But there was still time to get things right, he added, and announced that he was going to teach them a dance. “It’s good Medicine,” he said. They were told to take it back to Wind River and teach it to their fellow tribesmen. “And I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the Ghost Dance,” McCoy said. “Here it was 1924 and Wovoka, his grandson, twenty-some Paiutes, nine old Arapahoes and I were dancing in a circle, shuffling along, painted with sacred paint, singing the songs. The same old songs, the same old dance.”
After an hour of dancing, Wovoka said it was time to go. He stood in front of the limousine, making his final blessings. “The old buffalo hunters and warriors put their hands into their pipe bags,” McCoy remembered, “drew out five- and ten-dollar bills, and then marched single file toward the Messiah, presenting their offerings.” Wovoka accepted them and then got into the limo. He settled in, looking out the window at McCoy and then rolled it down. Out came his hand, which dropped a cake of red paint into the cowboy’s coat pocket. It was the same paint that Wovoka had given to Kicking Bear and the other pilgrims upon their original visit, and it was to be applied to the face for the dance that called up the ghosts. And then from the back seat of the fancy car came a whisper. “I will never die,” Wovoka said. “Is that so?” McCoy replied, gazing at the man who dreamed an apocalypse. Wovoka nodded. “Never?” McCoy asked one more time. “No, never,” he said. Eight years later, he walked on. His wooden grave marker in the Paiute cemetery in Yerington said “Jack Wilson. Died Sept. 20, 1932, Age 64.” One day, a new headstone was added. “Founder of the Ghost Dance,” it says. “His teachings of hope, good will, and promise of life after death will live as long as man inhabits this earth.”
CODA:
Ghost Dance II
“On January 27, 1913,” wrote Steven Rinella in American Buffalo, “twenty-five presses at the Philadelphia Mint began stamping out three thousand buffalo nickels a minute. Production continued until 1938, and Black Diamond’s profile became the most widely distributed image of a buffalo in the world. In the midst of that production, in 1915, Black Diamond himself was put up on an auction block in New York City. There were no bidders. His keeper then offered Black Diamond for private sale.” He was purchased for $300, less than the starting bid of $500, and taken to a slaughterhouse on Fourteenth Street. “The carcass yielded 1020 pounds of meat,” Rinella noted, and his head was mounted on the wall of the packer’s office. Its whereabouts are now unknown.
A few years before the death of Black Diamond, fifteen buffalo from a seed herd at the Bronx Zoo were loaded onto a railcar and shipped to Cache, Oklahoma. They had been living at the zoo under the auspices of the American Bison Society, a group that was started by New York aristocrats including Andrew Carnegie, which also included the artist Frederic Remington. President Theodore Roosevelt was the president of the society. Once a buffalo hunter himself (in fact, his hunting cabin had been shipped from the Badlands to the Columbian Exposition and sat near Sitting Bull’s on the midway), it was his belief that the buffalo must be returned to the Great Plains, lest its disappearance diminish the American spirit. “In Oklahoma,” Rinella wrote, “the train was approached by a group of curious Comanche Indians. The Indians remembered buffalo, though the children had never seen one.”
On May 7, 2016, President Barack Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act. The animal that gave its name to Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill had now come full circle; it was officially the national mammal. A few months later, on November 1, there was a ceremony to mark this moment at Wind Cave National Park in Wyoming. The ceremony celebrated the buffalo’s restoration across the West as well as the herd that originated in this region. According to Lakota tradition, the cave is the place from which the ancients emerged, followed by the buffalo. Its high, barometric winds roil and blow through one of the world’s great natural labyrinths—the breath of the earth, as the legend goes, right here under the grasses of the prairie. Two days after the ceremony in the park, there was another one nearby. This was on the Wind River Reservation of the eastern Shoshone, honoring the release of ten buffalo from a federal refuge in Iowa, with help from the National Wildlife Restoration—an effort that was forty years in the making. There had been no buffalo on this reservation since 1885, two years after Sitting Bull had gone on the last buffalo hunt elsewhere on the Great Plains. Accompanied by native drums and prayer and song, the small herd headed right out onto the plain as soon as the corral gate was opened.
Sitting Bull and Sacajawea now lie near a remote rural highway, and neither site is well maintained. (Some say, however, that Sacajawea is actually buried on the Wind River Reservation, home of her ancestors. There are many memorials to her across the West, statues portraying her with her child on her back, which was how she accompanied Lewis and Clark. Each statue seems to invoke the petrified woman and child after which Standing Rock was named. In North Dakota, the Sitting Bull and Sacajawea burial sites each have statues marking their graves.) Occasionally tourists making a pilgrimage, especially those from faraway lands, stop to pay their respects, and notice the beer cans and shotgun shells that litter the graves and find themselves cleaning. Appalled at the manner in which we treat our icons, especially Sitting Bull, for he is a hero to many, they make note of it in their journals and wonder how it has come to this.
