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Sitting Bull $3.50STANLEY VESTAL

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The Sooner Magazine

Belles lettres and bell ringers

Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux. ByStanley Vestal . Boston : Houghton, Mif-flin Company. 1932 . $3.50 .

EARLY ninety years agoan Indian boy ran away from camp tojoin his father and some other Siouxwarriors who were looking for scalpsand glory. They found the enemy andlay in ambush for them ; but before themoment for the charge came, the boy'simpatience overcame him, he shot for-ward on his fleet pony, bore down on aman who stood with arrow drawn tothe head, and struck him with a coupstick, a light peeled rod with a feathertied to the end . The arrow went wild,and an instant later the thundering Siouxrode the enemy warrior down, killed andscalped him. The boy was unarmed,and he was only fourteen years old. Hehad no name at that time, but his proudfather immediately dubbed him SittingBull, a name which he believed had beendivinely and miraculously bestowed onhimself, and was therefore his to use orgive away . Our popular accounts wouldhave us believe that this boy grew up tohe a coward. Before his death he wasto count sixty-three of these coups, hon-ors won by striking the enemy with thehand or something held in the hand,and to bear in his body the scars of twobullets and an arrow--all in front .He was born near the present town of

Bullhead, South Dakota, into the Hunk-papa tribe of the Teton or prairie Sioux.He came of a fighting race and a fight-ing family, a race jealous of courage,strength, and prestige . And he was,in time, to be elected head chief of thegreater part of this nation . For thefirst fifty years of his life he had littleor no contact with the whites andpractically nothing is known of this per-iod beyond what Mr Vestal has gather-ed from old Indians, comrades of Sit-ting Bull, and preserved in the presentvolume . In this account he appearsas a reckless, ruthless, and cun-ning warrior, master of such strategy asexisted in the glorified sport of Indianwarfare; as a social leader, a poet, anda singer, a favorite with the women, afierce, intense patriot . And yet he wasadmired by the Indians almost as muchfor his kindness as for his courage; on

December

many occasions he is known to havesaved the lives of enemies, and one ofthese, an Assiniboin, became his adoptedbrother and a famous warrior. He diedwith Sitting Bull .As his power increased among his own

people his economic sagacity developed.The existence of his nation depended onthe integrity of their hunting grounds.He launched war party after war partyagainst Crows, Rees, Hohe, and Flat-heads, and he saved the great buffaloherds for his people until the ever in-creasing pressure of the whites broughthim into contact with the soldiers . From1864 until his surrender, clashes withtroops alternated with battles againstother Indians, and Sitting Bull rarelycame off second best .

In 1875, on recommendation of the In-dian Bureau, the Washington authori-ties determined to put the hunting Siouxon reservation ; this was the beginningof the campaign which reached its tragicclimax in the battle of the Little BigHorn . Sitting Bull did not seek thatfight ; Custer sought it . Custer was am-bitious . Mr Vestal thinks he had hiseye on the presidency . Eight years be-fore, he had come upon the encampedSouthern Cheyenne, Arapahoe and Kiowain the valley of the Washita in Oklaho-ma, and achieved a great victory; it hasbeen called a massacre . If he could dothe same thing to the Sioux he wouldbe the greatest Indian fighter of all time .But there were too many Sioux, and thethree divisions of troops failed to syn-chronize their attacks . Reno attackedand the Sioux, Sitting Bull in the leadas usual, drove him back across the river.Custer attacked and Sitting Bull stayedwith the women and children west ofthe camp ; he knew he was not neededagainst Custer . His young men wouldtake care of that little force, and besidessomething told him that there must beanother body of troops coming up . Hewas right; if Benteen had not been hope-lessly entangled in the badlands theremight have been another tale to tell .And because Sitting Bull was a strate-gist, because he tried to hold his womenand children from panic, he has beenbranded as a coward . And because theIndians, who knew next to nothing aboutthis strange white breed, who foughtthem as if they had been some new kindof animal, robbed the dead and mutilat-

96

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The Sooner Magazine

ed some of them, he has been brandedas a monster of cruelty. And yet theold Indians (who were eye-witnesses)say that on the night of the battle Sit-ting Bull gave a command which de-serves to be recorded among the me-morable utterances of mankind: "To-night we shall mourn for our dead, andfor those brave white men laying upyonder on the hillside ."

fluence . Because of his prestige, the In-dian agent, Major McLaughlin, felt thathe must be removed . The Ghost danceand the Messiah craze offered a goodexcuse ; but it was only an excuse . Sit-ting Bull never believed in the Messiah,and had little to do with the ghostdancers . The military ordered his arrest .The Indian police tried to arrest him .Fourteen Indian policemen and SittingBull Indians lay dead around his cabinwhen the affair was over . But SittingBull was a "good Indian ;" and the In-dian Bureau reigned supreme over thetamed and leaderless Sioux .The entire book is a process of ex-

ploding myths . Most of these myths or-iginated in ignorant, prejudiced or de-liberately falsified reports, memoirs, andfiction . But there is another source ofinformation available ; it is the oral testi-monv o f old Sioux, Cheyenne, NesPerce, Crow, Cree, Blood, Blackfeet .Assimboin, some of them friends andrelatives, some of them enemies, all ofthem eve-witnesses . It would seem thattheir testimony is reliable ; in the firstplace an Indian has a wonderful mem-ory and does not commonly lie to hisfriends ; in the second place their testi-mony checks, even though taken at dif-ferent times and places ; in the thirdplace, not all the incidents offered re-dound to the honor and dignity of Sit-ting Bull ; and finally, their evidencechecks with some of the records kept bywhites which are known to be unpreju-diced . It would seem that Mr Vestalhas sifted and preserved most of the evi-dence which is yet available . While heis a vigorous partisan of his hero, he is

December

also a historian with a historian's ob-jective devotion to truth . It is sufficientto say that his style is adequate to histheme . His picture of Sitting Bull andhis Sioux is probably as nearly correctas will ever be obtained .

Out of it the old chief emerges as thefinest representative of a heroic civiliza-tion, heroic in the sense in which thecivilization of Mycenae and Troy washeroic ; a civilization built, in respect ofeconomics on the buffalo, in respect ofsocial amenities on war . And this civili-zation, in which personal qualities weresupreme, came into disastrous conflictwith the mass culture of the Americans,built on the machine, in which personalqualities counted (and still count) forvery little . The world lost somethingwhich it could ill afford to lose whenthe culture of the Plains Indians was de-stroyed.-KENNETH KAUFMAN, '16as,'19M.A.

THE MIAMI-PICHERZINC-LEAD DISTRICTBY SAMUEL WEIDMAN

This book, published Septem-ber l, describes the geology andthe mining and milling methodsof the important mining districtof the northeastern part of Ok-lahoma .

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Finally seven months after the battle,RESTAURANT Sitting Bull, tired of dodging the soldiers,

led his band into Canada . The RedCoats knew how to handle Indians, and

113 N . Broadway Sitting Bull made his young men behave .He was happy . But the buffalo weregetting scarce, the Canadian governmentrefused him a reservation, and the trad-

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old chief, in desperation, came in . Out-Every Service For Your Car

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settled down on Grand river, took upPARKING HOTEL farming, and behaved . Inwardly he was

still going the Indian road! He was still112 W. 1st Cars called for and delivered chief of the Sioux, he still clung to his

old religion, he still refused to sell the

Phone 7-1888 Sioux empire for a song . His exploita-tion by Buffalo Bill increased his in-