Little Wolf and the American West with Megan Kate Nelson

[00:00:00] Lindsay Chervinsky: What can we learn about leadership from America's most iconic region? Welcome to leadership and legacy conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. I'm Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky director of the library. In this podcast series, we talk with experts about leadership and history, how studying these stories helps us understand our current moment, and how we can apply lessons from leaders in the past to our own lives.

Do you have a favorite writer? I do. And her name is Dr. Megan Kate Nelson. She's a historian of the Civil War in the West, a native Westerner herself, and currently a Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th century American history at the Huntington Library.

She's also the author of many books. And did I mention she's a Pulitzer Prize finalist? That was for her book Three Cornered War, which was about the Civil War in the West. So she's not just my favorite, but backs it up with some pretty flashy credentials. For this conversation, we're talking about a figure in her new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking, and Belonging on the American Frontier, which will come out in spring 2026.

Our conversation focused on Little Wolf, a native chief of the Northern Cheyenne. Here's my conversation with Dr. Nelson:

Well, thank you and thank you so much for joining our podcast. I'm so delighted to be able to chat with you and to bring a different type of leadership than I think most people think about and most people learn about in their history books to our listeners.

So one of the characters in your new book is Little Wolf. For those of us who don't know who that is, can you give us a little bit of a brief biographical sketch so we can know a little bit about his life?

[00:01:38] Megan Kate Nelson: Yes, absolutely. Little Wolf was a real person, he was born in the 1820s as part of a Northern Cheyenne band.

This was kind of an interesting moment for the Cheyenne people. They were originally one tribal nation, and in this moment in the 1820s and thirties, they split into two groups, into the Northern Cheyenne and the Southern Cheyenne. Little Wolf's parents decided to go with their band, the Eaters band, to the north.

So he went with his two brothers and his parents. He spent the first years of his life in this really massive northern Cheyenne homeland from the Wind River mountains in Wyoming to the Tongue and the Rosebud Rivers in Montana, to the North Platte in Nebraska. So a huge homeland.

This was in this time an almost completely Indigenous world. Most of the trade and the warfare, uh, for the Northern Cheyenne was with other tribal nations. Although they did have some relationships with a handful of both European and American traders at this point. When Little Wolf was old enough to join war parties, he did very well. Uh, he demonstrated his bravery by riding up to the enemy and tapping them with his coup stick, which was a sign for the Northern Cheyenne, you weren't hiding behind a rock and shooting at someone. You were coming right up to their face and you were hand to hand. This was seen as kind of the ultimate in military manhood in Northern Cheyenne culture.

He also demonstrated his generosity. There's this famous story about him. He went out on a hunt when he was quite young and the hunting party got caught in a blizzard and they had to hunker down together in a snow drift.

And there was an older man with them on this hunting expedition, and he gave the older man his buffalo robe and used the man's kind of thin blanket himself in order to save him. So this was already, when he was quite young, he was demonstrating generosity, which is another very coveted characteristic in Northern Cheyenne culture.

And so he was really from a young age showing all of these different characteristics and a willingness to kind of sacrifice for the greater good. And as he grew into adulthood, he also developed into a master military strategist. So he was the one who planned a lot of the war party attacks on other tribal nations like the Crow and the Pawnee.

And then also later on US army troops. And his fellow Northern Cheyenne really recognized him. In his twenties, he became a leader of the Elkhorn Scrapers Military Society, which is one of the four kind of fundamental pillars of Northern Cheyenne governance. And then later he was elected as a band chief from the Eaters Band.

Uh, and this meant that he joined the, what was called the Council of 44. The Northern Cheyenne had a very sophisticated and very organized governmental structure, and so he was a member of this group that made decisions for the entire tribal nation and ultimately was then elevated not only to a group of four that oversaw the whole Council of 44, but in 1864, they also made him Sweet Medicine chief, which is the highest you could get in terms of political leadership.

