BLOOD BROTHERS

Deanne Stillman’s book was more than the story of the friendship between Buffalo Bill Cody and the Lakota Chief, Sitting Bull. It was the history of both men after the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn (a.k.a. Custer’s Last Stand) until their deaths in 1890 (Sitting Bull) and 1917 (Buffalo Bill). This was well written and by far the most informative book about these two superstars (three, if you include Annie Oakley) of the late 1800s. Deanne put in a lot of information that I already knew, but it was necessary in order to tell the whole story. After the slaughter at Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull became Public Enemy No.1, even though he didn’t kill Lt. Col. Custer or lead the attack against the blue coats. His second in command, Crazy Horse, lead the attack. One must remember that the army attacked the Indian village first, thus precipitating a revenge attack by a combination of various tribes. I’ve often thought that the many different names of Indian tribes were just as confusing as the multiple names one Russian character holds in a classic Russian novel, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The Sioux are three tribes: the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota (all speaking different languages). Each tribe has many sub divisions, Sitting Bull is a Hunkpapa, which is a division of the Lakota, which in turn is part of the Sioux nation. Got It? Anyway, let’s review some of the main parts of this informative and compelling non fiction book. The first part involves Sitting Bull’s exit out of the USA into Canada.

“After the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, Sitting Bull and his people were hounded and hunted for years. They found refuge in Canada, finally returning to the Great Plains five years later when the buffalo began to vanish in Canada as they already had in the United States. There was also another problem: Sitting Bull’s renegade Hunkpapa band of Lakota Sioux had lost the protection of the Canadian government, which had succumbed to pressure from American officials, sending the Indians south, across what Indians called the Medicine Line, into their homeland, where they became prisoners of war.” Sitting Bull called the head of government in Canada, the Grandmother (I’m assuming he was referring to Queen Victoria) and he called the President of the USA, the Grandfather. The newspapers across the nation stated, Sitting Bull Surrenders! “Public Enemy Number One had been captured and America should no longer fear the man who single-handedly killed Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer on the Little Bighorn battlefield. It was of no consequence that Sitting Bull did not participate in the final siege; Crazy Horse, the other leader of the assault on the Seventh Cavalry, had already been killed, and it mattered only that Sitting Bull, the remaining figurehead, had been rendered powerless.” Sitting Bull and his people surrendered at Fort Buford, North Dakota on 7/19/1881. “All together, there were 188 Lakota men, women, and children coming in that day. Their clothing was rotten and falling apart, and some were covered only in dirty blankets.” Sitting Bull was dressed as a ragamuffin. “But they did not know that for Sitting Bull, his dress that day was something of a choice; it would not have befitted a Lakota leader to look better than his people...his appearance was misunderstood by his captors (for the umpteenth time).” The Wasichu (whiteman) just didn’t understand the Indians. All this happened in the first nine pages.

Let’s meet Buffalo Bill Cody. “In Europe, he was known as “Nature’s Nobleman,” a frontier self-sufficient with the sophistication of Western civilization; in America, he was “King of the Old West”- a title he deserved. He was a hunter, scout, shooter, rider, warrior, teller of tall tales, and a man of adventure par excellence. His experience in city and plain rendered him a kind of wise man, and presidents and generals sought his advice. His friends included Frederic Remington and Mark Twain and Pawnee chiefs; broncbusters who could drink him under the table and might have even been better riders; archdukes from foreign lands and ranch cooks who needed a job. He was open to all, he had no airs. What you saw was what you got, even if what you saw was sometimes a mirage. “He was the simplest of men,” as Annie Oakley would say at the end of his life, “as comfortable with cowboys as with kings.” “On May 19, 1883, Buffalo Bill launched his equine extravaganza in Omaha, Nebraska. The progenitor of the spectacle that Cody would take into history, it was called The Wild West, WF Cody and WF Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition. Interestingly, the title of the Wild West did not include the word show - it was not presented as something removed from the frontier, but rather as the Wild West itself.” Later in the year Cody’s steamer carrying his show collided with another steamer and sunk. The Wild West lost $60,000 that year (no small sum at the time). Then Cody met Annie Oakley. “After she demonstrated her skills, Cody hired her immediately. Together, she and Buffalo Bill would take the frontier spectacle to new heights of glamour and excitement.” The final piece of the show was the hiring of Sitting Bull. Cody had tried to hire the chief for two years to no avail. When Sitting Bull found out that Annie Oakley joined the show (he met her in St. Paul), “...he was ready to entertain an offer from the wasichu who was also named for the buffalo."

So you got a 56 page taste of this non fiction book. What happens after Sitting Bull joins the Wild West Show and his subsequent assassination by the Indian police on his Standing Rock Indian Reservation is a matter of history. Isn’t it peculiar that this story starts with Sitting Bull’s 1876 participation in Little Bighorn and ends with the tragedy of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota. Yet he was a peaceful man...he just wanted his people to be left alone. He so wanted to make peace with Grandfather. So sad.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: The writer’s prose was terrific. I’ll close out my review with her beautiful paragraph that I call Imagine:

“Imagine being born into a world where your tribe was the most powerful in all the land and within that being born at the climax of its power. Imagine that in your lifetime, you witnessed a thing that consumed nearly everything you loved and were nourished by and that nearly everyone you cherished or parlayed with was destroyed, altered, killed, or locked up. Imagine being a person who lived through such a thing, sought to head it off directly and softly, was both celebrated and hated for doing so, and yet, because of an alliance with the natural world and it with you, saw the whole thing coming - even your own end. And then, finally, imagine embracing life with all of your might and force, your generosity and joy, trying to contain the wellspring of sorrow and blood that was flooding your world and drowning it, knowing that a river cannot be stopped but that there are many different ways to ride it. This was Sitting Bull’s fate and condition, and this is how it unfolded.”

Imagine.