Stephen E. Ambrose On Sitting Bull

Stephen E. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer

(New York: Doubleday and Co.; 1975), pp. 351, 352.

‘Sitting Bull is perhaps the most famous of all North American Indians.

The whites first knew him as the instigator of resistance to United States Army forays in 1872 into the northern Sioux territory and then as the organizer of the Indian forces that fought Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876.

Later he was a star attraction in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. There he made money, most of which, Annie Oakley, another of Buffalo Bills stars, stated, “went into the pockets of small, ragged boys.

Nor could he understand how so much wealth could go brushing by, unmindful of the poor.”

After looking over much of the eastern United States, sitting bull declared that in his opinion “the white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.”

‘His photograph the one in which he is wearing a buckskin, fringe shirt, a crucifix around his neck, his braids over his breast, weasel tails hanging from them, his chin jutting at the camera, his broad mouth set, his sharp nose pushing out defiantly, his eyes narrow and hard, watching and wondering, a single feather in his hair has been distributed worldwide.

Books have been written and movies made on his life. He appeals to everyone to the Indian lover his strength of face and character and the awesomeness of his dignity bear witness to the nobility of Indians, while to the Indian hater his ferocious resistance to the whites entitles him to, if nothing else, deep respect.

‘Sitting Bull was an extraordinary man for any race at any time, and such a man is of necessity complex. He was all that the whites thought he was, and much more. He was an orator, a philosopher, an advisor, a propagandist for his cause, a lay preacher, a teacher, a husband and father, a healer of the sick, a psychiatrist, a political leader, and a man. He evidently never held any authorized tribal position, either political or military, which may have contributed to rather than detracted from his strength. . . .’

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