He had the responsibility of carrying what was called the medicine bundle, which was handed down through the generations from the original Sweet Medicine who had given the Northern Cheyenne their political and cultural structure. So by the 1860s when he really starts to come to the attention of the US Army, he is holding three leadership positions.

This was very unusual. He was the first and the last man to hold those positions, and he was really in charge of both the, the political and diplomatic leadership of the tribal nation and its military strategy on the ground.

[00:05:20] Lindsay Chervinsky: Sometimes when we're thinking about historical figures, and I think this is especially true when we're studying Native Nations, is we tend to read the history backwards, and we know that ultimately they lost most of their power.

They were forced on reservations. We sort of erase that part of the story, but that was very much not the lived reality during most of the 19th century. And for most of the 19th century, these were powers that the United States had to reckon with and had to think about. So I'm wondering if you could sort of set the stage a little bit for us in terms of like the different actors in the area and why maybe white Americans cared about Little Wolf and cared what they were doing at that moment to help us push back against some of that historical determinism.

Nelson emphasized that indigenous leaders like Little Wolf were important to white Americans because of the increasingly prominent role the West played in American politics and imagination in the mid 19th century. The Northern Cheyenne stood in the way of American plans, and they were very effective at disrupting American efforts to absorb their homelands

[00:06:23] Megan Kate Nelson: When Little Wolf was rising to leadership status in the 1850s and 1860s, the American West and the Great Plains were really at the center of a lot of American legislation, a lot of American myth building. The California Gold Rush is in 1849. The Colorado Gold Rush is in 1859, the Montana Gold Rush in 1863. So there is a huge kind of migration push in the wake of those gold rushes and then also the Mexican American War.

And so the Great Plains peoples really don't have a lot of interaction with white Americans until this point, until they start seeing these wagon trains coming across on the, what became known as the Oregon Trail and when the Bozeman Trail was blazed in 1864 in order to get miners to those Montana gold fields.

And so white civilians are kind of moving through their landscape. They don't really show any desire to stay, but the— they were still trespassers and interlopers, and that was really the first engagement that the Northern Cheyenne had with white civilians. And then US Army personnel came in their wake and one of the main figures in charge, I mean there were multiple departments that covered Northern Cheyenne kind of homelands and then the territories in which they hunted. Phil Sheridan was in charge of most of those departments.

[00:07:51] Lindsay Chervinsky: For people who don't know who that is, he was a, a general from the US Army, is that right?

[00:07:54] Megan Kate Nelson: Yes, and he was one of the kind of top figures. Once Ulysses S Grant left his post as the general of the armies to become president.

Then William Tecumseh Sherman took those reigns and Phil Sheridan —and these are —Grant and Sheridan and Sherman are probably the three most well known northern military generals from the Civil War. And they were also experts in partisan warfare in what is known as hard war, where you attack people's communities in addition to their fighting forces, and that had always been part of Native American fighting style. There was raiding warfare where they would just make quick strikes to siphon off horses or get guns or ammunition. But then there was also a kind of attack that was meant to kill people. And for most Native Nations, that was an attack on an encampment and they would usually kill the men and then take the women and the children captive and either absorb them into their societies or use them as bargaining chips to get something else.

So the fighting styles here are interesting. Also, the US West is an enormous landscape and the US Army in the wake of the Civil War, really only has about, I think 30,000 soldiers spread out over this vast space, and they were both cavalry and infantry, and you cannot try to chase down the Northern Cheyenne who were the best horsemen in the northern plains.

The Comanche were the best in the southern section, but you can't chase them down if you're on foot. So they really didn't have the personnel to get things done. But one of the major commanders in the field, General George Crook, who was in command of a fort in Nebraska, was one of the leading campaigners against the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota during this period.

The command structure of the US military wasn't really — it was very difficult for them to kind of figure out what to do with the Northern Cheyenne, especially during the exodus, because Little Wolf and the Northern Cheyenne were moving through like five different military departments.

