Last Words: Sitting Bull
"I will not go! Attack! attack!"
December 5, 1890
"I will not go! Attack! attack!"
December 5, 1890
No casual visitor, traveling through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in what is now South Dakota, could find the site of old Sitting Bull's cabin without help. Driving through prosperous fields of wheat, cattle fodder and sunflower seeds—along with what makes them grow, huge portable irrigation systems—one scans the hundreds of acres for a farmer or field hand who might know the way. But this is a deserted landscape.
I stop at the local Indian radio station, a twenty-four-hour broadcaster of arguably the least soothing body of third-world music in the world, a cacophony of drums, chants, howls, and cries, only to be told, "You'll never get there." Directed to Skinner's Ranch as a starter, I follow an old dirt trail that descends from the plains down through rugged waste terrain into the wash of the Grand River. At a Boy Scout camp several young teenagers, there to practice for an upcoming Sun Dance, lead me through corn fields, heavy undergrowth and barbed wire to a small obelisk set (and there is no other word for it) in the middle of nowhere.
On December 15, 1890, the fifty-nine-year-old Hunkpapa Sioux leader Sitting Bull was asleep in a rough cabin here, in bed with one of his two wives and a child. Under his pillow was a pistol, alongside his body a Winchester repeating rifle. Followers and bodyguards lay asleep outside in scattered tepees and assorted hovels, exhausted from hours of ritualized frenzy, the so-called Ghost Dance phenomenon, in the expectation that Jesus Christ, of all people—first murdered by whites and now understandably sympathetic to the plight of the equally betrayed Indian—would soon return from the dead a second time. Little did this ragtag assemblage of followers know that forty-four "metal breasts" or Indian police (so called from their badges) were at that moment before dawn riding down on the encampment to arrest, and if not that to kill, their leader.
The quarry, Tatanka Iyotake, or Sitting Bull, is without question the most famous Indian ever to grace our historical narrative. In terms of caricature he was larger than life, the product of garish newspaper reportage that makes today's excesses seem minimal by comparison. His name was household fodder for over two decades, though no author, editor or scribe ever saw Sitting Bull, to say anything of interview him, until the man was well past forty. No doubt his presence and presumed leadership at the Custer massacre, however misunderstood the role he played there, contributed to this infamy. It was not every day, after all, that a United States military command had been wiped out to the last man (only three times in our history, as a matter of fact, in each case by Sioux, a tribe so named from French doggerel meaning "cutthroat").
INSERT HERE PHOTO:
Site of Sitting Bull's Last Cabin
Grand River wash, South Dakota
Sitting Bull, even to some white contemporaries, presented a noble figure: charismatic, proud, mystic, brave, lofty in sentiment, incorruptible. Reading his life and times today one is drawn to add yet another descriptive, tragic, the obligatory tribute to any figure who vainly presides over the utter ruination of his people, as did this man.
Of all the Sioux, Sitting Bull never wavered in his opposition to the way of the wasichus, nor did his incredulity at their greed ever lessen. White society was sick at its core, crazed with anger and lust to destroy the natural bounty that Wakantanka, or the Great Spirit, provided so generously; obsessed with a foolish, glittery mineral known as gold; purveyor of bribes, false treaties, trinkets and whisky that deceived Indians and rotted their values. "I would rather die an Indian than live a white man," he once said. "White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo as their fathers did. White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their tepees here and there to the different hunting grounds. The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our own fashion."
He had, after all, seen everything and could judge for himself what sort of life he preferred, that of his ancestors or that of white civilization: from the glory days of his youth, uncontaminated by any outside influences; an adulthood as a chief and spiritual leader of his people, when (as at Little Bighorn) he helped preside over the largest assembly of Sioux ever seen, to battle the invader; the humiliation, just five years later, of riding at the head of a pathetic remnant, just 287 people, only 44 of whom were men, to the final surrender; the incongruous association with Buffalo Bill Cody and the Wild West Show that confirmed Sitting Bull's contempt for white society; his final years on the Standing Rock Reservation, forced to grow crops, raise cattle and endure the contempt of Indian Bureau officials ("I never knew him to display a single trait that might command admiration or respect," wrote one agent, who catalogued Sitting Bull's various other character defects as "crafty, avaricious, mendacious, ambitious, a physical coward," and so on. General Sherman called him "a humbug"); to the final ignomy of being killed by his own people, perhaps the complete wasichu perfidy.
