Rain in the Face

Rain-in-the-Face
Ité Omáǧažu
Lakota leader
Personal details
Born	c.1835
Died	September 15, 1905 Bullhead Station, Standing Rock Reservation
Signature

Rain-in-the-Face (Lakota: Ité Omáǧažu )(in Standard Lakota Orthography) (c. 1835 – September 15, 1905) was a warchief of the Lakota tribe of Native Americans. His mother was a Dakota related to the band of famous Chief Inkpaduta. He was among the Indian leaders who defeated George Armstrong Custer and the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment at the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn.

Born in the Dakota Territory near the forks of the Cheyenne River about 1835, Rain-in-the-Face was from the Hunkpapa band within the Lakota nation. His name may have been a result of a fight when he was a boy in which his face was splattered like rain with his Cheyenne adversary's blood. Late in his life, the chief related that the name was reinforced by an incident when he was a young man where he was in a battle in a heavy rainstorm with a band of Gros Ventres. At the end of the lengthy combat, his face was streaked with war paint.

He first fought against the whites in the summer of 1866 when he participated in a raid against Fort Totten in what is now North Dakota. In 1868, he again fought the U.S. Army in the Fetterman massacre near Fort Phil Kearny in present-day Wyoming. He again was on the warpath in 1873 when he took part in the Battle of Honsinger Bluff where he ambushed and killed an army veterinarian Dr. John Honsinger, an army Private and another civilian near present-day Miles City, Montana. He returned to the Standing Rock Reservation, but was arrested by Captain Thomas Custer in 1874 on orders of General George A. Custer for the murder of Honsinger. He was taken to Fort Abraham Lincoln and incarcerated. However, he escaped (or was freed by sympathetic Indian policemen) and returned to the reservation, then fled to the Powder River. In the spring of 1876, he joined Sitting Bull's band and traveled with him to the Little Big Horn River in early June.

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