ArizonaRealCountry.com 45 July 2019 was also sufficiently alarmed to beg Sitting Bull to openly reject the Ghost Dance and send its adherents away from Standing Rock. Sitting Bull, however, was in no mood to remove the Ghost Dancers even if he himself would not participate, as for him anything that would lift the spirits of the despondent tribal members would be a good thing. But perhaps there was another reason he would not join the growing chorus of Indian Agents and "peace" Indians to demand the departure of the dancers. He may very well, by this time, had a death wish, fueled by that very same vision of the meadowlark he had seen and heard just a few years earlier. At any rate, he sent Weldon away (Mary Collins had already left) and waited for the inevitable. McLaughlin, who with his power and sway over pro-accommodation chiefs could have prevented the violence to come with a simple arrest. Daniel Royer, his panicked counterpart at the Pine Ridge Reservation, called for armed intervention against the Ghost Dance and against Sitting Bull. The armed intervention came courtesy of both the U.S. Army and the Sioux Indian Police, many of whom had been friends of Sitting Bull in the past but were now supportive of accommodation and assimilation with the whites. There would be one final dramatic act before Sitting Bull would be basely murdered. The one white man whom he still fully trusted, the man who had brought him into his Wild West show and gave him that sombrero and the gray trick pony, Buffalo Bill Cody, had been made aware of the volatile situation at Standing Rock by none other than Bear Coat Miles, who was now the commanding General of the department. Miles too wanted to avoid a violent confrontation, so he urged Cody to approach the chief, talk to him, and perhaps persuade him to eschew the movement. Cody, anxious to save his old friend, readily assented, and together with Pony Bob Haslam, his old Pony Express and Wild West show companion headed west to Standing Rock. As Cody himself would later state: "He (Miles) asked me if I could go immediately to Standing Rock and Fort Yates, and then to Sitting Bull's camp. He knew I was an old friend of the chief and he believed that if anyone could induce the old fox to abandon his plans for a general war I could...I was sure that if I could reach Sitting Bull he would at least listen to me" (Carter, Buffalo Bill, p.345). Sitting Bull was not interested in nor wanted to provoke a general war, he just wanted to get under Agent McLaughlin's caw, and sadly for him and his ultimate fate, he did just that. When Cody and his party arrived at Standing Rock on the morning of November 28, 1890, and announced their intention to proceed onward to Sitting Bull's camp, McLaughlin was so alarmed that he first sent a cable to Washington, D.C. urging President Benjamin Harrison to scrub the Cody-Miles mission, then he arranged with two officers at nearby Fort Yates to hold a drinking party in Cody's honor, hoping to drink him under the table until the response from Washington was received. But Cody was made of stronger stuff, and waking up refreshed the next day, not only stated he would go on to Sitting Bull's home at Grand River but asked for two military wagons loaded with supplies for the chief and his people. McLaughlin seemingly lost, but with Cody en route to Sitting Bull's camp, a response from President Harrison came in, canceling the mission and ordering Cody to turn around and report back to General Miles. McLaughlin later smugly asserted that he saved the life of the showman-scout by arranging to rescind the mission, but it is more likely that Sitting Bull would have greeted his old friend warmly, even hospitably, and that he would have at least listened to him. Till the end of his life, Cody would bitterly insist that if he had been allowed to meet with his old friend he could have persuaded Sitting Bull to reject the movement and been able to save his life. But it was not meant to be. With Cody out of the way, a chagrined Miles now ordered the deployment of the army, which gave Agent McLaughlin the excuse he needed to send in the Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull at Grand River. The final stage in the tragedy to follow was now set in motion. As Sitting Bull had prophesied, those who would murder him would be his own people. The commander of the 39-man police squad, Lieutenant Bull Head had as a youth fought with Sitting Bull against Custer at the Little Bighorn, as did a few of the others on their way to Grand River. Another one, the man who would actually kill the chief, Sergeant Red Tomahawk, would later state, with a tinge of regret, that he had been a friend of the great chief. All of the men approached their mission with a sense of sadness and foreboding, but they had chosen Christian ways, had aligned themselves with the peace chiefs, and as in the case of the Sioux who held Crazy Horse down 13 years earlier while an army sergeant bayoneted him to death, they were all intent on carrying on their mission. Arriving overnight they crept silently up to the chief's cabin, surrounding it. Then at precisely 6 a.m. the police squad kicked in the door of the cabin, grabbed Sitting Bull, naked, out of bed and informed him that he was under arrest and