Having deprived the Indian of his ancestral lands, his guns, war ponies, food stock, and nomadic lifestyle, the last objective of white officialdom was to obliterate traditional religion. Despite its crude, semi-Christian overtones, the "crazy dancers" of the Ghost Dance terrified most wasichus who came in contact with it, rekindling as it did horrific memories of the old days when barbaric Indians rampaged the countryside painted in wild colors, shrieking war cries. Press coverage didn't help ("Messiah Expected To Arrive At Pine Ridge Today, When The Savages Will Fight," read one headline), even though missionaries on the spot downplayed the hysteria as a passing phenomenon. Mary Collins, a Congregationalist, set up her portable organ in front of Sitting Bull's own cabin as the dancers chanted and went into trances, played "Nearer My God to Thee" to match their drums, then fearlessly lectured some of her wandering flock -- "Louis," she yelled at one of her fallen away converts, "get up, you are not unconscious, you are not ill; get up and help me send these people home." And Louis did.
Nevertheless, whites decided to arrest the man they considered a lightening rod for "unreconstructed" malcontents, despite the inevitability of trouble that such a course would ignite. In a move as shrewd as it was callous, authorities at nearby Fort Yates on the Missouri sent "reservation" Indians to do the work, not army units or the assistance of people sympathetic to Sitting Bull such as Buffalo Bill Cody, who thought a wagonload of candy would bring "old Bull" in. Officers at the Fort took turns plying Cody with liquor hoping to derail his scheme, and they succeeded. "You must not let him escape," the arresting team of Sioux were then instructed, "under any circumstances." This proved to be an open invitation to judicial murder, as even the press admitted. Wrote the New York Herald, "The slightest attempt to rescue the old medicine man" was thus "a signal to send Sitting Bull to the happy hunting ground."
The metal breasts, most of whom were dressed in army blue, arrived before dawn, lead, incongruously enough, by one of Sitting Bull's veterans from the old days, now "Lieutenant" Bull Head. He had prophesied his own death the night before. "I am going to get killed," he told his men, but "I will not run away from the danger. Be brave, like the agent told us to be." Rousting Sitting Bull from his sleep, five or six metal breasts alternately cajoled and berated the old chief, meanwhile trying to dress him. By the time they had pushed him out the door towards their mounts, however, a crowd had assembled, awakened by the tremolo cries of Sitting Bull's women. Bull Head walked on Sitting Bull's left, holding the chief by one arm, his gun aimed at Sitting Bull in the other. Shave Head held Sitting Bull's other arm, and Red Tomahawk had the chief from behind, with a pistol to Sitting Bull's head. Stung by a taunt from his favorite son, the fourteen-year-old Crow Foot ("They are making a fool of you") Sitting Bull defied his captors. "I will not go!" he yelled, and then shouted "Attack! Attack!" Bull Head was shot immediately. As he twisted and fell he in turn shot Sitting Bull in the chest at the exact moment that Red Tomahawk discharged his pistol into Sitting Bull's cranium. The chief died instantly. Like a spark put to prairie grass, the entire congested, milling scene erupted into a barrage of point blank, indiscriminate firing that killed or mortally wounded thirteen people in a matter of seconds. It is said, though some dispute the story, that Sitting Bull's old grey circus horse, a gift from Cody, interpreted all the shooting as a signal to perform his usual tricks, just as he had before adoring crowds during Buffalo Bill's traveling shows. This added a touch of bizarre to an already squalid affair.
The metal breasts dragged their wounded into the old cabin and waited for a relief column of regular soldiers from Fort Yates, which upon arrival promptly bombarded these men with cannon fire. The young Crow Foot was found hiding under bedclothes, and plead for his life. Bull Head, with four bullets in him, and an agonized three days left to his life, ordered execution: "Kill him, they have killed me." "I then struck Crow Foot across the forehead with my gun, knocking him down," related Lone Man. "As he lay there we fired three shots into his body." When things calmed down, Crow Foot's carcass was heaved out of the cabin onto the dirt outside. When the metal breasts were finally relieved, the body of Sitting Bull was mutilated with an oxen yoke, his jaw ending up somewhere in the vicinity of his left ear.
