Disputed Grave of Sitting Bull

Mobridge, South Dakota

Tatanka Iyotake - "Sitting Bull" -- was a defiant foe of 19th century Manifest Destiny. Neither North nor South Dakota wanted him while he was alive. However, attitudes have changed, and Sitting Bull is now a point of pride in the Dakotas, many, many years too late for him to enjoy it.

Two towns, one on each side of the Dakota state line, claim to have Sitting Bull's bones. Which to believe?

Everyone accepts that Sitting Bull was killed and buried in Fort Yates, North Dakota, in 1890. But he was born 50 miles downriver, in Mobridge, South Dakota, which felt that Sitting Bull should be buried there. So on April 8, 1953, several Mobridge citizens -- including a few Sitting Bull descendants -- drove to Fort Yates and stole Sitting Bull's bones. They dug up the grave with a backhoe and scurried back across the border before Fort Yates had finished breakfast.

Fort Yates said that all Mobridge got were some horse bones, or maybe the bones of an anonymous pioneer who was buried on top. Mobridge, however, acted as if they really had Sitting Bull. They encased the bones in a steel vault embedded in a 20-ton block of concrete, then buried the whole thing on top of a very visible bluff overlooking the Missouri River. They built billboards directing tourists to the site and erected a granite pedestal over it, topped by a seven-ton rock bust of Sitting Bull, carved by the designer of Crazy Horse Mountain, Korczak Ziolkowski.

The reason for this squabbling eludes us, since, from a tourism perspective, the Mobridge site appears to be just as sparsely visited as the one in Fort Yates.