And yet, Sitting Bull did not “participate” in the show, in the sense that other Native Americans did; he was Sitting Bull, after all, “the Napoleon of the Great Plains,” “the Moses of his people,” and in the manner of all royalty through time, it was enough for him simply to appear. At each venue, he would ride through town in the parade, right behind Buffalo Bill, wearing his war bonnet, and then generally once around the ring, as an honored guest in a carriage, and then he would fade back into the mists and the show would go on.
Fans were starstruck, even those who hated Sitting Bull in their belief that he had killed Custer. All wanted to see these giants of the frontier, and express their admiration or rage, to participate in history shortly after it had been made, or even revisit scenarios of which they had been a part. After the show, many could actually meet their idols. In one instance, when the Wild West played Columbus, officers of the Seventeenth U.S. Infantry who were based there visited Sitting Bull at his tent. Recognizing one of the men, he smiled, jumped up, and said “How How!,” and then shook hands with a Lieutenant McMartin, who returned the greeting through the interpreter. “This young man,” Sitting Bull said to reporters, “rolled cigarettes for me at Fort Randall.” McMartin rolled another, lit it, and handed it to Sitting Bull. As he smoked it, McMartin explained that he had been in charge of Sitting Bull when the chief was confined to that fort. Often enough, there were arrangements for groups of women and children to visit the cast in their village, and on Sundays religious-minded fans could even follow them to church (attended by white and red man alike)—the beginnings of what is still, today, in frontier tourist towns that thrive on myth and reenactments, an attraction known as “cowboy church.” The visits were an anointing of sorts, and young men wanted to join the “show folk” who were disparaged in temperance-minded quarters and run away with the circus and all of its painted, wild ponies. Women were transformed, for a moment or two; they wanted to leave town with Buffalo Bill, and we know that regardless of where they met him, some did. “Women on the plains have prayed for him,” said Outdoor Life magazine, “have called that name as the one thing between them and suicide.”
When Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill arrived in Montreal in August 1885, they had been traveling together for several weeks. Montreal was the biggest city in Canada, a burgeoning center of trade and commerce with its own tribal rivalry—this one involving the British and the French, who had vied for control of the territory since the aboriginal Iroquois had been vanquished. Fueled by its own rivalry, it was the perfect place for the staging of a photograph that would become iconic and memorialize an alliance between the former enemies, Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.
Of their own stature, each man was a figure of great admiration in Canada. While feted in many American locales and later in cities around the world, Buffalo Bill was welcomed as if a native son in Montreal, given a “magnificently illuminated” commendation by the mayor and members of Parliament at a ceremony attended by thousands. “The celebrated bison hunter,” reported La Patrie on August 17, “was congratulated for having given our people such a remarkable, true-to-life idea of life in the Far West and the expansion of civilization in those faraway lands. . . . [The mayor said that Buffalo Bill’s show] was a veritable contribution to the science of natural history and its creators deserved praise for having presented it in such a suitable way from every aspect. Mr. Cody has garnered legitimate fame and merits all the honor he has received.”
The newspaper also noted that one W. H. Murray commended Cody and his troupe as well. This was remarked on because “Adirondack Murray,” as he was popularly known, was a kind of celebrity about town, and other towns, including on his home turf of New England, where he had built a reputation as a strong wilderness advocate, writing bestselling books that had rendered him the “father of camping.” It sounds silly now, but at the time the idea of spending weeks away from work or the drudgery of home in a land where all such things were once integrated by its original inhabitants and the frontiersmen who followed had become novel. It was as if Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill hadn’t already been “camping” for years. Later, Adirondack Murray would pose with Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill in one of the lesser-known photos taken in Montreal, a fortunate white man who got to appear with the two icons on the continent who most embodied the idea of wilderness. Shortly thereafter, he opened a restaurant in the Yukon, perhaps hanging the image in a window.