[00:09:55] Lindsay Chervinsky: So if we're thinking in traditional white western terms, what you're saying is that he is like a military leader, he is a political leader, and then he is — what would be the third category? You said there were those three different positions. Is that sort of like a cultural leader? We almost might think of in that way?

[00:10:10] Megan Kate Nelson: A little bit, but also a diplomatic leader. The government— Cheyenne had recognized by the 1860s that treaty negotiations with the US government, were going to be a part of their lives pretty consistently. And they needed someone who they believed would represent all the most important desires and visions for the Northern Cheyenne in negotiations and talks with the US government.

[00:10:33] Lindsay Chervinsky: Often, when we talk about traditional American leaders, we think about either diplomats, we think about war leaders, we think about politicians, and so we're merging that all into one.

What were some of his biggest moments in which he was a leader or the things that would maybe fit into a standard history textbook?

[00:10:49] Megan Kate Nelson: So militarily, there were kind of three moments. One was in 1866, he led an attack on a US Army fort to Fort Phil Kearney, which was one of several forts on the Bozeman Trail, which had been blazed directly through Northern Cheyenne territory, and this was one of their big demands of the US government and all of their treaty negotiations in this period. They wanted those forts out of there, and so they made a demonstration against this fort and they won, and this was their greatest victory against the the US government in this period.

[00:11:22] Lindsay Chervinsky: Throughout our conversation, Nelson emphasized the different ways Little Wolf epitomized Northern Cheyenne leadership values like consensus building, attention to the needs of the larger community, and self-discipline. We'll return to this later.

[00:11:37] Megan Kate Nelson: He also made a decision with, and I should also note that the Council of 44 and the kind of older chiefs, they kind of made decisions by consensus.

So even though Little Wolf was this tremendous and very unique leader, he never made a decision by himself. And this is also one of the leadership characteristics of the Northern Cheyenne, is that they were always discussing and negotiating if they could not — if Little Wolf could not convince his fellow chiefs to take an action and they would not take that action.

It did not matter that he was the Sweet Medicine chief. So I think this is a really interesting component of their political structure and important to understanding how he became such an effective leader during this period because he was obviously very persuasive. The Northern Cheyenne decided to ally with Sitting Bull, and not only the Hunkpapa Lakota, but the Oglala Lakota, um, and their Arapaho Allies.

Uh, little Wolf did not fight directly in either the Battle of the Rosebud or Little Bighorn. He was actually out hunting with part of his band when those battles occurred. But he demonstrated and exemplified that great alliance between all of those tribal nations that were giving the US government such trouble during the, the 1860s and the 1870s, but really little wolf's kind of big moment as a leader came in the fall of 1878.

Uh, they had been forced to surrender after the US army really went after. Both the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne and the wake of Little Bighorn because they were so outraged at that victory on the part of Native Peoples, and they forced Little Wolf and the Northern Cheyenne to basically go to Indian territory and rejoin their Southern Cheyenne kin, and it was an absolute disaster.

These are people who had lived their entire lives in the Northern Rockies. And the Great Plains, and suddenly they're in a completely different place in Indian territory where it's hot and humid. 50 of their people died in the first year that they were there. There was a lot of great discontent and Little Wolf tried to speak to Indian agents and to US Army officials to convince them that the Northern Cheyenne needed to go back to the north country, go back to their homelands.

The US government refused. And so Little Wolf took action himself. He gathered together several other chiefs and about 300 people, and they prepped in an interesting way, and this is the sort of interesting component of Northern Cheyenne military leadership. You had to be good at logistics and at strategy and tactics.

So you had to be good at all three things. And so. What they first did is they moved their camp north of the river and as far away as possible from Fort Reno on the reservation as they could get. Then they stole horses, kind of siphoned them off over the course of a couple months from their Southern Cheyenne kin with with whom they were having some real problems because they were not in alliance.

