Completely faithful to his culture
If you
were asked to name the most famous Indian chief of them all you might say
Geronimo or Cochise, you might opt for Crazy Horse or Chief Joseph but you
would most likely choose Sitting Bull.
Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, Sitting Bull
The Hunkpapa Lakota known as Sitting Bull, Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake in Standard Lakota Orthography, also nicknamed Slon-he or "Slow", c. 1831 – 1890, is best known as the architect of Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn and as friend of Buffalo Bill Cody and one of the stars of Cody’s Wild West. The first was only partially true and he only appeared with Cody for four months in 1885. But his was a truly great life.
Screen Bulls
Sitting
Bull has been portrayed on screen very many times, starting with the Francis Ford's 1912
silent movie Custer’s Last Fight,
when he was played by William Eagle Shirt (Thomas Ince’s favorite Indian actor
and a true Sioux), and then in several other silents, including two in 1926,
both played by African-American Noble Johnson. New Yorker J Carrol Naish did
him twice too, in the dire 1950 Annie Get Your Gun (he didn’t have to sing) and the fairly preposterous 1954 Dale
Robertson B-picture Sitting Bull.
Michael Granger was a really bad-guy Bull up in Canada in Fort Vengeance in 1953.
Sioux chief from New York
Australian Michael Pate, who had played pretty well every other Indian chief,
regardless of tribe, did a Sitting Bull in The Great Sioux Massacre in 1965, also to be found in the Clunker rack in
stores. More recently, August Schellenberg seems to have cornered the market a
bit in Sitting Bull performances, from Witness
to Yesterday in 1973 on TV to HBO’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in 2007, with the 1996 TV Crazy Horse in between.
An August Sitting Bull
Noted Native American actors Eric Schweig
and Graham Greene have also had a go. There are at least 30 celluloid Sitting
Bulls all told. Some have been good but many have been inaccurate and
inappropriate and some have been plain silly. Russell Means gives us a splendidly malevolent Bull in the TV adaptation of Larry McMurtry's Buffalo Girls. He is seriously nasty.
The bad guy
For
years many people’s view of Sitting Bull was as the evil and ferocious killer
of brave Custer. This later turned to awed fascination, even lionization. Pompous
and unpleasant Indian Agent James McLaughlin of the Standing Rock agency where
Bull was confined from 1882 disliked the chief intensely and despite evidence
to the contrary considered him one of the leading recalcitrant
non-progressives; Sitting Bull was a disgruntled trouble maker, obstinate and
narrow-minded. This view of Sitting Bull was taken as gospel for many years and
so the Lakota chief has had a bad press and suffered from a poor reputation well
into the twentieth century.
The corrective
In 1932,
however, Stanley Vestal (pen name of Walter Stanley Campbell, who taught
literature and creative writing at the University of Oklahoma) published Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux.
Vestal conducted exhaustive research, speaking to many elderly Sioux Indians
who had known Bull, in particular the old chief’s nephews White Bull and One
Bull.
Stanley Vestal
Vestal’s portrait came as a shock to many (Indian and white). His Sitting
Bull was a great man – actually, the book teeters on the edge of hagiography.
Rather in the way that Mari Sandoz did for Crazy Horse, Vestal painted his
portrait of Sitting Bull looking through a personal and literary lens rather
than a clinical historical one but his book was an invaluable corrective.
Corrective
Robert Utley
In 1993,
Robert M Utley, well known to those interested in the West as biographer of
Geronimo, the Texas Rangers, Billy the Kid and George Armstrong Custer, brought
out his very fine biography, The Lance
and the Shield: the Life and Times of Sitting Bull (Henry Holt &
Company). It is an excellent title: the lance was Bull’s favorite weapon and it
symbolizes the first part of his life as he did all in his power to attack the
invading whites and drive them from his tribe’s lands, while the shield
presented to him by his father, which he treasured, represented the protective,
elder-statesman Sitting Bull of later years who (like Crazy Horse) adopted a
more defensive policy of not seeking war but still resisting fiercely
unwarranted assaults.
