[Stensland is an American educator. In the following essay, she provides an overview of Eastman's works, focusing on the apparent blending of history and legend in his autobiographical works.]

Charles Alexander Eastman, the Sioux, Ohiyesa, is unique among Indian writers. No other writer moved so far culturally in a lifetime, from the tribal life of the Santee Sioux, who were in exile following the Minnesota Uprising, to the white society of Dartmouth College and Boston University Medical School, a world in which he met Matthew Arnold, Theodore Roosevelt, Longfellow, Emerson and Francis Parkman. As a result, Eastman's autobiographies, biographies, and stories are told by him as he experienced and perceived them. His Indian contemporaries, on the other hand, have provided mainly "as told to" biographies, with all of the possible misunderstandings and misinterpretations which occur when there is a recorder or editor and often a translator as well. Consider, for example, Black Elk, who told his story in Sioux to his son Ben, who then translated it into English for John Neihardt, who then reworked it into his own style.

But because Eastman lived so successfully in two such diverse cultures, a number of problems appear in his recording of history and of the Santee Sioux tribal stories. The first problem arises because he was an Indian-thinking author writing for white readers. He is often quoted as an authority for historical fact. Yet it is not clear that in his own mind he separated historical fact from legend. A second and related problem is a failure at times to separate the historical incidents and stories told in the tribe from his own created short stories. A third problem is his conversion to a conservative Protestantism, which, as a result of strong influence upon him from the age of fifteen until his marriage at the age of thirty-three, probably led to certain interpretations of Sioux legends and customs.

George E. Hyde, American historian, in Red Cloud's Folk speaks of Eastman's Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains as "a spectacle of poor and distorted memory that is appalling, as nearly every date and statement of fact is incorrect." Eastman was not by nature nor by training an historian, his education having been that of a medical doctor. Hyde's own historical accuracy must be questioned when he expresses some disbelief that a full-blooded Sioux would belittle Chief Spotted Tail. Eastman was not a full-blooded Sioux, since his grandfather on his mother's side of the family was Captain Seth Eastman, white pioneer artist and professional soldier at Fort Snelling.

We know that to the tribal Sioux precise place and time were unimportant. What was important was where the buffalo herds were and in which river fish could be caught. Time was recorded mainly as seasons, the time of the summer rendezvous, or the first spring thaw, that period of the annual sugar-making. Most Indians of the nineteenth century did not know their exact time or place of birth.

If one expects to read Indian Boyhood as the chronological story of Eastman's early years, he will be disappointed. As an autobiographer, Eastman does start at the beginning, but he does not give his birth date nor a precise place of birth. What is far more important is who he is—the son of "the handsomest woman of all the Spirit Lake and Leaf Dweller Sioux," a child whose grandmother was descended from a haughty chieftain of the Dwellers among the Leaves and whose great grandfather was Chief Cloud Man. Far more important than precise time and place was the story of his birth, an event which he says his brothers recalled often with such mirth, "for it was the custom of the Sioux that when a boy was born his brother must plunge into the water, or roll in the snow naked if it was winter time; and if he was not big enough to do either of these himself water was thrown on him.… The idea was that a warrior had come to camp, and other children must display some act of hardihood." This first autobiography of Eastman's is more topical than it is chronological, containing such chapters as "My Indian Grandmother," "My Playmates," "Evening in the Lodge," and "A Winter Camp." He tells us about early hardships when the Santee Sioux were forced into exile by the Sioux Uprising in Minnesota. He does tell us that he was a little over four years old at the time. He describes the pursuit of part of the tribe by General Sibley across the Missouri River, the thrill of a blizzard which overtook them the following winter, during which the family lay for a day and a night under the snow, and the betrayal of his father and two older brothers at Winnipeg during the second winter after the Uprising. All of these events occurred between 1862 and 1864. But two chapters later he describes an Indian sugar camp in Minnesota, an event which had to take place before the Uprising. This is followed by yet another chapter, "A Midsummer Feast," an event at which the boy received his name, Ohiyesa, meaning winner. If the reader is thinking historically, he must realize that this chapter, too, took place in Minnesota, since Chief Mankato, who was chief of the village and played an important part in the selection of the name, was killed in the Battle of Wood Lake during the Uprising.

A good story is far more important to Eastman and to other tribal Indians than accurate history. A modern author, N. Scott Momaday, discusses the Indian relationship of art and reality in his consideration of myth and legend: "We are concerned here not so much with an accurate representation of actuality, but with the realization of the imaginative experience." As Momaday explains the process, when the imagination is superimposed upon the historical event, it becomes a story and is invested with meaning. Any suffering can be endured if it is given meaning through the tribal imagination.

