If Medicine Crow becomes only “the Native guy who stole Nazi horses,” then the most important part of the story disappears.

The horse theft was extraordinary because of who he already was and because of what he became afterward.

Without the Apsáalooke context, it is merely a strange war story.

With that context, it becomes a story about cultural continuity across one of the most disruptive centuries in Native American history.

The Last Direct Link To A Different Historical World

Medicine Crow’s death was widely described as the loss of the last living person with direct oral-history connections to someone who had participated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The description reveals how quickly historical distance can expand.

In 1876, White Man Runs Him rode as a Crow scout during the campaign against Lakota and Northern Cheyenne forces.

He lived long enough to teach a boy born in 1913.

That boy lived until 2016.