Definitive
Mr. Utley’s
book, like all his works in fact, smacks of the word ‘definitive’. He writes in
such a balanced way and shows evidence of such exhaustive and careful research
that you instinctively believe what he writes. The Lance and the Shield is an outstanding work.
Robert M Utley
Furthermore
the book is dedicated to his sons, whom he named Don and Phil - so what’s not
to like?
Early life
Discounting
a bit of mumbo-jumbo in a prologue, Utley moves right into Sitting Bull’s early
life. He believes that the probability is that Sitting Bull was born into a
distinguished Hunkpapa family at Many Caches on the Missouri River in 1831,
which would have made him in his mid-40s at Little Bighorn and perhaps 59 at
the time of his sudden death.
The
Hunkpapas were one small tribe of the greater Sioux confederacy. Sioux is really a generic word whites
used to describe the Dakotas and Lakotas, a corruption of a Chippewa word
signifying enemies, and is probably thus better avoided, although in time the
Lakota and Dakota people came to answer to the term. Seven closely-related
groups established themselves in the westernmost part of the Sioux lands, the
Oglala, Brule, Miniconjou, Two Kettle, Sans Arc, Blackfeet (Blackfeet Sioux or
Sihasapa, not the Blackfeet tribe further to the northwest) and the Hunkpapa or
Uncpapa. Utley tells us that “the Lakota culture was hardly a generation old at
the time of Sitting Bull’s birth” and altogether the Lakota peoples numbered no
more than twenty thousand, the Hunkpapas no more than three thousand. In 1870
all of Dakota Territory counted fewer than 5000 white citizens. By 1880, there
134,000 and only five years later this number had doubled. The Sioux were
simply submerged by a white tide of land- and resource-hungry humanity.
The boy
was named Jumping Badger at first, or sometimes Slow, because of his deliberate
ways. The boy’s father, Sitting Bull, was a chief and his mother, Her Holy
Door, was a small, intelligent woman who remained a great influence on the
younger Sitting Bull until her death in 1884.
The cardinal virtues
In the
chapter Youth, Utley describes very
interestingly the life of a growing Hunkpapa and it is clear that Sitting Bull,
as he was named in honor of his father, excelled in all pursuits. He gained an
early reputation as a warrior against the traditional enemies of the Sioux, the
Crow. Utley tells us of the four cardinal virtues of the people which Sitting
Bull did his utmost to shine in throughout his life: they were bravery, first,
meaning individual valor (which signified more than group victory); next came
fortitude – the capacity to endure physical pain and discomfort without
complaint as well as with dignity and reserve; generosity was also key to the Sioux
character and if you had more than one of anything you had a moral duty to give
it away to those who lacked; lastly, wisdom came from age and experience as
well as insight gained through an active spiritual life.
Warrior and medicine man
Chapter
2, titled Warrior, tells of how Bull
won his eagle feathers for counting coup and red ones for being wounded in
combat. The following chapter, Wichasha
Wakan, describes Bull’s spiritual path, his developing role as medicine man
and ability to prophesy. He belonged to various exclusive or secret societies
where he exercised a growing influence on the tribe. One of these was the
Heyoka, who remind us of the Cheyenne “contraries” of Thomas Berger’s novel
Little Big Man: they did things backward – they might dress lightly in winter
and warmly in summer, for example, or walk and ride backwards. Bull had dreamed
of thunderbirds, a powerful augury, and those who had done this painted lightning on their faces.
Sitting Bull grew to have an almost priestly role.
It is in
this chapter, though, that Utley comes closest to Vestal in his picture of his
admired character. The youthful Sitting Bull could apparently do no wrong and
excelled in everything. He rather reminds you of that awful head boy at school
who shone in all disciplines and was the darling of the teachers. You longed
for him to be taken down a peg. It comes as a relief later to hear of certain
military or strategic shortcomings Sitting Bull displayed. Once the principal
enemy became the whites, the wasichus,
with their miners, railroad workers, settlers and, worst, soldiers, Utley says
that the lessons were clear. Early defeats taught the Sioux first that they
must acquire better firearms, and second, avoid open battle with the ‘long
knives’, relying instead on guerrilla hit-and-run tactics at which they
excelled. “Sitting Bull’s record suggests that he fully grasped the first
lesson, only partly the second.”
