Meanwhile, his old friend Buffalo Bill was being enlisted to head off a possible confrontation. Cody had just returned from a European tour. He was scheduled to testify before Congress at a hearing brought about by advocates of Indian rights who were angered by the fact that several members of the Wild West had gotten sick and died while the show was abroad. They wanted to shut down Buffalo Bill and his enterprise, and such calls would escalate over time. The calls came to nothing because, for the most part, the Indians who traveled with Cody liked doing so, and they were not in favor of giving up their ways and assimilating, which many of the Native American rights proponents advocated. The Wild West or the reservation were two roads being offered, and whenever Cody’s scouts came looking for cast members, a number of Indians chose the first one, showing up by the hundreds every spring in Rushville, Nebraska, for sign-up days, dressed in feathers and furs. Now, as Cody debarked at New York harbor on November 24, he received a telegram from General Miles asking him to proceed immediately to Standing Rock, where—as Major McLaughlin had just informed Miles—a tense situation was unfolding. Miles further authorized Cody “to secure the person of Sitting Bull, and deliver him to the nearest Commanding Officer of US Troops.” It was the general’s hope that Cody could convince his old friend to surrender—for the last time.
Cody contacted three friends, Dr. Frank Powell (aka White Beaver, a member of his show), Pony Bob Haslam (another cast member), and Lieutenant G. W. Chadwick—although the rec-ord varies and he may have enlisted the aid of other friends. On Thanksgiving Day, November 27, they arrived by train at Mandan, North Dakota, announcing via telegram to McLaughlin that they would be checking in at Standing Rock the following day. Meanwhile, Arizona John Burke and a contingent of Indians were heading for Pine Ridge as part of a two-pronged peace mission. Sometime during this period, Cody received a telegram with more news of import, this time regarding a personal matter: his ornate, three-story house in North Platte, Nebraska, was on fire. Friends and neighbors were trying to save it with a bucket brigade, as his wife, Louisa, and daughter Irma retrieved valuable possessions amid the inferno. “Save Rosa Bonheur’s painting,” he wrote back, referring to the famous portrait of him that Bonheur had painted when the Wild West was in Paris. “The rest can go to blazes.” And it did; except for the painting, the house was destroyed, along with souvenirs and mementos from his travels around the world. But when Cody reached Fort Yates on the reservation, he was not able to continue any further; it was as if everything in his life had come to a halt. Apparently he was drunk, and according to Dr. Powell, Cody needed to rest for a few hours before continuing. His friends left, and when they returned he was completely incapacitated, having spent the entire afternoon drinking. Later, Powell and Pony Bob learned that McLaughlin’s officers had plied him with liquor to prevent him from heading to Sitting Bull’s cabin. Given his fondness for spirits, this would not have been difficult. And the fact that his beloved home on the Platte was aflame may have contributed to the urge to knock himself out. In any case, one thing is certain: even as his wife and daughter were trying to save his home his friendship with Sitting Bull came first. Behind it all, perhaps there was a distant echo of his midnight ride to save his father long ago; now the moment was back again, offering a chance to resolve itself, regardless of whether Cody was aware of the offering.
Early the next morning, he sobered up and announced that he was on his way to see his friend. Unable to prevent his departure, the officers provided him with a wagon and he loaded it up with sweets from the supply store, knowing that Sitting Bull liked candy. In addition to his three companions, he was now accompanied by five newspaper reporters. “I was sure,” he wrote later, “that my old enemy and later friend would listen to my advice.” But he confessed to also being concerned; he was going to “a hostile camp of Indians, risking all on the card of friendship and man-to-man respect (willing to test the ghost-dance shirt . . . perhaps, if pushed); but above all, desirous to save my red brother from a suicidal craze.” Meanwhile, McLaughlin was still trying to prevent Cody’s intervention; he had wired the Interior Department, asking for someone to overrule General Miles’s order for Cody to bring Sitting Bull in. En route, Cody’s party was headed off by Joseph Primeau, McLaughlin’s interpreter. He told them that Sitting Bull was not at home, and that he was heading to Fort Yates on another trail, driving a wagon pulled by two horses, one shod and the other not. Changing course, Cody found a trail that matched and followed it. Unbeknownst to him, the day before Primeau had seen such a trail, and used the information to send Cody on a detour. That night, at his camp along Four Mile Creek, he received the news that President Benjamin Harrison had rescinded the order for him to bring in Sitting Bull. The following day, Cody and his party returned to Fort Yates and soon left for the railroad station at Mandan.
