Across The Fence: Crow Dog: Spotted Tail's assassin

During the late 1860s and throughout the 1870s Spotted Tail was a principle chief of the Brule Sioux and a tireless advocate of peaceful relations between the tribes of the western plains and the ever-increasing influx of white settlers and seekers of gold. Born in 1823 in the White River country, which is now South Dakota, his father Tangle Hair and his mother Walks-with-the-Pipe gave him the name Jumping Buffalo. As a young warrior Jumping Buffalo was given the tail of a raccoon by a white trapper and he often wore it in his warrior headdress, thus earning the name Spotted Tail.

Spotted T...