A Note on 100 Voices by Bruce Brown 100 Voices: Full List * Crow/Arikara * Sioux/Cheyenne * American * Rosebud Guided Tours: Crazy Horse at the Little Bighorn * Crazy Horse at the Rosebud Features: Who Killed Custer? * Who Killed Custer? Audio Book Features: Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger * Winter Count of Crazy Horse's Life Features: Bogus Crazy Horse Photos * Unsung 7th Cavalry Scouts Saga Features: Indian Battlefield Tactics * Woman Warriors * Little Bighorn Maps Features: U.S. Medal of Honor Winners * U.S. Atrocities * Indian Atrocities Features: Little Bighorn Mysteries * Virtual Museum

The Sioux and Cheyenne -- who reckoned the year from the first snow of winter to the first snow of the next winter -- kept pictographic calanders that served to both mark the passage of the years and to memorialize noteworthy events.

So the Winter Count of Rosebud denotes the winter of 1765 - 66 with a pictograph meaning "Lakota woman warrior wounded counting coup," the Winter Count of American Horse denotes the winter of 1784 - 85 with a pictograph meaning "a young man with smallpox shot himself," the Winter Count of Cloud Shield denotes the winter of 1848 -49 with a pictograph meaning "American Horse's father captured a Crow woman, who was really a hermaphrodite," and the Winter Count of American Horse denotes the winter of 1877 - 78 with a pictograph meaning "Crazy Horse was killed."

The top two images here are from the Winter Count of Brown Hat, known to the Americans as Battiste Good. The image below is the Winter Count of Lone Dog as depicted in the Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1886.

For more Winter Counts, please see the Winter Count of Crazy Horse's Life.

The Year The Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian edited by Candace S. Greene and Russell Thornton, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 2007 plates 1 and 12