Like Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull was regarded with much reverence in the land of the Grandmother. It was there that he had made a last stand of his own before returning home, and when he visited Montreal with the Wild West he was greeted like a returning hero. All along the streets of Wellington, McGill, St. James, Catherine, and Pointe-Saint-Charles, crowds cheered the parade. “The first performance was held in a summer downpour,” wrote Walter Havighurst. “Annie Oakley did her shooting through a curtain of rain and splashed her horse through standing water. But the crowd cheered wildly and the sky brightened. Before the final rout of Indians from the settler’s cabin, sun streamed down and the wet ponies shone like paint.” Later the cast was taken to Lachine on the St. Lawrence, where LaSalle had dreamed of heading for China in a canoe caravan. “Sitting Bull was presented to a group of Iroquois chiefs,” Havighurst noted, “and the whole party, red men and white, boarded the steamer Filgate for a swift and swirling trip through the rapids. Back at the dock in Montreal, they inspected the spanking new steamers Sarnia and Sardinia.” Later they would go the studios of the world-famed photographer William Notman and pose for the iconic pictures.
It is not known if Major James Walsh of the North-West Mounted Police visited with Sitting Bull when he was in Canada. Sitting Bull had forged a deep alliance with Walsh and others while there, and it was north of the Medicine Line that Sitting Bull had learned to write his own signature in English, as opposed to the ledger drawings he would also make, featuring the lance and shield and buffalo on its haunches that was his stamp of identity. Later, when he would sign his autograph for fans, there was speculation in certain quarters that he was some sort of fraud, not “Sitting Bull” at all, but that was hardly the case, and to set the record straight on many things, Walsh had arranged his first interview with a white journalist, on October 17, 1877, several weeks after Sitting Bull had met with an army commission which came to Canada, seeking his return.
The reporter was Jerome Stillson of the New York Herald, who had also covered the commission hearings. Through his groundbreaking coverage and subsequent interview, we can gain insight into Sitting Bull’s mind-set a little over a year after the Little Bighorn, and understand how far the wheel had turned by the time he joined the Wild West and posed for the Notman photographs eight years later. Stillson was clearly in awe of Sitting Bull, although the florid language of his coverage was not atypical of the era. To help Stillson try to understand Sitting Bull, Walsh intervened here and there, adding Lakota context to questions that took no account of it. Without such sensitivity, this first interview with Public Enemy Number One might have been much different.
“At 3 o’clock,” Stillson’s first report begins, “Sitting Bull entered, followed by Spotted Eagle and the rest,” referring to his delegation. “Now for the first time was visible to white men since the beginning of the Indian Wars the most noted Indian of the period, and now was made real [James Fenimore] Cooper’s often derided vision of the Indian face. . . . His features, like Goethe’s made music to the senses. He wore a quiet, ironical smile. His black hair streamed down along his beardless and swarthy cheeks over clean cut ears, not burdened with ornaments.” Sitting Bull sat down on a buffalo robe near a wall and lit his pipe.
“This commission that has come to interview me,” he said, “can go to the devil.” It was the very first comment attributed to Sitting Bull in the newspapers of the day—and bear in mind that it came one year after his tribe’s great victory at the Little Bighorn.
Among the commissioners was General Alfred Terry of
the U.S. Army, one of the men who had led his soldiers onto the Bighorn battlefield when it was all over, discovering the carnage, all the dead men and horses, all the men mutilated except Custer and Myles Keogh. Now, at the commission north of the Medicine Line, General Terry told Sitting Bull that the president wanted to make a lasting peace. He would like all hostilities to come to a close and that all the people of the United States shall live in harmony. “If you will return to your country,” he continued, “and hereafter refrain from acts of hostility against its government and people, a full pardon will be given to you for all acts committed in the past.” Of course, you would be subject to the rules that applied to all Indians now living at the agencies, Terry explained to Sitting Bull, and you would have to give up your guns and horses.
