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Little Priest was a tribal representative and warrior.
Little Priest followed his father in the role of chief of his village in 1840. In that same year, the people of the village had relocated from Wisconsin to Iowa. Then, in 1846, he and other Winnebago leaders signed a treaty trading the reservation land in Iowa for land in Long Prairie, Minnesota. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1855 to sign the treaty that exchanged the Long Prairie lands for reservation space south of Mankato, Minnesota.
Little Priest supported the Minnesota...
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The 140th annual Homecoming Celebration of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska will be held July 27th through July 30th. This summer’s pow wow commemorates Chief Little Priest and Company “A” Fort Omaha Scouts of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska.
Chief Little Priest was the last true war-chief of the Winnebago people. Little Priest was born in Wisconsin on the tribe’s ancestral lands but became a war chief in 1844 in northeast Iowa where the tribe had been forced to move to what was then described as “neutral ground” by the U. S. Government. The tribe was moved several more times in the coming years.
In 1863, the Winnebago were forced to move again to South Dakota to face virtual starvation at the hands of the U. S. Government. Seeing this, Little Priest and some of his followers escaped down the Missouri to the Omaha Reservation in northeast Nebraska.
In the summer of 1863, Chief Little Priest and 46 other warriors enlisted in a Nebraska cavalry regiment and fought with General Alfred Sully. In late 1864, Chief Little Priest’s company of Winnebago scouts was assigned to a cavalry regiment out of Fort Omaha Nebraska. In 1865, the band enlisted in Company “A” of the Fort Omaha Scouts at Decatur, Nebraska.
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