Sitting Bull Is Around Here Somewhere

Ft.Yates Sitting Bull Burial Site

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From the casino we headed to Ft Yates, home of the tomb of Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull, while I knew as a famous Indian I learned on a trip was the man credited for the battle the Native Americans won at the Battle of Bull Run. Fort Yates is a very sad and desolate area. Still an active reservation, tepees have been replaced by modular box homes of poverty and oppression. We stopped in at the post office in Fort Yates and asked where we could find the tomb of Sitting Bull. I waited in the car while Joe investigated in the post office and I knew when he returned laughing that something was array. Joe informed me that we passed the tomb coming through town we just didn’t look hard enough for it. Little did we know that the tomb of this man, would have been located on a little patch of dirt littered with glass and litter would be found in an almost empty lot behind the Taco John’s. The tomb and the areas surrounding it was very desolate and not taken good care of. We really didn’t know what else to do; we were expecting Fort Yates to be a little bit more than a town of low-income housing and a sad monument, so we headed for South Dakota. Not far out of Fort Yates, we found the Sitting Bull College. The beautiful facility educates 350 students. The facility is only 7 months old; the original one burnt down last year and is now the storage building near the reservation town. We saw the old one first and were very sad to see such a building in such disrepair have to be the college. We were delighted to see the new one and had a lovely chat with one of the professors there who teaches science and research at the 2 year school. Continuing on we headed for the SD boarder. Only after getting in too deep to turn around did I realize that the gas tank was running too low for my comfort. We luckily found one tank of gas along the way in a store/gambling spot/bar/ and gas station. Looking at the map, we realized that we had arrived in South Dakota miles ago. We decided to press on after getting the gas and travel the few extra miles to cross the Missouri River and come back up a different road than we had come. After coming to the bottom of the river where we planned to cross and head north again, we come into the little town of Mobridge South Dakota- what a surprise! This beautiful town of a few thousand sits on the Missouri River. After traveling to the chamber of commerce for info and a breakfast recommendation, we ate at the Prairie Family Restaurant and had the best pancakes and Denver Sandwich! (Western omelet served on grilled Texas toast) We explored Mobridge some more to find out there was a more respectable Sitting Bull statue only 3 miles from town. The town brochures told us that the reason there were two memorials is because the body of sitting bull (at fort Yates) had been stolen and moved to SD with the help of the Sioux Indians. Ironically the Ft Yates site made no reference to fact that Sitting Bulls Body was not really there any longer. We drove to the memorial driving through a haze of Locust that banged into the windshield, rested on the wipers, and splotched themselves all over the front of the car. When we got to the memorial the locusts were everywhere. They landed all over the car the second we stopped. I hesitated for a few minutes about whether I would get out but I soldiered on and got out. The locusts flew and jumped off the ground as we walked, kicking up 50 at a time. Another van drove up and the wife of the couple in the minivan was not as crazy as I felt at the time and did refuse to get out of the car. We swapped cameras and took each other’s pictures.

The Shrine But No Bull

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