Even the great Sitting Bull joined the circus. Fifty dollars a week from Buffalo Bill turned buckskin and blessed feathers into costume, great battles into show. The glory of Little Big Horn played day after day for Englishmen – skin cool and pale as unfletched chicks – to careful claps of their soft hands.
What choice did he have? White man’s lines penned him like stock, and the buffalo gone. Herds that were once three days long run dry as the hard ground of ’85. No meat, no robes, no flesh for the bones of teepees. No dry shit, even, for a fire.
Maman remembered him, proud outside Legare’s store, speaking for the Sioux driven north to their deaths after Custer’s Last Stand. His people like 4,000 buffalo halted on the lip of a cliff and set up camp. Freezing, teeth falling out or broken on bottles. He stood and demanded to be seen. He was a tall man, too, Maman always said, pinching my chin.
In England, France, Sitting Bull would have been as rare as I am on these city streets. Tearing strangers between recoil and fascination at the wild, baffling work of God.
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