Sitting Bull Champion Of The Sioux Author:Stanley Vestal Sitting Bull CHAMPION OF THE SIOUX A Biography BY STANLEY VESTAL NORMAN UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS To LEWIS F. CRAWFORD because he first introduced me to SITTING BULLS family and friends Introduction WHEN THE FIRST edition of this book appeared, Stanley Walker in his review in Books declared, This is a splendid biography. The book had, at any ... more »rate, the distinction of being the first biography of a great American Indian soldier and statesman in which his character and achievements were presented with the same care and seriousness they would have received had he been of European ancestry. It was, moreover, unique in being the fruit of prolonged first hand research among Plains Indians, with whom the author has been closely associ ated since boyhood. Yet the book is a straight-forward narrative, not cluttered up with the documents and eye-witness accounts on which it was based j for these were separately published as New Sources of Indian History a source book extending to some 350 pages. So now the publishers, having noted an insistent demand for the book, offer this new edition, updated and revised in the light of fresh evidence. And since the Indians who knew Sitting Bull are gone now and can give us no more information, this edition may well prove definitive. It is my hope that it will bring as much pleasure to the reader as the research and writing of it brought to me. What great man born on American soil has been most misrepre sented We can think at once of several strong candidates. Mine is Sitting Bull. 1 New Sources of Indian History 1850-1891. The Ghost Danes The Prairie Sioux, A Miscellany, by Stanley Vestal Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1934. IX SITTING BULL It is true that Abraham Lincolns name trails after it more legends than any other. But after all, the Lincoln legends generally have some shred of truth about them, whereas the Sitting Bull legends seem to be made out of whole cloth, and have no relation to the facts at all. They are in general mere fabrications, many of which were concocted by war correspondents, and were afterward embodied in a book writ ten by the Indian agent during whose term of office Sitting Bull was put out of the way. And the worst of it is, these yarns are not artistic not half so colorful and interesting as the truth turns out to be. For example, they said that Sitting Bull was not a warrior, though the pictorial record of some forty of his exploits verified repeatedly during his lifetime has lain in the Museum at Washington, D. C., for two generations. They said he was not a chief, though scores of men I knew saw him inaugurated as head chief of all the non-agency Sioux. They said he was a coward, though no one who has the slightest knowl edge of Plains Indians can believe for a moment that a coward could for years have been leader of the warlike Sioux and Cheyennes They called him a hostile because he went as far away from white men as it was possible to go. They called him a beggar and a coffee-cooler, when everyone knows that he was the very last Indian to give up his hunting and ask for rations at an agency. They accused him of opposing civili zation because he resisted the hasty policy of land-hungry politicians a policy resulting in these disgraceful conditions which the reformed Indian Bureau is now trying to remedy. Finally, they said he was crazy and killed him because he dared hope for the second coming of Christ. It was a plain case of give a dog a bad name, and then hang him. 55 Like all his race, he has been misunderstood and misrepresented. Yet in this Sitting Bull has been most unlucky of all Indians, for the popu lar legend of his life was largely the creation of personal enemies. From the date of his birth to the manner of his death, it is a tissue of error and falsehood. His first biographer, W...« less