White soldiers left the gruesome task of piling up the bodies to Sgt. Red Tomahawk. Sitting Bull's mangled remains lying in blood were scraped off the yard and propped up against a fence pole, for fear it might freeze to the ground. Red Tomahawk commandeered a farm cart and loaded the dead policemen inside, then ordered Sitting Bull thrown on top. The men refused, as this would symbolically attest that Sitting Bull had won this struggle, henceforth known among Indians as "The Fight in the Dark." Red Tomahawk conceded the point, had the cart emptied and restacked, this time with Sitting Bull on the bottom. No thought was given to the seven "hostiles" they had killed. They were hauled into a shed and left in a heap. It took two weeks before missionaries came up with the idea that perhaps these corpses should be buried. The exact location of their common grave has never been dignified by any sort of headstone or slab.
As for Sitting Bull, he was unceremoniously interred in a pauper's plot in the post cemetery at Fort Yates. Prisoners in the army stockade dug the hole, Sitting Bull in an open wooden box was pushed in, then quicklime poured over the body and the lid nailed shut. As dirt was thrown on top, an eerie mist from the chemicals burning away his flesh rose from the pit. When Sitting Bull's wives came later to sit by the grave singing death songs, they were shooed away.
The dead metal breasts were buried with full military honors at the nearby Catholic mission. A huge crowd turned out. Pensions promised by the Indian Bureau to the widows and orphans of these slain men were not paid. "What thieves, what liars are the whites," as one chief said, apparently without surprise. It took a special act of Congress in 1930 to appropriate the release of funds to honor this commitment. By then, at least, the Indians could vote.
Buffalo Bill Cody bought Sitting Bull's grey horse and the cabin down by Grand River from the two wives, and paraded both in his travelling shows. A local merchant offered $1000 for Sitting Bull's skin, which he intended to tan, cut up and sell as souvenirs. The quicklime used by the army put an end to this enterprising idea.
At the turn of this century Fort Yates in North Dakota was abandoned, and all the bodies in the post cemetery, save one, dug up and removed. Sitting Bull's grave sat alone, unmarked for many years, occasionally tidied up and covered with a loose cairn of stones, its weathered wooden marker repainted every decade or so. It was frequently "disturbed." Two white teenagers left a dance in 1905 and, as a lark, dug into the grave. Frank took off with "a nice large thigh bone," while Jimmie got a rib. Someone eventually poured a rough concrete slab over the spot. Today, Indians come and drink beer here.
INSERT PHOTO HERE:
Sitting Bull's Original Grave
Fort Yates, North Dakota
In 1953 Sitting Bull's nephew, Clarence Grey Eagle, who as a boy had hid in the bushes when the chief was taken and killed, requested permission to remove what bones remained to a suitable memorial near Mobridge, South Dakota, near where Sitting Bull was born and died. Other people’s interest in something hitherto considered valueless, of course, excites curiosity and then greed in the minds of those who actually possess the artifact in question, and North Dakota refused. In the middle of a dark April night, with cold in the air and snow squalls falling, Clarence Grey Eagle and a group of men from Mobridge drove across the border with a tow truck, a licensed mortician and several laborers. The tow truck illuminated the site and heaved the slab aside, the men dug a trench several feet deep, and a toe bone was the first relic recovered, followed by twenty-four other pieces of skeleton, including a crushed skull. There is a photo of Clarence, in a shabby greatcoat and oversized hat, holding a bone in his hand by the pit. "I am satisfied," he remarked as no further traces of Sitting Bull could be found. At close to dawn, their caravan raced to, and crossed, the South Dakota border, whereupon they all got out and offered the toast, "Piss on North Dakota." Clarence Grey Eagle let out a war cry. Later that day Sitting Bull's remains were buried on a bluff overlooking the Missouri, encased in about twenty tons of concrete. "It'll take an A-bomb to move him now," said one of the "ghouls." When news of the coup leaked out, many Indians claimed the grave robbers had not done a thorough job. Bones of spurious authenticity began selling in Bismarck for $4 a piece.
The sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who spent most of his life working on a Mt. Rushmore-style portrait of Crazy Horse in the Black Hills, carved a six-ton bust of the Sioux Chief that now marks his grave. The memorial was dedicated sixteen months later. Captain George Armstrong Custer, grand nephew of Long Hair, smoked a peace pipe with "Miss Indian America," Mary Louise Defender. Public drunkenness among the Indians who attended was, to the relief of the Mobridge Chamber of Commerce, quite minimal. A Hollywood version of Sitting Bull's life, originally to have starred Boris Karloff, was released simultaneously. Chief Dewey Beard, an actual veteran of Little Big Horn, fell asleep halfway through. Chief Ben American Horse complained that "the Indians talked and looked like Mexicans," which of course they were. Captain Custer "resented" the portrayal of his illustrious ancestor as some sort of psychotic murderer. Meanwhile, a drive to change the name of Main Street in Mobridge to Sitting Bullevard was defeated.
Today the site is largely isolated, the Missouri River at this stage in its flow having been turned into a giant, incongruous lake by the Corps of Engineers, full of ski jets and speed boats, which necessitated a relocation many miles away of the main highway. Today, the grave could hardly be called a tourist attraction, most passers by opting instead to visit the reservation casino, which never closes. Ziolkowski's statue has suffered the ravages of neglect and vandalism. The nose has been painted various colors, Sitting Bull's feather chopped off, the peace pipe defaced, the bust used as target practice, the original fence torn apart and trashed. At the base of Tatanka Iyotake's column lie offerings: pouches of tobacco (cherry cavendish), blocks of soap, several snake skins, knotted rags, bags full of pollen and seed, plastic hair combs and cigarettes. The view is both immense and empty at the same time.
INSERT PHOTO HERE:
Sitting Bull's New Grave
Near Mobridge, South Dakota
Overlooking the Missouri River
Two weeks after Sitting Bull's death, the Ghost Dance movement came to a bloody end at Wounded Knee. Newspapers and government officials called this event a battle, and handed out over a dozen Congressional Medals of Honor to troopers of the 7th Cavalry, who in the mayhem of that event managed to kill several of their own "friendlies," Sioux scouts. Indians, of course, refer to Wounded Knee as more of a slaughter where over three hundred died, mostly women, children and old men. Speaking for Indians everywhere, and certainly for Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Black Eagle summed it all best. "When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth—you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center anymore, and the sacred tree is dead."
Wounded Knee and the few skirmishes that followed marked the official end to Indian hostilities, and the official death of the American Frontier.
I stop at the local Indian radio station, a twenty-four-hour broadcaster of arguably the least soothing body of third-world music in the world, a cacophony of drums, chants, howls, and cries, only to be told, "You'll never get there." Directed to Skinner's Ranch as a starter, I follow an old dirt trail that descends from the plains down through rugged waste terrain into the wash of the Grand River. At a Boy Scout camp several young teenagers, there to practice for an upcoming Sun Dance, lead me through corn fields, heavy undergrowth and barbed wire to a small obelisk set (and there is no other word for it) in the middle of nowhere.
On December 15, 1890, the fifty-nine-year-old Hunkpapa Sioux leader Sitting Bull was asleep in a rough cabin here, in bed with one of his two wives and a child. Under his pillow was a pistol, alongside his body a Winchester repeating rifle. Followers and bodyguards lay asleep outside in scattered tepees and assorted hovels, exhausted from hours of ritualized frenzy, the so-called Ghost Dance phenomenon, in the expectation that Jesus Christ, of all people—first murdered by whites and now understandably sympathetic to the plight of the equally betrayed Indian—would soon return from the dead a second time. Little did this ragtag assemblage of followers know that forty-four "metal breasts" or Indian police (so called from their badges) were at that moment before dawn riding down on the encampment to arrest, and if not that to kill, their leader.
The quarry, Tatanka Iyotake, or Sitting Bull, is without question the most famous Indian ever to grace our historical narrative. In terms of caricature he was larger than life, the product of garish newspaper reportage that makes today's excesses seem minimal by comparison. His name was household fodder for over two decades, though no author, editor or scribe ever saw Sitting Bull, to say anything of interview him, until the man was well past forty. No doubt his presence and presumed leadership at the Custer massacre, however misunderstood the role he played there, contributed to this infamy. It was not every day, after all, that a United States military command had been wiped out to the last man (only three times in our history, as a matter of fact, in each case by Sioux, a tribe so named from French doggerel meaning "cutthroat").
