Robert Yellowtail

Robert Summers Yellowtail (August 4, 1889 – June 20, 1988) was a leader of the Crow Tribe. Described as a "20th-century warrior", Yellowtail was the first Native American to hold the post of Agency Superintendent at a reservation. Separated from his mother at the age of 4 years old, Yellowtail was culturally assimilated into a reservation boarding school. When he was 13 years old, he went to the Sherman Institute, in Riverside, California, graduating in 1907. He then attended the Extension Law School in Los Angeles, transferring to the University of Chicago Law School, where he gained his Juris Doctor degree.

Personal life Yellowtail was married four times. In 1911, he married a daughter of Spotted Horse, and after she died during the 1920's, he then married Lillian Bull Shows. His second marriage ended in divorce, and in 1932, he married his late wife, Margaret Picket. After which in 1960, he entered his fourth marriage to Dorothy Payne.

Political activism In 1910 During this time, Yellowtail was able to get white ranchers to return 40,000 acres of land to the tribe, built a Crow Hospital, brought horses and cattle from Canada, and buffalo from Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowtail was a leading figure in the opposition to a dam on the Bighorn River in the southern portion of the reservation. The dam would flood the Bighorn Canyon, sacred to the Crow. Yellowtail was unable to prevent the dam's construction, which began in 1961, but won a modest increase in compensation to the tribe after a divisive fight. In a final irony, Yellowtail Dam was named after Yellowtail.

Yellowtail was the subject of a 1985 video, Contrary Warriors: A Story of the Crow Tribe.