Man on Two Ponies

by Don Worcester

  He sent Bull Ghost to Standing Rock with his indirect request for a pass to visit Pine Ridge. A few hours before Bull Ghost arrived, Col. Drum had received orders from Miles to arrest Sitting Bull and to call on the agent for assistance. Drum and McLaughlin read and reread Sitting Bull’ s letter and concluded that he intended to leave with or without permission. Both were sure he planned to join the Ghost Dancers in the Badlands, and that would be a disaster. They decided to stall Sitting Bull until the next ration day, December 20, when he would be virtually alone in his village. Any attempt to arrest him when all of his people were present would almost surely lead to a bitter fight. They concluded that the Indian police had a much better chance of making the arrest peacefully than the cavalry did.

  McLaughlin wrote Lt. Bull Head, chief of the Indian police, to keep a close watch on Sitting Bull and his people. Bull Head’s farm was a few miles upriver from Sitting Bull’ s cabins. White Bird rode through the night with the agent’s letter.

  While White Bird was making the forty-mile ride to Bull Head’s farm, Sitting Bull held another council. His friends decided he should leave for the Stronghold as soon as possible. Since it would take two days to grease the wagon wheels, round up the ponies, and make other preparations for the long journey, Sitting Bull couldn’t leave until December 15. Bull Head’s police observed preparations being made for a move, and by evening they had managed to learn when Sitting Bull planned to leave.

  Bull Head hurried to the school a few miles below the village and asked teacher Jack Carignan to write a letter informing McLaughlin that Sitting Bull would leave on December 15, then sent Hawk Man with it to the agency. At the same time Sitting Bull’ s spies were riding in the opposite direction with the news that McLaughlin and Col. Drum were preparing to arrest him. Hawk Man reached Standing Rock late in the afternoon of December 14.

  McLaughlin and Drum agreed that they had no choice but to make the arrest immediately, regardless of the danger, for the prospect of Sitting Bull joining the Ghost Dancers in the Badlands was frightening. McLaughlin wisely had been sending police to the area around Bull Head’s farm in case they were needed. He sent Sergeant Red Tomahawk, a Yanktonai Sioux, racing through the night to Bull Head with orders to make the arrest in the early morning, adding that troops would be at Oak Creek crossing, twenty miles away, in case they were needed. “You must not let him escape under any circumstances,” he concluded.

  Col. Drum had officers’ call sounded at Fort Yates, then ordered Capt. E. G. Fechet to take Troops F and G, Eighth Cavalry, with a Hotchkiss and a Gatling gun, and to move out at midnight. As they were about to depart, Col. Drum stood by Fechet’s horse. “Captain,” he said, “after you leave here use your own discretion. You know the object of the movement. Do your best to make it a success.” Ninety-nine men, five officers, two Indian scouts, and Louis Primeau, all bundled up in buffalo skin coats, set out at a trot in near-freezing weather. In three and a half hours the cavalry covered the twenty miles to Oak Creek crossing and stopped. A courier from Bull Head was supposed to be waiting for them. There was no courier, and the police cabin there was empty. Fechet, recalling Col. Drum’s admonition to use his own discretion, knew that if there was trouble at Grand River in the morning, his troops would be of little use twenty miles away. He gave orders to proceed at a trot, and by daybreak the cavalrymen were only a few miles from the Grand River village.

  Red Tomahawk didn’t spare his pony that night, for he reached Bull Head’s farm in under five hours. During the night additional police arrived, so that on the morning of December 15 Bull Head had thirty men. None of the police were happy about their awesome assignment of arresting Sitting Bull for the whites. Some of them were Yanktonais, but others, like Sitting Bull, were Hunkpapas, and they doubted that what they were doing was right even though Sitting Bull was making trouble for all, and none of them deluded himself into thinking the arrest could be made without bloodshed. All felt sad, but they were determined to do what Whitehair McLaughlin wanted done.

