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Top - Showing dress of the Sun Dance performers in certain features of
the last Sun Dance of the Sioux, 1928. All brilliant colors, both body
and regalia.
Center - Vice President Curtis being posed for photo during the Sun Dance proceedings for use of the movies and Sunday illustrated editions. Bottom - During the recess of the ceremony of the Sun Dance. |
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We were staging in the Rosebud Country, last home-land
of the red folks and of the Sioux. Their lonely and forbidding huts
were in evidence along the way; ground-floor, flimsy log cabins, with
one door, a window and mud roof; their farms bare, parched and
treeless, utterly devoid of growing or growable things. Here they eke
out a miserable existence with their little families, hopeless and
hungry, a forlorn fruitless life. Occasionally is seen a small
white-painted church, always surrounded by a large burying ground filled with graves and marked with little wood crosses, glaring proof of the neglect suffered by them under the restricted reservation system. Past an Indian trading store, kept by a white man. Always where there is profit it goes to the whites from the pockets of the reds. Up and down the highway runs over land, the natural haunt of the rattler and the coyote, shunned by birds, beasts and white men. Once the regulation log shanty was seen on the crest of a barren ridge, alongside of which was a canvass tepee, all surrounded by broken-down wagons, parts of mower and rake, showing that the owner had tried to live as regulations required. It was plain that farming could not succeed on such land, yet he was not permitted to leave his allotted location; and so he had set up a flimsy canvass-lodge where he could at least have fresh air and sunshine which the white man's kind of log hut did not supply. Then over barren ridges, past He Dog's village, where there was another trading store, passing and meeting but three motor cars in a half-day's journey. Farther west the lands improve slightly. Some of it is devoted to flax, and sometimes wheat crops mature, but the crops this year had failed on account of excessive frosts, hail, and the withering hot winds. Here and there were evidences that ranchers tried to get a start, and had failed, on lands leased from the Indian— further proof that the red man is forced to live where the white man cannot. A stop for lunch at a white man's town, census 100, where they raised cattle and had a court house, stores and a post-office, all forty miles from a railroad. While this year's crop was a failure, they were hopeful that boom days would come again. Another long leg of the journey over this lifeless and uninviting country,—waterless, dusty and dreary, and the historic Wounded Knee massacre site and the trading store—became a stop for gasoline and oil. A glance over the monument and massacre grounds only added to the cheerlessness and the depressed feeling resulting from the last few days' experiences in the Indian country. John Cross Dog, with his wife and a few merchandise packages, and their little boy, were taken on board the car for a ride towards their home beyond Pine Ridge. Between Wounded Knee creek and Pine Ridge agency the country improved; there was wheat harvested from it and other evidences of human habitation and practical farming. A short stop was made at the agency office to ask about the chief. He had started to the sun dance, but the dilapidated old Ford broke down somewhere in the Bad Lands section and he never arrived. He now had gone to visit friends at the Standing Rock district in North Dakota; he wanted to visit Sitting Bull's grave there. Thunderbull came to shake, with his cheerful "How Kola," and then a snapshot was made of Red Cloud's monument and grave; the start was then made on the last lap. |
Sun Dance participants
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