NO. 6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SITTING BULL — PRAUS 3 



travelers, and residents on the Plains. Sitting Bull made three known 

 pictographic autobiographies besides the one illustrated with this 

 article.- It is understandable that none of the Quimby specimens show 

 encounters with white soldiers or civilians since Sitting Bull was a 

 prisoner at the time with an uncertain legal status. Descriptions of 

 current locations of the Kimball, Smith, and Pettinger pictographs 

 can be found in Stirling's article. 



There are 13 pictographs in the Quimby collection. The last is not 

 complete and appears on the back inside cover of the ledger in which 

 all were originally bound. Though now loose, they were in a record 

 book kept by Captain Quimby as Quartermaster of the 31st Regiment 

 of Infantry. It is amusing to note that an inventory was made of the 

 regiment's supplies while it was stationed in Texas and that foodstuffs 

 are largely missing or in short order. 



The flyleaf of the ledger contains the identifications for the indi- 

 vidual pictographs. There is no way of ascertaining, however, whether 

 the tabulation was made at Sitting Bull's dictation or from memory 

 at a later date. 



Sitting Bull's pictographic efforts were drawn in pencil and ink and 

 painted in with watercolors. He did not restrain himself to a set pat- 

 tern in choosing combinations of media. In pictograph 2 (pi. i), for 

 example, the horse's mane, tail, hoofs, and legs, and the human eyes 

 are done in ink, while the same horse's nostrils and eyes are penciled 

 in. In the same figure there is a touch of red to the war bonnet, with 

 white and yellow coloration on the gunstock. In contrast, pictograph 

 4 (pi. 2) is done carefully in ink and pencil. In most cases Sitting 

 Bull reserved colors for himself and his horses, and kept his antagonist 

 in the black and gray of pencil and pen. 



Though colors must have had specific significance in earlier days, 

 they were no doubt chosen at random by the later Plains artists. Since 

 horses were so valuable and important to the Indian, it can be safely 

 surmised that Sitting Bull chose colors for his steeds that corre- 

 sponded to their original hues. The events depicted in the Quimby col- 

 lection are autobiographical but not necessarily in chronological order. 

 The first known Sitting Bull pictographs (Kimball) were drawn 

 around 1870 and are in typical Plains Indian style of flat planes and 

 profiles only. The later Smith and Pettinger series reflect Sitting 

 Bull's ability as a student of Rudolph Cronau, illustrator for the Leip- 

 zig Gartenlaube on the High Plains during the late 70's and early 8o's. 

 In the Quimby collection there is no attempt to show the face in three- 



2 See Stirling, M. W., op. cit. 



