|
 Sitting
Bull and a Michigan Family -- Legacy of an Unlikely Friendship
By William John Armstrong
Sitting Bull was a great Lakota Sioux warrior and hunter. He also was
a recorder of history. Today, a collection of pictographs drawn by one
of
America's best-known Native Americans is housed at the Fort St. Joseph
Museum in Niles, Michigan. How these drawings came to reside in Michigan
is a tale of an unlikely friendship between one of the
nineteenth-century's most uncompromising Indian leaders and an army
officer's wife and daughter.
The Lakota Sioux was the western-most band of the Sioux, a Native
American people who originally came from the headwaters of the
Mississippi River. The Lakota consisted of seven subtribes: Oglala,
Brule, Two Kettle, Blackfeet, Sans Arc, Minniconjou and Hunkpapa.
Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa. At the time of Sitting Bull's birth in
1831, the seven tribes lived as nomads in the vast plains that stretched
from the Missouri River to the Bighorn Mountains and from the Platte and
Republican Rivers to the Canadian prairies.
When Sitting Bull was born he was named Jumping Badger. But he came
to be known as Slow because of his willful, deliberate ways. As a boy,
Slow spent endless hours riding horses and shooting a bow and arrow. The
economy of the Hunkpapa was inextricably tied to the buffalo, and all
aspects of life, both social and political, were tied to the migrations
and habits of the great herds. Only war was more important.
The Lakota were great fighters. In little more than a century they
had pushed aside Kiowas, Omahas, Poncas, Otos, Pawnees, Arikaras,
Mandans and Hidatsas. During Sitting Bull's life, the Lakota's chief
enemies were the Crows and Assiniboins. While the Lakota Sioux fought to
control hunting grounds and to defend themselves, they also fought for
plunder, revenge and glory. A Lakota man gained prestige, leadership and
honor during battle; Sitting Bull excelled both in the hunt and in war.
A good horseman, Sitting Bull was the first to strike, whether it be
a herd of buffalo or a Crow war party. By the age of ten he had killed
his first buffalo; by the age of fourteen he had counted his first coup
on an enemy. (The coup was a striking or touching of an enemy, living or
dead.) Sitting Bull's first coup gave him the right to wear a white
feather and garnered him the great honor of being given his father's
name, Tatanka-Iyotanka, which meant Sitting Bull. The name suggested one
possessed of great endurance, like the buffalo, which when brought to
bay, would sit immovable on its haunches and fight to the death.
During the 1850s Sitting Bull fought bravely in many war expeditions
and earned the admiration of his people. In 1857 he became a tribal
leader not only because of his war accomplishments, but because he had
distinguished himself in the four virtues prized by the Hunkpapa:
bravery, fortitude, generosity and wisdom. He also had the uncanny
ability to predict the future through visions, increasing his stature
among his people. One of his visions foretold that one day he would be
killed by a member of his own people.
Beginning in 1864 Sitting Bull led the Hunkpapa Sioux in their
struggle to force the whites from their land. While other leaders
believed that reconciliation was the only hope for their people, Sitting
Bull was uncompromising in his belief that the whites had to go. For the
next four years he led his followers in offensive actions in both the
Powder River country and the Upper Missouri region against a series of
United States forts. He was the Hunkpapa's most effective weapon against
the whites, but his efforts ultimately proved futile. By 1870 the Lakota
were split into treaty and nontreaty factions. While Indian leaders such
as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail took their people to live on the
reservations, Sitting Bull shifted from an offensive to a defensive
posture.
If he couldn't coerce the whites from Lakota land, Sitting Bull would
head his people north away from them. He was recognized as the leader of
the "hunting bands," Indians who refused to go to the
reservation and detested the thought of succumbing to the white man's
way. These bands followed the buffalo as their ancestors had, living the
old ways and preserving their culture. During the summer months, the
various tribes often gathered for the Sun Dance or tribal hunts.
Reservation Indians often joined their nonreservation brethren, but
returned to the reservation for the winter. In 1876, while the U.S. Army
was trying to capture the hunting bands, the Battle of the Little
Bighorn took place, pitting Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and the
Seventh U.S. Cavalry against a huge assemblage of nomadic and reservation
Indians. While most Americans at the time believed Sitting Bull led the
Indians in the fight, evidence suggests that he played a small role in
the actual battle. It didn't matter. For the rest of his life, Sitting
Bull was remembered as the man who defeated Custer.
