Dave Bald Eagle

But appearing in an Oscar-award-winning film was one of the least interesting things David William Beautiful Bald Eagle ever did. He lived with his grandfather White Feather as a child, the Rapid City Journal has written . His other grandfather was Chief White Bull, a relative of Sitting Bull and one of the leaders in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Both would tell young David their war stories, and exhort him to remember them. Bald Eagle only spoke Lakota until he was 12, when he started school. He spent his teenage years learning English, playing sports — everything from pole vault to baseball — and competing in the rodeo. He saw the West before barbed-wire fences and roads arrived, says his son, Kili Bald Eagle. "He used to tell me about how he could ride across the state and he'd never have to open a gate," Kili says. As a young man Bald Eagle enlisted in the horse cavalry. A few years later it was mechanized: The Army swapped his horse for a motorcycle, and made him a messenger. He was discharged on Dec. 7, 1941. After he'd signed his papers, he heard the news about Pearl Harbor. At his commander's request he reenlisted, joining as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne. Sgt. Bald Eagle's first combat jump was during the invasion of Anzio, Italy. He was part of a regiment that fought so fiercely a captured German soldier called them "Devils in Baggy Pants." Then he parachuted into Normandy, suffering severe injuries when he was accidentally dropped directly over German troops, an easy target for gunfire. "We were just like clay pigeons, coming down. Most of my outfit was wiped out," he told the Rapid City Journal in 2001 . "The first medics to reach him left him for dead," the paper wrote. "But some British commandos came along and found he still had a pulse." Bald Eagle survived. He started a musical career, as a drummer for Cliff Keyes' Big Band, the BBC reports . While he was in the Army, he'd met and fallen in love with an English dance teacher named Penny Rathburn. After he returned from the war, they were married. Penny was pregnant with their first child when she died in a car crash. Bald Eagle was devastated. He started race car driving, tried skydiving, returned to the rodeo circuit, took up bareback bull riding, became a stunt double in the movies. But when chasing death, he came across success. His work as a stunt double "made his name," according to Richard Bullock, who has written an obituary of Bald Eagle . Shooting Westerns required "people who can actually ride horses," as Sonny Skyhawk puts it. Skyhawk is a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation who has been a film actor for nearly four decades. The Westerns he was in represented Native people as less than human, Skyhawk says: "We were always being shot down or killed. With one bullet five or more Indians would fall." But Bald Eagle always tried to teach people about Native American history and life, whatever was happening around him, Skyhawk says. "He excelled at being an educator, and did whatever it took, whatever his own power and talents, to bring that to the forefront," Skyhawk says. Dave Bald Eagle, at 95, playing the role of Dan in Neither Wolf Nor Dog. Courtesy of Steven Lewis Simpson hide caption And he toured with Casey Tibbs' Wild West Show as a rodeo performer, under the name "Chips Warner, " because crowds didn't like Indian names. "When she came into my life, my life changed again," Bald Eagle told the Rapid City Journal . "She was the one who kept me alive." "Before he left Belgium ... David told Josee that he had a cave in South Dakota waiting for her if she ever wanted to come live with him. "All Josee could think about was that cave in South Dakota ... she decided to leave Brussels behind in 1972." The cave comment was a joke, Bald Eagle later explained , but Josee seemed totally game for the plan. The two married the next year, and instead of a cave, they lived on a horse ranch on the Cheyenne River Reservation. They