This language made him a passive figure in the story of American expansion — useful, compliant, ultimately tragic, but not an agent with his own strategy and his own values.

Later accounts, from the early twentieth century, sometimes swung in a different direction — treating him as a figure who had failed his people, who had been too trusting or too naive, who should have seen what was coming and responded differently.

This account is also inadequate, because it blames him for the consequences of American violations rather than locating responsibility where it belongs.

The most adequate language for describing Black Kettle is the language of the tragic hero: a figure of genuine moral and strategic intelligence who operated with integrity in circumstances that were not ultimately responsive to integrity.