After receiving a vision, Jerome warned several dancers to stay away from a large gathering of tribes in 1890 thus saving them from being victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre.

On August 5, 1881, after a long-simmering feud, Crow Dog shot and killed principal chief Spotted Tail (who was also at the Grattan massacre), on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.

According to historian Dee Brown in his bestselling book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: White officials... dismissed the killing as the culmination of a quarrel over a woman, but Spotted Tail's friends said that it was the result of a plot to break the power of the chiefs...[2]In 1883, writs of habeas corpus and certiorari were filed on his behalf by lawyers who volunteered to represent him pro bono; his case was argued in November 1883 before the U.S. Supreme Court in Ex parte Crow Dog.

On December 17, 1883, the court ruled in a unanimous decision that according to the provisions of the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed on April 29, 1868, and approved by Congress on February 28, 1877, the Dakota Territorial court had no jurisdiction over the Rosebud reservation and subsequently overturned his conviction.

In response to the ruling in Ex parte Crow Dog, the U.S. Congress passed the Major Crimes Act (18 U.S.C.