His three fellow loungers, two Cheyenne and his nephew White Bull, are said to have had “shaky legs.” They could hardly match the daring Tatanka Iyotake, chief of the Lakota Nation, or, as many know him, Sitting Bull. In placid contrast, he “rose up slowly . . . and started back at a measured pace toward his horse.” The immovable display well suits his namesake, but before we read of this stoic, bovine squat, Ernie LaPointe, our narrator and Iyotake’s great-grandson, narrates the chief’s days as a child. Iyotake’s boyhood name was Jumping Badger, but he was mocked as “Hunkesni, ‘slow-moving,’ ‘weak,’' for thinking before he acted, a moniker that, unlike his wounds, didn’t stick.
As the story unrolls with the face-to-face campfire feel of an indigenous oral yarn, LaPointe synthesizes treaties and dates galore, a relief for scrutinous history buffs, by which he refutes some long-assumed falsehoods of an earlier Sitting Bull biographer—Stanley Vestal. Factual insistence does not stifle the epic action and drama that proceed, however, at least not in this writer’s opinion. Like peering through backstage curtains on climactic scenes, LaPointe’s familial tie to Iyotake offers an intimate insider scoop on the warrior’s life from his hair-waving coup-counting days in the plains to his desperate scurry from Uncle Sam’s self-righteous boot.