The Long Knives
First,
in the early 1850s, came General William S Harney, “a big, powerful man with
personality and convictions to match”, whom the Sioux called Mad Bear,
unilaterally and arrogantly naming ‘supreme chiefs’ of the tribes (who had
never existed) and dealing only with them.
General Harney
The grand council that was convened
at Fort Laramie on the North Platte which led to the Fort Laramie Treaty of
1851 was attended by many Indians but not by all. Those who did not attend or
sign, including Sitting Bull, were nevertheless held to be ‘treaty breakers’
when the provisions they were ignorant of or disapproved of and had not agreed
to were not kept. In any case, like so many treaties, it only lasted as long as
was convenient to the white man. As an old Indian, veteran of many such
councils, summed up: “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but
they never kept but one: they promised to take our land and they took it.”
The
narrative is studded with one injustice towards the Sioux after another, often
at the hands of stupid or arrogant or racist army officers (who were sometimes
all three). Take as just one example, the account of an Army lieutenant named
John L Grattan who on August 19, 1854 marched into a Sioux village and demanded
the surrender of a Miniconjou visitor who had killed an ox [in a rare slip Utley
says “an oxen”, which is a bit odd] strayed from an emigrant train. When the
chief of the village temporized, Grattan immediately ordered his thirty men to
open fire with rifles and cannon. When the Sioux fought back and killed the
soldiers, the whites termed it the Grattan Massacre and would not rest until
the “savages” had been punished.
In the
1860s it was Generals Sibley and Sully. The war against the Lakotas they
launched in 1863 would last, on and off, until 1881. There are useful and
fascinating maps that chart the progress of the whites as they encroached, step
by step, broken treaty by broken treaty, upon Sioux lands, trying to confine
the Indians to reservations which would be theirs “eternally” but which were
then broken up and the land stolen within a few years. Also marked are the
sites of “battles”, which were often murderous attacks on the tipis of women
and children claimed as “victories” by fame-hungry soldiers.
It is
clear that while there was no overall “big chief” of the Hunkpapas, still less
of all the Sioux, Sitting Bull played a leading role in the attack on the
invading whites. He made military mistakes (for example underestimating the
power and effectiveness of artillery and Spencer carbines) and did not always
succeed but he gradually built up a reputation as a formidable warrior and a
thorn in the side of the “bluecoats”. At the same time, Utley relates, Sitting
Bull was able to welcome “black robe” missionaries and envoys and was content
to trade with whites when it suited his purpose. But when the soldiers
attacked, he was an implacable foe.
An older Bull
In 1870
Sitting Bull shifted his strategy. He heeded the advice of his uncle Four
Horns: “Be a little against fighting but when anyone shoots be ready to fight.”
In Utley’s terms he changed from an emphasis on the lance to the shield.
Standing Bear
There
are entertaining descriptions of half-caste and white characters such as Frank
Grouard, of mixed white and Polynesian blood, runaway son of a Mormon
missionary, freighting and mail riding in Montana and getting into scrapes with
the law, who arrived in Bull’s tipi and was adopted by him. He became known as
Standing Bear (no relation to Henry in Longmire)
or Grabber. Standing Bear, who soon became fluent in Lakota, provided the
Hunkpapas with invaluable information on the whites and often fought fiercely
on the Sioux’ behalf. He left us priceless accounts of Sioux life and Sitting
Bull in particular.
Frank Grouard
He fell
out with Sitting Bull and moved in with Crazy Horse. Later he left the tribe
and became an emissary of the
Indian Peace Commission at Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska. In 1876 Grouard became
Chief Indian Scout and interpreter under General Crook. In a May 1876 report
Crook wrote, "I would sooner lose a third of my command than Frank Grouard!"
