1998, Filter Press, Palmer Lake, Colorado, 90 pages

The Glorious Quest of Chief Washakie is a labor of love, on behalf of his descendants, notably U.S. WWII Veteran Ralph, who also penned numerous soulful illustrations for the book. The book, however, puts Washakie in his place, a tyrant who drove his son to suicide, who went on a months-long quest to reassert his patriarchal status among his people by killing and scalping seven unidentified men. Washakie, “the Rattler” was a big fighter and a big talker, not the type of hero to appeal to European-American sensibilities.

Washakie was clubbed on the head and left for dead when his people were slaughtered by a Blackfeet warband at age five. The rest of his life was a single-minded pursuit of power among his mother’s Shoshone people, so that he might battle their enemies, the Blackfeet, Crow, Cheyenne and Sioux. Washakie had the same enemies and same friends as the legendary Liver-Eater. Upon discovering, at Red Lodge, Montana, that the “Liver-Eater” was a friend of the crows and not their enemy, and that the deeds of his supposed feud with them attributed by the writers of Crow Killer, were very similar to the exploits of Washakie, I would sight Washakie as an inspiration for much of the fiction spun about Johnson.

At the center of Washakie’s tale is his quest to a sacred flat-topped mountain in “the Big Horn Range,” where non-aligned elders of no particular tribe kept the sacred Medicine Wheel, dispatched warriors embarking on a vision quest to sacred places, supervised the crafting and consecration of talismans, and preached a universal brotherhood under one God. The eldest of these medicine men was:

“A patriarch, a man of incredible age, with a long, flowing beard and blue eyes, and wearing a white robe…”

It appears that “The Secret History of North America” has another unplumbed Caucasian mystery.

From 1798 to 1900, The Rattler, saw his world vanish and devoted his life to saving a piece of his people’s heritage during the free-for-all over the land of his ancestors, and succeeded in the greatest measure possible.