And the Southern Cheyenne actually went to the US officials and said "The Northern Cheyenne are stealing our horses." And the, the US Army was like, "How do you know it's not white, you know, rustlers?" And they said, "Because they are taking the best one."

[00:14:40] Lindsay Chervinsky: Oh man.

[00:14:42] Megan Kate Nelson: Yeah. So they said "The white horse thieves just take the whole herds.

They don't care. But the Northern Cheyenne are picking off our best horses because they know they are the best horses."

[00:14:52] Lindsay Chervinsky: Oh my gosh. That's amazing.

[00:14:53] Megan Kate Nelson: Isn't that great? So they basically gathered this herd in a gully north of their campsite. They gathered supplies. They knew they were not going to take anything else with them, so they could travel really fast through the American West.

This was the fall of 1878, and they left in the night. And mostly they traveled at night making sometimes up to 60 miles a day, which is incredibly fast for that time period. The US Army didn't figure out they were gone for about 10 hours, so they had a significant head start 'cause they had left their lodges and they had left their fires burning.

So they just thought they were still there and they basically fought a series of running battles. Little Wolf would stop whenever the US soldiers were within a day or two, and he would find a really good defensive position and he would set up, he would take control of the water sources and lure US soldiers basically into a trap.

And so this happened multiple times, and you would think that the soldiers would learn, but they never really learned when it came to Indian warfare during this period. Little Wolf was able to successfully kind of thrust and parry his way into Nebraska and took shelter in the Sandhills of Nebraska. I don't know if you have ever been there.

This is a huge, really interesting landscape that the Northern Cheyenne knew very well, and so they used all of the conditions of the Sandhills, the way they disorient you, the way that there are a lot of lakes in the Sandhills because of drainage issues and they create fog during certain times of years.

So they used the fog to their advantage. They confused the US Army officials into thinking they were in places that they weren't, and they stole a bunch of cattle from local ranchers and survived during the winter. Now, I should note that one of the things they also did in order to survive on this exodus was that they did attack Kansas cattle ranches to siphon off cattle and horses when they needed them, and, and they did in fact kill many Kansas residents, probably around 30 or 40.

And this did not help their reputation in the moment. Many newspapers initially were kind of sympathizing with them, that they were, this was a sort of gallant thing that they were doing. But when they started killing white civilians, newspapers, and politicians turned against them in a way. But this was seen as one of the most amazing military feats against the US Army in this period.

But what I think is even more interesting and says more about Little Wolf's military leadership is that they moved north of the Sandhills. They went toward the Black Hills, which is one of their holy sites, and they were making their way toward the Powder River. And another group of US Army soldiers was coming up on them and had found them, and Little Wolf knew basically that this was the end.

They were in the north country. They had achieved their goal and he knew one of the commanders that was coming after him, a guy named William Clark. And so he negotiated with Clark and surrendered, and he did that to save his people because they were, if they kept fighting the US Army, they were gonna get trapped in certain places because they were not still on the road. He knew that if, that the army would also give them rations if they surrendered. And so this is something that he did for the greater good of the people. And this was another kind of ideal Northern Cheyenne leadership characteristic, was that willingness to sacrifice for the greater good, to think only of the community and not your own desires, your own power, your own leadership.

So those were the kind of major moments for him militarily.

They were being sent out for multiple forts. They were taking over. They were sometimes using trains, and so they could get there really quickly, but they always miss them because

[00:18:32] Lindsay Chervinsky: It's really hard to fight and subdue an enemy if you can't find them.

So Little Wolf surrenders. What happens after that?

[00:18:38] Megan Kate Nelson: So he negotiates for his people to stay in the area. He — there is a relatively new fort on the Tongue River called Fort Keogh and he and his people establish a camp around there in 1879. Now, about a year later, in December, 1880, Little Wolf got very drunk. And this was very unusual.

He was never a drinker. This was one of the kind of, not only a kind of sacred law, but also another leadership characteristic was to always be in command of yourself, right? To have self-discipline. And there was never any evidence that before this point, Little Wolf really drank at all, but he got very drunk.

