Early Life: Buffalo Bull Facing The Wind
Plenty Coups was born into the Mountain Crow tribe in 1848 at the-cliffs-that-have-no-name (possibly near Billings, Montana), to his father Medicine-Bird and his mother Otter-woman. He was given the birth name Chíilaphuchissaaleesh, or "Buffalo Bull Facing The Wind".
At the time of his birth, the Crow nation's numbers had been decimated by smallpox from contact with white foreigners, reducing their population from between ten and fifteen thousand members down to around one- to two-thousand. Surrounding tribes took advantage of their reduced numbers and were incessantly attacking the Crows, in particular the Sioux. Additionally, all Indian nations, including the Crow, were under heavy pressure from foreigners who were exterminating bison and squeezing the various Indian nations together to compete for land and food, which created a peak of inter-tribal warfare at this time. Plenty Coups grew up facing perhaps the most difficult times his people had seen in many years, perhaps their history.
Read more about this topic: Plenty Coups
Famous quotes containing the words early, buffalo, bull, facing and/or wind:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“As I started with her out of the city warmly enveloped in buffalo furs, I could not but think how nice it would be to drive on and on, so that nobody should ever catch us.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a Negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“The “universal moments” of child rearing are in fact nothing less than a confrontation with the most basic problems of living in society: a facing through one’s children of all the conflicts inherent in human relationships, a clarification of issues that were unresolved in one’s own growing up. The experience of child rearing not only can strengthen one as an individual but also presents the opportunity to shape human relationships of the future.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 second inform Press home Christmas.”
—Orville Wright (1871–1948)