Scotsman records rare images of
Sioux Ceremonial Chief Frank Fools Crow

Interview by David Mason.
The News Corporation Journal December 1989.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Writing books on the American Indians has become a passion for Andrew Hogarth after his fourth book, “The Great Plains Revisited,” was published in Sydney recently.

Andrew works on the third floor as a camera operator at News Limited, but since 1981 he has spent ten months travelling 77,000 miles across the harshest countryside in North America – in search of a dream.

When visiting the Great Plains of North America, Andrew bases himself in Los Angeles and hires cars to make the treks to the Indian settlements. Needles to say, the cars are a lot worse for wear when he returns.

“The Great Plains Revisited” was dedicated to Jack Little, Bill Tall Bull, Paha Ska and frank Fools Crow, and all their Indian counterparts from various reservations ranging from Pine Ridge in South Dakota to Lame deer in south-eastern Montana.

The book is a collection of these traditional Indians who are constantly fighting huge multinational companies to keep their land in its original state. A section at the back of the book is also dedicated to the historical sites, Andrew visited as he tried to set out a visual picture for the readers.

Geographically, the Great Plains runs 2,500 miles north to south, and is 600 miles wide at its widest point. The territory takes in ten American states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.

To help with his research, Andrew has over 500 publications dealing with the American West, which he has collected over a decade, since his first visit to the Great Plains in 1981.

Many people ask him why he does it – his answer is simple: “I really enjoy being on the open road, watching the sun rise in the east and set in the west. It’s as free as one can hope to get in this frantic world of timetables.”

I also feel the need to record the Native American people, going about their business in their everyday attire. The recording of oral history past down through the generations, is also one of my main driving forces behind the book publishing.”

Although Andrew has to work with tight budgets on his book publishing, he always donates multiple copies to the main state libraries and universities in Australia and also in the United States of America, and schools on the Lakota-Sioux reservations of Pine Ridge and Standing Rock.

The books are to be used for research by students interested in the history of the American West. Later this year, Andrew will try to secure a publisher in the United States. Unlike his three previous books, his latest creation is a hardback which means it should market well in the USA.

Andrew’s books are more than a hobby, he is really involved in his work. “To meet Frank Fools Crow (aged 99) last year was such a thrill, when I shook his hand it finished all my work.”

“I had finally touched history and shaken hands with one of only a handful of truly great traditional Native American Indian leaders still living in these modern times.” Sadly Fools Crow died in November, 1989, four months after meeting with the Scottish author.

“My first visit to the Great Plains in 1981 was the realisation of a dream, which I thought would be the culmination of my studies, but it began an intense quest for more knowledge which has lasted nine years.”

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Go West, Young Man

Interview by Daphne Guinness.
Mode Magazine March 1990.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

It’s not Cowboys, it’s not Calamity Jane, it’s not Jesse James. “The Great Plains Revisited is the American Indian conflict with the United States Army, which may not sound too whoops, but author Andrew Hogarth says it is just amazing who is turned on by Red Injuns.

Marlon Brando, of course, Elton John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin, and Kevin Costner the movie star are three off the top of his head. “A gentleman in the Blue Mountains has just built a tepee – he’s a painter and draws American Indians, and a lawyer in the city… he just bought my book, too.”

Bookrap bumped into Hogarth flogging “Plains” in a Paddington (Sydney) cakeshop. The assistants simply laughed at his would-they-be-interested-in-a-book-about-Indians pitch and continued icing television gateaux, but being a Scot, he wished them a Happy New Year and went on to sell six copies of his
$25 dollars, 350 limited-edition volume before the day was out. Most went to bookshops for hard cash, which is unusual; books are usually sold on a sale-or-return basis.

But Hogarth is that trendy phenomenon: the package publisher who writes, takes pictures, does artwork layout and produces the entire book (his pal Charles Renwick did the line drawings).

