REMAINS OF BLACK HORSE RETURNED BY MUSEUM

The National Museum of Health and Medicine has returned leg bone fragments of Black Horse, a Native American who associated with Cheyenne Chief Little Wolf after the battle of Little Big Horn, to his lineal descendants. The remains were returned under provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Receiving the remains were Gilbert Brady, the great-grandson of Black Horse. Among the other 13 who attended, including Laforce Lonebear, spiritual adviser to the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, were other descendants from the four daughters and one son of Black Horse.

The remains were hand-carried back to Montana after a short ceremony at the museum. Following a wake, the remains were buried in a military funeral with the rest of the remains of Black Horse at the Lame Deer Cemetery. A feast followed the burial.

U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, chair of the Indian Affairs Committee, was a special guest at the funeral. Campbell is the only American Indian presently serving in the U.S. Senate, and is one of 44 chiefs of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe.

A U.S. Army scout under the command of General Nelson Miles in the 1870s, Black Horse later joined Cheyenne chiefs Black Kettle, Little Wolf, and Dull Knife in an attempt to return to their homeland in Montana. Black Horse was shot through both legs by a settler in February 1879 and was treated by Army surgeons at Fort Keogh, Mont.

"The patient is recovering rapidly," wrote the Army surgeon in June 1879, "but there was much trouble in feeding him, as he would not eat food prepared as the whites do. He has been almost entirely subsisting on coffee, dried buffalo meat and biscuits, of which he ate at times voraciously."

The museum, which was founded in 1862 as the U.S. Army Medical Museum, received the necrotic bone fragments about two months after removal from the left femur of Black Horse. He was reported to be doing well six months after his treatment.

"Black Horse was an important figure, especially in the establishment of the Northern Cheyenne and their reservation on their traditional homelands," said Lenore Barbian, Ph.D., assistant curator of the anatomical collection at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. "The necrotic fragments were his only remains at the museum."

According to Ruby Sooktis, whose mother was a granddaughter of Black Horse descended from one of his daughters, Black Horse received a $13 monthly pension and a two-room log cabin built by the U.S. Army after his service as a scout. Family accounts show he lived the life of a farmer and cattle and horse rancher and died in 1934.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine began as the national repository for Civil War injuries when Surgeon General William Hammond directed medical officers in the field to collect "specimens of morbid anatomy . . . together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed" and to forward them to the newly founded museum for study.

The museum's first curator visited battlefields and solicited contributions from doctors throughout the Union Army. During and after the war, museum staff took pictures of wounded soldiers showing effects of gunshot wounds as well as results of amputations and other surgical procedures.

The information collected was compiled into six volumes of "The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion," published between 1870 and 1883. The collection continues to support advances in clinical research.

In addition to the 2,000 specimens in the Civil War Skeletal Collection, the anatomical collection at The National Museum of Health and Medicine includes about a dozen other collections of anatomical and pathological skeletal specimens; medical research collections containing slides, tissue blocks, and related documentary materials; fluid-preserved gross organs, and other miscellaneous material. The collections are accessible to researchers in pathology, forensic pathology, forensic anthropology, physical anthropology, Civil War medical history, orthopedic injuries, and human biology.