About Kicking Bear
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Kicking Bear was an Oglala Sioux by birth. Records indicate that he was born around 1853, but his place of birth remains unknown.
His father was named Black Fox, and his mother's name was Woodpecker,
and he was said to be a husky, vigorous man. Through his marriage to
the niece of a Minneconjou chief, Kicking Bear became a minor band
chief in the Lakota Sioux Nation. While he distinguished himself in
several battles to protect Lakota land during the War for the Black
Hills (1876-77) — including the battle at Little Big Horn — he attracted the most attention for his advocacy of the Ghost Dance.
The Ghost Dance movement gained his notoriety among the Sioux Indians in the period around 1890. This religion was started in Utah in the year 1888 by Wovoka, a Paiute Indian, and fostered the belief that the movement would restore Indian men and women — and their deceased ancestors — to a fast-disappearing way of life. Within two years, it had spread over most of the western half of the United States. Kicking Bear had been a member of a delegation sent to Nevada by the Sioux, and upon his return to the reservation became active in exhorting the Indians in the ritual of the Ghost Dance. The U.S. Army stopped the movement with the Wounded Knee massacre.
Kicking Bear was arrested and imprisoned at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. In 1891 his sentence was commuted provided he join the European tour of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, an experience he found humiliating. After a year-long tour, Kicking Bear returned to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to care for what mattered most to him — his family. He died May 28, 1904 and he may be buried in the vicinity of Manderson, South Dakota. This would make his age at his death about fifty-one years.