Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Former Colorado Senator, Dies at 92

A Democrat turned Republican, he was the only Native American during three terms in the House of Representatives and in 12 years in the Senate. He was also a judo expert and an Olympian.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Cheyenne Indian who walked into a political caucus in Colorado to kill time one day in 1982 and wound up serving two terms as a state legislator, three more in Congress and 12 years as a United States senator, died on Tuesday at his ranch in southwestern Colorado. He was 92.

His daughter, Shanan Campbell, confirmed his death.

The ultimate political outsider, Mr. Campbell was the only Native American during his tenures in the House of Representatives (1987-1993) and in the Senate (1993-2005), a political maverick who rode a motorcycle and wore buckskins, cowboy boots and coral-and-silver necklaces. He once wore a full Cheyenne headdress in a Senate floor debate.

Unlike the legal-fiscal-civic résumés of most politicians, his history was remarkably diverse. In a misspent youth, he stole cars and guns, brawled, rode the rails and went to reform school. But he worked his way through college as a teamster before studying at a university in Japan for four years, emerging as a world-class judo expert who represented the United States at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He taught in high schools and at a college, designed award-winning jewelry, and became a rancher and a licensed pilot.

Irreverent, blunt and independent, the rough-hewed Mr. Campbell was a fiscal conservative and a social liberal who favored gun rights and abortion rights, billed himself as the champion of the average voter and refused to be bound by party lines. He switched allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans in 1995.

With American Indians accounting for less than 1 percent of Colorado’s electorate, he built a coalition of unions, women and Hispanic voters, but he alienated environmentalists by defending ranching, mining and timber interests. His relatively modest legislative accomplishments included the establishment of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, which opened in September 2004.

Mr. Campbell called the museum “a monument to the millions of Native people who died of sickness, slavery, starvation and war.” Wearing the full headdress he had donned on the Senate floor as the sponsor of the museum bill, he said, “Only 400 years after the Old World collided with their world, the Native people of this land became America’s first endangered species.”

Mr. Campbell said his great-grandfather, Ruben Black Horse, had fought with the Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho and Lakota Sioux warriors who overwhelmed Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Montana’s Little Bighorn in 1876. He sponsored legislation that dropped Custer’s name from the site in 1991 and designated it the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

Indian gambling casinos were the biggest issue in his mailbag, Mr. Campbell told Native People’s Magazine in 1997. “While gaming has been a godsend for tribal jobs, schools and needed programs,” he said, “there is a dark side to the casinos. Little by little they are contributing to the erosion of culture in subtle ways.”

During his years in the Senate, Mr. Campbell became gradually more conservative, voting for the Defense of Marriage Act and refusing to support same-sex marriage, although he was one of six Republicans who voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, a constitutional clause intended to ban same-sex marriage on the grounds that the issue should be left to the states.

He announced in 2004 that he would not seek re-election, noting that he had been treated for prostate cancer. “Somewhere along the line, I said, ‘I’m not going to die in this place,’” he said of his decision to retire. “I want to do what I can, but I’m not dying here.”

Benny Marshall Campbell was born in Auburn, Calif., on April 13, 1933. His mother was a Portuguese immigrant, his father an American Indian.

His father was a chronic alcoholic, often jobless and absent from the family. His mother had tuberculosis, and her prolonged confinements in a sanitarium required her to place her children in an orphanage in Sacramento.

“I don’t blame my mother for that,” Mr. Campbell told Herman J. Viola, the author of an authorized biography, “Ben Nighthorse Campbell: An American Warrior” (1993). “She had nothing. My dad was off drinking. She didn’t have any choice.”

Divorced and then reunited, his parents settled in the 1940s and opened a small grocery store. Benny’s father taught him to solder metal and fashion jewelry. The boy did well in art and woodworking in school, but got into trouble for stealing cars and guns and for drunken brawls, and was sent to reform school. He quit high school in his junior year to enlist in the Air Force and became a military policeman.

Mr. Campbell was introduced to the Japaneses martial art of judo by migrants he had met working in California’s agricultural fields as a boy. While serving in the Korean War, he began studying judo in earnest. After being discharged in the early 1950s, he attended San Jose City College on the G.I. Bill and later San Jose State University, where he joined a highly regarded judo team and became its captain. He won the N.C.A.A. Pacific Coast championship four times. After graduating in 1957, he taught at various schools.

From 1960 to 1964, Mr. Campbell studied Japanese and judo at a university in Japan. He won 48 of 50 tournament matches, earned a gold medal at the Pan American Games in 1963 and joined the United States judo team at the 1964 Olympics. (He tore a ligament, lost his first match and retired from active competition, ranked fourth in the world.)

Mr. Campbell did not investigate his roots until 1968, when he first visited the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. Thereafter, he maintained a close association with the tribe and identified as Cheyenne. He took the middle name Nighthorse in 1980, when he was enrolled as a tribe member, and was inducted into its council of chiefs in 1982.

Mr. Campbell’s first two marriages ended in annulment and divorce. Since 1966, he had been married to Linda (Price) Campbell, a public school teacher. They had a son, Colin, and a daughter, Shanan. His survivors include his wife, their two children and four grandchildren.

Mr. Campbell wrote “Championship Judo: Drill Training” (1974), and later trained and bred championship show-ring quarter horses at his ranch near Ignacio, Colo. He also founded Nighthorse Jewelry Designs, creating American Indian motif pieces that sold for up to $20,000. He earned a pilot’s license and bought a small plane to deliver his wares to dealers.

One day in 1982, intending to fly to California from a small airport in Southwest Colorado, he was grounded by heavy thunderstorms. To kill a few hours, he drove into Durango and went to an open meeting of local Democratic leaders who were choosing candidates for various offices. He even stood up and gave a dynamic speech lauding a friend running for sheriff.

Then came nominations for a seat in the State Legislature.

No one volunteered.

“One person, I remember was not feeling well,” Mr. Campbell told his biographer. “Another person was too busy. In the end, nobody could or would do it. By default more than anything else, I guess, everyone started looking at me.”

“Would you be interested?” someone asked.

“Well…”

Mr. Campbell served four years in the statehouse. He sponsored no major legislation, but his fellow lawmakers named him one of Colorado’s 10 best legislators. Soon, he was off to Washington. After leaving the Senate in 2005, he became a lobbyist for the law firm Holland & Knight in Washington. He later founded his own lobbying firm, Ben Nighthorse Consultants.

Lake Nighthorse, a reservoir in La Plata County, Colo., was named in his honor.

Jack Healy contributed reporting.

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