The point of “Plains” is that it isn’t just a series of dramatic black-and-white pictures of famous faces such as Frank Fools Crow, the 99-year-old Ceremonial Chief and Medicine Man of the Lakota-Sioux Nation who died last year. “When I shook his hand, I felt inspired – it was like touching history.”

“Plains also includes a 17-page directory of battlefields, monuments and markers, which tells how to get there and what further books to read. Hogarth thinks his timing is just right. He was watching the “Today Show” on television and the subject under discussion was book trends for the coming decade when someone said that “the days of books on ball games and space are over. What people want now is history.”

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Brave Crusader

Interview by Adam Walters.
The Daily Telegraph March 1990.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Much has been written about South Africa’s blacks, but native Americans are battling for space on the world stage. Scottish-born Australian Andrew Hogarth has dedicated a part of his life to their plight and told Adam Walters of his battle.

Andrew Hogarth maintains that tales of how the west was won should trigger memories of triggers, and how the native Americans didn’t have many to pull. Instead, he says Hollywood has adulterated a graphic history of mass slaughter to portray the illusion of a fair battle between the “goodies and the baddies.”

Many a film studio has romanticised the heroes of America’s early pioneers, but Hogarth will argue until he is red in the face, that the settlers were the villains and the native Americans the victims.

Born in Edinburgh, Hogarth has an unlikely background for a human rights activists, and he is the first to admit his research of Indians began as a hobby. A former journalist with a soccer magazine, his involvement would grow from part-time interest to total fascination, as his three books and many articles on the subject testify.

In his latest text, “The Great Plains Revisited,” Hogarth employs the talents of artist Paul Farley to capture the wisdom of the last great Lakota-Sioux Ceremonial Chief Frank Fools Crow. Farley’s sketches are dominated by portraits of Hogarth’s heroes.

In fact the book was dedicated to the memory of Jack Little, Bill Tallbull and Frank Fools Crow. All three men are direct descendants of the Lakota-Sioux and Cheyenne chiefs who fought to repel the genocide of their proud tribes during the Plains Indian Wars of the 1870”s.

For Hogarth they have almost become mentors, but it would be wrong to mistake his respect for the great men as an emotional preoccupation. He talks with authority and objectivity about how “imaginative” script writers fictionalised the pioneering days to the point of creating popular perceptions. “ I’ve set out to try and destroy the misinterpretations given to people by the American movie industry,” he said.

“A close study of the history books will reveal the exact opposite of what we see in the Saturday afternoon westerns.” He points out that the native American of the Great Plains had not seen guns before the bloodthirsty arrival of white men from the east coast.

Thankfully the bow and arrow are synonymous with Indians because that’s all they had. That humble weapon is about the only thing Hollywood has done to give an accurate impression of the hopelessness faced by Indian tribes when their land was being stolen."

His book contains a detailed map of the locations and dates of battles, including the day Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and 265 men of the Seventh Cavalry fell at the Little Bighorn valley in south-eastern Montana.

With the Lakota-Sioux and Cheyenne native Americans combining forces to protect their families and land, Custer’s entire command was wiped out within two hours of charging the village. According to American folklore Custer died a hero, but he was in fact the victim of his own bad timing.

Custer’s Last Stand has become a legendary chapter in the United States history books, but as Hogarth points out, the deaths of his Lakota-Sioux and Cheyenne counterparts hardly rates a mention at the battlefield today. “The Lakota-Sioux and Cheyenne chiefs were the political and spiritual leaders of their time, and they defended their land instinctively - they were not the aggressors.”

The damage caused by the unforgiven unrelenting march of so-called Manifest Destiny in the United States of America during the nineteenth century, was not restricted to heavy native American losses. White man’s invasion has left a legacy of humanitarian, social and environmental issues as disturbing as the problems faced by Australia’s Aborigines.

The poverty on some reservations provides a sickening third world contrast to the more familiar bright lights of modern America. Hogarth said, “The parallels between native Americans and Aborigines are as finite as the injustices inflicted upon them by the English speaking world. Just as Aborigines are fighting to keep their land, the native American nations are constantly attempting to fend off governments and multi-national companies.”

