Jeremiah Potts (c. 1840 – July 14, 1896), (also known as Ky-yo-kosi, meaning "Bear Child"),[1] was an American-Canadian plainsman, buffalo hunter, horse trader, interpreter, and scout of Kainai (Blood) and Scots heritage.

Upon the death of his father in 1840, Jerry was given to American Fur Company trader Alexander Harvey by Namo-pisi prior to rejoining her tribe.

American Fur Company trader Andrew Dawson of Fort Benton, Montana, a gentle man who was called "the last king of the Missouri," adopted young Potts.

[6] He taught the boy to read and write and allowed him to mix with the Native Americans who visited the trading post to learn their customs and languages.

In his late teens, Potts, who adopted the carefree mannerisms of the frontier, joined his mother’s people and, from then on, drifted between them and Dawson.

During this time, Potts passed all the nai-Cree rites of passage including the final agony of the Sun Dance wherein the fledgling brave is tied to a pole by thongs threaded through his chest muscles.

As a person of mixed blood, he had to prove to both Indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans that he could cope in their respective cultures, and was well served by his quick wits, reckless bravery, skills with the knife and lethal accuracy with both a revolver and a rifle.

[7] Potts married two sisters of the Piegan Blackfeet (Aamsskáápipikani) named Panther Woman and Spotted Killer,[8] who blessed him with several sons and a couple of daughters.

Three of his descendants, including Janet Potts, became Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers during the middle years of the 20th century.

[9] When he journeyed to Montana Territory to buy horses he would carry cash - often as much as a thousand dollars - with which to make the transactions.

Around this same time, he became a minor chief with the Kainai, in recognition of his bravery in battle, his unquestioned leadership abilities, and his knowledge of the prairies.

He was fluent in American English, Blackfoot, and Crow (Apsáalooke aliláau), had a better than average ability in Plains Cree (nēhiyawēwin) (which he would speak only when necessary), and was passable in Lakota-Sioux (Lakȟótiyapi), Assiniboine (Nakona or A' M̆oqazh), and Algonquin.

From a distance the stocky, bow-legged Potts looked like a Euro-American trapper in his buckskin clothing, his Stetson at a jaunty angle upon his head.

Just in the nick of time, Jerry Potts with a group of Peigans and two Blood bands, who were armed with repeating rifles, came to their assistance.

In the daylong so-called Battle of the Belly River, on October 25, 1870, near present-day Lethbridge (called by the Blackfoot Assini-etomochi – "where we slaughtered the Cree") the combined Cree-Assiniboine force, who lost over 300 warriors, was defeated.

He ceased working for the force at age 58, because the pain of throat cancer made it so that he could no longer ride, and died a year later, on 14 July 1896, at Fort Macleod.

The Macleod Gazette and Alberta Livestock Record paid tribute to the man who “made it possible for a small and utterly insufficient force to occupy and gradually dominate what might so easily, under other circumstances, have been a hostile and difficult country.

it is not too much to say that the history of the North West would have been vastly different to what it is.”[11] Jerry Potts is buried at Fort Macleod with the rank of Special Constable in the North-West Mounted Police.