In the early twentieth century, Yellow Wolf dictated his memoir to L.V.

McWhorter, a Washington state farmer and writer who had developed relationships with nimíipuu people and who spent decades collecting their accounts of the 1877 events.

The result was “Yellow Wolf: His Own Story,” published in 1940 — one of the most detailed first-person accounts of the 1877 events from a nimíipuu perspective.

Yellow Wolf’s account is valuable precisely because it is not the account of a principal leader.

He was a warrior and an observer, and his memoir records the specific texture of the fight — what he saw and heard and experienced at each stage — in ways that the more summary accounts from the army side or the diplomatic side do not capture.