Grouard was a major player in Crook’s 1876 Rosebud campaign. He reached the
Little Bighorn battle site at 11 pm on June 25, discovering the bodies of the
slain before being chased back to Goose Creek by hostiles, bringing Crook the
news of Custer’s death. In 1877 Grouard claimed he was present at the murder of
Crazy Horse and he was present at the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.
He later
served as a US marshal in Wyoming and was involved in the
Johnson County War of 1892. He died in St Louis in 1905. It really
is a fascinating life and why a movie hasn’t been made of it is anyone’s guess.
They’d get it all wrong, though.
Other
fascinating characters appear in the story, like “Custer’s black white man”,
Isaiah Dorman, an ex-slave from Louisiana who was married to a Hunkpapa and
known to the Sioux as Teat. A wood chopper near Fort Rice, he had signed on
with Custer as an interpreter. When Dorman was wounded at Little Bighorn, Sitting
Bull told the braves, “Don’t kill that man, he is a friend of mine” and he gave
him water from a buffalo-horn cup. But as soon as Bull was gone a Hunkpapa
woman shot him with a rifle and others mutilated his body. No known photograh of Dorman exists.
Custer
Perhaps
Sitting Bull’s most remarkable achievement was before the battle at Little
Bighorn: it was the way he managed to unite the Indians – not only different
Sioux tribes but also other peoples, especially the Northern Cheyenne. Sitting
Bull came as close as anyone to being thought of as a dominant chief and his
word was listened to and respected like no other’s. The combined villages may
have numbered twenty thousand and they acted with unusual discipline and
harmony.
Custer
Sitting
Bull himself did not, of course, ‘command’ the forces at Little Bighorn. The
Sioux and Cheyenne did not have generals as the whites understood the term and
while whites may have attributed to Bull Napoleonic evil genius as a supreme
commander, it was simply not the case. Utley says:
The Indians did not win the Battle
of Little Bighorn because of generalship or even leadership. They won because
they outnumbered the enemy three to one; because they were united, confident
and angry; and above all because the immediate threat to their women and
children fired every man with determination to save his family. The Indians won
too because their foes allowed themselves to be beaten in fragments and because
their leadership broke down.
Bear Coat Miles
Little
Bighorn may have been a “victory” which shocked the United States but it was
the beginning of the end for the Indians, including Sitting Bull. After Custer
came General Nelson A Miles, known to the Sioux as Bear Coat. Miles was a wily
politician good at claiming more than his due but he was also a tough general.
General Nelson A Miles
In his chapter Winter of Despair
Utley describes the post-battle year as Hunkpapas, frozen and starving, tried
desperately to beat off the merciless blows of the army. In early May 1877, to
Sitting Bull’s despair, Crazy Horse and his people surrendered at Camp
Robinson, Nebraska. The next day Bear Coat attacked the Miniconjou village on
Muddy Creek, burning it, killing the chiefs and scattering the people into the
winter wilds. Sitting Bull would still not surrender, however, and at about the
same time crossed the border into Canada.
The land of the Grandmother
Utley’s
chapters on Sitting Bull’s four years in Queen Victoria’s Canada are absolutely
fascinating. But it was a story of how a sympathetic and friendly welcome,
especially at the hands of the police inspector James M Walsh, “Long Lance”,
turned gradually sour. It was a question of politics, really, as Ottowa, London
and Washington jousted for position on a difficult question. In one way the
United States were only too happy to be rid of Sitting Bull and his people, and
pressed the Canadians to grant them the status of Canadian Indians. But the
British dominion had enough troubles with its own Indians to wish to absorb
American ones, and stubbornly refused. The Canadian treatment of the Hunkpapas
was fair, correct and decent. But the Canadians wanted them to leave. Walsh was
increasingly sidelined and the Ottowa line hardened.