Eastman's Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains cannot be considered history which records historical fact from native sources. By the time the Santee Sioux author recorded the stories of Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, Sitting Bull and others, their stories were already legendary in the tribe, given meaning through tribal imagination. Hyde says that the Oglala Sioux have almost no memory of the killing of Chief Bear Bull, the result of a feud which split their tribe into two hostile factions and influenced its later history.

As Eastman told the story, the cause of the trouble was the arrival of General Harney at Fort Laramie in order to make a treaty with the Sioux. Historically, there was no Fort Laramie at the time. General Harney first came into the vicinity fourteen years after Bear Bull's death and he did not come to make a treaty. But as Eastman tells it, General Harney bribed the wicked chief, Bear Bull, who attempted to bully the people into accepting the treaty. Red Cloud's father (who historically had been dead for many years) defied the chief. Bear Bull consequently killed both Red Cloud's father and brother. According to Indian tradition, young Red Cloud then had to kill Bear Bull, which he did, and was proclaimed a hero. According to Hyde, on the other hand, during a period of liquor peddling in Oglala camps, followers of Chief Smoke and followers of Bear Bull got into a quarrel while drinking. Bear Bull tried to stop the quarrel and was shot down, perhaps by Red Cloud.

In the historical version of the tale, Red Cloud's role in the incident is quite uncertain. In the version Eastman reports from his Indian sources, the heroic nature of young Red Cloud is established. He avenged both his father's death and his brother's. Every event in Eastman's version of Red Cloud's life, from his learning to discipline himself to ride a pony bareback to his resistance speeches, is told to develop the image of the brave and wise leader. The stories, coming from Eastman's Indian sources, members of the Oglala tribe, demonstrate Indian values—heroism, defense of family and tribe, and self reliance. Red Cloud's story was already legendary in the tribe, but it was not historically accurate. Eastman, the converted Christian, however, finds it necessary to add at the end of the selection that Red Cloud's private life was also exemplary: he was faithful to one wife, a devoted father to his children and a lover of his country, values not necessarily Indian.

Eastman's story of Chief Spotted Tail is a bit more confused. His Brule sources in the early twentieth century probably did not agree completely on the heroic nature of the one chief who counselled submission to the superior forces of the white man. Even so, the story is legendary rather than historical. Hyde points out that Eastman's date for Spotted Tail's birth—1833—has to be wrong, since the chief would have been a warrior in 1839 at the age of six; he would have killed a man in a duel with knives in 1841 at the age of eight, have married in the same year and fathered a child the following year at the age of nine. In spite of the historical absurdity of such facts, many historians have accepted Eastman's date. Because Spotted Tail apparently had a certain vanity about his age, at forty he often told people that he was thirty, but later on in his life in a legal affidavit he said he was born in 1823 or 1824. To the Brule Sioux who reported to Eastman, such confusion and lack of consistency was trivial. What was important was that the chief established himself as a warrior and attained the rank of shirt wearer at an early age: "It is personal qualities alone that tell among our people, and the youthful Spotted Tail gained at every turn. At the age of seventeen, he has become a sure shot and a clever hunter."

Hyde argues with Eastman about the tribe of Indians against which Spotted Tail made his reputation as a warrior. Eastman says it was against the Utes; Hyde argues that historical records indicate that it had to be against the Pawnees. By the time Eastman heard the story it did not make much difference which tribe the chief fought against. The important point was that the young man had distinguished himself against an enemy of the Brules.

Spotted Tail has often been spoken of as a poor orphan, an idea which came originally from Eastman and has been continued by a number of historians. This may be further evidence of the legendary characteristics which had already penetrated the Brule story of the chief. The poor, unpromising orphan boy who becomes the savior of his tribe or the recipient of the stories of the tribe is a common characteristic in the Indian myths of many tribes. The Sioux First Born, or Elder Brother, fathered by the Sun and mothered by the Earth, was an orphan on earth, who because of loneliness created Little Boy Man, who in turn had only the animals to play with. Little Boy Man was created innocent, trusting, and helpless, but with the guidance of Elder Brother, he learned to conquer the animal people and withstand the forces of the elements. The story of Stone Boy, told in several tribes, is also told by Eastman. In this story a young girl, who had lost all ten of her brothers through hunting, miraculously finds a baby boy, whom she names Stone Boy, an orphan, awkward and unpromising, who later rescues her brothers from the country of the Thunder Birds.

