With the encroaching wasichu, there came more warfare on the plains. On July 28, 1864, the biggest battle on the northern plains unfolded. This was the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, in which General Alfred Sully attacked a large party of Lakota including Sitting Bull and his band encamped in a trading village, in retaliation for the raids on settlers that had led to the bloody Dakota War of 1862. The tribes that were assaulted had not been involved in the Dakota War, but that didn’t matter; they were on the plains and within reach for an act of vengeance. Thousands of cavalry troops advanced on the Indians, firing bullets as the tribes attempted to hold them off with bows and arrows. Late in the battle, a disabled Dakota named Bear’s Heart asked to participate. Sitting Bull and other leaders consented and he was placed on a horse-drawn travois and sent down the hill into the fray. His horse was killed and he was too, as he sang his own death song. Soon, cannons ripped into the embattled Indians, and after suffering many casualties they fled south into the Badlands. The cavalry overran the encampment, burning tons of buffalo meat and killing horses and ponies that were left behind. One infant was shot. But some had discovered Bear’s Heart, and they fired their guns in tribute.
The warfare of 1864 was instructive for Sitting Bull. Having skirmished with the cavalry across that summer, he observed that “the white soldiers do not know how to fight. They are not lively enough. They stand still and run straight; it is easy to shoot them. They do not try to save themselves. Also, they seem to have no hearts. When an Indian gets killed, the other Indians feel sorry and cry, and sometimes they stop fighting. But when a white soldier gets killed, nobody cries, nobody cares; they go right on shooting and let him lie there. Sometimes they even go off and leave their wounded behind them.”
As a result of the summer campaigns of 1864, there was collateral damage for a party of settlers heading across the plains at that time. Sitting Bull would later emerge as the man who saved a young white woman who became a famous kidnapping victim, penning a book called Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians, with a Brief Account of General Sully’s Indian Expedition in 1864, Bearing Upon Events Occurring in My Captivity. It was a brutal account of her capture and life with natives, and she included details of the scalping of her nine-year-old niece as she tried to escape. Her book was a bestseller and one of the first in a series of lurid “captivity narratives” that riveted the country during the Indian wars and advanced all manner of speaking tours and careers. Some of the kidnap victims could never readjust to white society and went berserk; others returned to live with Native Americans. By 1867, it was becoming clear that the Lakota were increasingly besieged and required new leadership—men who were younger than, say, Four Horns, Sitting Bull’s uncle. Four Horns called all of the bands together, along with some Cheyenne and Yanktonai, to discuss his plans. He recommended that his nephew, thirty-six-year-old Tatanka Iyotake, become chief of the tribe. It was believed that he was advanced in his thinking and action for someone that age, wrote his great-grandson Ernie LaPointe. The tribe also agreed that the number two position be filled by Crazy Horse. “Four chiefs went to Sitting Bull’s tipi and escorted him out,” LaPointe wrote. “They brought a buffalo robe with them and had him sit on it. Then they carried him to the council tipi for the ceremony.”
Four Horns said that there was now a new chief and that it was up to this chief to see that the Lakota were fed and defended. “When you tell us to fight, we will raise up our weapons,” he said to Sitting Bull. “If you tell us to make peace, we will lay down our weapons. We will smoke the Cannupa Wakan [sacred pipe] so Wakan Tanka will bless our decision.” Then Sitting Bull was presented with a special bow and arrows and a rifle. He was given a headdress of eagle feathers trailing to the ground, and each feather represented a coup by the warrior who presented it. He was given a magnificent white stallion, lifted onto its back, and paraded around the camp, followed by warriors “dressed in their finest and wearing their eagle feathers proudly.” As he was led around the camp, Sitting Bull sang a song. “I humble myself when my people speak my name/So said Tatanka Iyotake.”
On June 12, 1885, a Friday afternoon, the Atlantic Express arrived at the train depot in Buffalo, New York. Major Burke emerged, followed by Sitting Bull and his entourage. A reporter from the Buffalo Courier was waiting. “He is ours,” Burke called out. “I have captured him.” Sitting Bull seemed to have stepped out of a frontier diorama. He was wearing a full war bonnet with forty large eagle feathers and a buckskin tunic trimmed with beads. He carried a bow and arrows and a peace pipe trimmed with ribbon. There was a medicine bag at his side and he wore a crucifix around his neck. The party boarded an open carriage and headed for the Driving Park. Buffalo Bill was waiting.
CHAPTER FIVE
In Which Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Join Up in the City of Buffalo, and Tatanka Iyotake Reunites with Annie Oakley
Some friendships form quickly and fade just as fast. Others last for a short period of time, an hour, say, or a day, but even they may be as deep as the kind that lasts for a lifetime. And then there are those in which mysterious forces, the hand of the Creator perhaps, necessity, desire, brings two people together, even former enemies, in an alliance that seems unlikely, and in the end, not at all. Such was the join-up of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, “Foes in ’76, Friends in ’85,” as a photo caption would say of the pair, each an icon to himself, together a powerhouse of mythology and might and sparks.
