrows, hide scrapers, saddles and a skull — were carried across the state to Lincoln, displayed at the Historical Society’s museum on the first floor of the Capitol.
High Eagle’s items ultimately ended up at the museum’s new home at 15th and P streets, and then on History Nebraska’s website, and then — in October — on a computer screen in Florida.
And soon, they’ll be in his great-granddaughter’s hands.
The warrior
High Eagle’s death in 1952 put him on the front page of newspapers around the country.The Arizona Republic: “High Eagle was a brave of 19 in the camp of Chief Crazy Horse June 25, 1876, when the Sioux swooped down on General Custer.”
The Los Angeles Times: “High Eagle, who had survived the Indian Wars, died in a white man’s invention. He was riding in a car which overturned last night.”
Joseph High Eagle, taken around 1890.
History Nebraska
The Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal: “The old Indian lived in a cabin near Red Shirt village where the sorrowful notes of the (women) keening could be heard today.”
At the time, he was one of three remaining Native survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a distinction that brought him a measure of fame.
He was invited to reunions and anniversaries at the battlefield. He met movie stars when they vacationed in the Black Hills. He had roles in several Westerns, including “Custer’s Last Stand” and “Tomahawk.”
Before that, he’d served as an interpreter, on the reservation and at an annual Wild West show near St. Louis.
The newspapers reported High Eagle was 94 when he died, but even he didn’t know when he was born, the Gordon Journal reported in 1953.
The writer of that story — the son of a government interpreter who’d been stationed on the Pine Ridge Reservation — described meeting High Eagle and another Bighorn warrior in 1900 as a boy, when the two would visit his parents, trading conversation for coffee.
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“I used to sit up into late hours just listening to their hair-raising, flesh-creeping stories of the two weather-beaten warriors,” he wrote.
In Florida, Asmund is trying to learn those stories, too.
She knows what she’s been told about her great-grandfather. That he was nearly blind toward the end of his life. That he was funny. That he spoke French. That he was married to Nellie. That he was a holy man, and gave the blessing at the dedication of the Crazy Horse Memorial.
And that he was a good man. “My grandmother loved him,” she said.
‘The right thing to do’: Why a Sioux warrior’s ceremonial items are leaving Nebraska museum, headed to his family in Florida
It's not clear how Joseph White Eagle's leggings, clay pipe and eagle feather hand fan ended up with a Boyd County doctor a century ago.
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