Wooden Leg (1858–1940) Northern Cheyenne warrior and later tribal judge. Born on the Rosebud River in present-day Montana, he fought as a teenager at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876) against Custer's 7th Cavalry, and also took part in the Battle of the Rosebud and other engagements of the Great Sioux War. After Cheyenne resistance ended, he settled on the Tongue River (Northern Cheyenne) Reservation, converted to farming and ranching, and served for years as a reservation judge, mediating disputes within his community. Wooden Leg is known to readers primarily through Thomas B. Marquis, an army physician and amateur ethnographer who lived among the Northern Cheyenne, learned Plains Indian sign language, and interviewed him at length in the 1920s. Marquis compiled these interviews into the first-person narrative Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer (1931), still regarded as one of the most detailed Native accounts of the Little Bighorn campaign and of pre-reservation Cheyenne warrior life. Wooden Leg himself did not write the book — he narrated it orally, in sign and broken English via interpreters, and Marquis shaped it into continuous prose — so catalog entries sometimes list Wooden Leg as narrator/subject and Marquis as compiling author, or credit both jointly depending on convention.
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