The men had much in common. Both were fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. Both were celebrated, surrounded by admirers and those who embodied the other side of admiration, jealousy; both were known to everyone and no one, in the end, misunderstood, trapped in a persona, worn down by their gifts.
Both were men of action, fearing not a rumble nor a personal assault; they were warriors in service of their people and their time, not unlike Montezuma and Cortés in some ways, Mon-
tezuma who carved out hearts with obsidian and ate them, and dreamed of the newcomer’s arrival atop a horse, and Cortés, who performed the assigned dance, lusting for sparkles in the ground and sending greyhounds to devour those in the way. But unlike Montezuma and Cortés, there was one thing that made them blood brothers, took them way beyond a show biz alliance, and that was the buffalo, to which they both owed their lives and paid tribute with their names. Two sides of the buffalo coin they were. William Cody had killed thousands of them—about three thousand to be exact—while he hunted as an employee of the railroad, taking the plentiful animals from the land to feed workers along the Iron Road, leaving their carcasses and organs to rot where they were felled and skinned. He won his name in a contest because he shot more buffalo on one day than the other guy, and from then on, that’s how Cody was known. The name allied him with the animal that was synonymous with the Great Plains, although he was really no friend to the buffalo—until late in life, after he had witnessed or known about some terrible things, and he had a change of heart and tried to save them. On the other hand, Sitting Bull was kin to the buffalo (along with the other creatures of the plains); when he killed one or several, he uttered a prayer, and then his people were called in to take the animal, and they carved it up, later making use of not just the meat, but the hide, the horns, the hooves, the spleen, the sinew, and when he danced under the sun, staring at it until he nearly went blind, the dance was in concert with the buffalo, whose skull looked on and whose bones were all around him, and pierced his skin, and he asked for continued blessings for his people and through the pathway of the dancing and sacrifice and the buffalo and all other facets of the circle, there was life.
“PTE” the Lakota called the buffalo. It crossed the Bering land bridge during the Ice Age on its way to America as horses were heading in the opposite direction, populating the rest of the world and returning to their homeland thousands of years later and meeting up again with the buffalo on the plains. The Indian, the horse, and the buffalo formed a triumvirate that became the symbol of the frontier, drawing people
to its heart, stirring up a fever that caused people to pay large sums of money for train trips across the plains, picking off the slow-moving buffalo through the windows.
In 1883, as the Wild West show began, Sitting Bull had come in from Canada and at Fort Buford was permitted to go on one more buffalo hunt, the very last one before the curtains closed. The railroad had divided the vast herds in half—the northern and southern herds—and by then both populations had dwindled. After that, cows replaced buffalo on the reservations, and every month a steer would be released and resident Indians would be permitted to kill it in a mock version of their hunts. There was never enough meat and, of course, this strange form of early canned hunting did not satisfy the Indians’ other needs. For instance, they were not permitted to hold Sun Dances, the most important ceremony of the year, or any number of other rituals. Their medicine bags were confiscated and so were their pipes (though there is many an account of facsimile medicine bags being presented to authorities while the real thing was hidden away). And they were not allowed to leave the agencies without special permission, which was hard to acquire. In short, they were prisoners, with few ways out. One escape hatch was the Wild West, a spectacle that employed not just cowboys and Indians, but elk and horses and buffalo as well—not that the animals wanted a job, but they too became reenactors in a frontier drama that was over but would never close.
It is not known what Sitting Bull thought about beginning his Wild West career in a city called Buffalo (itself probably named after the animal, though that is not known for sure either). A smart man, he must have known that this was the English word for what he called “pte,” and he had surely heard it many times from interpreters, most prominently, perhaps, when he embarked on that final buffalo hunt, for it was a noteworthy adventure known at the time it happened as being the last one that he and his people would be permitted to embark on and thus there was much ceremony. We can further surmise that he may have seen the word at the train depot or elsewhere, or that someone even joked en route about heading to Buffalo, of all places, “Hey, chief, get it? Do you know where you’re going?” or that the reporter waiting for him on the depot probably was introduced, in translation, as representing the Buffalo Courier, and that he understood, most likely and before he arrived, that William F. Cody, whose show he was joining, was a famous figure nicknamed “Buffalo Bill.” But if he did make those assumptions, would they have caused him pain or a sort of strange amusement at one more folly of the wasichu? A reaction he must have had, but it is lost to the ages, and at that point you could say that having witnessed and been part of one of history’s most rapid reversals of fortune, he may have simply thought, “It figures.” Yet in a little while, he would be meeting up with a new herd of the four-legged, small though it was, for they were part of the Wild West, and from then on, he would be touring with them.
On the day that Sitting Bull arrived in Buffalo, he traveled along Michigan Avenue in a parade of carriages with his in the lead. One of the men who accompanied him was the reporter from the Buffalo Courier. The interpreter William Halsey was also there.
