A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Historiae Literarum et Artium, 4. (Szeged, 2004)
Nagy Imre: A Preliminary Report on the Friedman Kein Canvas
Wolf Face (ca. 1835-1908) was a Southern So'taa'e (Eggan n.d.), who had a considerable war record. During the 1850s, he had been in heavy fighting with the Pawnee, and in 1853 he was one of the scouts with Tall Bull who found the Pawnee village before the famous fight, when the Potawatomi hunters helped the Pawnee (Grinnell 1915: 90-94). Because of this deed, during the 1900s he was one of the two Cheyenne warriors who had the right to select the center pole for the Sun Dance lodge. Grinnell reports that his naked body showed five scars which, from their position and size, represented serious wounds (Grinnell 1923, 2: 228). In 1877, according to agency employee Ben Clark, Wolf Face had his own camp of followers 11 , comprising 32 families one mile east of the agency (Fowler 2002: 14). All these personal data illustrate that Wolf Face was a noted and well respected fighter who definitely „made a record for the shield". The Little Buffalo Thigh shield is exceptional that so many drawings and the paintings of an early Plains shirt preserved its main features. However, there is no other shield type known to the author which survived the turbulent years of Cheyenne history in triplicate. We already referred to the one in the collection of the Kansas City Museum (Cat. no. 40.616), which was collected by Col. Daniel B. Dyer- allegedly from the Southern Cheyenne chief Whirlwind (Fig. 18). This collection history is very dubious, as we explained above with the information what Little Buffalo Thigh gave to James Mooney. The other piece was published by Dockstader (1962: Fig. 213), and incorrectly attributed to the Mandan. It is obvious from the composition that it might be connected to the other known Little Buffalo Thigh shield variant (Fig. 19). The third specimen was preserved in the late 1970s in an unidentified, private collection in Cincinnati, Ohio (Carter 1978). During the 1880s, this shield was in the collection of the painter Henry F. Farny, as it appears on his composition „End of the Race". The execution of the design is so close to the Kansas City Museum specimen (the placement of the bear paws, and their renderings, the green stripes on the left field) that we might surmise that these two pieces were made by the same shieldmaker. We know from Little Buffalo Thigh that his father False Lame prepared four shields at different times. Two of these might be prepared in companion at the same time, and given to their owners in partnership. If we recall what happened to the owners, we can figure out whose shields ended up in the hands of White curio-hunters. It was Little Shield, Little Buffalo Thigh's half-brother, who received the shield first. He died in 1885, and his half-brother thought, the shield was buried with him. Next was Black Hawk, who died in 1867. Shortly after his death, the Cheyenne village was burned by General Hancock. It is very probable that soldiers „collected" everything from the abandoned village before they burned it down. Consequently, his shield might be one of the surviving specimens. 11 Wolf Face was a band chief during a certain period of time, definitely. Stan Hoig published a large group photograph of Cheyennes and White men from 1889, listing Little Chief, Cloud Chief, Cut Nose, Starving Elk, and Wolf Face as Southern Cheyenne leaders present (1980:42-43). Unfortunately he fails to identify them in the group, although Little Bear, Starving Elk, Little Chief, and Cloud Chief can be recognized with the help of other photographs. Wolf Face is among them, stares at us from the depth of the years, but we can not recognize his face yet. 118
