IF THESE BONES COULD TALK

In the 1941 Western They Died With Their Boots On, set between 1857 and ’76, Anthony Quinn wore a bone breastplate playing Crazy Horse opposite Errol Flynn’s George Armstrong Custer. Lakota extras in the 1955 film Chief Crazy, starring Victor Mature and set in the 1870s, also wore bone breastplates. But the real Crazy Horse never wore a bone breastplate, as he was killed in September 1877, shortly before such breastplates became a decade-long fad among the Lakota and other North Plains tribes. One widely circulated portrait of a pallid young Indian identified as Crazy Horse has been deemed inauthentic in part because the subject is wearing a bone breastplate, or in Lakota.