Who was Sitting Bull, this ghostly leader of the hunting bands? The
answer is not an easy one. He didn't like talking with white men, so
little was known about him. One of the first white men to be well
acquainted with him was Major James Walsh of Canada's Northwest Mounted
Police. The two met at Wood Mountain, Canada, where Sitting Bull had led
his people after the Little Bighorn. Although Walsh felt the Indians
were terribly mistreated by the Americans, he worked hard to convince
Sitting Bull to return with his people to the United States and live on
the reservation. His primary reason for not wanting to allow the Lakota
to remain in Canada was Sitting Bull.
"He is the shrewdest and most intelligent Indian living,"
Walsh wrote to the Canadian minister of the interior. " Sitting Bull has
the ambition of Napoleon, and is brave to a fault. He is respected as
well as feared by every Indian on the plains. In war he has no equal. In
council he is superior to all. Every word said by him carries weight, is
quoted and passed from camp to camp."
John Finnerty, a Chicago Tribune reporter, gained access to Sitting
Bull's camp while the Lakotas were under Walsh's charge and noted, I
don't care what everybody says about Sitting Bull not being a warrior.
If he has not the sword, he has, at least, the magic sway of a Mohammed
over the rude war tribes that engirdle him. Everybody talks of Sitting
Bull, and, whether he be a figure-head, or an idea, or an
incomprehensible mystery his present influence is undoubted. His very
name is potent.
Whether a powerful warrior or a charismatic leader, by 1880 Sitting
Bull had worked his way into the imagination of the American public.
When he and his followers finally surrendered to American authorities at
Fort Buford on July 19, 1881, he had become one of the most famous
Indians of his era.
Sitting Bull and 167 of his immediate followers were transported by
steamer to Fort Randall, Dakota Territory, on 17 September 1881, not to
the Standing Rock Agency with the rest of his tribe as promised. The
army felt he still posed a threat and were not inclined to release him
to the Indian bureau. The broken band of Lakotas settled about one-half
mile west of the fort and was guarded by the Twenty-fifth U.S. Infantry,
a regiment of black enlisted men commanded by white officers. It was
while Sitting Bull was living near Fort Randall that Martha Quimby and
her daughter became acquainted with him.
Captain Horace Quimby, a New Hampshire native, was the regimental
quartermaster at Fort Randall when the Lakota arrived. Living at the
post with Quimby was his wife, Martha, originally from Richmond,
Indiana; his wife's sister, Margaret Smith; and the Quimbys' two
daughters, eighteen-month old Belle and five-year-old Alice. Two other
children, Charles and Helen, were back East attending school.
Martha Quimby, Maggie Smith and Alice often visited the Hunkpapa
encampment. They soon struck up a friendship with Sitting Bull and his
family, sometimes bringing them gifts of food and other items to
supplement the regular supplies provided them by the government. Martha
believed she taught Sitting Bull to write his name, but evidence
suggests that he had already learned from a trader while living in
Canada. Perhaps she helped him improve on his signature, or perhaps the
chief did not want to offend her by telling her he already knew how to
write his name.
During one of their visits to the Lakota encampment, Martha noticed
some sketches Sitting Bull had drawn for the Indian agent. She asked him
if he would draw some for her. He agreed. Sitting Bull was particularly
fond of children and he especially liked Alice. She may have been one of
the reasons he agreed to Martha's request. After acquiring a ledger book
from the Indian agent's headquarters, Sitting Bull went to work.
Sitting Bull, like other Plains Indians, kept an account of his coups
through drawings that illustrated specific events. These illustrations,
also called pictographs, permanently preserved a man's deeds beyond the
typical recitation of exploits around the council fire. While the images
carefully depicted important events, information was also conveyed by
the individual's dress and the various symbols that appeared. In
aboriginal times, Indians painted on animal skins using indigenous
pigments and porous buffalo-bone "brushes." With the
appearance of the white man, however, the Indians adopted materials such
as paper, pencil, pen, water color and crayon.
Sitting Bull's first known pictographic series, drawn before 1870,
consisted of thirty-one illustrations completed in typical Plains Indian
style, using flat planes. This comprehensive series detailed the
important events in his life in chronological order. While at Fort
Randall, Sitting Bull drew three other known compilations: two for army
families, one of whom was the Quimbys, and a set for the post trader.
The Quimby set is composed of events that appear to be plucked randomly
from Sitting Bull's past. They also reflect his friendship with Rudolph
Cronau, a German magazine illustrator for the Leipzig Gartenlaube, who
visited Fort Randall in late 1881 to paint portraits of the Lakota. The
horses in the Quimby collection, for example, are shaded in an attempt
to show a realistically rounded body.
