Kicking Bear was an Oglala by birth. Through marriage he joined the Miniconjou and became a band chief. Both the Oglala and the Miniconjou belong to the Lakota Nation. Kicking Bear distinguished himself in several battles to protect Lakota land during the War for the Black Hills (1876-77), including the battle at Little Big Horn Creek.
Kicking Bear was a leader in the Ghost Dance religious movement, practiced a century ago by Indian men and women in the belief that it would restore them and their deceased ancestors to a fast-disappearing way of life. The U.S. Army stopped the movement with the Wounded Knee massacre.
Kicking Bear was arrested and imprisoned at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. In 1891 his sentence was commuted provided he join the European tour of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, an experience he found humiliating. After a year-long tour, Kicking Bear returned to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to care for what mattered most to him -- his family.
In 1898, more than twenty years after the event, Kicking Bear painted his account of the Battle of Little Big Horn at the request of artist Frederic Remington. General George Armstrong Custer can be seen in yellow buckskins on the left side of the painting. Sitting Bull , Rain-in-the-Face, Crazy Horse, and Kicking Bear stand in the open center area. The figures rendered in line in the upper left corner represent departing spirits of dead soldiers.