Why should I walk a thousand miles back to the Dakota Territory on foot? Sitting Bull asked. Terry replied that the president would not consent to the Hunkpapas’ return “armed, mounted, and prepared for war.” Sitting Bull then launched into a reply of defiance, and his words add great resonance to the alliance that he would later make with Buffalo Bill.
. . . We have done nothing. It is all the people on your side who started . . . making trouble. We could go nowhere else so we took refuge here. It was on this side of the line that we first learned to shoot, and that’s why I came back here again. I would like to know why you came here. I did not give you my country, but you followed me from place to place, and I had to come here. . . . Look at me. I have ears, I have eyes to see with. If you think me a fool, you are a bigger fool than I am. This house is a medicine house. You come here to tell us lies, but we do not want to listen to them. I don’t wish such language used to me, nor any such lies told to me in my Grandmother’s house. Don’t say two more words. Go back where you came from.
The meeting disbanded, and later that evening Sitting Bull spoke with Stillson. At first he was reluctant to do so, but Walsh convinced him that it could help his cause. “The reporter,” he said, “was a great paper chief who talked with a million tongues to all the people in the world. This man is a man of wonderful medicine; he speaks and the people on this side, and across the great water, open their ears and hear him. He tells the truth; he does not lie. He wishes to make the world know what a great tribe is encamped here on the land owned by the White Mother. He wants it to be understood that her guests are mighty warriors.” Sitting Bull said he would grant the interview, but only after dark, and the only people who could attend were Major Walsh, two interpreters, and a stenographer.
At 8:30 p.m., several hours after the talks with the army commission had concluded, “The most mysterious Indian chieftain who ever flourished in North America was ushered in by Major Walsh,” wrote Stillson. “He locked the door behind him. . . . Here he stood, his blanket rolled back, his head upreared, his right moccasin put forward, his right hand thrown across his chest.”
Stillson stood up and approached Sitting Bull, offering both hands, and Sitting Bull grasped them. “He was about five feet ten inches,” he wrote. “He was clad in a black and white calico shirt, black cloth leggings, and moccasins, magnificently embroidered with beads and porcupine quills. He held in his left hand a foxskin cap, its brush dropping to his feet. . . . His eyes gleamed.”
After a moment, he said, “I am no chief.”
“You are a great chief,” Stillson said, “but you live behind a cloud. Your face is dark; my people do not see it. Tell me, do you hate the Americans very much?”
“I am no chief,” Sitting Bull said again.
“What are you?” Stillson asked.
“A man,” he replied.
Puzzled, Stillson turned to Walsh. “He means to keep you in ignorance of his secret if he can,” the major said.
His position among his bands is anomalous. His own tribes, the Hunkpapa, are not all in fealty to him. Parts of nearly twenty different tribes of Sioux, besides a remnant of the Hunkpapa, abide with him. So far as I have learned, he rules over these fragments of tribes, which compose his camp of 2,500, including between 800 and 900 warriors, by sheer compelling force of intellect and will. . . . He is supposed to have guided the fortunes of several battles, including the fight in which Custer fell. That supposition, as you will presently find, is partially erroneous. His word was always potent in the camp or in the field, but he has usually left to the war chiefs the duties appertaining to engagements. When the crisis came, he gave his opinion, which was accepted as law.
“Is Sitting Bull a medicine man?” the reporter then asked. “Don’t for the world,” Walsh said, “intimate to him that you have derived the idea from me, or from anyone, that he is a mere medicine man. He would deem that to be a profound insult. In point of fact he is a medicine man, but a far greater, more influential medicine man than any I have ever known. He speaks. They listen and they obey. Now let us hear what his explanation will be.”
“You say you are no chief?” Stillson then said to Sitting Bull.
“No!” he said.
“Are you a head soldier?” the reporter asked.
“I am nothing,” Sitting Bull said. “Neither a chief nor a soldier.”