In the end
it was the buffalo, the pte, that
defeated Sitting Bull. They stopped coming and the people, not rationed on a
reservation, starved. Finally, at long last, in 1881 Sitting Bull realized he
must go back to the States and surrender.
One of
the few “goodies” in this painful story is Jean Louis Legaré, a trader at Wood
Mountain who sympathized with the Sioux and did his best – almost bankrupting
himself – to help them. He negotiated and arranged the surrender under the best
terms possible and he comes across as a most attractive character.
Jean Louis Legaré
The ragged, gaunt procession entered Fort Buford on July 19, 1881 and surrendered. Sitting Bull was the last to hand over his prized Winchester repeating rifle. Afterwards he sang a song: A warrior / I have been / Now / It is all over / A hard time / I have.
Decline and fall
For
twenty months, in the latest in an endless series of broken promises, Sitting
Bull was separated from his people and imprisoned as a PoW at Fort Randall. In
May 1883 he was transferred to Fort Yates. He stood ready to compromise. He
would learn to earn his living from the land and send his children to the white
man’s school. Utley suggests how hard it must have been to live confined, on
the government dole and with a white overlord.
James McLaughlin, Indian Agent
Agent James McLaughlin was a
successful and dynamic but essentially petty and arrogant man and he disliked
Sitting Bull from the outset. This was to have very negative, indeed fatal
results for the Hunkpapa chief.
Buffalo Bill
The
brief interlude in 1885 with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West is described in the
short chapter 21, The World Beyond,
and makes you inevitably think of Little
Big Man again. Bull had an especially close relationship with Annie Oakley,
Little Sure Shot as he called her.
Bull and Bill
Bull adapted amazingly well and was happy to
make money from his autograph (he had learned to write his name) and selling
trinkets his wives made, though in line with the cardinal virtue of generosity
he gave most of the proceeds away. Curiously in a way, the ‘killer of Custer’ was
feted and entertained, and he enjoyed it. But he was soon back at Standing
Rock, living quietly and suffering various illnesses.
Standing Rock
Bull
opposed the disgraceful Sioux Acts of 1887 and 1888, which attempted to
apportion private homesteads to the Sioux and make available the “surplus land”
(about half the total) to white settlers.
But he had no power, not even influence any more. To the land grabbers
Bull was a mindless obstructionist battling the benevolent programs of a
generous government. But Sitting Bull said, “I would rather die an Indian than
live a white man.”
The
government cut rations as fast as it stole the land and there was a series of
crop failures. Starvation once again stared the Sioux in the face. It was
against this background that the Ghost Dance movement arose that led to the
tragedy of Wounded Knee. Sitting Bull seems to have dallied with the religion
in his capacity as Sioux holy man but to have been basically skeptical. That didn’t
stop McLaughlin and the army being terrified that he would join and lead the “dangerous”
movement, inciting war once more.
Caroline Weldon
The
penultimate chapter, which deals with the final days and the Ghost Dance, tells
of another interesting character who came into Sitting Bull’s life, Mrs. Caroline
Weldon (called by many, including Utley, Catherine Weldon, but she was only ever Caroline). She is clearly the model for Amanda Teasdale in Berger’s 1999 sequel The Return of Little Big Man.
Born Susanna Caroline Faesch in Basel, Switzerland in 1844, she came to America with her family in 1852, settling in Brooklyn. In 1866 she wed Dr. Bernhard Claudius Schlatter, a physician and fellow Swiss but it was an unhappy and childless marriage. In 1876 she ran away with a certain Christopher Stevenson, a married man, and they had a son, Christie. Stevenson went back to his wife, and her husband, Schlatter, divorced her in 1883. She changed her name to Caroline Weldon.
She joined the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA) and became passionate in defense of the Lakota after the notorious Dawes Act of 1887. She managed to befriend Sitting Bull, acting as his secretary, interpreter and advocate, moving with her young son Christie to live at Sitting Bull’s compound on the Grand River at Standing Rock Indian Reservation. She clashed with Indian Agent James McLaughlin (she wasn't the only one) and he initiated an effective smear campaign against her so that she was reviled in the press.