Let us recall that one of the reasons Sitting Bull had joined the Wild West and had traveled with other troupes before allying with this one is that he wanted to learn how the white man moved in the world. He wanted to learn his ways, to find out about the things that were the foundation of his dominance. Had he known there were so many white people, he would soon say upon visiting cities of the Midwest and East, he would have understood that his war could not have been won. Yet now that it was over, one of the things he most wanted was for his children to flourish in the world that had overtaken them. To that end, he played several roles, not that he was acting or presenting a false front or pretending to be a person that he was not. Certainly, he was an ambassador of sorts, not in the glad-handing way, for that would have been untrue, but he was also a representative of his people, and as such there were specific things he would be conveying. You could say that he was a man on a mission. To that end, he was also a kind of spy in a strange land; given his attunement to the natural world, he would have continued this walk in cities and towns, absorbing details of life and behavior and how the newly constructed centers of human endeavor worked upon ground that had once supported other tribes. So it must have been with a sense of puzzlement and curiosity that he entertained the questions of the reporter from the Courier, who probably confirmed things that he already knew and indicated that the distance between the two cultures would not be bridged in words, at least in this first interview.
“Have much pleasure and much fatigue,” Sitting Bull said, according to the report that appeared on June 13, the next day, evidently in response to a series of unreported queries. “Great difference between prairie travel on horse and foot and on the wagons drawn by the vapor horse. Major Burke very kind, all persons very kind. Think all the pale-faces feel kind to the Sioux soldier. Believe they know why he held his braves and all his people to starve rather than submit to what was wrong. Believe the pale-faces respect him for the hard fights and do not wish to hurt him because he had to kill the pale-faces when he was fighting.” He continued in this vein, adding that he always spoke the truth to the white man, but was always deceived. Still, in his heart, he had no wish for blood, and he knew the power and brain of the white man. He was sorry the white man was not as honest as he was full of brain power, and he recognized the wasichu’s inevitable supremacy.
“I hope that the red man has enough self-respect and the white man enough honesty left to make the end of the controversy a peaceful one,” he said. It was to that end that he had agreed to come and see “the great scout and warrior, Buffalo Bill,” and was pleased to be in the old campground of the Great White Father, hoping to meet him in Washington. “If he would listen,” Sitting Bull said, “I have something to say. I would not ask for something he cannot give.” All he wanted, he explained, was for a wide prairie where he could live with his tribe in safety. And he hoped that the pale-faces would let him die in peace, and that his people could bury him undisturbed.
In retrospect, this last remark was significant, almost wrenching, in fact, suggesting a certain concern, you might say, or prescience, given Sitting Bull’s ability to see and feel the past and the future, for discussion of what might happen to him in death is not something that appears elsewhere in the historical record. Another, more thoughtful reporter, might have wondered why the Lakota warrior expressed such a concern, and pressed him a bit further. Perhaps the reporter wanted to, but shied away for various reasons; the statement was a striking one in the most fundamental of ways, and it’s quite possible that the reporter thought about it later, especially when Sitting Bull was assassinated and interred. In any case, the interview quickly moved on, with the reporter asking about the Little Bighorn—which still obsessed the country. Sitting Bull raised his hand and warned him off. “That is of another day,” he said. “I fought for my people. My people said I was right. I will always answer to my people. The friends of the dead pale-faces must answer for those who are dead.”
To break the spell of this apparently awkward moment, the interpreter offered cigarettes and they all had a smoke. As the carriages continued down the avenue, Sitting Bull took note of the size of the horses pulling vehicles such as brewers’ conveyances. These would have been much bigger than the fast and fleet ponies his people rode, bigger even than the more robust cavalry horses he had encountered in battle; they were plow and draft horses, after all, and for a man who had an alliance with the four-legged, these must have been quite a wonder. Soon, Buffalo Bill would be giving him his own horse, and for the first time since his surrender two years earlier, he would be permitted to dress in full war regalia and ride the animal that had been stripped from his tribe. In doing so, he would re-create a moment that was contained and paid for—yet eternal. It was where he lived, after all, along with Buffalo Bill and the cowboys of the Wild West, who joined him in staged acts of glory and defiance, the endless ve
rsion of the American dream.
What was Sitting Bull thinking as he approached the Driving Park? Recall that he was oh so gaily dressed when he emerged from the train, with his war bonnet of eagle feathers and owl feathers dipped in crimson. He wore a buckskin tunic trimmed with intricate beadwork and it was said that his medicine bag was the finest specimen of handicraft ever turned out by the Lakota nation. His black hair was braided in long scalp locks, the reporter noted, and the two main plaits were twined with strips of otter skin. He wore a brass chain with a crucifix around his neck, and buckskin pantaloons trimmed with black and white beads; on his feet were moccasins decorated with elaborately worked porcupine quills. He carried a long calumet trimmed with ribbon, and a bow and arrows in buckskin cases festooned with beads. On his face, there were a few traces of vermilion pigment that he had applied several days earlier, probably for his journey out of the plains.
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