“What? Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
It was an answer that was coy and truthful. A term or phrase could not begin to explain that he was part of a world where all were related, the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, rocks, trees, the creatures of the wing . . . yes, there were many who followed him, and yes, there were many who did not, but to a man who was seeking a name for all of this, such a thing could not be conveyed.
Stillson then asked why the great chiefs who were in Canada with him looked up to him. “Oh,” Sitting Bull said, smiling proudly, “I used to be a kind of a chief. But the Americans made me go away from my father’s hunting ground.”
“You do not love the Americans?” Stillson asked. “I saw that all the warriors around you clapped their hands and cried out when you spoke. . . . If you are not a great chief, why do these men think so much of you?”
“Your people look up to men because they are rich,” Sitting Bull said. “Because they have much land, many lodges, many women?” The reporter said that was so. “Well,” Sitting Bull continued, “I suppose my people look up to me because I am poor. That is the difference.” This sort of thing, a voluntary commitment to poverty, was a point of pride in the Lakota community.
“What is your feeling toward the Americans now?” Stillson asked. Sitting Bull touched his hip where his knife was, an interesting bit of body language, perhaps a tell of sorts. “Listen,” he said, and then put his right hand on Stillson’s knee. “I told [General Terry and his men] what my notions were—that I did not want to go back there,” and he reiterated that he had no intention of relinquishing his guns or horses. “Don’t you see that you will probably have the same difficulty in Canada that you have had in the United States,” Stillson wondered. “The White Mother does not lie,” replied Sitting Bull. And then the reporter asked about the “great lies” that are told about Sitting Bull. “White men say that you lived among them when you were young; that you went to school; that you learned to write and read from books; that you speak English; that you know how to talk French?”
“I have heard some of these stories,” Sitting Bull said. “They are all strange lies. What I am I am . . . I am a man. I see. I know. I began to see when I was not yet born,” he explained, and it was a story his brothers and sisters knew well. “When I was not in my mother’s arms,” he continued, “but inside of my mother’s belly. It was there that I began to study about my people.” Stillson then touched Sitting Bull on the arm, but Walsh jumped in. “Do not interrupt him,” he said. “He is beginning to talk about his medicine.” Walsh’s statement was correct, and it must have offered a kind of reassurance, much needed quite possibly in this, his first interview with a representative of the other side, that Walsh himself was a true friend; here was a wasichu who knew him so well that he could almost finish his sentences.
And it must have been further assurance that the land of the Grandmother was, for the moment, his home. And so Sitting Bull continued. “I was still in my mother’s insides when I began to study about my people,” he said. “God gave me the power to see out of the womb. I studied there, in the womb, about many things. I studied about the smallpox, that was killing my people—the great sickness that was killing the women and children. I was so interested that I turned over on my side. The God Almighty must have told me at that time that I would be the man to be the judge of all the other Indians—a big man, to decide for them in all their ways.” It was a statement that revealed much about Sitting Bull’s path and fate and burden, and while it may not have resonated that way for Stillson, who may have thought it to be aggrandizing, though he did not say so, he pressed him on the matter. “And you have since decided for them?” he asked. “I speak,” Sitting Bull said. “It is enough.”
It was soon time to ask Sitting Bull about “the most disastrous, most mysterious Indian battle of the century—Custer’s encounter with the Sioux on the Bighorn—the Thermopylae of the Plains,” Stillson wrote. He showed Sitting Bull a map of the battlefield and Indian encampments (including his own, which Sitting Bull confirmed) and troop movements, and Sitting Bull also confirmed the point of Reno’s attack and the hilltop rise where Custer and his men made their last stand. It quickly became apparent that this conversation was the end point of the interview, as Sitting Bull got up to leave.
“Do you have the stomach for any more battles with the Americans?” Stillson asked. Sitting Bull said that he did not want any fight. “Not now?” Stillson continued. Sitting Bull then “laughed quite heartily,” Stillson reported, and then said, “No, not this winter.”
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