He went into a trading fort. He had two wives and three children, two sons and a daughter, and his daughter was in the trading fort, gambling or playing some sort of game with a warrior named Starving Elk. And Little Wolf became enraged that this man was engaging with his daughter in this way, and he killed him.

And one of the sacred laws of the Northern Cheyenne is that you do not kill another Cheyenne. And Little Wolf knew immediately that this part of his life was sort of over. So he threw down his weapon. He said, I'm going to withdraw to this space if anyone needs me. It was Starving Elk's family's perogative if they wanted to take revenge and they did not. But what this meant is that Little Wolf was stripped of his Sweet Medicine chief designation and basically kicked off the Council of 44. He was no longer a band chief and no longer the head of the Elkhorn Scrapers. This was a, a major moment in his life.

But interestingly, so he and his family just sort of withdrew to a camp further up the Rosebud River, and then other families began to follow him. So he was clearly still, even though he did not hold these official designations, he was still a leader and his camp, his encampment became the kind of nucleus for the reservation that was declared for the Northern Cheyenne in 1884. So they did in fact secure a reservation. They're one of the only tribal nations that were at first removed and then returned to their homeland and their reservation was established there. The Navajo people are another one, but this was a very rare occurrence.

[00:20:52] Lindsay Chervinsky: And is the reservation still in that place?

[00:20:54] Megan Kate Nelson: It is, yes. It's right next to the Crow reservation, which is interesting. They were traditional enemies, those two peoples and the people of Montana really wanted those two reservations to merge because this is happening the 1880s as also the open range era in the west.

And cattle ranchers really wanted that land, wanted to be able to set their cattle loose in the winter on reservation land, and that was not gonna happen. So this created another era of conflict.

[00:21:25] Lindsay Chervinsky: This striking moment made me want to understand more about Little Wolf's motivations as well as how he had learned about leadership.

But as Nelson would tell me, we often know less about Native American leaders than we do about white historical figures. This gap can be attributed to less surviving documentation, but also to cultural reasons, since most of what we know about him comes through white intermediaries who may or may not have told the whole story.

Do we have any sense of why? So this is clearly one of his like leadership fail moments or his personal failure moments. Do we have a sense of what sparked that? Was it the shift in the surrender? Do we have any sense of what caused this pretty significant change in behavior?

[00:22:07] Megan Kate Nelson: He never talked about it. He never told anyone why he did what he did or if he told anyone it was his family and they did not share it with any outsiders who would've recorded it for us to read.

It's possible that this is part of the traditional knowledge and the history of the Northern Cheyenne people. I am not Northern Cheyenne. I'm not native and so that information has not been shared with me, so it's possible that he told his wives and his children and his closest family. I would think it's reasonable to assume that this shift from a kind of traditional culture and the agreement to stay on the reservation, the Northern Cheyenne, were resisting a lot of the elements of reservation life. They often did not send their children to English schools. They did not go to church. They continued to practice their own religion or what they — their spiritual beliefs. So they resisted in many ways, but I think that was such a marked transition and such a traumatic transition for so many native people to be forced to live in a place.

I mean, it was really good that they were living in a landscape that they knew and that they were in their homelands, but they were still being surveilled. They were still being forced to remain in place when really they had been a mobile society for so long. And I don't think it surprised anyone that people would respond in perhaps some self-destructive ways.

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[00:24:17] Lindsay Chervinsky: So who are the people that he learned from? Some of the great leaders that we talk about, they often read history. Abraham Lincoln talked about George Washington and Winston Churchill talks about British greats. So who were the people that he drew inspiration from, that he took leadership lessons from?

[00:24:32] Megan Kate Nelson: This is something we also don't know all that much about because again, he didn't talk about this to many people, and the white anthropologists who then came and talked to Little Wolf or the US Army soldiers who recorded his words in treaty negotiation were not interested in this aspect of his life.

