AUTHORNORM MATTEONINorm Matteoni is a California lawyer and student of the West. He specializes in eminent domain and was long ago taken by a statement of Sitting Bull – “I wish all to know that I do not propose to sell any part of my country.”
He authors the two volume treatise – Condemnation Practice in California. This is his first venture into historical non-fiction. The book is written from the perspective of the Lakota chief’s resistance to what the Indian Bureau sought in making over the Indian as a white Indian. Mr. Matteoni writes of the land and how it was lost to the relentless push of Manifest Destiny. He tells this story through the clash between the new man and the Indian said to have masterminded the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In 2008 he photographed the northern Plains, home to the Lakota, and studied historical photos of the main characters of his book, using those as illustrations for the story he tells. |
SITTING BULL
An American hero who was vilified as a "bad Indian"
One week after the infamous June 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn, when news of the defeat of General George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry troops reached the American public, Sitting Bull became the most wanted hostile Indian in America.
He had resisted the United States’ intrusions into Lakota prairie land for years, refused to sign treaties, and called for a gathering of tribes at Little Big Horn. He epitomized resistance. There are other battles than those of war, and the conflict between Sitting Bull and Indian Agent James McLaughlin was one of those battles. Theirs was a fight over the hearts and minds of the Lakota. |
Sitting Bull was killed on a pre-dawn police action at his cabin on the Grand River on December 15, 1890. The Indian Police of Standing Rock Reservation were sent to arrest the Lakota chief by Indian Agent McLaughlin.
The chief had become too much of a disruptive influence to the Indian Bureau’s assimilation policies to make the Indiana white Indian – to Christianize and civilize the red man. The Ghost Dance that sweep across the Plains in 1890 was the subterfuge for removing Sitting Bull from the reservation. But the reasons were more basic; he constantly challenged the Bureau’s policies and the Government’s forever revision of treaties. The killing was said to be the result of resisting arrest. |