But sometime during the chaotic forty-eight hours of his mission, a moment of which we must take note was under way. It’s mentioned deep in the annals, buried in an avalanche of words, and as such is easy to overlook. Sitting Bull had gotten word that Buffalo Bill was looking for him—shortly after he left. “Is it true?” he asked the man who told him, a wasichu who had in fact warned McLaughlin that Sitting Bull was planning to leave. Yes, it’s true, the man said. What meaning did this have for the medicine man as things were careening toward a conclusion? We can imagine that perhaps it strengthened him along this bend in the path. Perhaps it gave him heart, or affirmed his friendship with Cody when most needed. Perhaps he was even wearing the hat that Cody had given him before he left the show—a sombrero, some said. Once, a friend had tried to put it on and Sitting Bull waved him off. “No,” he said. “Pahaska gave that to me.” The hat was his and his alone. Now, hearing that his old friend had been nearby, he may have wondered if he sought his return to the Wild West. Or maybe it was another kind of lifeline. You never knew about those wasichu. It could have been anything—someone wanted something, that was for sure. The man who told Sitting Bull about Cody asked him to surrender; everyone knew that the endgame was afoot. Sitting Bull declined, and said he had to go see his people about “The New Religion.” He knew that doing so was a death sentence—or an arrest. Yet at that moment there may have been only one thing that mattered. Cody had been there and Sitting Bull knew it, and on he continued. Their friendship lived on another road.
Several days after the failed intervention, newspapers heightened the call for an end to ghost dancing. The following item ran in the New York Herald, to which Sitting Bull had given his first interview with a white man so long ago. There was no mention of the things that were conveyed at that time, no indication that what Sitting Bull had said reverberated at all.
It is stated today that there was a quiet understanding between the officers of the Indian and military departments that it would be impossible to bring Sitting Bull to Standing Rock alive, and that if brought in, nobody would know precisely what to do with him. He would, though under arrest, still be a source of great annoyance, and his followers would continue their dances and threats against neighboring settlers. There was, therefore, cruel as it may seem, a complete understanding from the Commanding Officer to the Indian Police that the slightest attempt to rescue the old medicine man should be a signal to send Sitting Bull to the happy hunting ground.
There are certain atrocities involving Native Americans that have occurred around important holidays of the white man. Partly, this is because these holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s—are in the winter, and when the ground is frozen, say, or during a snowstorm, it is difficult to fight back if you are hunkered down against the cold. But why the spirit of these festive occasions has led to bloodshed rather than brotherhood is a question for another time.
The cascade of moments preceding Sitting Bull’s death involved a cadre of tribal policemen comprised of former followers as well as personal enemies and Indians from other tribes who did not revere the chief as the Hunkpapas did. They were backed by cavalry troops in case
things went awry. The night before the arrest, First Sergeant Shave Head, a member of Sitting Bull’s tribe, told his relatives that they mustn’t be ashamed to see him reeling around as if he were drunk since he had every reason to act that way. “I am a dead man,” he said, uttering remarks regarding his role in a play within a play—a fate that enveloped all of the horse tribes. “As good as dead. I am here in spirit, but my body is lying on the prairie. We have been ordered to arrest Sitting Bull.”
