The Earth Is All That Lasts by Mark Lee Gardner

Author:Mark Lee Gardner [Gardner, Mark Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062669896
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Sitting Bull had been promised his band would reside near the Standing Rock Agency, which, among other Lakotas, served the rest of the Húnkpapas, including Gall and his followers. But despite that promise, the army wasn’t so certain of the wisdom of releasing him to the Indian Bureau just yet. And impertinent statements Sitting Bull gave to the press didn’t help. In speaking with one reporter, the chief declared he hadn’t surrendered at Fort Buford, and he didn’t want a white man over him. Nor did he want an agent. “I never stood in the white man’s country,” Sitting Bull informed the reporter. “I never committed any depredations in the white man’s country. . . . The white man came on to my land and followed me. The white men made me fight for my hunting grounds. The white man made me kill him or he would kill my friends, my women, and my children.”

When asked about a Húnkpapa chief named Running Antelope, long friendly to the whites, Sitting Bull called him a fool. Running Antelope had signed treaties that allowed the white man to occupy Lakota lands, primarily the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the 1877 treaty stealing the Black Hills. “Ever since that time,” Sitting Bull said, “there has been trouble.” Sitting Bull viewed Crazy Horse’s uncle, Spotted Tail, with equal contempt. On August 6, news arrived at Fort Yates that Spotted Tail had been shot and killed near the Rosebud Agency. The killing was supposedly the climax to a personal feud, but some Lakotas thought the motive was revenge for Crazy Horse’s death. The Oglala war chief’s relatives accused the army of paying Spotted Tail to bring Crazy Horse in so he could be murdered. No evidence exists for such a scenario, but Spotted Tail’s killer, a Brulé named Crow Dog, was a relative of Crazy Horse.

Sitting Bull bluntly said Spotted Tail’s death was “a fit ending for a fool.” Spotted Tail surrendered when he “should have kept the warpath.” It was plain to Sitting Bull, as it had been to his dead friend Crazy Horse, that had all the Lakotas united, they could have held off the white man. But Red Cloud and Spotted Tail had refused to recognize Sitting Bull as the supreme chief. They and other “tame Indians” touched the pen. By siding with the white man and against their fellow Lakotas, these chiefs had doomed the antitreaty bands.

Of course, it was one thing for Sitting Bull to think Spotted Tail was a fool for not going to war, but his words were published in newspapers across the country, including the New York Times. Another news story out of Fort Yates quoted a “prominent official” who speculated that Sitting Bull had secreted a cache of firearms in the mountains, which was guarded by the chief’s best warriors. Upon the heels of this story came a dispatch reporting that two Húnkpapa women were caught carrying guns and ammunition into Sitting Bull’s camp. He “undoubtedly means mischief,” the dispatch read.

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