The Sitting Bull drawings were studied by his close friends and by
members of his family before and after his death. They were mnemonic
devices that would allow stories to be retold over and over by those
familiar with the events depicted. Some of these people redrew many of
the pictographs from memory, with the details intact, to give to friends
or other interested parties.
Sitting Bull completed twelve drawings for the Quimbys before Captain
Quimby was transferred to another post in 1882. One the day the family
departed, Sitting Bull came to the steamboat with a thirteenth drawing,
which was unfinished. It was of a horse without a rider. He handed it to
Martha and said that his "heart was bad," sorrowful that it
wasn't completed.
Sitting Bull and his band of Lakota left Fort Randall in April 1883
and joined their people at the Standing Rock Reservation. The 1880s was
a difficult time for the tribe. The Lakota had to deal with the
realization they could no longer effectively resist U.S. government
forces. While leaders like Gall and Running Antelope worked to help
their followers survive in the new environment, Sitting Bull was
considered an obstructionist. The Standing Rock Indian agent charged
that the poor attendance at the agency school was due to Sitting Bull's
"bad influence." He may have been an obstructionist, but
Sitting Bull was soon living in a log cabin with personal property that
included twenty horses, forty-five cattle, eighty chickens and fields of
oats, corn and potatoes. He or his two wives built stock and implement
sheds and dug a root cellar. He also benefited from his celebrity
status.
Sitting Bull's first venture into the outside world for the purpose
of making money occurred in September 1883, when he traveled to Bismark
for a celebration honoring the new capital of the Dakota Territory.
There he filled his pockets with cash by selling his autograph for up to
two dollars. In March 1884 he accompanied Indian agent James McLaughlin
to Minneapolis, where they visited governmental, financial, industrial
and commercial institutions. That same year, Sitting Bull and a group of
his tribesmen traveled to New York City, appearing on stage in native
costume. They played to packed houses for two weeks before moving on to
Philadelphia. In 1885 Sitting Bull signed with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild
West show and spent four months traveling in Canada and the United
States (including stops in Detroit, Grand Rapids and Saginaw
in September).
During this tour Sitting Bull became acquainted with famed markswoman
Annie Oakley. According to Oakley, "he made a pet of me. He is a
dear, faithful, old friend, and I've great respect and affection for
him." Sitting Bull returned that respect by symbolically adopting
Oakley as his daughter and a member of his tribe. Sitting Bull made much
money on the tour, but he gave it away to street urchins and hangers-on
or spent it on feasts for his friends. Agent McLaughlin criticized him
for being foolish with his earnings, but he secretly worried that
Sitting Bull's fame would give the old chief a new independence and
negatively influence the other Indians on the reservation. Sitting Bull
was offered another season with Buffalo Bill, but McLaughlin denied him
permission to go.
By the end of the 1880s, reduced rations, crop failures, disease and
the taking of their land had reduced the Lakota to a broken people. Hope
appeared, however, in the form of a prophet named Wovoka, who prophesied
that the whites would be erased from the continent by a flood and the
Indians would return to their old ways of life. Word of this Paiute holy
man spread quickly to the Lakota. Throughout the Great Plains, Native
Americans quickly embraced the Ghost Dance Religion, which was based on
the song and dance revealed to Wovoka by the supernatural world. Sitting
Bull and other Lakota chiefs felt that, if anything, the Ghost Dance
would lift the spirits of their people and that it should be allowed.
Some, not all, white officials and settlers viewed the dance as
preparation for an Indian uprising.
In an effort to stop the movement, agent McLaughlin ordered Sitting
Bull to be placed under arrest. On 15 December 1890 McLaughlin sent
thirty-nine Lakota Sioux policemen to the chief's cabin and arrested
him. Before they could lead him away, however, many of Sitting Bull's
followers had gathered to protect their leader. Shots were fired between
the policemen and the followers and a fight ensued in which eight
Indians and four policemen were killed; two other policemen were
mortally wounded. One of the eight Indians to die was Sitting Bull. The
police killed him the moment the shooting started, fulfilling the vision
he had a few weeks earlier than he would be killed at the hands of his
own people.
The Quimbys must have been saddened by the news of Sitting Bull's
death. At the time, Martha Quimby was living in Niles with her children.
Captain Quimby passed away in 1883. Martha died thirteen years later
after slipping on the sidewalk and fracturing her skull. Alice inherited
the Sitting Bull drawings and other Indian artifacts the family
collected while stationed out west. When Alice died in Niles in 1947,
the collection was given to the city's Fort St. Joseph Historical
Association Museum. Today, the complete collection of pictographs is on
display at the Fort St. Joseph Museum. ***
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issue of Michigan History, complete with Sitting Bull's
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