A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Historiae Literarum et Artium, 1. (Szeged, 1997)

Nagy Imre: „The Black Came over the Sun...” Lame Bull’s spiritual oeuvre

hand, Harvey White Shield reported to Mooney that Lame Bull's Yellow Tipi was prepared about 1871, three years before the battle of Adobe Walls. The Yellow Tipi of Lame Bull Fig. 3 shows a distinct composition with black top and bottom, while the central field of the tipi cover is solid yellow. Four bluish-green stripes connect the two black zones. This feature relates the tipi design to the Yellow Tipi of White Shield, where four narrow, black lines connect the lowermost and uppermost zones on the cover. A four-pointed star of the same bluish-green color is painted between the smoke flaps. This motif connects the design with the black tipi design on the Hazen drawing. There is a row of buffalo hoofprints just above the lower black zone, and a red circle outlined in green in the middle of the back. Two black buffalo figures face this central circle. A close inspection of the above tipi designs indicates that they share a common repertoire, each having a threelayered composition, and a wide range of variations of the circle, crescent and fourpointed star motifs. The Yellow Tipi of White Shield and the Yellow Tipi of Lame Bull share the four narrow, connecting stripes between the lower and upper zones, as well as a third tipi reported by Harvey White Shield. The „Plain Tipi" of Lame Bull Harvey informed Mooney that he saw a painted canvas tipi of Lame Bull in 1878, which had an unpainted central field, while four stripes connected the top and bottom of the tipi cover, as on his father's tipi, and on Lame Bull's Yellow Tipi. Black dots indicated stars at the lower and upper zones of this canvas lodge. My reconstruction (Fig. 5c) follows Mooney's description of these 'black spots'; however, we might suppose that these stars would have covered the upper field completely. In summary, with a critical use of the visual documents, and with the close study of textual sources, we can identify at least four different painted tipi designs originated by the Cheyenne medicine man, Lame Bull. Lame Bull, the dreamer of shields We have learned that Lame Bull was a great medicine man, being the leader of the Fire Dance, the dreamer of dramatic Cheyenne tipi paintings, and the successful leader of war parties. Then the question comes naturally: did he ever dream or make a protective war shield ? The answer however, is far from evident. Strangely, this question seems never to have been asked by James Mooney. Lone Wolf, the cousin of Lame Bull, would have been able to answer it, certainly. Cousins, nephews, brothers and sons were the natural candidates for the ownership of shields prepared by a medicine man. It is hard to believe that a strong spiritual man like Lame Bull never dreamed of, nor made a shield. Fortunately, we have a starting point to unravel this mystery. In 1992,1 had the chance to study an intricately-painted shield in a European private collection (Fig. 7). The painted design is somewhat irregular for a Cheyenne shield. However, its basicmeaningful unit might be classified according to my Cheyenne shield typology as „dark arc on the upper circumference" (Nagy 1995). Short red lines ending in black dots hang 67