  Bull Head gave them their instructions. Before daybreak they would ride to Gray Eagle’s cabin, then to a spot south of the river opposite Sitting Bull’s cabins. The Ghost Dancers, Bull Head pointed out, would expect any trouble to come from the north, from the agency or Fort Yates. In the early dawn they would cross the river and surround the cabin in which Sitting Bull slept. While Bull Head, Shave Head, and Red Tomahawk made the arrest, Red Bear and White Bird would saddle Sitting Bull’s favorite mount, a gray trick horse Buffalo Bill had given him. They would put Sitting Bull on it and leave as quickly as possible, before his people were aware of what was happening.

  Gray Eagle, Sitting Bull’s brother-in-law, had accepted the fact that clinging to the old ways was foolish and had made a determined effort to adjust. His attempts to convince Sitting Bull to change were in vain. From the moment he arrived at Standing Rock, Sitting Bull had carried on a feud with the agent, refusing to cooperate in any way. He had his doubts about the Ghost Dance, but it provided an opportunity to regain his lost prestige. Another reason he embraced it was that his white-haired foe wanted it stopped. Gray Eagle, like many Hunkpapa progressives, regretfully concluded that for the good of the tribe Sitting Bull should be removed, but for him, too, it was a sad business.

  At Gray Eagle’s cabin, Eagle Man joined the party with eight more police, bringing the number to thirty-nine. All removed their hats and knelt while Bull Head prayed to the white men’s God, asking help in doing what they had to do without bloodshed. Then they remounted their ponies. “Hopo,” said Bull Head, and they headed for the river in a misty drizzle that froze on their ponies’ manes. In the trees, owls hooted mournfully. Owls were believed to be the ghosts of dead relatives. “They’re telling us to be careful,” Red Tomahawk remarked. Sensing death hovering about them, the others shivered, wishing they were somewhere else.

  They crossed the river in the dim light, and the dogs in the village immediately started barking noisily, alerting the sleeping Hunkpapas to the fact that intruders were coming. The police loosened their reins and galloped to Sitting Bull’ s cabin and hastily dismounted, eager to get it over with quickly. Bull Head, accompanied by Red Tomahawk and Shave Head, knocked on the door. Red Bear and White Bird ran to the corral to saddle Sitting Bull’s horse while the others surrounded the cabin.

  “All right, come in,” Sitting Bull responded to the knock. The three entered and Shave Head struck a match, located a kerosene lamp, and lighted it. Naked, Sitting Bull sat up, then threw off his blankets and arose. “I come to take you to the agency,” Bull Head told him. “You’re under arrest.”

  “All right, let me put on my clothes and I’ll go with you.” One of his wives brought him his clothes, but he took his time putting them on, while the nervous police tried to hurry him. “Sitting Bull wasn’t afraid,” Little Soldier admitted later. “We were.” When he was nearly dressed Sitting Bull told Crow Foot, his seventeen- year-old son, to saddle his horse.

  “We’ve taken care of that,” Bull Head told him.

  Bull Head and Shave Head each took Sitting Bull by an arm, while Red Tomahawk walked behind him, pressing his pistol against his back. As they passed through the doorway, one of Sitting Bull’ s wives began wailing loudly. Red Bear and White Bird hadn’t arrived with the horse, so they had to wait. It was still too dark to see more than a short distance.

  By now the entire village had been aroused by the dogs and the wailing woman, and everyone ran to Sitting Bull’s cabin. Catch-the-Bear, one of Sitting Bull’s bodyguards who had sworn to kill Bull Head, looked each policeman in the face, trying to locate his enemy. “Where is Bull Head?” he growled. “Now here you metal breasts are,” he continued, referring to their badges, “just as we expected. You think you’re going to take him, but you’re wrong. You won’t get away with him.” He turned to the others. “Come on,” he shouted, “let’s protect our chief.”

  Sitting Bull’s horse was brought from the corral, and the nervous policem
en pushed him toward it. From the back of the crowd Crawler shouted, “Kill them! Kill them! Shoot the old metal breasts and the young ones will run.”

  “Come on,” Bull Head told Sitting Bull. “Don’t listen to anyone.”

  “Brother-in-law, do as the agent says,” Gray Eagle pleaded. “Go with the metal breasts.”

  Jumping Bull, an Assiniboine Sitting Bull had adopted years before when he was a boy, also pleaded with him. “Brother, let’s break camp and move to the agency. You take your family and I’ll take mine. If you’re to die, I’ll die with you.”

