Jerry Potts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since March 2007. |
Not much is known about Jerry Potts’ early life except that he was very dangerous man. He had a great shot with a rifle and was a great knife fighter. His first kill was Antoine Primeau, a French-Canadian trapper who he killed when he was age twenty-two for picking on him.
Potts was what people called a "half-breed". He was born into the Blood Tribe. He later married two members of the Piegan tribe named Panther Woman and Spotted Killer. He considered himself a Piegan but he kept his Indian name, Kyi-yo-Kosi, which means Bear Child, that had been given to him by the Blood tribe. He was very resourceful and was possibly the smartest trader on the prairies at the time.
By the time Potts was twenty-five he was a wealthy man because of his horse trading. He never had less than one hundred horses in his herd which made him one of the richest Indians because wealth was measured by how many horses a man owned. The price of a good horse at the time was between 75 to 150 dollars. When he journeyed to the United States to buy horses he would carry cash usually as much as a thousand dollars with which to make the transactions. People knew he carried big amounts but they left him alone because they also knew who he was. His father’s name was Alexander Potts who was a Scottish fur trader. His mother was Crooked Back of the Blood Tribe.
Jerry Potts became a minor chief in the Blood Tribe when he was approximately 25 because of his bravery in battle, his leadership abilities and his familiarity of the prairies. It was said that “…he knew every trail from Fort Edmonton to the lands of the Cheyenne and Apache and every hill between those trails.” He could find food when everybody else had returned to camp with nothing. He spent a great deal of his life in what is now Montana, guiding, trading horses and drinking.
Jerry never learned to read or write but he could sign his own name and was able to recognize it if someone pointed it out. He was often mentioned in news articles printed in the Helena Herald and other newspapers. He would have to have someone read him the article. Although he couldn’t read or write, he could speak several languages. He was fluent in English, Blackfoot and Crow. He could speak a little better than average in Cree, and was average in Sioux, Assiniboine and Algonquin.
Potts never fully understood white man’s way of thinking. For example, he never understood the reason that white settlers kept chamber pots in their houses. He once asked a Mountie, "Why would anyone p--s [pee] in a perfectly good eating bowl when the entire prairie lay before him?" Potts wore a cat skin, which he believed to be magic, next to his body at all times. He hung the scalps of men he had captured on the pole of his tepee like most Indians. He usually wore ‘white man’s clothing’ most of the time which included a hat that had a wide headband. He had a bushy, drooping moustache that was as stylish in that time as any white man’s.
From a distance, Potts looked like a white trapper in his deerskin clothing with his hat at an angle on his head. He would carry two .44 pistols that hung from his gun belt along with the rifle which never left his side. Under his jacket he always carried two smaller pistols. On his leg he strapped a long-bladed knife. He always kept a small gun inside a hidden pocket, which saved his life several times.
In 1871, Potts was about thirty-one when his mother was murdered. Her killer had been an Indian who was drunk on ‘firewater’ so he declared his own personal war on the whisky runners. That decision led to the disappearances of several runners during the next few months. The next year, Potts chased and shot a whisky runner named Good Young Man off his horse with one shot. Good Young Man fell dead, a rifle bullet piercing in his spine. Potts spared his victim’s cohort because he had never hurt Potts. Besides, witnesses were helpful in spreading the word that Potts had gotten even. By the time Potts was thirty-six he had killed at least 40 men, mostly whiskey runners.
Jerry also despised Wolfers. Wolfers were white hunters who shot and killed wolves. The Wolfers were hated by both Indians and white men. It was a gang of thirteen wolfers who massacred a group of old Indian men, women and children in the Cypress Hills on June 1, 1873. The reason? Some of the wolfers’ horses had gotten away from them during the night. They couldn’t find the thieves so they slaughtered the first group of Indians they came across. Even though Potts loved whisky, had no love at all for whiskey traders whom he hunted mercilessly. When a relative was violently murdered in 1873 by a whiskey runner from Montana he hunted the man down. He killed him in a face-to-face shootout. The man died from a single pistol wound shot directly through his right eye.
In September, 1874 Potts was trading horses in Fort Benton, Montana. He was hired as a guide by the North West Mounted Police who was at the fort. His contract as a guide for the NWMP was to last 22 years. He was paid $90 per month, which was quite a bit higher than a regular guide.
He only ceased working for the force at age 58 because the pain of throat cancer made it that he could no longer ride. He died a year later.
His weakness in interpretation was his habit of translating the speaker’s message in the fewest words possible. At meetings between NWMP officials and Indian chiefs he would listen intently then, following each speech would abbreviate what they had said into one or two short sentences.
Jerry’s many descendants still live mainly in Alberta and Saskatchewan and a few in Montana. One of his descendents, a woman named Janet Potts, became a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer during the 1900s.
