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This is the story of Two Leggings' desire for fame, his rise as a warrior, and his efforts to achieve a spiritual vision. He takes us along on buffalo hunts, war parties against the Piegans, and horse stealing raids against the Piegans and Sioux. His obsession to become a chief and famous warrior drove him to repeated forays against enemy tribes for scalps and horses. He relates the religious relationship between vision fasts, medicine bundles, and a war raid's outcome, sun dances in which performers pierced their breast muscles with wooden skewers, and wife stealing between rival warrior societies. . . . It is a remarkable story. -Chicago Tribune

This is a rare piece of Americana-a first-person account of the psychological, religious, and social life of a nineteenth century Indian. The dramatic recital is a real contribution to our native biography, history, and ethnology, and an important treatise in a fascinating but curiously neglected field. -Baltimore Sun * Baltimore Sun * This is the story of Two Leggings' desire for fame, his rise as a warrior, and his efforts to achieve a spiritual vision. He takes us along on buffalo hunts, war parties against the Piegans, and horse stealing raids against the Piegans and Sioux. His obsession to become a chief and famous warrior drove him to repeated forays against enemy tribes for scalps and horses. He relates the religious relationship between vision fasts, medicine bundles, and a war raid's outcome, sun dances in which performers pierced their breast muscles with wooden skewers, and wife stealing between rival warrior societies. . . . It is a remarkable story. -Chicago Tribune * Chicago Tribune * Two Leggings . . . was one of the last Crow Warriors. From 1919 to 1923 he told his story of Crow life and wars to William Wildschut, an ethnologist with the Museum of the American Indian . . . . This is the poignant story of the end of traditional Crow life and attitudes, which Two Leggings saw ending with the last warfare rather than the death of the buffalo. -Pacific Historian * Pacific Historian *

Shortly before his death in 1923, Two Leggings was extensively interviewed by a representative from New York's Museum of the American Indian Mr. Nabokov, a research associate of the Museum, has done a creditable rewrite job and what emerges is a life story which adds immeasurably to anthropological and historical records. Orphaned at an early age, Two Leggings tells of his youth and his driving ambition to be a war chief. He displays, in the intrinsically poetic language of his people, the motives guiding them. The details of how he acquired his medicine are particularly interesting. Two Leggings became a member of an underground warrior society and distinguished himself in battle, leading the last of the Crow warrior parties before they were shuttled off to a reservation. He is reticent about his reaction to the white man and uninformative on domestic affairs (there is a smattering of detail on wife-stealing, some remarks upon finally meeting the girl he had envisioned). But it's a stimulating study for scholar and layman alike. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Peter Nabokov is on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology and the American Indian Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of Native American Architecture (1988) and editor of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian and White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492–1992 (1991).

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