Hogarth said, “The never ending battle for the native American people to protect their reservations and sacred sites from mining and other damaging ventures can be likened by the fight to save Australia’s Kakadu National Park.

The rifles and pistols of the wild west might have gone, but the white man’s gun is always smoking in Washington. There have been countless delegations of Indian chiefs and elders who have spoken to politicians, but nobody wants to know about them.”

It is that frustrating pursuit of fairness, which continues to inspire Hogarth in his personal attempts to help his native American friends tell their side of the story. “I have paid for the production of my books from start to finish.

“By publishing independently I can control what is let out into the public domain. The oral history passed down through the generations is written down once, and not tampered with by the large publishing houses and their editors, satisfying their own personal agenda.”

“The trips to the Great Plains region of the United States of America over the last decade, the research, travel costs, photography, text layout and printing have all been financed by my own pocket through working jobs, and selling my books to independent bookshops, and interested individuals along the way.”

Hogarth has certainly came a long way from the young teenager in Edinburgh, Scotland, who was told at the tender age of fifteen by the school headmaster that he could not continue with further education. Luckily his skills developed in the field of graphic reproduction and printing, have allowed him to express his passion for the native American culture through the printed page and photography.

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Cheyenne Hole: The Story of the Sappa Creek Massacre

Book review by Tom Pearson.
The Guardian November 1991.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

On April 23, 1875 a detachment of soldiers of the US army and 20 buffalo hunters surrounded a Cheyenne camp on Sappa Creek, in the state of Kansas. They proceeded to shoot down the men, women and children of the camp.

The official army records stated that 27 Cheyenne died. The actual figure was closer to 100. Women and children were thrown alive into a fire in the mopping-up exercise. Others, who had taken refuge in a sleeping hole cut into the side of the river bank, were dragged out and executed.

This booklet is the fourth publication by Andrew Hogarth on the Plains Indians of North America. It recounts the resistance of the Great Plains Indians to the policy of the United States government to ‘settle” the west during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

“Cheyenne Hole” begins by giving the reader some background, broadly setting out events which proceeded the massacre. Beginning with the increasing numbers of white settlers who staked claims to the land of the Plains Indians in the early 1860’s. Hogarth emphasises the support the United States government received from the industrialists in the east. The government, he says, was “morally and economically bound to subdue the Indians.”

The buffalo was the major food source of the Plains Indians. The slaughter of millions of buffalo, mainly for the manufacture of leather in the east, as well as a rich mens’ sport, became central to the strategy of the army to undermine the social organisation of the Indians considered “hostile” those who had not been forced to live on reservations.

The decimation of the buffalo “set the scene for an inevitable clash between the Indians and the United States government.” The description of the massacre is precise and graphic. Having made a number of visits to the Great Plains (the author lives in Sydney), Hogarth’s eye for detail and his meticulous research allows him to draw a clear picture of the events that took place on that “cool grey morning” of April 23. He draws on Cheyenne oral history as well as the few scant written accounts, and in the process discredits the official report given by the officer who oversaw the killings.

And it is here that the real value of such works as “Cheyenne Hole” is found. The authors do not approach history as though it were immutable and lifeless. “What hold greater weight,” Hogarth and Vaughan ask, “the written word or the spoken word? Ultimately it depends on the society in which you live. Both of these are relevant to the story of the Sappa Creek Massacre.”

It is this approach which enables Hogarth and Vaughan to peel back some of the veneer of official records, which have been nailed down so tightly over the real history of a people.

The booklet has some beautiful illustrations by Australian artist Paul Farley, as well as graphic maps by Graham Carney of the Sappa Creek area, and of the Great Plains as they were in 1875.

* Hogarth has travelled extensively throughout North America. He has written three other works on the Native Americans of the Great Plains. Kim Vaughan compiled information, proof read and edited Cheyenne Hole and Andrew Hogarth’s three previous works. Cheyenne Hole is available at the Napoleon Military Bookshop, 336 Pitt Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Phone: (02) 264 7560.