She was opposed to the Ghost Dance movement of 1890 and this seems to have led to an estrangement with Sitting Bull. In November of '90 she left for Kansas City, MO, to stay with her nephew but her son died en route. She eventually returned to Brooklyn and died there in 1921. She was buried in the borough's Green Wood Cemetery.
It is truly a remarkable story.
She joined the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA) and became passionate in defense of the Lakota after the notorious Dawes Act of 1887. She managed to befriend Sitting Bull, acting as his secretary, interpreter and advocate, moving with her young son Christie to live at Sitting Bull’s compound on the Grand River at Standing Rock Indian Reservation. She clashed with Indian Agent James McLaughlin (she wasn't the only one) and he initiated an effective smear campaign against her so that she was reviled in the press.
She was opposed to the Ghost Dance movement of 1890 and this seems to have led to an estrangement with Sitting Bull. In November of '90 she left for Kansas City, MO, to stay with her nephew but her son died en route. She eventually returned to Brooklyn and died there in 1921. She was buried in the borough's Green Wood Cemetery.
It is truly a remarkable story.
Caroline Weldon in 1915
(by permission of Daniel Guggisberg)
Death
Robert
Utley treats the death of Sitting Bull without apportioning much specific blame.
He says of McLaughlin,
He cannot have been too sorry over
the death of Sitting Bull, but he certainly was not prepared to risk the lives
of his policemen for it. Confinement of Sitting Bull in some distant prison
suited McLaughlin’s purposes fully as well as death, and without much doubt
that is what he intended.
Of the
Indian police, Utley writes:
The most persuasive refutation of
the charge against the police lies in their own actions. However badly they
handled the arrest, they clearly made every possible effort to get their
prisoner out of the Sitting Bull settlement alive. Only when fired on … did
Bull Head and Red Tomahawk ensure, as the agent had ordered, that under no
circumstances was Sitting Bull to be allowed to escape. As Captain Fechet
pointed out in his official report, “If it had been the intention of the police
to assassinate Sitting Bull, they could easily have done so before his friends
arrived.
This is
probably right, although it is also possible that police instructions were too
vague, even deliberately vague, especially when police chief Louis Primeau
warned officer Bull Head that Sitting Bull must be watched very closely. “If he
should [attempt to leave the reservation] you must stop him and if he does not
listen to you do as you see fit.” McLaughlin’s own letter to Bull Head added
the postscript: “You must not let him escape under any circumstances.”
Sitting Bull
If not a
deliberate assassination, the death of Sitting Bull seems to have been a result
of incompetent and over-nervous police officers and lack of diligence in
wording of orders from an antagonistic agent not sorry to see Sitting Bull
dead.
Sitting
Bull was not a paragon of virtues and he was not a general of Napoleonic skill
but as Robert Utley says in his final words,
He was a real Indian, and a real
person, completely faithful to his culture. He earned greatness as a Hunkpapa
patriot, steadfastly true to the values and principles and institutions that
guided his tribe. In this guise, not as some generic ideal Indian of the
popular imagination, his memory achieves contemporary significance.
Excellent post! Many thanks!
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome. Thanks!
DeleteJeff
Wow, Jeff I am very glad to have found your blog. I loved your take on Sitting Bull and the extensive treatment here. This is the kind of site I search for. I have always loved the Old West and have a Western that is being published this summer called Redemption. Hope to read more of your posts - great stuff here.
ReplyDeleteHow kind. Thank you.
DeleteIf your publisher sends me a copy of Redemption, I'll review it for you on the blog!
Best wishes,
Jeff
Hi Jeff;
ReplyDeletethe details pertaining to Caroline Weldon are not correct - the image shows an unrelated person. I would he happy to share the correct details and also furnish the only known and positively identified photograph of her (original in my possession)
Best regards
Daniel
That's very interesting. Caroline or Catherine? I was going by Robert Utley, usually impeccable in his scholarship and research. I would be very glad to learn more about her.
DeleteJeff