John Two Guns White Calf
Native American chief
John Two Guns White Calf (also known as John Two Guns and John Whitecalf Two Guns) (1872–1934) was a chief of the Piegan Blackfeet in Montana. He was born near Fort Benton, Montana, and was the adopted son of Chief White Calf. After the elder White Calf died in 1903, while a guest of President Theodore Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., White Calf became the last chief of the Blackfoot Tribe. He died from the flu at Blackfeet Indian hospital, according to the Choteau Acantha, however the Indian agency reported it was pulmonary tuberculosis that took his life at age 63. John Two Guns White Calf is buried in a Catholic cemetery in Browning, Montana.
Promotional career
He became famous for his work promoting the Glacier National Park for the Great Northern Railway, as a way to encourage tourism and traffic on railways. In 1912, he traveled with several other Blackfeet to the 1912 United States Land Show in Chicago, which was possibly the first publicity trip for the tribe. He also claimed to be the model for the profile on the Indian head nickel. The sculptor, James Earle Fraser, said that the image he used was a composite of several people. Three of these speculated individuals were native chiefs of the Seneca, Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux, named Chief John Big Tree, Two Moons, and Iron Tail.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Two Guns White Calf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.