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Tom Three Persons: Legend Of An Indian Cowboy
Hugh Dempsey, one of Canada's best known historians on prairie Native biography and history, has written an interesting and informative account of the life of Blood Indian Tom Three Persons. Three Persons, according to Dempsey, had two claims to fame. First, he captured the world title in bronco riding at the 1912 Calgary Stampede. Second, he was a successful Native rancher at a time when Natives are believed to have economically excelled at very little. Although Dempsey sums up the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century as ones of misfortune for the Bloods in general, somehow Three Persons managed to overcome adversity and setbacks to find both prosperity and fame.
Set in southern Alberta, primarily on the Blood Reserve, Dempsey begins this short biography with background material on the Three Persons family, providing a window into Blood cultural and family relations. Three Persons was fortunate to belong to a society where membership and kinship counted. His own story really began when, in the Native tradition, he had a vision and met his spirit helper, "Billy." Some people speculated that "Billy" was in reality the devil. Nevertheless, Three Persons attributed his economic and rodeo success to "Billy."
In subsequent chapters Dempsey follows Three Person's life through the ebb and flow of reserve existence and the rodeo and stampede circuit. He seemed to move easily between the Native and White cultures of southern Alberta and the prairies. In following Three Persons on his quest for rodeo fame, the author draws a picture of the customs of the early reserve period and illustrates Blood and Native resilience in...