Lakota Chief David Beautiful Bald Eagle Jr.has died on the Cheyenne River Reservation at the age 97.
He was born in a tepee in 1919. He was an Army soldier, an actor, a champion dancer, cowboy, and chief of the Minicoujou band.
Chief Bald Eagle was a paratrooper in World War Two who took part in the D-Day invasion of France. He almost didn’t survive, when his battalion was accidently dropped on enemy lines instead of behind them. Bald Eagle spoke with SDPB in 2008 as part of the Oyate Oral History Project. He told a story of a French couple he met years after D-Day who witnessed his landing in Normandy.
“This couple threw their arms on me and cried, so of course I cried with them, and they told me that they didn’t think they would ever see me alive again because it was right in front of their house on the street that I was laying there in a pool of blood, and so that was the end of my war, I never did fire a shot,” says Beautiful Bald Eagle.
The services for Chief Bald Eagle are set for Friday at Black Hills National Cemetery near Sturgis. You can hear a five minute montage of Chief Bald Eagle talking about his life by clicking play below.