Where is Sitting Bull's Cabin?

 

 

 Photograph of Sitting Bull's Log Cabin at the 1893 World's Fair from a rare copy of Halligan's Illustrated World's Fair history by Jewell Halligan. Public domain book is from my collection.

 The photograph above shows Sitting Bull's cabin at the 1893 Colombian Exposition in Chicago. Rain in the Face is front and center, and I have tentatively identified several others, but need more time to verify. Each of the people in the photograph above had a part to play in the visit to the fair and several traveled the next year to Coney Island as well. To my knowledge, this is the only photo taken of the cabin inside its enclosure at the fair. Photography at the fair, restricted by management and not being a technology available to everyone in those early days of photography means there are limited photographs to choose from. Surprisingly, the Halligan book cannot be found online and is rare in libraries. The above picture is floating around the internet, but I had to purchase a copy to verify its source.

As the librarian at Sitting Bull College for almost two decades, one question continued to come up again and again: what happened to Sitting Bull's cabin? Local historians and visitors have consistently raised the question over the years. It also continually presented itself in media within past and recent publications. Countless books contain a few sentences stating that the cabin traveled to the 1893 World's Fair and then to Coney Island. The sentences hang out there in the air as provocations to explore the story further. The cabin story acts as a sort of bookened ending to the death of Sitting Bull and the end of one era and the beginning of another. The problem is that the story of the cabin in that new era has never been told. What was the story behind the site of a tragedy becoming a sort of carnival attraction? To my knowledge, not even an article has been written exploring the topic. The continual movement of dispersed archival and historical materials online is slowly revealing a story that up until recently would have been practically impossible to extract.
 
Imagine if the site of one of our recent gun tragedies went on a trip around the country charging admission at local festivals. It would be pretty distasteful, but that is very similar to what happened with Sitting Bull's cabin. As I dig into the story, it reveals itself as a complex tale, fascinating in its details. The relations between the whites who organized the cabin journey and the American Indians who participated for their own complicated reasons promises to reveal the era's intertwined complexities. As the story reveals itself, I feel it has much to say about American Indians navigating the new realities of a world where the "frontier" and their freedom had just closed like a door behind them. It also has much to say about the realities of a new world where everything became a commodity to be marketed and nothing was off limits. As someone who has lived for much of my life on the existential and intellectual border between the Indian and non-Indian worlds where most of this story is found, I see this story through the lens that only that experience can give.

The primary cabin story is more about the journey and not the destination. But what was the final destination? Over the years, some have said it ended its days in the park in McLaughlin, South Dakota. Ian Frazier notes in a footnote in his book Great Plains that he found a reference to it being thrown in the dump after the 1893 fair. I know this isn't true because it later traveled to Coney Island. There was a sort of "confusion of cabins" around the 1893 fair and it was likely one of the others. 

One of the promotional photos either sold or given away around the time of the fair. The coat he is wearing was recently sold at auction last year for over 60 thousand dollars. Photo from my collection.

A number of photos and other promotional materials surrounded the cabin at the fair. Photographs of Rain in the Face and a few of the other Lakotas working at the cabin can be found. In addition, a few photos of a "reenactment" of the day Sitting Bull was killed with the same advertising can be found . Photos I have found so far have the same caption noting the cabin's location at the fair and the Mandan Log Cabin Company. I have also found one that includes Longfellow's famous poem The Revenge of Rain in the Face. Maybe poet Ina Coolbrith got one of those and was inspired to write her poem The Captive of the White City

In our modern context of shootings, a photo reenacting such an event for the purposes of marketing is pretty disturbing. I am unsure who took the so called reenactment photos and more research is needed. Denver Public Library has a number of D.F. Barry photos, but the reenactment photos are not listed among them. Some feature Barry and unidentified white men along with the remaining family of Sitting Bull standing outside the cabin at what appears to be a rural site. The identities of these other white men could tell me whether as I hypothesize, these were taken when P.B. Wickham and others were negotiating with Sitting Bull's widows to buy the cabin in mid 1891.

In September 1894, when the cabin was on display at Coney Island, a teetotaling Brooklyn tax commissioner named George Forester bought the cabin from the Sitting Bull Cabin Company after purchasing many other items according to a September 1894 article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The cabin at Coney and in Chicago seems to have run a brisk added business in selling Lakota art objects. An interesting story in itself. In fact, a "war shirt" purchased from Rain in the Face went down during the infamous sinking of the La Bourgogne in 1898. The shirt became an item of discussion during a Supreme Court trial about the sinking. The trial later went on to have an impact on the Titanic disaster and its aftermath.  A letter to James McLaughlin proves that he did buy it. I need to take a closer look at the McLaughlin papers to find out if there is more to be found. The McLaughlin papers may have much more to say about this since both he and his son Harry were involved.

As of of late 1894, the cabin was in the possession of a Brooklyn tax commissioner. Where did it go from there? He purchased it for $1000 dollars, the same price the Wickham group paid Sitting Bull's widows a few years before. Did it get resold and now sits in someone's private collection? Does it rest in some back room or basement, a pile of forgotten logs? Maybe it met the same fate as the one of Lincoln's many cabin homes? One of the multiple cabins at the fair that were so numerous references to them in publications become mixed up: a "confusion of cabins". Purchased by a similar profit minded group and brought to the fair, it later was found rotting and possibly being used as firewood in bad condition. The search continues.