Curley was one of several Native American Indian scouts who rode with the Seventh Cavalry led by Lt.-Col. George Armstrong Custer in 1876. The Crow tribe regularly served in U.S. Army scouts during the 1870s. This photograph was taken in 1883, seven years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Apparently he was the only survivor of Custer's last stand, and the first to report his defeat. The Crow served as scouts for the Army in the Great Sioux War, because the were in conflict with the Sioux. It's seems a shame both tribes didn't unite against their common enemy, but I don't know a lot about that part of U.S. history.
Incidentally one of the other Crow scouts was named White Man Runs Him. Which is not some race traitor epithet, but refers to some incident when he was a kid and stole candy from a store, and was chased by a white man. His family witnessed it, started calling him that, and the name stuck.
I am always struck by the dignity conveyed by older photographs of native Americans. If you read the first accounts by Europeans, they were overawed by their physical beauty, health, and freedom-loving attitude. One wonders what kind of societies they may have created if the Columbian exchange was not so disastrous for them, with 90 percent of the population dying of diseases to which they had little resistance, plus the long, grinding expropriation and genocide over centuries. And it must be impossibly infuriating for them, now, to see European Americans heedless of the awful history that led to the world we now know.
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