  Sitting Bull’s son Crow Foot came out of the cabin. “You always called yourself a brave chief,” he sneered. “Now you’re letting the metal breasts take you away.” Sitting Bull stiffened at this challenge to his courage. He knew his people were ready to rescue him.

  “Then I won’t go another step,” he said.

  As the three police pushed and pulled him toward his horse, his followers shrieked and cursed the police. “You won’t take our chief,” they shouted.

  Catch-the-Bear threw off his blanket, raised his rifle, and shot Bull Head in the right side. As he was falling, Bull Head shot Sitting Bull in the chest with his pistol while Red Tomahawk’s bullet struck him in the back of the head. Lone Man leaped on Catch-the-Bear, tore his rifle from his hands, knocked him down with it, then shot him.

  Sitting Bull’ s followers threw themselves at the police with guns, clubs, and knives, and four more police fell. In the midst of the wild melee and flying bullets, Sitting Dull’s old trick horse thought it was back in the Wild West Show. It sat on its haunches and bowed its head as if praying. Seeing it the police were frightened, for it seemed that Sitting Bull’s spirit had entered his boiSe. While this was going on Hawk Man mounted his pony and galloped off to find the troops, who were now only a few miles away.

  After a few minutes of hand to hand fighting, the police drove the dancers dashing to a line of trees along the river. The police, not wanting more bloodshed, stopped firing at them.

  With both police lieutenants out of the fight, Sergeant Red Tomahawk took charge and ordered his companions to carry the badly wounded men into the cabin. Bull Head had been shot three more times as he lay on the ground, and Shave Head was also seriously wounded. One of the police discovered Crow Foot hiding under a pile of blankets. “Uncles, don’t kill me!” he begged. “I don’t want to die.” The policeman asked Bull Head what to do with him.

  “Do what you like. He’s one of those who caused this trouble.” The man knocked Crow Foot through the cabin door, where he sprawled half-conscious on the ground. Two other policemen, with tears streaming down their faces, shot him.

  Sitting Dull’s followers now began firing from behind the trees and from a knoll at fairly long range. The police sought cover and returned the fire. In the meantime, Hawk Man found the troops and reported to Capt. Fechet that all of the police had been killed, for they had been so badly outnumbered he didn’t see how any could survive. While the troopers pulled off their heavy coats and gloves to be ready for action, Fechet wrote a hasty note to Col. Drum. He would, he said, hurry to the relief of any policemen who might still be alive. He handed the note to Hawk Man and sent him on his way, then ordered the troopers to advance at a gallop. Another policeman met the column. The police were cornered in and around the cabin, he said, and they were low on ammunition. Fechet’s decision to continue past the Oak Creek crossing saved the police from likely disaster.

  In a few minutes the troops crossed a ridge and saw the village half a mile below them. In the early morning light they could see Sitting Hull’s cabin shrouded in gun smoke. From the timber and the knoll came the sound of rifle fire. Fechet had a white flag raised as a pre-arranged signal, but the police hadn’t seen the troops and failed to respond. Not absolutely sure where the police were, Fechet had the Hotchkiss gunners drop a shell into the open space between the cabin and the timber, where it exploded too close to the police for comfort. Lone Man tore a curtain from the window and ran out, waving it at the approaching soldiers. A few shots into the timber from the “gun that shoots twice,” as the Tetons called the Hotchkiss, and Sitting Hull’s people fled.

  “I saw evidence of a most desperate encounter,” Fechet reported later. “In front of the house, and within a radius of fifty yards, were eight dead Indians, including Sitting Bull, and two dead horses. In the house were four dead policemen and three wounded, two mortally. To add to the horror of the scene the squaws of Sitting Bull, who were in a small house nearby, kept up great wailing.”

  Relatives of policeman Strong Arm who lived at the Grand River village came looking for him. When they saw his body they, too, began to wail. One of them, Holy Medicine, picked up an ox yoke and beat Sitting Hull’s corpse with it until trooper Jerry Hart stopped him. “What the hell did you do that for?” he asked. “The man’s dead. Leave him alone.”

