Sioux Victory

The western plains produced few nobler redskins than Chief Sitting Bull, last great leader of the Sioux tribes. It was Sitting Bull, driven to recklessness by the perfidy of the U.S. Government, who cried, "Let us have one big fight with the soldiers," and assembled the awesome army that wiped out General George Custer and soldiers of the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. But 14 years later, conquered by the forces of the Great White Father, Sitting Bull was old, fat and quiet. One frosty morning in 1890, a detachment of Indian police galloped up to his cabin on the Sioux reservation in South Dakota and shot him to death.

He did not die without a fight--a pitiful handful of his old friends battled the policemen, and 16 men were killed in the brutal little fray. As rifles barked, an old, grey circus horse that belonged to Sitting Bull pirouetted, postured and then sat down gravely near the chief's cabin and raised one hoof, apparently under the impression that it was back under the big top. After these Chekhovian obsequies. Sitting Bull's body was carted to Fort Yates, N.Dak.

Lonely Grave. After the Army pulled out of Fort Yates in 1903, Sitting Bull's grave lay untended under the scraggly grass of the deserted parade ground. Then, last fall, a 78-year-old Sioux patriarch named Clarence Grey Eagle went on the warpath. He had witnessed the great chief's death when he was a boy of 16; when he heard that the grave was to be covered with water from the new Oahe Dam, he hurried indignantly to Mobridge (pop. 3,800), S.Dak. Would the Chamber of Commerce build a memorial, he asked, if he moved the chief's remains across the state line and reburied them near town?

Mobridge agreed. Five other towns, anxious for a new tourist attraction, clamored for Sitting Bull's bones too. Montana's Senator James E. Murray argued that the chief should be reburied at Montana's Custer Battlefield Cemetery, near the remains of General Custer.* And North Dakota, aroused to civic pride after 63 years, suddenly decided it prized Sitting Bull after all. The old chief's granddaughters--Mrs. Nancy Kicking Bear, Mrs. Angelique LaPointe and Mrs. Sarah Little Spotted Horse--had all agreed to Grey Eagle's project, but North Dakota's Governor Norman Brunsdale refused to let the grave be opened.

Rescuers. Grey Eagle had an ace up his sleeve. Both the old burial site in North Dakota and the new one in South Dakota are within Standing Rock Indian Reservation and thus on federal land. The Secretary of the Interior had agreed to the move. One morning last week, under cover of a blinding snow storm, Grey Eagle and a crew of workmen dug up Sitting Bull's bones, hurried them across the state line in a truck, reburied them, covered the grave with 20 tons of cement, and stationed an armed guard near by. Mobridge prepared to place a bust of Sitting Bull by Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski over the new grave. Grey Eagle went contentedly back to his sod hut amid an outraged clamor from North Dakota.

*Who is actually buried at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.