According to Eastman, Chief Spotted Tail was an orphan reared by his grandparents. Moreover, he was slow-moving as a boy, a child who because he had no parents to present him to the tribe and to give feasts in his honor, was greatly disadvantaged. This seems quite clearly the beginning of a legend. Hyde claims that history disputes this, pointing out that the diary of Lieutenant G. K. Warren for September, 1855, records that the chiefs Man-Afraid-of-His-Horse and Grand Partisan were at Fort Laramie with Spotted Tail's father. Hyde gives further evidence that Spotted Tail was not an orphan. But to the Brules, Spotted Tail had already become a legend whose achievements were enhanced by his unpromising beginnings.

Eastman must also, however, report the less heroic side of Spotted Tail. Some Sioux felt that he had "copied the white politician too closely after he entered the reservation. He became a good manipulator, and was made conceited and overbearing by the attentions of the military and of the general public." The converted Christian author also condemns him for "high handed actions," including elopement with another man's wife.

In a chapter on storytelling in Indian Scout Craft and Lore, Eastman describes what happened to stories as they were told in the tribe: "True stories of warfare and the chase are related many times over by actors and eyewitnesses, that no detail may be forgotten. Handed down from generation to generation, these tales gradually take on the proportions of heroic myth and legend. They blossom into poetry and chivalry, and are alive with mystery and magic." The stories of the chiefs when Eastman heard them had already taken on some of that mystery and magic, since a good story was a higher value than historical accuracy.

A second problem as we study Eastman's writing is that of separating those stories which were tribal legends from Eastman's own storytelling. Perhaps it is simply the arrogance of our profession which makes us want to separate the two. The storyteller of the tribe was among the most respected of men: "He was not only an entertainer in demand at all social gatherings, but an honored school-master to the village children. The great secret of his success was his ability to portray a character or a situation truthfully, yet with just a touch of humorous or dramatic exaggeration." No doubt, in Eastman's mind, the art of storytelling was a noble one. Why should he make a distinction between his own stories and those told in the tribe, simply because he was writing the stories rather than telling them orally? Indeed, he did tell his own stories orally during the year 1914, when he directed a Boy Scout camp in Maryland, and during the years 1914 to 1925 when his wife ran a girls' camp in Munsonville, New Hampshire.

In the earliest of the collections of stories, Red Hunters and Animal People, published first in 1904, he seems to be separating his own storytelling from the stories he heard in the tribe, either by having a member of the tribe tell an exciting story which happened to him, in the midst of Eastman's own story, or by having a tribal storyteller tell a legend about an animal in order to explain to children a phenomenon they had observed. An example of the first is "The Sky Warrior," in which two Sioux hunters are tempted to shoot a pair of eagles, until one stops the other because he has seen that one of the eagles is a male who once saved him from starvation when he was injured. The eagle had killed a deer, off which both man and bird feasted. The result in Eastman's story is that the hunters do not shoot the two eagles. In another story, "The Dance of the Little People," young boys around the age of ten assimilate a hunt by making small bows and arrows for a mouse hunt. But when they see a white mouse, which they presume to be the chief, one of the boys declares that they must cease the hunt because they will have good luck if the mice are spared after the chief's appearance. This is an excuse for the boys to ask Padanee, the old storyteller, to confirm this legend, as well as others about the Moon-Nibblers and their dances in the full moon. Thus Eastman in each case uses a native story teller to tell the legend, but he imposes his own super-structure on it in order to tell us about aspects of Indian life—the belief that certain humans had special relationships with particular animals or birds and the assimilation of the hunt by small boys, a custom the author also described in Indian Boyhood.

The problem of mixing history and legend with original stories becomes more complicated in Old Indian Days. In "The Singing Spirit," what appears to be Eastman's story of some Yankton Sioux hunters who become lost in the late fall is attached to what seems like a partly historical and partly legendary account of a half-breed named Antoine Michaud, who plays a homemade violin in the wilderness. But before the hunters realize what the sound of Michaud's violin is, there is the opportunity to incorporate an old Santee legend of a strange little man named Chanotedah. An example of what seems to be mixing history and original short story is "The Famine." Since so little information exists about the Santee Sioux during the years of exile, it is tempting to assume that the story is historical. Near Fort Ellis in Manitoba, the tribe was starving, under the leadership of White Lodge, whose father was Little Crow, leader of the Sioux Uprising in 1862. A Scotch trader, Angus McLeod, who was in love with one of White Lodge's twin daughters, rescues the daughters and presumably the tribe. The beginning of the tale is quite factual but the ending becomes very romantic, so one must assume that at best only part of it is historical.

