Deanne Stillman - Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill

To my dear, departed friend Michael Blake, author and screenwriter, Dances with Wolves

To Bugz the wild horse, 19982009, guide through the Dreamtime

They say there is to be a buffalo hunt over here!

They say there is to be a buffalo hunt over here.

Make the arrows! Make the arrows!

Says the father, says the father.

Lakota Ghost Dance song

I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences

And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses

And I cant look at hobbles and I cant stand fences

Dont fence me in...

Cole Porter, Dont Fence Me In

Now that weve met, weve changed.

from a Modoc Indian song

For each of my books, there has been a precipitating incident that has caused me to venture into that particular story. The incidents are similar, for they involve acts of violence, the killing of people, wild animals, assaults on the land, and these acts have unfolded on a very big canvas, the American West. It is across this terrain that I see the incidents taking place, moments or months or years after they have happened; that is to say that I can literally picture them, in bas-relief, as the consequence of forces and matters that have long been in play, and when this picture begins to form, I know that the incident will become the prism through which I will tell my next story and there is no turning back.

Some time ago, while working on my book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West , I learned about a strange and heartbreaking moment that had transpired outside Sitting Bulls cabin while he was being assassinated during an attempted arrest. A horse was tethered to a railing, and at the sound of gunfire he started to dance, trained to do such a thing while he was in the Wild West, Buffalo Bills famous spectacle of which Sitting Bull was a part for four months during 1885. I couldnt shake the image and as I began to look into it, I learned that the horse was a gift to Sitting Bull from Buffalo Bill, presented to Sitting Bull when he left the show to go home. The fact that Buffalo Bill had given Sitting Bull a horse upon his departure was significant. This was the animal that transformed the Westand was stripped from the tribes in order to vanquish them. It was a gift that Sitting Bull treasured, along with a hat that Cody had given him as well. After Sitting Bull was killed, Buffalo Bill bought the horse back from Sitting Bulls widows and according to some accounts rode it in a parade. And then the horse disappears from the record.

It was the legend of the dancing horse that led me into the story of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, for it symbolized so much. As I thought about the steed outside Sitting Bulls dwelling as his killing was under way, a portal into something else opened upexactly what, I was not sure of at the time, other than the fact that here was my next story, and it was calling and at some point I would head on down its trail.

Later, as I was well along this path, I came across another image. Its now on the cover of this book, and it too captured my attention. It was taken for publicity purposes while Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill were on tour in Montreal, and its caption was Foes in 76, Friends in 85. I began to imagine these two men on the road, Sitting Bull on that horse, crisscrossing the nation, visiting lands that once had belonged to the Lakota, appearing as himself on crowded thoroughfares that were built on top of ancient paths made by animals and the people who followed them, with William F. Cody, another mythical figure of the Great Plains, reenacting wartime scenarios that had one outcomethe end of the red man and the victory of the whiteleading the whole parade in a celebration of the Wild West that became the national scripture. What were the forces that brought these two men together, I wondered, and what was the nature of their alliance? Were they each trapped in a persona, a veneer that was somewhat true? And behind the myths, the projected ideas in which they were preserved, who were they in day-to-day life? Theirs was certainly an unlikely partnership, but one thing was obvious on its face. Both had names that were forever linked with the buffalo (Sitting Bull refers to it, something that is not readily apparent from the name itself), and both led lives that were intertwined with it. One man was credited with wiping out the species (though that was hardly the case) and the other was sustained by its very life. They were, in effect, two sides of the same coin; foes and then friends, just as the photo caption said. So this image too entered my consciousness; here were two American superstars, icons not just of their era and country, but for all time and around the world. What story was this picture telling and how was it connected to the dancing horse outside Sitting Bulls cabin?

To take a close look at these matters and find out about other underpinnings of this story, I have spent much time on the plains. I have attended memorials of the anniversary of the Little Bighorn, the infamous battle from which this country has yet to recover, in which the Lakota and Cheyenne defeated Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry in 1876, leading to the round-up of remaining renegade Indians; the flight of Sitting Bull and his people to Canada; his ultimate return as a pariah only to be blamed for the murder of Custer and then celebrated as a brave and defiant rebel. I have visited Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial nearby, traveled the Badlands where the remnants of the horse tribes sought refuge after the massacre at Wounded Knee, explored the terrain of William F. Cody in Cody, Wyoming, the town that he founded and which offers visitors a stay at the Irma Hotel, named after a daughter. I have visited the site of his defunct mine in Arizona, one of the ventures near the end of his life from which he could not recover. I have communed with wild horse herds that are said to be descendants of Buffalo Bills horses on their home turf in Wyoming, where they flourished until recent round-ups obliterated them and their history, and I have spent time with mustang herds on a sanctuary in South Dakota where descendants of cavalry horses live out their lives, and where descendants of Sitting Bulls horses carry on in a national park nearby and where at night, under the northern lights, you can hear the thundering hooves of the ancient steeds if you get quiet and listen for the sounds behind the winds that are forever wailing.

What divided Indians and the white man is still in play. Out on the Great Plains, a staging ground for the original cataclysm, there is a face-off in North Dakota at a place called Standing Rock, where Sitting Bull was essentially a prisoner when the land became a reservation and before that lived in its environs as a free man. An oil company wants to force a pipeline through sacred lands on Indian territory and those who first dwelled there are saying no. They fear a spill that would contaminate the waters which flow nearbythe lifeblood of us all. They have been joined by thousands of Native Americans from across the country, who arrived on foot, by canoe, and on horseback. It has been the largest such gathering of the tribes in one place in Americas recorded history, and many of these tribes are historic rivals. Regardless of the outcome at Standing Rock, one thing is certain: a shift is under way.

There was another momentous occurrence, and one that will reverberate for all time. In the frontier era, when the cavalry showed up on Indian lands, terrible things were afoot. Now, thousands of veterans had come to Standing Rock in support of Native Americans.