Right. They were interested in getting concessions from him or getting him to talk culture or things like that. Most Northern Cheyenne men learned about the history of the tribal nation. They learned about culture from both of their parents, from both their mothers and their fathers, and then also older male relatives, uncles and grandparents, and elders in the community. So all of that knowledge that he had about Northern Cheyenne traditional beliefs and about politics and the important role of the Council of 44 and the Sweet Medicine chief that came down to him through family.

[00:25:23] Lindsay Chervinsky: You talked about the importance of compromising, getting agreement as a group, which is almost what today we would think of as like a committee-like structure or a parliamentary type of government, which requires a certain amount of ability to compromise, to convince people of your position to work out negotiations. Do we know if he had the opportunity to observe any of that? Because that's a very different skill than battle orders, which tends to be a much more hierarchical practice, and so often those skills are not contained in the same people.

And I'm wondering if he had the opportunity of observation.

[00:25:55] Megan Kate Nelson: Definitely observation militarily, not politically, I don't think, because the band chiefs would meet once a year or as needed, but you were only allowed to sit into those discussions if you were invited, so it's possible that he was invited.

It's also possible that some other relatives had also been band chiefs, but we don't really know that for sure, and definitely diplomatically, he was part of several different delegations, one at Fort Laramie in 1868. He also traveled to Washington DC in 1873 as part of the Northern Cheyenne delegation that spoke with the Secretary of the Interior and also with President Grant about staying in their homelands.

But I am not aware that he ever sat in on other treaty talks before that point, although he was a band chief. And then as the leader of the Elkhorn Scrapers Military Society, he would've been part of discussions about the future of his band and where they were going to end up and how they were navigating bison hunting and the loss of bison herds, things like that.

But definitely he was able to observe from a very young age military movements and military leadership. But he did seem to have a knack for military strategy that we don't really see from other Northern Cheyenne chiefs. So that may have been something unique to him where he was just good at envisioning the chess pieces of a particular kind of military action.

[00:27:20] Lindsay Chervinsky: Obviously we're limited by the information that is shared with us, and I wanna get at that sort of source problem in a second. But did he ever talk about particular moments where he learned those lessons? Or were there battles that were particularly instructive prior to the peak of his power that he noted as important step stones?

[00:27:39] Megan Kate Nelson: He never talked about that, but he did take part in war parties and engagements with other tribal nations in which they used a tactic that he used quite often later against US Army personnel, which was the kind of surprise attack, where you set yourself up and you hide many of your forces to disguise your numbers, and then you lure them in and attack them with flanking maneuvers and attack them from the front and control the landscape of the battlefield.

So definitely he learned in those moments. How to, even with smaller war parties, how effective that strategy was. And he did in fact use it quite often, several times during the Exodus and then also in the — the fight at Fort Phil Kearney, which was known later as the A Hundred Men Killed Fight or the Fetterman Fight.

And it was extremely successful because US Army personnel did not know how to combat it. And so I think what I think we can tell from the kind of strategies that he used that he was very observant, that he knew what US Army personnel were going to do in reaction to his pokes and prods. And he knew that if he created a big, obvious trail into a canyon, that the US Army would follow it and then they could from their high positions on the canyon rims, start shooting at them and kill a great deal of them. Those are in fact things that happened. And I think he also learned the importance of what we would term or what military historians would term logistics. How important, having good and fast horses, getting a fresh supply of horses on a long campaign, all of these kinds of things. He was learning as he was fighting as a young man and then taking those lessons and applying them when he was in charge.

[00:29:24] Lindsay Chervinsky: There's often a phrase in the history field, history is written by the winners, so we often celebrate the leaders that win long term. I'm wondering why you think it's really important for our listeners and Americans in general to have a better understanding of native leadership.

This question opened a fascinating conversation into Northern Cheyenne leadership values and how they overlap or differ from more familiar leadership values in white American society. We also had the chance to talk more about the source issues facing this kind of research.