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‘Past Life’ focus on modern shame.

Cheyenne Hole: The Story of the Sappa Creek Massacre, April 23, 1875.
By Andrew Hogarth and Kim Vaughan.

Independent book review by Rob Inder Smith December 1991.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Historian-writer Andrew Hogarth must have been a Native American in a previous life. So passionate and meticulous is he in chronicling the Native American history and culture it is impossible not to believe he was, at one time a Cheyenne.

In his latest booklet, “Cheyenne Hole,” Hogarth and co-author Kim Vaughan have painstakingly pieced together, with maps, the story of the Sappa Creek Massacre in Kansas on April 23, 1875. It is a little-known event in his well documented history of the United States government’s genocide of the Native American people during the white man’s push west across the Great Plains.

There are no monuments, and state maps and tourist brochures do not mark the historic site. It took Hogarth three years to finally locate the exact spot of the incident. But nearly one hundred people from one village mainly half-starved women and children were attacked and killed by the United States cavalry in a three-hour battle. Atrocities were committed and Hogarth a Scotsman living in Sydney, is damming in his condemnation of the perpetrators.

Making no pretence to impartiality, he lambastes cavalry leaders such as general Philip Sheridan and Second Lieutenant Austin Henely for “ wholesale slaughter,” “indiscriminate killing” and “questionable ethics.” With the white man and his railroad came “decimation of the buffalo herds, the Cheyenne tribes life blood.

Few historians know what happened at Sappa Creek, and there is little evidence to prove it did. But Hogarth is thorough in accrediting his sources and provides an impressive bibliography for the size of the publication, whish was done on a shoe string budget.

Hogarth says: ‘Henely’s report… states his order to ‘kill the herders.’ This order… excluded a peaceable solution… Henely knew the direction the encounter would take… and had already lost control of the situation… by his poor choice of (creek) crossing, lack of knowledge of the topography and miscalculation of the size of the village.”

The title is the name of the large three-metre crescent-shaped hole in which the last of the Sappa Creek villagers, were trapped and picked off by the buffalo hunters. Hogarth says: ‘Henely then ordered the village, camp and ammunition to be burnt… Cheyenne, including children were also thrown in the fire.”

Henely’s report of the incident said 27 were killed – 19 warriors and eight women and children – and was as haphazard in burying the truth as it was a military engagement. This is because buffalo hunters did most of the killing while Henely and his troops floundered in the Sappa Creek, which they were trying to cross.
Hogarth writes that a settler named Grout, working two miles (3.3km) downstream during the battle, later counted more than 20 piles of empty Sharps cartridge cases on the ridges overlooking Cheyenne Hole, with four to 25 cases in each pile. Sharps bullets were used mainly by the buffalo hunters on the plains.

John Koontz, who settled near the massacre site in 1879, told local historian Doc Wimer, that: “We could tell the position of the buffalo hunters and the soldiers by the empty cartridges. (Buffalo) Hunters using Sharps were east and north of the Cheyenne; soldiers using carbines were southwest of the village. “From the amount of empty shells, there were possibly two dozen hunters or cowboys in the fight.

As well, cowboy John Love, of Oberlin, Kansas, visited the battlefield two days after the massacre. He counted the bodies of 28 Cheyenne warriors lying where they had fallen. Squaws (women) and children and possibly some of the braves had been thrown into a gulch and covered.

The authors ask: Why is Lieutenant Henely’s report not consistent with the physical conditions of the land and the stated number of soldiers?, and why did the battle occur at all when the presence of Stone Forehead (Medicine Arrow), the Keeper of the Sacred Arrows, would have undoubtedly led the Cheyenne to seek a peaceful solution?

“Cheyenne Hole: The Story of the Sappa Creek Massacre” is one of Hogarth’s modest works – he has written three books on the Native Americans of the Great Plains region and their confrontations with the United States Army from 1854-1890. But with it, he has stood on the cliff-face of history and screamed: “This is the way it should be known.”

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