2 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I23 



His refusal, and the refusal of the main body of the Sioux, to become 

 "reservation Indians" led to General Sheridan's campaign and to 

 Custer's massacre on the Little Bighorn River in Montana in 1876. 

 Sitting Bull's participation in that famous defeat has been argued for 

 years by both Indians and whites. His name, however, became inex- 

 tricably linked with that Indian victory. 



The last gasp and last hope for freedom by the Sioux expressed 

 itself in the Ghost Dance, which was organized on the Standing Rock 

 Agency some time in 1890 at the invitation of Sitting Bull. Panic- 

 stricken whites saw this revival of Sioux nationalism as a prelude to 

 another bloody and costly uprising and promptly made plans to sup- 

 press it. Resistance to arrest led to Sitting Bull's death at the hands of 

 agency police on December 15, 1890. 



There were many Indian leaders, contemporaries of Sitting Bull, 

 who had equal and even superior claims to fame and yet never shared 

 with him the spotlight of publicity. His reputation rests to a large ex- 

 tent upon his association with the Custer tight and the sensation- 

 starved newspapers of the post-Civil War era. Newspapermen as- 

 signed to the "Indian Wars" exaggerated their releases and even 

 manufactured hair-raising stories to satisfy their editors' demands for 

 action and drama. Sitting Bull became and still is a controversial fig- 

 ure: rogue and coward to a few, fearless and faithful adherent to 

 Indian ideals to most. 



The Plains Indian cultural pattern prescribed success in war and in 

 the theft of horses as the two legitimate avenues to distinction. Sitting 

 Bull evidently had a lot of ability to run off horses successfully, as can 

 be surmised from his pictographic records. In pictographs 2 and 11 

 (pis. I and 6) the horse carries the brand of the United States xA.rmy, 

 attesting to his skill as a horse thief. In warfare he could lay claim to 

 63 coups against enemy Indians and whites by 1870. The privilege of 

 reciting his exploits around the council fire was generally not enough 

 for the man who wanted to preserve their memory in a more perma- 

 nent manner. Sitting Bull, like his Plains contemporaries, kept a 

 visual account of his coups through pictographs, a primitive form of 

 picture writing. In aboriginal days these were painted on animal skins 

 with indigenous pigments and porous bufifalo-bone "brushes." xA.s 

 soon as available, white man's paper, pencil, pen, watercolor, and 

 crayon were quickly accepted. There is an unknown number of picto- 

 graphic records of winter counts, buffalo hunts, raids, biographies, and 

 historic events in public museums and private collections. These were 

 in many cases originally produced because food-hungry Indians soon 

 learned that they had a market value to souvenir-hungry soldiers. 