On December 14, twenty-eight Indian policemen gathered at the home of Bull Head. “They were wearing their blue uniforms and badges,” Stanley Vestal reported after years of correspondence and meetings with participants. “The more important among them had tied white handkerchiefs around their necks as identification. The moment was somber; some among the group had fought with Sitting Bull at Rosebud and the Little Bighorn. Others had starved with him in Canada.” All were aware of the fact that they were on hallowed ground; Bull Head’s home was nearly the exact site on Grand River where Sitting Bull had been born fifty-nine winters before. Lone Man said that they all felt sad. Bull Head outlined his plan and, now joined by eight more men, at four on the following morning, with an icy drizzle falling, the police gathered in front of his cabin. Bull Head offered a Christian prayer and they mounted their horses and headed out in a column of twos. Two miles downstream, they paused at Grey Eagle’s cabin, where they were joined by more men, for a total of forty-four. They crossed the Grand River to the north side, with the horses’ hooves rattling and slipping on the ice. Coyotes howled and owls hooted, and at least one of the men considered it a warning.
Sitting Bull was sleeping on his pallet with the elder of his two wives and one of his two small children. There were others in the room, including dancers from that night’s event and Crow Foot, his seventeen-year-old son. Other members of his family were in a smaller cabin nearby, across the wagon road. Just before 6 a.m., dogs began barking and there came the clatter of hooves; someone pounded and kicked at the door, calling out for Sitting Bull.
“Brother, we came after you,” Shave Head said.
“How,” the chief said, “all right.”
The standard and even at this point mythological accounts of what happened next state that Sitting Bull was dragged naked into his front yard. But his great-grandson LaPointe writes that according to Sitting Bull’s stepsons, eyewitnesses to the event, the police waited for him while he got dressed, putting on his shirt and leggings.
Tatanka Iyotake then walked toward the door of the cabin. “I will stand with you,” Crow Foot said, and picked up his weapon—as opposed to the early narratives, which state that Crow Foot was afraid and went to hide under his bed.
“At the door,” LaPointe writes, “Tatanka Iyotake paused, then turned around and sang a farewell song to his family. ‘I am a man and wherever I lie is my own.’ ” And then he walked out of his cabin. Crow Foot was behind him, carrying a weapon.
Sitting Bill was immediately flanked by Bull Head and Shave Head. Behind him was Sergeant Red Tomahawk, brandishing a pistol. By now, the ruckus had awakened the entire settlement, and people pressed in from all directions against the police cordon, shouting and calling out insults. Catch-the-Bear, an ally of Sitting Bull’s, barreled through the crowd and confronted Bull Head. “Now here,” he said, “just as we had expected all the time. You think you are going to take him. You shall not do it.” Then he turned to the crowd and yelled, “Come on now, let us protect our chief.”
Bull Head asked Jumping Bull for help. “Brother,” Bull Head said, “you ought to go with the police and not cause any trouble.”
“Uncle,” added Lone Man, “nobody is going to hurt you. The agent wants to see you and then you are to come back. . . . Please do not let the others advise you into any trouble.”
Sitting Bull pulled back, and Bull Head and Shave Head tightened their grip, trying to haul the chief toward a waiting horse. “You are arrested,” said Red Tomahawk, pushing from behind. “You can either walk or ride. If you fight, you shall be killed here.” The crowd erupted in a frenzy, shouting at the police and calling out, “You shall not take our chief.”
Suddenly Catch-the-Bear shouldered a Winchester, aimed, and fired. Bull Head went sprawling, his right side ripped open. As he fell, he grabbed his revolver and shot Sitting Bull in the chest. Red Tomahawk fired into the back of his head, killing Sitting Bull. Then Strikes-the Kettle fired, hitting Shave Head’s stomach. The three men fell to the ground as more shots were exchanged and a vicious battle erupted, with Sitting Bull’s men swarming over the police with knives, clubs, and guns fired at point-blank range. Within minutes, the fight was over. Five of Sitting Bull’s followers had been killed and three more were wounded. Five of the police had taken fatal rounds. The dancers fled to a grove of trees behind the cabin. Red Tomahawk took charge, and ordered the wounded policemen dragged into the cabin. The others took up defensive positions in the barn and corral.