INSERT HERE PHOTO:
Site of Sitting Bull's Last Cabin
Grand River wash, South Dakota
Sitting Bull, even to some white contemporaries, presented a noble figure: charismatic, proud, mystic, brave, lofty in sentiment, incorruptible. Reading his life and times today one is drawn to add yet another descriptive, tragic, the obligatory tribute to any figure who vainly presides over the utter ruination of his people, as did this man.
Of all the Sioux, Sitting Bull never wavered in his opposition to the way of the wasichus, nor did his incredulity at their greed ever lessen. White society was sick at its core, crazed with anger and lust to destroy the natural bounty that Wakantanka, or the Great Spirit, provided so generously; obsessed with a foolish, glittery mineral known as gold; purveyor of bribes, false treaties, trinkets and whisky that deceived Indians and rotted their values. "I would rather die an Indian than live a white man," he once said. "White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo as their fathers did. White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their tepees here and there to the different hunting grounds. The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our own fashion."
He had, after all, seen everything and could judge for himself what sort of life he preferred, that of his ancestors or that of white civilization: from the glory days of his youth, uncontaminated by any outside influences; an adulthood as a chief and spiritual leader of his people, when (as at Little Bighorn) he helped preside over the largest assembly of Sioux ever seen, to battle the invader; the humiliation, just five years later, of riding at the head of a pathetic remnant, just 287 people, only 44 of whom were men, to the final surrender; the incongruous association with Buffalo Bill Cody and the Wild West Show that confirmed Sitting Bull's contempt for white society; his final years on the Standing Rock Reservation, forced to grow crops, raise cattle and endure the contempt of Indian Bureau officials ("I never knew him to display a single trait that might command admiration or respect," wrote one agent, who catalogued Sitting Bull's various other character defects as "crafty, avaricious, mendacious, ambitious, a physical coward," and so on. General Sherman called him "a humbug"); to the final ignomy of being killed by his own people, perhaps the complete wasichu perfidy.
Having deprived the Indian of his ancestral lands, his guns, war ponies, food stock, and nomadic lifestyle, the last objective of white officialdom was to obliterate traditional religion. Despite its crude, semi-Christian overtones, the "crazy dancers" of the Ghost Dance terrified most wasichus who came in contact with it, rekindling as it did horrific memories of the old days when barbaric Indians rampaged the countryside painted in wild colors, shrieking war cries. Press coverage didn't help ("Messiah Expected To Arrive At Pine Ridge Today, When The Savages Will Fight," read one headline), even though missionaries on the spot downplayed the hysteria as a passing phenomenon. Mary Collins, a Congregationalist, set up her portable organ in front of Sitting Bull's own cabin as the dancers chanted and went into trances, played "Nearer My God to Thee" to match their drums, then fearlessly lectured some of her wandering flock -- "Louis," she yelled at one of her fallen away converts, "get up, you are not unconscious, you are not ill; get up and help me send these people home." And Louis did.
Nevertheless, whites decided to arrest the man they considered a lightening rod for "unreconstructed" malcontents, despite the inevitability of trouble that such a course would ignite. In a move as shrewd as it was callous, authorities at nearby Fort Yates on the Missouri sent "reservation" Indians to do the work, not army units or the assistance of people sympathetic to Sitting Bull such as Buffalo Bill Cody, who thought a wagonload of candy would bring "old Bull" in. Officers at the Fort took turns plying Cody with liquor hoping to derail his scheme, and they succeeded. "You must not let him escape," the arresting team of Sioux were then instructed, "under any circumstances." This proved to be an open invitation to judicial murder, as even the press admitted. Wrote the New York Herald, "The slightest attempt to rescue the old medicine man" was thus "a signal to send Sitting Bull to the happy hunting ground."
