Two Leggings

The Making of a Crow Warrior

by Peter Nabokov

"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

"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

"A valuable addition to our knowledge of the life of the Plains Indian."—New York Times

"Two Leggings lifts the curtain on a kind of life it is almost impossible to imagine anywhere in the United States during the second half of the last century. Mr. Nabokov has preserved a priceless document not only for ethnologists bur for plain readers as well. . . . His narrative lays open, as by a surgeon’s knife, the inner world of Indian religion and morality."—Mark Van Doren

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).

226 pp — ©1982