The Coolidge Week

P:At Deadwood, S. Dak., 300 strong men allowed their beards to grow long and bushy, for President Coolidge was coming to town. They wanted him to see Deadwood as it looked in the days of the gold rush, following 1876, when "Wild Bill" Hickock, "Deadwood Dick" and "Calamity Jane" were kicking up dust in its streets. A pageant was staged for President Coolidge, who gladly shook the wrinkled hand of aged "Deadwood Dick."

P:The President was also made White Chief and Protector of the Sioux Indians. Chief Henry Standing Bear administered the oath of fealty, said: "Mr. President, it is a great honor to us that you have come among us and into our camp. . . . Our fathers and our chiefs, Sitting Bull, Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, may have made mistakes, but their hearts were brave and strong, their purposes were honest and noble. They have long gone to their Happy Hunting Ground, and we call upon you, as our new High Chief, to take up their leadership ... to protect and help the weak."-- To cap the ceremony, Rosebud Robe (soon to appear in vaudeville as "the most beautiful Indian maiden in the world") placed upon White Chief & Protector Coolidge's brow a war bonnet of 200 feathers. Nineteen of the warriors who had helped kill General Custer's men on June 25, 1876, cheered vigorously.

P:Back in Rapid City, S. Dak., President Coolidge heard the complaint of a group of Indians from Quapaw, Okla., who said they had lost $60,000,000 worth of oil royalty rights through the acts of one-time (1921-23) Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall.

P:Vuco Perovich, Montenegrin by birth, barber in Rochester, N. Y., by trade, who has constantly maintained that he would rather hang than spend his life in prison, was last week pardoned by President Coolidge for a murder for which he was convicted in Alaska in 1905. Mr. Perovich attracted attention in 1909 by protesting that his constitutional rights had been violated when President Taft commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. In 1925 a Kansas district court upheld Mr. Perovich's protest, so he was released under a habeas corpus writ and became an active barber. But, last June, the U. S. Supreme Court upheld onetime President Taft in considering the life sentence more merciful than the death sentence (TIME, June 13). Only President Coolidge remained to keep prison bars from terminating the prosperous barbering business of Mr. Perovich, who now hopes to dramatize his own life as a cinemactor.

--The Sioux Indians are now demanding $700,000 from the U.S.Government for alleged confiscation of their lands in the Black Hills district, wherein stands the Summer White House.