The metal breasts, most of whom were dressed in army blue, arrived before dawn, lead, incongruously enough, by one of Sitting Bull's veterans from the old days, now "Lieutenant" Bull Head. He had prophesied his own death the night before. "I am going to get killed," he told his men, but "I will not run away from the danger. Be brave, like the agent told us to be." Rousting Sitting Bull from his sleep, five or six metal breasts alternately cajoled and berated the old chief, meanwhile trying to dress him. By the time they had pushed him out the door towards their mounts, however, a crowd had assembled, awakened by the tremolo cries of Sitting Bull's women. Bull Head walked on Sitting Bull's left, holding the chief by one arm, his gun aimed at Sitting Bull in the other. Shave Head held Sitting Bull's other arm, and Red Tomahawk had the chief from behind, with a pistol to Sitting Bull's head. Stung by a taunt from his favorite son, the fourteen-year-old Crow Foot ("They are making a fool of you") Sitting Bull defied his captors. "I will not go!" he yelled, and then shouted "Attack! Attack!" Bull Head was shot immediately. As he twisted and fell he in turn shot Sitting Bull in the chest at the exact moment that Red Tomahawk discharged his pistol into Sitting Bull's cranium. The chief died instantly. Like a spark put to prairie grass, the entire congested, milling scene erupted into a barrage of point blank, indiscriminate firing that killed or mortally wounded thirteen people in a matter of seconds. It is said, though some dispute the story, that Sitting Bull's old grey circus horse, a gift from Cody, interpreted all the shooting as a signal to perform his usual tricks, just as he had before adoring crowds during Buffalo Bill's traveling shows. This added a touch of bizarre to an already squalid affair.
The metal breasts dragged their wounded into the old cabin and waited for a relief column of regular soldiers from Fort Yates, which upon arrival promptly bombarded these men with cannon fire. The young Crow Foot was found hiding under bedclothes, and plead for his life. Bull Head, with four bullets in him, and an agonized three days left to his life, ordered execution: "Kill him, they have killed me." "I then struck Crow Foot across the forehead with my gun, knocking him down," related Lone Man. "As he lay there we fired three shots into his body." When things calmed down, Crow Foot's carcass was heaved out of the cabin onto the dirt outside. When the metal breasts were finally relieved, the body of Sitting Bull was mutilated with an oxen yoke, his jaw ending up somewhere in the vicinity of his left ear.
White soldiers left the gruesome task of piling up the bodies to Sgt. Red Tomahawk. Sitting Bull's mangled remains lying in blood were scraped off the yard and propped up against a fence pole, for fear it might freeze to the ground. Red Tomahawk commandeered a farm cart and loaded the dead policemen inside, then ordered Sitting Bull thrown on top. The men refused, as this would symbolically attest that Sitting Bull had won this struggle, henceforth known among Indians as "The Fight in the Dark." Red Tomahawk conceded the point, had the cart emptied and restacked, this time with Sitting Bull on the bottom. No thought was given to the seven "hostiles" they had killed. They were hauled into a shed and left in a heap. It took two weeks before missionaries came up with the idea that perhaps these corpses should be buried. The exact location of their common grave has never been dignified by any sort of headstone or slab.
As for Sitting Bull, he was unceremoniously interred in a pauper's plot in the post cemetery at Fort Yates. Prisoners in the army stockade dug the hole, Sitting Bull in an open wooden box was pushed in, then quicklime poured over the body and the lid nailed shut. As dirt was thrown on top, an eerie mist from the chemicals burning away his flesh rose from the pit. When Sitting Bull's wives came later to sit by the grave singing death songs, they were shooed away.
The dead metal breasts were buried with full military honors at the nearby Catholic mission. A huge crowd turned out. Pensions promised by the Indian Bureau to the widows and orphans of these slain men were not paid. "What thieves, what liars are the whites," as one chief said, apparently without surprise. It took a special act of Congress in 1930 to appropriate the release of funds to honor this commitment. By then, at least, the Indians could vote.
Buffalo Bill Cody bought Sitting Bull's grey horse and the cabin down by Grand River from the two wives, and paraded both in his travelling shows. A local merchant offered $1000 for Sitting Bull's skin, which he intended to tan, cut up and sell as souvenirs. The quicklime used by the army put an end to this enterprising idea.
At the turn of this century Fort Yates in North Dakota was abandoned, and all the bodies in the post cemetery, save one, dug up and removed. Sitting Bull's grave sat alone, unmarked for many years, occasionally tidied up and covered with a loose cairn of stones, its weathered wooden marker repainted every decade or so. It was frequently "disturbed." Two white teenagers left a dance in 1905 and, as a lark, dug into the grave. Frank took off with "a nice large thigh bone," while Jimmie got a rib. Someone eventually poured a rough concrete slab over the spot. Today, Indians come and drink beer here.
