One must wonder whether William S. Hart read Chief Luther Standing Bear's 1928 autobiography before he wrote the introduction for it.

Hart spent years creating a professional façade of Western authenticity, based on his memories of a long-ago boyhood spent partially in the Midwest. In reality he was a method actor from New York who never cowboyed, never rodeoed, and eventually turned into the character he developed for the stage and screen.

For whatever reason, Hart used the opportunity of introducing Luther Standing Bear's autobiography to chide posers who didn't truly know the West they depicted or "put on the map" — fellow east-coasters Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Remington and (especially) Owen Wister, author of the 1902 novel, "The Virginian."

Perhaps it was predictable. By 1928 Hart was a bitter man. He'd been pushed out of an industry by film producers who could no longer market his brand of moralistic melodramas that had played so well during World War I, when "right and wrong" were high on the minds of American movie audiences. The war over, audiences wanted to breathe. They wanted the thrills and excitement that Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson were giving them (and who, ironically, had authentic cowboy and rodeo backgrounds).

Hart's introduction appeared in the original edition but was justifiably omitted from subsequent reprints — justifiable on many levels, from the language he used to his lack of knowledge about Luther's formal education (which far surpassed his own), as the reader will see below. Unlike Hart's own autobiography, Luther's autobiography, "My People the Sioux," is still published today — without Hart's commentary.

Luther Standing Bear knew the West when it was still tame. Born in the 1860s in South Dakota, he was named "Plenty Kill" (Ota Kte) by his father, a Brulé Lakota chief with plenty of kills under his belt (or, notched on his coup stick). He was raised in a traditional way that was soon shattered. His experiences would fill a book (and they do; we can't give it justice here). He was the first boy to enter the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania where he took the name Luther, and where he tried, and succeeded, in doing well in order to make his father proud.

Like his father (and like author Helen Hunt Jackson*), he supported the 1887 Allotment Act (aka Dawes Act) because he saw land ownership as a pathway to U.S. citizenship, which was denied most Indians until 1924. (With a century's hindsight, the Allotment Act is seen as having been detrimental to Indian land ownership.) He spent a season with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and performed for the king of England; given Luther's formal education and his natural, inherited leadership abilities, Col. Cody put him in charge of the other Indian performers. In 1905 he was named chief of the Oglala Lakota — a position he held only briefly. Reservation life and second-class citizenship were not for him.

Eventually he came to California where he met film producer Thomas Ince, who hired him as a consultant (but, from Luther's autobiography, Ince must not have listened too well). His first screen credit was for the 1916 film adaptation of H.H. Jackson's "Ramona" (a lost film). He appeared in the 1921 Hart vehicle, "White Oak," and the two men evidently maintained a friendly relationship as seen here.

Here's the "but." Luther doesn't devote many pages of his autobiography to "Hollywood" except to say that Ince once told him: "Standing Bear, some day you and I are going to make some real Indian pictures." The day never came. "I wrote Mr. Ince that I was willing to work for my people and to help him, if he would accept my ideas and my stories. I waited for a reply, but none came."

"I have seen probably all of the pictures which are supposed to depict Indian life," Luther writes in 1928, "and not one of them is correctly made."

Not one.