Cronau Original Sketch of Kangi-Yatapi, Crow King

KANGI-YATAPI = CROW KING, A FAMOUS CHIEF OF THE BLACKFOOT SIOUX, 1881
Rudolf Cronau (1855-1939)
Graphite on artist's board
Signed and dated lower left: Rud. Cronau 10/10 81
Inscribed lower left: Kangi yatpi /
Krohen Konig /Chief of the Blackfoot Sioux
Standing Rock N. Dac.
15 3/4 x 12 3/4 inches sheet.
Provenance: The Artist, New York; Margaret Cronau Wunderlich, daughter of the artist ; and by descent.
Crow King, also known as Medicine Bag That Burns, Burns The Medicine Bag or simply Medicine Bag; was a Hunkpapa Sioux war chief at the time of the Battle of Little Big Horn. Crow King was one of Sitting Bull?s war chiefs at the Battle, he led eighty warriors against Custer?s men on Calhoun Hill and Finley Ridge. For the duration of the battle of Little Bighorn, Crow King and his band of eighty warriors attacked Custer from the south, allowing Crazy Horse and Gall to surround the 7th Cavalry.
Born in Solington, Germany, in 1855, Rudolf Cronau was considered by his peers to be one of the leading ?Special Correspondents? of his day; writing and illustrating his articles. Cronau studied at the Dusseldorf Academy, principally under Andreas Muller and later with Andreas Achenbach. After his studies, he was employed in Leipzig by its two most important weekly newspapers, Das Illustrirte Zeitung and Die Gartenlaube. Over the next decade, Cronau contributed to both newspapers and wrote numerous books on his travels.
Cronau "recognized, articulated, and helped to perpetuate a sense of affinity that had long been a part of many Germans' interests in American Indians. He captured the excitement and melancholy of first encounters that were often lost in the broader literature but characteristic of individual experience," (Penny 98).