Rare cabinet card albumen photograph of Tatanka Iyotake, better known as Sitting Bull. This is perhaps the quintessential view of the Native American legend. Sitting Bull was a Lakota leader who led his people during years of resistance against the brutal anti-Native American policies promulgated by the United States government in the second half of the 1800s. He was killed by police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota during an attempt to arrest him. Authorities had feared that the highly influential leader would join the Ghost Dance movement, which preached resistance to assimilation.

Before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw many soldiers, "as thick as grasshoppers", falling upside down into the Lakota camp, His people took this vision as a foreshadowing of a major victory. About three weeks later, the confederated Lakota tribes and Northern Cheyenne defeated the 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, annihilating Custer's troops and seeming to fulfill Sitting Bull's vision. In response, the U.S. government sent thousands of soldiers to the area, forcing many of the Lakota to surrender. Sitting Bull refused, and in May 1877 led a band north to Canada. He remained there until 1881, when he and most of his men, low on supplies, returned to U.S. territory and surrendered.

Back at Standing Rock, the government feared that the influential Native American would use his influence to support resistance to their efforts to force assimilation. Police forces were ordered to arrest him. During an ensuing struggle, Sitting Bull was shot and killed. His body was taken to nearby Fort Yates for burial.

The image itself is credited to O.S. Goff and was published by the Zimmerman Brothers in the mid-1880s.


[Daguerreotype, Ambrotype, Tintype, CDV, Albumen, carte-de-visite, Salt print, Cabinet Card] [Western Expansion, Native Americans, Indians Affairs, Manuscripts