Archives West Finding Aid

John Stands In Timber was a member of the Cheyenne Indian tribe, born in Birney, Montana in 1882. Among his ancestors was Lame White Man, a Southern Cheyenne chief who was killed at the Little Bighorn in 1876. John received his education at the Haskell Institute, an industrial training school for Indians in Lawrence, Kansas. He returned to Montana where he first worked as a maintenance man at a school in Busby and a cowboy. He became active in tribal governance at the Northern Cheyenne reservation and eventually became a historian of the tribe. In 1955 he met Margot Liberty, a schoolteacher who was also pursing graduate work in anthropology. She began interviewing Stands In Timber in 1956, continuing until 1959, covering mostly topics dealing with tribal history. The tapes Liberty used to record the interviews were erased after she had transcribed them and only a few survived. In 1967, the same year Stands In Timber died, Liberty published an edited version of selected interview transcriptions, Cheyenne Memories (New Haven: Yale University Press). In 2013, Liberty published a compilation of all her interviews with Stands In Timber titled A Cheyenne Voice (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press).