Red Tomahawk then ordered Hawkman No. 1—No. 2 had been killed—to mount a horse, ride fast, and bring soldiers. Indians were firing from the top of a knoll at Sitting Bull’s cabin. From the timber beyond it, there was more firing. And shots were being directed at both places. Expecting trouble, Captain Fechét and his cavalry squadron arrived quickly. He raised a white flag, unable to tell friend from foe. The firing continued, and Fechét ordered Lieutenant E. C. Brooks to blast a shell from a Hotchkiss gun into the open space between the cabin and the timber. Lone Man, still inside, tore the white curtain from a window, tied it to a stick, and rushed out, waving it at soldiers. Sitting Bull’s allies scattered, breaking for the hills and nearby valley, then fleeing upriver. The cavalry searched every cabin within two miles above Sitting Bull’s, but found no one. As Captain Fechét surveyed the bloody scene around the chief’s cabin, Sitting Bull’s widows, in a house nearby, maintained a great wail. Relatives of one of the dead policemen arrived, and added to the chorus. One of them picked up a yoke in a stable where Sitting Bull’s body had been dragged, smashing his face with a savage blow. “What the hell did you do that for?” demanded one of the soldiers. “The man is dead. Leave him alone.”
To make sure the settlement had been cleaned out, the soldiers searched Sitting Bull’s second cabin. There they found the chief’s two wives and other women and children. Under some bedding on the floor, Lieutenant Matthew F. Steele found two young men, one of them Sitting Bull’s deaf-mute stepson. On the cabin’s wall, framed in gilt, was the portrait of Sitting Bull painted by Catherine Weldon. A policeman mourning the death of his brother in the shootout tore down the painting, smashed the frame with his rifle butt, and ripped a gash in the canvas with the barrel. Steele grabbed the painting, and later bought it from Sitting Bull’s widows for two dollars.
Now the morning sun was rising, and the soldiers were feeding their horses and making breakfast. As Fechét began to sip his coffee, the police shouted an alarm. From the timber just eighty yards away an Indian on a black horse, brandishing a long staff and singing a song, raced at full speed toward the soldiers. This was Crow Woman, one of the most zealous of the apocalyptic dancers. The police fired, and he retreated, emerging four hundred yards up the valley, driven back to the timber with another volley. But he tried again, this time galloping into the open, heading right through two cavalrymen who opened fire, escaping unscathed. He was wearing a ghost shirt, and to this day it is said that Crow Woman’s ride is proof of the shirt’s power.
The wounded policemen were hoisted into Fechét’s ambulance, and the dead were loaded into an old farm wagon taken from the settlement and hitched to Indian ponies. Sergeant Red Tomahawk ordered that Sitting Bull be thrown into the wagon as well; after all, his assignment was to bring the chief in. But his fellow policemen balked; Sitting Bull had caused the death of their brothers, and to take him away in the same wagon would have been a dishonor. Red Tomahawk insisted and the men threw Sitting Bull’s mangled corpse on the bottom and on top of him, four dead policemen
. A little after noon on December 15, 1890, the caravan headed across the trail to Fort Yates. The troops were preparing for Christmas, the holiday that celebrated a figure whose sacrifice led to resurrection—the same thing that the Indians had been dancing for when they tried to call up their ghosts.
Upon learning that Sitting Bull was killed, his old friend Major Walsh expressed a terrible sadness. “I am glad to hear that Bull is relieved of his miseries,” he said, “even if it took a bullet to do it.” Walsh compared Sitting Bull to a king, with dominion over a “wild-spirited people.” Such a man, he said, “cannot endure abject poverty without suffering great mental pain, and death is a relief.” Trying to correct the record, he noted that “Bull was not bloodthirsty. He was not cruel. He was kind of heart. He was truthful. He loved his people and was glad to give his hand in friendship to any man who was honest with him.” The tribute was all the more poignant because it came from a man who now had little standing in Canadian military ranks. After Sitting Bull and his tribe had returned to the United States, a scandal had erupted. Sitting Bull’s chief protector Walsh was blamed for it and forced to resign, suggesting that careers could be made or broken according to one’s treatment of “the man who killed Custer.” (Ironically, years later it was revealed that Sitting Bull had saved Colonel Marcus Reno. On day two of the Little Bighorn battle, Reno’s company was under siege, with no place to run. According to Stanley Vestal, Sitting Bull came to the front lines and saw the shooting. “Let them go!” he said. “They are trying to live!”)
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