When he came to telling the mythological tales, yet another problem confronted Eastman and also confronts his readers. He was a converted Christian who was looking at the Sioux mythology out of changing values and assumptions. The fifteen year old boy, whose father appeared miraculously in southern Manitoba after having been thought hanged at Fort Snelling at the time that Chief Shakopee and other participants in the Uprising were, was still highly impressionable: "I could not doubt my father, so mysteriously come back to us, as it were, from the spirit land." Many Lightnings had been converted along with hundreds of other Santee Sioux while they were imprisoned in Davenport, Iowa. Later Dr. Alfred Riggs, second generation missionary among the Santee and the director of the Indian School at Santee, Nebraska, became his mentor: "Next to my own father, this man did more than perhaps any other to make it possible for me to grasp the principles of true civilization." Still later other influences—Beloit College; Knox College; Dartmouth College; Mr. and Mrs. Frank Woods of Boston, his white mother and father during his years at Boston University Medical School; and finally the woman he married, the white missionary and teacher at Pine Ridge, Elaine Goodale—led him to accept conservative Christian beliefs. The result is that certain truly Indian concepts had to be rejected and others made to conform to white values. His wife helped edit one collection of myths, Smoky Day's Wigwam Evenings. In the introduction to that volume, Elaine Eastman discusses some changes which had to be made for the white audience: Symbolism in some of the creation stories was too complicated for young readers, and stories which would take an entire evening to tell to Indian children because of the detailed descriptions had to be shortened.

In addition, there is no doubt that in spite of certain disappointments about the Great White Father in Washington, D. C., and "civilized man," in general following the Wounded Knee Massacre, Eastman still felt that the white man's civilization was superior to the Sioux way of life. In a Popular Science article of November, 1894, he wrote, "The human mind equipped with all its faculties is capable even in an uncultured state of logical process of reasoning." The result is an attempt to make many of the Sioux characters and concepts fit Christian Biblical characters and concepts. Mrs. Eastman speaks of Little Boy Man as the Adam of the Sioux, while Eastman himself equates Adam with Elder Brother, who became weary of living alone and so formed himself a companion, not from a rib but from a splinter he withdrew from his toe. The companion was not a wife but rather the Little Boy Man. Unk-to-mee, the spider, Eastman says is akin to the serpent which tempted Eve. The Battle of the Elements he compares to the Biblical story of the Flood.

The term God is often used by Eastman in place of the Great Spirit or the Great Mystery. Although different tribes have different concepts, many modern Indians have agreed that the Great Spirit is quite a different idea from the Christian God. Sanders and Peek, Indian editors, who use the term Wah'kon-tah for the Great Spirit, write: "The Native American religions encountered by the white man were … more subtle, more complex in that Wah'kon-tah is incapable of being anthropomorphized as is Elohim who created man in his own image. Wah'kontah lacks image, being all things." In his Popular Science article, however, Eastman writes, "There is a strong implication that the Great Mystery has made man after himself, and that he is in shape like man, but with a few modifications. For instance, he is supposed to have horns symbolic of command; and his eyes are like the sun—no one can gaze into them."

We must ask what changes in the myths Eastman made, consciously or unconsciously, because of his Christian conversion. Ethel Nurge, in a discussion of the diet of the Dakotas, points out that in describing the sacrifice of a dog to the Great Spirit, Eastman leaves out the fact that the eating of the dog was an integral part of the ceremony. This is probably, as Nurge says, a tailoring of his writing to white prejudices, or perhaps Eastman himself had adopted the white man's objection to the eating of dogs.

Eastman's writings are invaluable because he lived the experiences and wrote about them effectively. All of his historical information should not be written off as merely tribal "bad memory," as Hyde has done. Much that he has recorded is found no place else, both history and legend, but it must be examined in the light of tribal imagination. The Sioux did not have a George Bird Grinnell to collect their legends. The best-known collectors of myths—Stith Thompson, Tristram P. Coffin, Susan Feldman, and Alice Marriott and Carol Rachlin—include no Sioux legends. In the prolific writings of Charles Eastman there is probably more Sioux legend, myth and history than is recorded any place else.

Anna Lee Stensland, "Charles Alexander Eastman: Sioux Storyteller and Historian," in American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 3, Autumn, 1977, pp. 199-208.