George Bent

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George Bent ( July 7, 1843 , † May 19, 1918 ) was the son of the famous American fur trader William Bent and his Cheyenne wife Owl Woman. He lived with the Southern Cheyenne from the age of 20 .

The life of George Bent

George Bent and his wife Magpie 1867

George Bent's father, William Bent, lived as a hunter and fur trader in the North American Plains. He saved the lives of two members of the Cheyenne and this made him a tribal friend. William Bent joined the tribe around 1820 and accompanied the Cheyenne on their hunting routes. He married the Cheyenne Owl Woman. A few years later he and his wife left the tribe, wanting to work as a trader again, and built a fort on the north side of the Arkansas River. This fort developed over the next few years into an important trading post and a popular meeting point for traders who roamed the prairie.

In 1843, George Bent was born in this fort. George lived in this fort, had contact with white traders and adventurers. His father decided that George should attend the white school, so he was sent first to Westport and later to St. Louis . When the Civil War broke out, George Bent and his younger brother joined the Confederate Army and served under General Sterling Price . By 1863 they had had enough of the war. George Bent left the army and joined the Cheyenne to live with them. Bent became an important man for the Cheyenne over the next several years. At first he acted as a translator in negotiations, later he became a mediator and reporter on the life of the Cheyenne.

Bent lived with both the Cheyenne and the whites, and he also hitchhiked lonely through the country as a trapper and fur trader, torn between its two cultures. Little is known about his life with the Cheyenne. To this day it is only known with certainty that he stayed with the Cheyenne on the Sand Creek River in the winter of 1864 and that he was an eyewitness to what went down in history as the Sand Creek Massacre . Soldiers attacked the peaceful Cheyenne village at dawn, brutally killing over 150 men, women and children, mutilating and scalping them as a result. George Bent and several others survived this massacre by running to the river bank and digging into the soft sand.

Bent in the late years

The publicist and publisher George Bird Grinnell wanted to explore the life of the Indians more closely at the beginning of the 20th century. So he worked out some questions and Bent translated. It was during this research that Bent met George Hyde. Bent and Hyde started a long-standing correspondence in which Bent wrote about the Cheyenne, their culture and their lives. This correspondence did not end until Bent's death in 1918. Hyde put together a book from this collected material, but this was rejected by all publishers and was forgotten. It was not until the 1960s, when America began to rethink the Indian question, that the director of the University of Oklahoma rediscovered the manuscript. Together with the aging George Hyde, the work was revised and published under the title Life of George Bent, Written from His Letters (1968) . The main part of these works consists of the letters of George Bent, this work is now considered to be one of the most authentic eyewitness accounts of Indian culture.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site - People. March 14, 2008, Retrieved May 27, 2008 (US National Park Service).

literature

  • David Fridtjof Halaas, Andrew E. Masich: Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent - Caught Between the Worlds of the Indian and the White Man . Da Capo Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-306-81410-5 .
  • George E. Hyde, Savoie Lottinville (Ed.): Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters . University of Oklahoma Press, 1983, ISBN 0-8061-1577-7 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bent, George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American son of the fur trader William Bent
DATE OF BIRTH July 7, 1843
DATE OF DEATH May 19, 1918