Dark Cloud

Who was Dark Cloud?

Dark Cloud was a Native American silent film actor, born Elijah Tahamont on September 20, 1855 at Odanak, Quebec, Canada. He was a chief of the Abenaki, a First Nations people belonging to the Algonquian peoples of northeastern North America.

Tahamont's father, also named Elijah Tahamont, had studied at Moor's Indian Charity School and Dartmouth College, where Native American education had been funded by a gift of £12,000 in 1767 from a Native American, Presbyterian Rev. Samson Occom. Moor's School had been established for "civilizing the wild, wandering Tribes of Indians in North America, and ... for promoting religion, virtue, and literature among people of all denominations."

Tahamont became known first as a popular lecturer, and as a model for artist Frederic Remington, the most successful Western illustrator in the “Golden Age” of illustration at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Remington wrote and illustrated a novel, John Ermine of Yellowstone.