If you go to the grave of Sitting Bull, and if you have seen his few photographs, you will note that his statue does not really look like him. That’s because the person who posed for it was Nancy Kicking Bear, his granddaughter. There’s a family resemblance but not enough of one to make anyone who has seen his images feel his power in this representation. But this brings us to another puzzle of the Great Plains. Not everyone believes that Sitting Bull was buried at this location, although other accounts place him nearby.
After his body was returned to Fort Yates, there was a funeral for the metal breasts, the Native American police who had been killed in the fight at his cabin. They were buried in the Standing Rock cemetery with full military honors, a three-volley gun salute, and the playing of taps. A little while later, Sitting Bull was buried in the Fort Yates military cemetery. “The grave had been dug by four Army prisoners from the guardhouse,” writes Judith St. George in To See with the Heart. “With only McLaughlin and three Army officers present, Sitting Bull’s body, wrapped in canvas and placed in a crude wooden box, was hauled from the Dead House to the grave in a two-wheeled cart pulled by a mule. Silently the box was lowered into the grave, with no honors at all.”
In 1915, Red Tomahawk, the man who killed Sitting Bull, was interviewed at Fort Yates by Colonel A. B. Welch, army veteran and adopted son of the Yanktonai Sioux Nation.
“Does his spirit ever come back here?” Welch asked.
“Yes, sometimes,” was the reply. “He rides in on an elk spirit.”
“I want to go to his grave,” Welch said. “Come with me.”
“No,” Red Tomahawk replied. “I do not go. I am afraid. There are mysterious flowers on his grave every year. We do not know where they come from. They are wankan. They should bury him in a church yard.”
Somewhere between the time Sitting Bull’s body had arrived at Fort Yates and was buried there, a lock of his hair was taken and so were his leggings. It was just as he had once told a reporter in something of an aside—he had feared not receiving proper rites when it was time. Years later, some of his descendants carried out a stealth operation and removed the bones from his grave at Fort Yates, taking them to the new site on a highway in South Dakota. There the bones were reinterred. In 1952, a ceremony marked the grave’s unveiling. But like so many things around Sitting Bull, a sad litany of disputes arose. Some said his bones had been spirited away long ago, and were never buried at Fort Yates at all. Perhaps the bones in that grave were someone else’s, a soldier’s maybe, or an Indian scout’s. Whose bones were really in the new grave? Should he have been buried there anyway? And if so, why isn’t the site turned into a museum that attracts more tourists and sell
s things?
Meanwhile, the dream of the ghost dancers is being dreamed again on the Great Plains. At Standing Rock, the vibrations of those who have gathered to pray and sing and drum have resounded around the world. Tribes from the four directions have arrived on foot, horseback, by canoe, and by car. In Wyoming, to the west of Standing Rock, when the buffalo were released, although it was a small herd, there arose a sound and it is said that the gusts at Wind Cave from where the ancestors of the animals emerged swirled in response, the breath of the earth accompanying the dance of the four-legged.
About ten years ago, when the Sacajawea visitors center opened up in Salmon, Idaho, a descendant of hers asked an elder if Sacajawea ruined it for everyone by helping Lewis and Clark on their expedition into the West. “No,” came the reply. “It would have happened anyway.”
And so we play our parts, all creatures great and small, and Sitting Bull knew this well—a meadowlark and other animals foretold the turns on his path, and he listened and was not surprised. Now his great-grandson Ernie LaPointe would like to make a course correction. A few years ago, the U.S. government returned Sitting Bull’s leggings and hair to LaPointe’s family. They were received with ceremony, but of course the work is not done. Since then, LaPointe has been hoping to move Sitting Bull’s bones one more time—to the Little Bighorn battlefield. There he would join the others, Native American and wasichu alike, and the spirits of the horses who carried them—all who rest in the greasy grass, all whose legacy is there.
A dawn
Appears,
Behold it.
—Lakota Dawn Song
The tribe
Named me,
So
In courage
I shall live
It is reported
Sitting Bull
Said this.
—Song of Sitting Bull
1 William F. Cody, Buffalo Bill, about twenty-nine.
2 First Scalp for Custer, illustration depicting Cody brandishing the scalp of Yellow Hand, which he took following the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
3 An Old-Time Buffalo Hunt, painting by Charles M. Russell, 1898.
4 An 1895 poster for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World performing in an arena featuring electric lights.
5 Annie Oakley, c. 1899.
6 Sitting Bull c. 1882. His signature was apparently added later for this souvenir card.
7 Autographed portrait of Sitting Bull with peace pipe, circa 1884.
8 The Paiute prophet Wovoka, sometime after the Ghost Dance era and Wounded Knee.
9 The Ghost Dance by the Ogallala [sic] Sioux at Pine Ridge Agency, drawn on the spot by Frederic Remington, published in Harper’s Weekly, December 6, 1890, nine days before Sitting Bull was killed.