that they would be taking him back to Standing Rock. Sitting Bull at first acquiesced, merely asking for time enough to put his clothes on, but in the time that had elapsed a large crowd had gathered by the cabin. Sitting Bull's loyal adherent Catch- the-Bear, who had squabbled recently with Lieutenant Bull Head over a box of rations, and the 15-year-old son of the chief, the boy who had been named in honor of the Canadian Blackfoot chief loudly protested the arrest of their leader. Crow Foot started haranguing the police while mocking his father. The following commentary was the final and inevitable result. Crow Foot (to Sitting Bull) - "Well, you always called yourself a brave chief. Now you are allowing yourself to be taken by the Ceska maza (Indian police)." Sitting Bull (at first, stunned by the insolence of his son, then firmly replied) "Then I shall not go." Lieutenant Bull Head (desperately imploring Sitting Bull) - "Come now, do not listen to anyone" (Utley, Lance and the Shield, p. 301). Moments later, with the crowd still chanting "you shall not take our chief," an aroused Catch-the-Bear picked up his Winchester, took aim, and fired into the side of Lieutenant Bull Head, who as he fell, aimed his revolver and fired a round into Sitting Bull's chest. That shot alone would not have killed him, but as the firing began in earnest a round fired by Sergeant Red Tomahawk into the back of the old chief's skull did. As Sitting Bull died, five other followers and five policemen, including the mortally wounded Lieutenant Bull Head, riddled with four bullets, would also join him in death. The teenaged Crow Foot, who had instigated the tragedy by his urging his father to resist arrest, would subsequently be captured and killed by the vengeful policemen, some of whom were said to be his own relatives (Utley, Lance and the Shield, p. 302). The pathos of this tragedy in front of the cabin at Grand River, the internecine carnage between friends and relatives, however, did not end just there and then. That very same gray trick horse that Buffalo Bill Cody had so generously and lovingly given the old chief, saddled and waiting to take his master to Fort Yates, rose, ears perking up at the sound of the firing, began doing its trick dances, miraculously unscathed by all of the bullets going in every direction. It finally stopped, sat down amidst the carnage and rose one hoof in the air. He would be taken to Fort Yates, where his original master Cody would once more take possession of this tragic horse. After participation in the Wild West show at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, this equine witness to history would disappear into oblivion (Carter, Buffalo Bill, p. 350). That too would almost be the case of his dead master. Bitterly dumped by Red Tomahawk and the survivors of the Indian police on the bottom of a wagon with the bodies of Lieutenant Bull Head and other police casualties of the cabin fight, the corpse of Tatanka Yotanka was buried, without honor, on the post cemetery under a simple cross. His nephew, the 16-year-old Clarence Grey Eagle, who had witnessed the death of both his uncle and his cousin Crow Foot, was incensed. For the next 63 years he would petition the government to release his uncle's body to his family, only to be rebuffed every time - until in 1953 the aged Grey Eagle took matters into his own hands. He along with a group of friends and relatives spirited the remains of Sitting Bull from its then resting place (Fort Yates having been abandoned 45 years earlier), taking the remains to a new burial site just across the South Dakota state line, near Mobridge, the closest town to where Sitting Bull had last resided while alive (Murphy, Edwin, After the Funeral, Barnes & Noble, 1995, pp. 15-154). Warrior, medicine man, chief, man. Sitting Bull was a man who only wished to be left alone, to do good for his people, and to hold on to the land his people had once lived on until driven out by broken treaties, broken promises, lies, and guns. He would go to the Wild West show not just to help his people but also to seek friendship with those whom he fought less than a decade earlier, and for a short time, he had found friendship with his former enemies. But once again, the lies of an Indian agent who claimed he was only doing good for the Sioux, propelled by the white land grabs of the pitiful remnants of land left to his tribe, had spurred the old chief to embrace if not totally accept a Ghost Dance that would ultimately do more harm than good - and finally cost this man his life. While he would never compromise his people, he would always be willing to listen to the whites, and by all evidence available he was indeed willing to listen to his old friend Buffalo Bill Cody - but that, and ultimately his life, would be taken away from him. Proud, wise, seemingly arrogant, but always eloquent. A leader, that was the man - and yes, he was a man known as Tatanka Yotanka, or simply enough - Sitting Bull. The great chief who once said he hated all whites began a dear friendship with Buffalo Bill Cody that would last the remaining five years of his life... “They treat me very kindly and when I return to my people I shall tell them all about our friends among the white men, and what I have seen.”