[00:30:00] Megan Kate Nelson: Well, I think in general we should be open to learning about different leadership styles from unexpected sources.

There's some famous story about the Duke basketball coach, about how he learned his leadership style from the women in his family. And that's something where people were like, "what?"

[00:30:18] Lindsay Chervinsky: I think especially given he was, I think, a pretty prickly personality. And so most people didn't particularly associate that with learning that from women.

[00:30:26] Megan Kate Nelson: Exactly. This is probably one of the reasons he was so good at what he did. Because he was willing to think about other people who you wouldn't anticipate or you maybe wouldn't define as leaders in a kind of traditional American sense. And what I really appreciate — so the Northern Cheyenne historian Leo Killsback has identified 10 leadership qualities that Northern Cheyenne leaders exemplified.

And I love this list. Because some will be very familiar to Americans, but some are a little more unique and very interesting to consider how we would apply them in our American governmental political life in particular. So the first and most important was a peaceful temperament.

[00:31:07] Lindsay Chervinsky: I think most of the presidents don't — that one — they do not get to check that box. No.

[00:31:13] Megan Kate Nelson: The — that it was really prized for Northern Cheyenne leaders to face adversity and criticism without acting unreasonably or predictably or impatiently. Just imagine what that would be like. Compassion was second and interestingly, in the Northern Cheyenne language, and this is something that Leo Killsback points out, compassion is synonymous — it's the same word for compassion, sympathy, mercy, and pity. Yeah, it's very interesting and I think part of it is, I think empathy is really important, I think, to understand what other people are going through and to be able to put yourself in that position and maybe say, "Okay, if we're going to create a policy for all Americans, well, how am I going to react if I am in this group, which is not where I am, what would my reaction to that be?" Generosity was a major revered characteristic, forgiveness. Veracity, the sacred laws of the Northern Cheyenne is that you always tell the truth. You do not lie. And yes, even when the truth is unfavorable to your position.

[00:32:22] Lindsay Chervinsky: Okay. So we've gone from, cannot tell a lie, did not cut down the cherry tree to almost no other president fitting that, but very good.

[00:32:30] Megan Kate Nelson: That's the fifth one. Righteousness. And by this, that's not in a religious sense. It's that you abide by the law.

[00:32:36] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm.

[00:32:36] Megan Kate Nelson: Okay. Moral laws and then also political laws.

This one I love the most, I think. Thoughtfulness, that you take the time to really think about the decisions that you're making and how they're going to affect all the people. And I also love this one because it is love.

I know it's love for one's family, for one's people, for one's nation, one's culture and cultural history, and also love of the land.

[00:33:02] Lindsay Chervinsky: Wow, that's incredible.

[00:33:03] Megan Kate Nelson: Isn't that amazing? Ugh, so good. Humility is the ninth characteristic.

[00:33:07] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yep.

[00:33:08] Megan Kate Nelson: Yep. And then the 10th is fortitude. Sort of the ability to thrive during really challenging times.

[00:33:15] Lindsay Chervinsky: That is such an amazing list. You know, one of the questions I usually ask guests are, what could people take from whoever we're talking about, whatever character it is, what can they apply to their lives?

But instead, I wanna say that everyone should think about this list and think about what maybe characteristics they feel like they're doing pretty well on, and what could they maybe improve on? Because I feel like that list not only would make us all better leaders, but would make us better citizens, better community members, maybe better family members, better friends, so that is phenomenal. You have written about a lot of different types of people, and sometimes it's been military leaders, sometimes it's been environmentalists, sometimes it's been scientists, sometimes it's been women. What are the challenges about writing about people where the source material is not as easy to access?

You don't have a George Washington Papers project for Little Wolf. You don't have Mount Vernon. You are very limited by what has been produced by others and what is passed down. And so I'm wondering if you could just talk briefly about those challenges.

