One of the main reasons that Lamar Hunt named the Chiefs with that name was that the Mayor of Kansas City who sold Hunt on moving there was H. Roe Bartle and his nickname was Chief.
Unique amongst significant city Mayors, Battle was a full time Boy Scout Executive with the Heart of America Council. He had started an honorary camping society and fellowship within BSA called the Tribe of Mic-O-Say. His tribal rank was Chief and that was his nickname for decades: Chief Bartle.
The team, of course, saw the traffic opportunities with tribal headdress and the like, but Hunt confirmed this numerous times.
I was privileged to meet Roe Bartle a few times. His program was credited with creating a district with the highest percentage of Eagle Scouts in the country.
Interesting; tx.
My understanding re the use of “chief” re the tribes (actually they are families, extended families, families who joined from other tribes, strays, captives) . . . is, that the colonists needed one or more terms to use, in order to identify leaders and sub-leaders (or to whom, the colonists chose to assign such titles).
Unfortunately for some tribes, the use of “chief” was part of a plot twist by some people who wrote some treaties designed to grab tribal land (of the moment). A person who may not actually be a *chief* in the minds of the tribe, would put his mark on the parchment where it read: *Chief Moving Cloud* . . . re some trade deal backed by the tribe’s land (of that moment) . . .
And the deal was valid in some colonial court (and back in Europe) . . . while the tribe was surprised to find, that the tribe had signed what turned out to not be the deal that the tribe had in mine - including, the tribe’s unhappiness about whom the colonialists had determined to be a so-called “chief.”
“Of the moment” means, that the ownership of land, varied from tribe to tribe, as a legal concept, and their definitions tended to be more fluid, for some others - seasonal, for some - it was their land, when they might return in 2 years (no matter that they had moved away for a long time).
One reference: books by Allan Eckert