Oglala Oral History Project records, 1980-1997

The Calico Winter Count is the winter count of the Calico Band of the Oglala Lakota, who now reside on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Little is known about the Calico Winter Count itself, other than it was the winter count kept by the band. The last official keeper of the winter count was Ben Marrowbone, a member and historian of the Calico Band. He was born in 1889, lived most of his life in the village of Calico and died in 1983, at the age of 93. He was well known during his lifetime as an authority on Lakota Culture and was especially noted for being the interpreter of the Calico Winter Count, a task he inherited from the previous band historian. The winter count stops at the year 1877, the year of Crazy Horse's death, and it is not known if there was any active effort to continue the formal winter count.

In 1980, Mike Her Many Horses, a former Lakota Studies instructor from Oglala Lakota College, recognized the cultural significance of having an unbroken winter count as an example of Lakota oral history, and set about trying to preserve it. The original winter count was apparently done in an old ledger. These pictographs were redrawn onto a new volume to include Lakota and English titles and presented to Ben Marrowbone to contextualize and connect the images to stories associated with each year between 1825-1877. He was 91 years old at the time and in the home of his niece, Gloria Goggles (née Runs Close to Lodge) in Ethete, Wyoming on the Wind River Indian Reservation. Mr. Marrowbone continued to work with Mike producing other video tape sessions about other aspects of Oglala oral history before his death in 1982. These sessions were originally recorded on a ¾” video format. Sometime after 1983, copies were made to the standard VHS format, however, there is some missing data, including 1842 figures.

In 1997 Meya brought the video tapes to the attention to the tribe's recognized expert in the Lakota language, Johnson Holy Rock. Though the winter count has been expertly translated by Mr. Holy Rock, there are certain sections that need to be reworked.