Riding Up Pennsylvania Avenue — Hollow Horn Bear at Two Inaugurations (1905 & 1913)

By the turn of the century, Hollow Horn Bear was the Lakota's chief orator and negotiator — a man who had made the journey to Washington again and again since his first trip in 1880: pressing claims for lost property, demanding cattle instead of beef rations, asking for schools, holding the government to the treaties. On March 4, 1905, he rode up Pennsylvania Avenue in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade — one of six famous chiefs on horseback, riding with Geronimo (Apache), Quanah Parker (Comanche), Buckskin Charlie (Ute), Little Plume (Blackfeet), and American Horse (Oglala). The photograph above shows them leading their section of the parade past the crowds. Newspapers across the country carried his image; with his eagle-feather bonnet and commanding presence, he became one of the faces by which America pictured the Lakota nation. That same year he was honored at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Eight years later, in March 1913, he came to Washington one last time — to attend the dedication of the National American Indian Memorial and to ride in Woodrow Wilson's inaugural parade. He presented President Wilson with a peace pipe made of South Dakota red pipestone. In the cold and rain of that inauguration he contracted pneumonia. Chief Hollow Horn Bear died at Providence Hospital in Washington on March 15, 1913, at the age of sixty-three, far from the Rosebud. By order of the Secretary of the Interior, a military escort carried him from Union Station, and hundreds crowded his funeral. He had first come into the white man's cities as a five-year-old prisoner at Fort Laramie. He left them as a statesman, escorted with honors, on his way home. ——— CREDITS & SOURCES About: Chief Hollow Horn Bear (Matȟó Héȟloǧeča), Sicangu Lakota, 1850–1913. Compiled account, drawn from the sources below. Sources: "Hollow Horn Bear," American National Biography (2000), by Duane Hollow Horn Bear; "The Death of an Indian Leader and His Afterlife in U.S. Imagery and Rhetoric," History of Anthropology Review; contemporary reporting in The New York Times and Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1905, 1913); Wikipedia (with full citations). Photo: Indian chiefs, headed by Geronimo, in review before President Roosevelt, Inauguration Day 1905, Washington, D.C. (public domain). Hollow Horn Bear is among the six riders. Shared in honor of Chief Hollow Horn Bear and his descendants.