WALKER, JAMES R. (1849–1926) was a physician with the Indian Service of the United States government who became an important scholar of Native American religion. He was born near Richfield, Illinois, on March 4, 1849. He joined the Union Army in 1864 at the age of fourteen and was eventually assigned to the U.S. Sanitary Commission to care for the sick and wounded during the Civil War. Walker resumed his schooling after he returned to Illinois at the end of the war and earned the degree of Doctor of Medicine from Northwestern University Medical School in 1873. He joined the government's Indian Service in 1877 and first served as a physician at Leech Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. In 1893 he was transferred to the Colville Reservation in Oregon, in 1896 to the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and later in 1896 to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. It...