When some of the subchiefs after his release said, “Let us kill our women and children and fight until we are gone, that is preferable to starvation here on the reservation,” he is reported to have made a dignified and manly speech, in which he maintained that the Almighty had decreed that they should continue on the reservation, virtually as prisoners of their conquerors, and resistance would only result in suffering and bloodshed, and could accomplish no good.
An intelligent savage, reared upon the Plains amidst surroundings not calculated to develop other than the lowest desires, and possessing a primitive idea of the true type of manhood, he has presented us with a career which shall endure in American history long after the frontiersmen shall have been forgotten.
War Dance
Sung by a party of Warm Spring Indians (Oregon) about 1889. A few of these Indians traveled in the East and gave entertainments. This song is repeated many times, rapidly.
I have no Sioux war-dance music, but the above is the most weird Indian song ever brought to my attention.
CHAPTER XIX. SITTING BULL—THE IRRECONCILABLE
Among other prominent Indians, this man presents a stern and dramatic figure. He has been praised and censured, flattered and abhorred; called brave by some, cowardly by others. He is an anomaly if we judge him by Departmental standards. More properly, he typifies the Plains spirit of 1840, and he was out of place in the reservation life of 1880–1890.
He bluntly told white people they lied; he refused to accept substitutes for solemn treaties; he met falsehoods with trickery of his own. He lived and died a strong, resentful man—his hand against white domination, even as white men’s hands were against him.
Sitting Bull (Tatanka Yotanka, “sitting buffalo bull”) was a noted medicine man, or shaman, of the Sioux Indians. He belonged to the Tetons and was of the Hunkpapa division. According to the Handbook of American Indians,[[33]] he was born in 1834. He presents one of the most picturesque characters among all our Indians in any period of American history. He was called Jumping Badger as a boy and manifested a great deal of ability in buffalo hunting in his extreme youth.