[00:34:11] Megan Kate Nelson: It's definitely more difficult to access, and as a historian and as a non-native historian, I rely on the generosity of native historians who have someone like Leo Killsback, who's written this amazing book on Northern Cheyenne history and culture and leadership, and has published it so that we can read it. There are certain, and he says in the book that there are certain things that are kept back because they're meant for the Northern Cheyenne people and not for anyone outside of that community. And I think one of the most important things to do as a historian is to be really respectful of that.

And to say, "okay." And I think as historians, you know, too, Lindsay, there are certain things we're not gonna be able to know.

[00:34:50] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:50] Megan Kate Nelson: There are certain kind of times and places where the trail really goes cold and we just have to accept that. As frustrating as it is, we would like to have all-

[00:34:59] Lindsay Chervinsky: I have a theory for why all historians really like mystery books, because in the mystery books, we always get the answer, and so it provides us with the satisfaction we don't always get in real life.

[00:35:10] Megan Kate Nelson: It's so true. All the clues end up turning up and yes, there is a final resolution. Would I love to have a Little Wolf memoir where he answers all the questions that you had today, answers all the questions that I have about the decisions that he made and his perception of the US government, his perception of himself as a Northern Cheyenne leader and as a father and as someone who then ultimately, I don't think he actually was ever — he did not live long enough to become an American citizen, so, and I don't think he would ever consider himself as such anyway, but I would love to have those sources. We would all love to have that one document that just kind of nails it.

Or that one oral history, that one story, but you just have to respect what is there. The piece together. A story of a life and a story of a person from whatever resources you happen to have.

[00:36:01] Lindsay Chervinsky: All right. Standard final question, and I think it'll be really interesting asking you about this because your work does not touch on it.

When you think of George Washington and leadership, what does that mean to you?

[00:36:12] Megan Kate Nelson: Well, when I think of Washington, I of course think of your work, Lindsay.

[00:36:15] Lindsay Chervinsky: Oh, thank you.

[00:36:16] Megan Kate Nelson: In both the cabinet and making the presidency. And I think it's important that Washington had that military experience and the idea that yes, you are the general, so you're making the ultimate decision, but you also have other people you consult with and you are responsible for the lives of other people. And if you decide that you're gonna charge this position, you better be willing to kind of take on that responsibility of the lives that will be lost in that moment. So that I think was always impressive to me about Washington's military leadership, and I think that when we think about the people who are military leaders who go on to take on other roles, this is kind of part of their profile too.

What did they learn in that moment? And that from that kind of style of military leadership that can translate or not sometimes into political leadership. But also, what I learned from your book about Adams is that not only did Washington — he stepped down after two terms when he did not have to, he also understood that he had to show the American people that not only was this happening, Adams was not his best friend, not even remotely, but he attended the ceremony and he walked behind him.

He sort of showed the American people with his body in the moment that he was giving over power and that Adams was in charge now.

[00:37:36] Lindsay Chervinsky: So great. I'm sitting here doing a happy wiggle 'cause I just — it's such a great moment. So thank you for sharing that with us and thank you for sharing your knowledge. It was so great to learn from you and I really appreciate your time.

[00:37:47] Megan Kate Nelson: Of course. Thank you so much for having me. It was great to think about Little Wolf in this context.

[00:37:55] Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you for joining us this week on Leadership and Legacy, and thank you so much again to our guest, Dr. Megan Kate Nelson. You can buy all of her previous books and pre-order her new book, The Westerners, wherever you like to buy books. I'm your host, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.

Leadership and Legacy Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and Primary Source Media.

In the spirit of George Washington's leadership, we feature the perspectives of leaders from across industries and fields. As such, the thoughts expressed in this podcast are solely the views of our guests and do not reflect the opinions of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. To learn more about Washington's leadership example, or to find out how you can bring your team to the George Washington Presidential Library, visit GW leadership institute.org.

Or, to find more great podcasts for Mount Vernon, visit George Washington podcast.com. You can also explore the work of Primary Source media at primarysourcemedia.com. Join us in two weeks for our next great conversation.