INSERT PHOTO HERE:
Sitting Bull's Original Grave
Fort Yates, North Dakota
In 1953 Sitting Bull's nephew, Clarence Grey Eagle, who as a boy had hid in the bushes when the chief was taken and killed, requested permission to remove what bones remained to a suitable memorial near Mobridge, South Dakota, near where Sitting Bull was born and died. Other people’s interest in something hitherto considered valueless, of course, excites curiosity and then greed in the minds of those who actually possess the artifact in question, and North Dakota refused. In the middle of a dark April night, with cold in the air and snow squalls falling, Clarence Grey Eagle and a group of men from Mobridge drove across the border with a tow truck, a licensed mortician and several laborers. The tow truck illuminated the site and heaved the slab aside, the men dug a trench several feet deep, and a toe bone was the first relic recovered, followed by twenty-four other pieces of skeleton, including a crushed skull. There is a photo of Clarence, in a shabby greatcoat and oversized hat, holding a bone in his hand by the pit. "I am satisfied," he remarked as no further traces of Sitting Bull could be found. At close to dawn, their caravan raced to, and crossed, the South Dakota border, whereupon they all got out and offered the toast, "Piss on North Dakota." Clarence Grey Eagle let out a war cry. Later that day Sitting Bull's remains were buried on a bluff overlooking the Missouri, encased in about twenty tons of concrete. "It'll take an A-bomb to move him now," said one of the "ghouls." When news of the coup leaked out, many Indians claimed the grave robbers had not done a thorough job. Bones of spurious authenticity began selling in Bismarck for $4 a piece.
The sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who spent most of his life working on a Mt. Rushmore-style portrait of Crazy Horse in the Black Hills, carved a six-ton bust of the Sioux Chief that now marks his grave. The memorial was dedicated sixteen months later. Captain George Armstrong Custer, grand nephew of Long Hair, smoked a peace pipe with "Miss Indian America," Mary Louise Defender. Public drunkenness among the Indians who attended was, to the relief of the Mobridge Chamber of Commerce, quite minimal. A Hollywood version of Sitting Bull's life, originally to have starred Boris Karloff, was released simultaneously. Chief Dewey Beard, an actual veteran of Little Big Horn, fell asleep halfway through. Chief Ben American Horse complained that "the Indians talked and looked like Mexicans," which of course they were. Captain Custer "resented" the portrayal of his illustrious ancestor as some sort of psychotic murderer. Meanwhile, a drive to change the name of Main Street in Mobridge to Sitting Bullevard was defeated.
Today the site is largely isolated, the Missouri River at this stage in its flow having been turned into a giant, incongruous lake by the Corps of Engineers, full of ski jets and speed boats, which necessitated a relocation many miles away of the main highway. Today, the grave could hardly be called a tourist attraction, most passers by opting instead to visit the reservation casino, which never closes. Ziolkowski's statue has suffered the ravages of neglect and vandalism. The nose has been painted various colors, Sitting Bull's feather chopped off, the peace pipe defaced, the bust used as target practice, the original fence torn apart and trashed. At the base of Tatanka Iyotake's column lie offerings: pouches of tobacco (cherry cavendish), blocks of soap, several snake skins, knotted rags, bags full of pollen and seed, plastic hair combs and cigarettes. The view is both immense and empty at the same time.
INSERT PHOTO HERE:
Sitting Bull's New Grave
Near Mobridge, South Dakota
Overlooking the Missouri River
Two weeks after Sitting Bull's death, the Ghost Dance movement came to a bloody end at Wounded Knee. Newspapers and government officials called this event a battle, and handed out over a dozen Congressional Medals of Honor to troopers of the 7th Cavalry, who in the mayhem of that event managed to kill several of their own "friendlies," Sioux scouts. Indians, of course, refer to Wounded Knee as more of a slaughter where over three hundred died, mostly women, children and old men. Speaking for Indians everywhere, and certainly for Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Black Eagle summed it all best. "When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth—you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center anymore, and the sacred tree is dead."
Wounded Knee and the few skirmishes that followed marked the official end to Indian hostilities, and the official death of the American Frontier.
