Frank Bird Linderman

Frank Bird Linderman was a Montana writer, politician, Native American ally and ethnographer. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he went West as a young man and became enamored of life on the Montana frontier. While working as a trapper for several years, he lived with the Salish and Blackfeet tribes, learning their cultures. He later became an advocate for them and for other northern Plains Indians. He wrote about their cultures and worked to help them survive pressure from European Americans. For instance, he supported establishment of the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation in 1916 in Montana for landless Ojibwe (Chippewa) and Cree, and continued as an advocate for Native Americans to his death.

Linderman worked at various jobs throughout his life: as a fur trapper, then an assayer, and later an agent for Guardian Insurance of America. He owned a hotel for two years. For another two years, he published a newspaper, the Sheridan Chinook. He served two terms in the Montana Legislature and campaigned for a seat in Congress. He published his first collection of Native American tribal stories in 1915 and wrote twenty more books over the next two decades. He wrote to share what he knew about Native American cultures and to preserve their traditional stories. His friend Charles Marion Russell, noted painter, illustrated many of these books.

Linderman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the child of James Bird Linderman and Mary Ann Brannan Linderman. He attended schools in Ohio and Illinois, including Oberlin College. In 1885, at the age of sixteen, he moved to the Swan Valley of Montana Territory in search of "the most unspoiled wilderness I could discover." Linderman collected Native American stories. His first book, Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagle's Lodge-fire, was published in 1915 by Charles Scribner's Sons. After moving with his family to a log home on Montana's Flathead Lake in 1917, Linderman focused his attention on writing. He had spent his life gathering stories, and he felt a duty to write them down. He wrote as much in a letter to a friend, "I feel it a duty to, in some way, preserve the old West, especially Montana, in printer's ink, and if I can only accomplish a small part of that, I shall die contented." He wrote six books of Native American legends, an autobiography, a collection of frontier stories, six novels, three animal stories, and a collection of reminiscences about his friend and artist Charles Marion Russell. His most important works, however, were biographies of Pretty Shield and Plenty Coups. He interviewed them in sign language over the course of several weeks. He shaped his notes into books that he presented as autobiographies. Anthropologists and ethnologists noted that Linderman shaped the narratives in significant ways. However, anthropologist Robert Lowie acknowledged that Linderman's work contains useful information about Crow life.