10 Fort Yates photographer George W. Scott staged a reenactment of Sitting Bull’s arrest and then memorialized it for the record. Shortly after Sitting Bull’s murder, the cabin was dismantled and shipped to Chicago, where it was rebuilt and displayed at the Columbian Exposition in 1893.
11 The death of Sitting Bull received front page coverage in newspapers around the country.
12 Sitting Bull’s son Crow Foot. He was killed with Sitting Bull in 1890. Photograph taken by D.F. Barry, date unknown.
13 Vice President Charles Curtis receives a peace pipe from Chief Red Tomahawk, slayer of Sitting Bull, at the United States Capitol on June 29, 1921. Curtis was part Kaw Indian—the first Native American to hold the office of Vice President.
14 Big Foot, Minneconjou chief, after the massacre at Wounded Knee, where he was found frozen in the snow.
15 Indian chiefs and U.S. officials, Pine Ridge, January 16, 1891, shortly after Wounded Knee. The group includes Cody (sixth from left, back row) and Kicking Bear, an early visitor to Wovoka, who returned to the Lakota with information about the Ghost Dance.
16 Buffalo Bill and his horse taking a bow after a 1915 performance with the Sells-Floto Circus. The horse could have been Isham, saved for Cody by his friends just before it was auctioned off to pay bills, or the horse that he had given to Sitting Bull and then reacquired, variously described as white or gray.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my editor, Bob Bender, for acquiring this book and his patience and assistance along its path; his assistant Johanna Li, for being there during the process; copyeditors Kathy Higuchi and Fred Chase and the entire crew at Simon & Schuster for all their work on my behalf. Also, I must thank my agent BJ Robbins for helping me take Blood Brothers—one more years-in-the-making endeavor—to fruition.
I would like to say that I am ever so grateful to my biggest fan, my mother, Eleanor Stillman, who wanted so much to help with this endeavor, and did, going through my library and writing down on index cards the names of every book that I read and consulted for this one—the bibliography. Now, as my book goes to press and she nears the end of her life, she doesn’t remember doing that. Although she has read chapters of Blood Brothers in progress, my most fervent hope is that she can see the book itself when published.
And now, let me say that it’s always difficult to face what Tennessee Williams has called “the pale judgment”—the blank page and its terrors. Who shall bear witness to the writer’s travails? Who shall provide comfort and aid when the page is full (for a moment)? To that end, I would like to thank Rex Weiner, George Solomon, and Sonnie Buttiglieri, all there at different times in my life, and let it be said, for no one can know the time or the hour.
Others who have helped me during my journey through this book, and in all sorts of other ways—a gesture, aid, solace, time, an ear, a venue, a hand—whether in this dimension or from afar: Jo Anderson, Pamela Berkeley, Mickey Birnbaum, Alaina Bixon, the late Charles Bowden, Jamie Brisick, Jeffrey Burbank, Gimique Camp, John Carver, Leslie Caveny, the late Rebecca and Sam Cohen, Lee Cohn, John Coinman, Lynda Crawford, John Densmore, Samantha Dunn, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Jeff Eyres, Eric Feig, Tony Gilkyson, Tod Goldberg, the late Zelda Gorodetzer, Kevin Hancock, Amy Handelsman, Melissa Henderson, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, Betty Lee Kelly, Lenora Kelly, Michael Kelly, Andrea Lankford, Tom Lutz, Kate MacMurray, Joshua Malkin, Anthony McCann, Mary Martha Miles, Victor Mongeau, Mary Otis, Carol Park, Jon Pierson, Michele Raphael, Luis Reyes, the late Helen Rosenberg, Patricia Roth, Bobbi Royle, Jessica Sampson, Barry Siegel, Pam Slipyan, Pamela Diane Gilbert-Snyder, the late Susan and Peter Stern, Ariana Stillman, Denise Stillman, Jon Stillman, the late Ron and Linda Stillman, Kathleen Sublette, Mark Sublette, Tom Teicholz, Mark Treitel, Stanley Triggs, Maggie Towers, Jean Waszak, John Waszak, Andrew Winer, Cisco, Buster, and Zoe the rescued cats, and others whom I have most likely forgotten to mention. You are all in the house and will be, always.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© CAT GWYNN
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her previous books include Desert Reckoning, based on a Rolling Stone article and winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards for nonfiction; and Mustang, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, now available in an audio edition with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, John Densmore, Wendie Malick, and Richard Portnow. In addition, she wrote the cult classic Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “a strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books and is a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside–Palm Desert Low Residency MFA Creative Writing Program.
Visit the author at www.deannestillman.com
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SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Deanne-Stillman
ALSO BY DEANNE STILLMAN
Desert Reckoning: A Town Sheriff, a Mojave Hermit, and the Biggest Manhunt in Modern California History
Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West
&n
bsp; Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango
Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave
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Blood Brothers Page 26
