THE ENGLISH WESTERNERS' SOCIETY
NOVEMBER 2009 BOOK REVIEW
This review first appeared in the Tally Sheet (Autumn 2007, Volume 54, Number 1)
SITTING BULL’S PIPE: Rediscovering the Man, Correcting the Myth
By Kenneth B. Tankersley and Robert B. Pickering. Published by Tatanka Press, Wyk, Germany, 2006. 116 pp., 62 illustrations, Bibliography and Index. € 43.00, i.e. 43 euros.
Dietmar Kuegler and the Tatanka Press will be known to many of our members as the late Colin Taylor’s publisher, especially of the two volume “Essays in Honor of John C. Ewers.” Some of the Tatanka books have parallel English and German texts but this, the Press’s most recent title, is in English only and the authors are American anthropologists. In his preface, Dr. Pickering says: “This book project began with a simple question, ‘Is the pipe currently owned by Forrest Fenn, the actual pipe pictured with Sitting Bull?’ ”. The resulting work is a mixture of history and material culture.
Roughly speaking, the first part of the book contains the history, beginning with a discussion of the relations between Sitting Bull and the Standing Rock Agent, James McLaughlin. The present reviewer must confess to being startled by the ferocity of the onslaught on McLaughlin, whose autobiography is entitled My Friend the Indian. The view presented here is not only of a man who was really an enemy of the Indian (especially of Sitting Bull) but a very unpleasant one, at that. A great deal has been written about Sitting Bull but McLaughlin lacks a biographer. It is perhaps time that this imbalance was redressed, as McLaughlin was a much more significant figure on the frontier than some men who have, in recent years, been given full-length biographies.
Among Sitting Bull’s property, sold by his widows, was a pipe which the chief was supposed to have “broken in anger” in October 1890 i.e. two months before he was killed. It is the authors’ contention that the broken pipe is not authentic and that an unbroken one, recently discovered, is his true pipe. They also go into the question of Sitting Bull’s burial and repeated exhumations, matters which have been controversial for well over a century.
In a chapter headed “Sitting Bull’s Myths”, Dr. Tankersley gives “an edited and interpreted” version of three of Thomas B. Marquis’s pamphlets: Sitting Bull and Gall, the Warrior; She Watched Custer’s Last Battle (a Cheyenne account much used by students of the Custer battle); and Which Indian Killed Custer? (in which Marquis, of course, reaches the conclusion that his own question is unanswerable. The “credit” was certainly not due to Sitting Bull, a point which the present authors seem concerned to establish). Marquis is best remembered for his book A Warrior who Fought Custer published in 1931, and these little pamphlets were published a few years later. They are now bibliographical curiosities and it might have been a good idea to have reproduced them photographically, with the editorial remarks printed separately. As it is, “the spelling and grammar has been changed to conform to twenty-first century American English.” Marquis was a doctor of medicine, who wrote in a plain and lucid style, and it would be sad indeed if his prose was thought to be beyond the present-day reader.
Between the history and the ethnology comes a “Photo Gallery” from the Forrest Fenn Collection. It should be emphasised here that the illustrations throughout this book are superbly reproduced. Nineteen of the photographs are of Sitting Bull himself, which alone would make this a desirable acquisition for anyone interested in the chief. The four “pipe chapters” i.e. “Sitting Bull’s Pipe: Determining Authenticity”; “Sitting Bull’s Pipes”; “A Piece on Pipes”; and “The Sacred Pipe in Modern Times”, have 22 colour illustrations.
While this beautifully designed and printed book will have a secure place in the Sitting Bull literature, it seems likely that it will be valued more particularly for its study on Indian pipes, in general, and of the disputed pipe, in particular.
Barry C. Johnson
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