During the 1860s, a group of Brule Sioux led by Spotted Tail traversed southwestern Nebraska, Kansas, and northeastern Colorado in search of buffalo and other big game. At the same time, the U.S. government imposed heavy restrictions upon the Sioux in an effort to confine them to an area north of the Platte River, and ultimately, onto reservations.

Spotted Tail promised U.S. Army personnel that he would comply with their directives to keep Sioux hunters north of the Platte. This promise proved difficult to keep when, in 1867, Spotted Tail found himself unable to control some Sioux hunters who pursued buffalo along Colorado’s leg of the Republican River. Calling the wayfaring hunters "hostile," H.G. Denman, Indian Superintendent for the region, arranged for ten men from Spotted Tail’s camp in Nebraska to travel to the Republican and summon the hunters back to camp along the Platte.

At an August 1867 meeting to arrange the retrieval of the defiant hunters from northeastern Colorado, Spotted Tail told Denman that he could no longer prevent his men from hunting on the Republican. According to author and collector of American Indian material culture, George Hyde, Spotted Tail’s men "were determined to go hunting." Ultimately, Denman consented and "gave the [men] passes and white flags with the wording ‘Spotted Tail’s Friendly Band,’ to be carried on the march [to and from the Republican] and put up over the tipis in camp."

The Colorado Historical Society holds one such flag believed to have been utilized by Spotted Tail’s men in 1867. The flag—along with manuscript materials and approximately eighty photographs—was purchased by the Society in the 1960s. In addition to the Society’s collection, an array of other materials pertinent to Spotted Tail are held by such repositories as the Denver Art Museum, the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, and the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

BY CAROLYN MCARTHUR, Curator of Material Culture