In the 1860s and ’70s, one of the best-known Plains Indians was the Kiowa war chief Satanta. In the East, he was seen as the orator of his people, a sort of rustic philosopher who represented them in treaty negotiations, and his observations on Indian-white relations were often repeated in great metropolitan newspapers. In Texas, he was regarded as the architect of the Warren Wagon Train Massacre in which seven teamsters were killed–a murderer who deservedly had been condemned to die, but who, at the last minute, had been given life imprisonment due to Reconstruction politics.

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Both these views overly simplified one of the most complicated men ever to rise from the Great Plains–a highly intelligent chief, diplomat and philosopher who was also a murderer, but a man whose life story has only recently begun to receive its full measure of justice.

Satanta was already an adult of distinction when he entered the history of the southern Plains. What is known of his early life is based on tribal tradition passed down through generations of Kiowa until the present day. When or where he was born is uncertain, but based on a general agreement about his age among white contemporaries, it may be assumed he was born between 1815 and 1818, when his people ranged between the North Platte River in what is now western Nebraska and the Canadian River of what is now north Texas and central Oklahoma. His father was Red Tipi, the ranking Kiowa priest of his day; his mother appears to have been Arapaho.

As a baby, Satanta was called Big Ribs, referring to the massive physique for which he was known throughout his life. When he grew older he received his permanent name, Set-t’ainte or ‘White Bear,’ perhaps based on a vision or some sort of personal achievement. Because Set-t’ainte is virtually unpronounceable to anyone besides a Kiowa, the whites anglicized the name to ‘Satanta.’

Kiowa boys began training as warriors at a very early age and were sent out on their own as soon as they proved capable. By the age of 20, most had married and begun families of their own. Satanta, however, was not allowed this early freedom; Kiowa tradition holds that Red Tipi was so proud of his son that he kept Satanta under strict supervision long after most young men would have gone out on their own. When his father finally released him into the world, Satanta was almost 30 and thoroughly prepared for his role in the Kiowa Nation.

Satanta enters conventional history in the mid-1850s, when he first attracted the attention of soldiers attached to military expeditions in Kiowa country. Although he was still a subchief, everyone noticed his large frame and fine features. One officer, Captain Richard T. Jacob, described him as ‘a man of magnificent physique, being over six feet tall, well built and finely proportioned’–a description that would be repeated throughout Satanta’s life. Whites also noted his intelligence, forceful personality and arrogance. He had a fine sense of the dramatic, but anyone who considered his posturing nothing but show entirely underestimated the man. Beneath his theatrics, he was an outstanding warrior and leader. At the height of his prestige in the late 1860s, frontier whites hated and feared him.

Satanta figured prominently in the intertribal warfare of the 1850s, as well as in treaty negotiations with the U.S. government. During a treaty conference at Fort Atkinson, Kansas Territory, in 1853, he aired Kiowa grievances to a dragoon officer, Major Robert Hall Chilton. One of the soldiers, Private Percival Lowe, thought Chilton and Satanta were pretty well matched, both being tough and uncompromising, and each understanding the other.

By the time of this treaty, Satanta was almost 40 years old and a noted warrior. In battle he wore red paint on his upper torso, face and hair, and a buckskin vest painted red on one side and yellow on the other. Among his associates was the ancient medicine man Black Horse, who provided Satanta’s most important piece of battle equipment–one of the sacred shields used during the Kiowa Sun Dance. To accept it, Satanta had to sacrifice his own flesh to the sun by having four deep gashes cut into the back of each shoulder just above the joint with the arm, a painful and enduring offering. He carried the shield during raids against other tribes and into Mexico.

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