  The troops now built fires to cook breakfast. About the time the coffee was ready, the police shouted a warning. Out of the timber about eighty yards away, a warrior on a splendid black horse came toward them at a gallop. He wore a Ghost Shirt and held a long lance as he sang a Ghost Dance song. The police recognized him as Crow Woman, one of the most fanatic of the Hunkpapa Ghost Dancers. While his people watched from hills across the river, he raced toward the soldiers determined to demonstrate the supernatural powers of his shirt.

  When the police tired a volley at him, Crow Woman turned his horse and rode back among the trees, only to return again to test their fire. Emerging a third time, he dashed between two soldiers on the picket line. Both tired their single-shot carbines at him but missed. Having proved his point to his satisfaction, Crow Woman rode triumphantly up the valley unharmed. His deed reaffirmed the faith of many Hunkpapas in their Ghost Shirts.

  Through Louis Primeau, Capt. Fechet urged Sitting Bull’s widows to tell those who had fled that the soldiers were leaving and they could return to their cabins. He sent other Indians up and down the valley to assure any who wanted to go to the agency they could safely accompany the troops. Many took him at his word and came in to follow the cavalry to Standing Rock, and others fell in with them on the way. Still others came to the agency a few days later, but many had fled south to seek refuge with the Miniconjus.

  Bull Head, Shave Head, and Middle, the three wounded police, were carried in the army ambulance that had followed the troops. Only one wagon was available, and Red Tomahawk, over the protests of many, ordered the dead policemen piled into it on top of the body of Sitting Bull. The man::h began after midday, and the column stopped for the night at Oak Creek crossing. At midnight Col. Drum arrived with two companies of infantry. Hawk Man had breathlessly repeated his story that all of the police had been killed, so Drum made a forced man::h to investigate.

  Despite the efforts of the agency and army doctors, Shave Head died the next night and Bull Head succumbed the following day, but Middle survived. The dead police were buried in the cemetery next to the Catholic mission church with military honors, a firing squad, and a bugler playing “Taps.” Sitting Bull was interred in the post cemetery at Fort Yates in a grave dug by military prisoners.

  Because of the legends that had grown up around Sitting Bull as well as what Miles and Buffalo Bill had said about him, his death was seen as the final act of Indian resistance. The settlers of South Dakota who had fled their homes returned to them, confident now that the dreaded old warrior was no more. Even if they had known that 200 of his followers had fled south to join Hump, they wouldn’t have worried. The fierce chief who had once been billed as the “Killer of General Custer” in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was lying wrapped in canvas in a rough wooden box under the South Dakota sod.

  Surprisingly, the news of Sitting Bull’s death aroused mixed feelings outside the reservations. Although many westerners rejoiced, and some Indian reformers felt the last obstacle to progress among the Sioux had been removed, regrettably by violence, others were outraged.

&nbs
p; “The land grabbers wanted the Indian land,” a New York minister who belonged to Bland’s Indian Defense Association proclaimed. “The lying, thieving Indian agents wanted silence touching past thefts and immunity to continue their thieving. The renegades among the Indian police wanted an opportunity to show their power. And so he was murdered.”

  Newspapers happily joined in the attack, accusing McLaughlin and Drum of conspiring to assassinate Sitting Bull and of having ordered the Indian police to do it. Secretary of the Interior Noble also fell under the glare of adverse publicity, although he had done his best to make it clear that the army had ordered Sitting Bull’s arrest. The fact that the deed had been done by the Indian police at the agent’s orders caused many to accuse him of having bloodied his hands in the affair. “McLaughlin is so proud of his exploit,” Noble wrote Morgan, “that he rather suppressed the source of his action. But it is necessary that it be shown and understood that this was the act of the Military, without qualification.”

  McLaughlin repeatedly pointed out that he had simply obeyed Miles’ instructions as relayed through Gen. Ruger and Col. Drum. The newspapers ignored his statements-the killing was the work of the white-haired agent and his Indian police. Who had ordered it done was irrelevant.

  Far from being proud of the tragic event, McLaughlin did resent the public’s ingratitude to the policemen who had risked and lost their lives to arrest one of their own race at the bidding of the whites. He immediately began a long and fruitless campaign to secure pensions for the survivors of the dead police.