Burial Site of Sitting Bull, Mobridge, South Dakota.

Sitting Bull, Where Do You Lie?

Fort Yates, North Dakota vs. Mobridge, South Dakota

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?

Burial Site of Sitting Bull, Fort Yates, North Dakota.

Fort Yates, North Dakota, has the scythe of history on its side. In 1890 Sitting Bull was shot in Fort Yates and buried near the spot. However, Fort Yates loses points for presentation. A dirt road leads to the grave site, which is at the far end of a small, dusty parking area. It's covered by a thick slab of concrete and a big rock.

Is Sitting Bull still in this grave? Not according to the folks downriver in Mobridge, South Dakota.

Mobridge freely admits that several of its citizens drove to Fort Yates on April 8, 1953, 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. Sitting Bull, they said, was buried deep -- in quicklime -- so that he would return to the earth quickly. Fort Yates then installed the slab of concrete and the big rock, suggesting that there was still something beneath them worth stealing.

Mobridge didn't care. Whatever bones they got they encased 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 bust of Sitting Bull, executed by the designer of Crazy Horse Mountain, Korczak Ziolkowski. Take that, North Dakota.

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.