What is relevant to the story of his hair and his remains is what happened to his reputation and to his physical legacy after his death — and the nature of his death itself, which was violent, politically charged, and surrounded by the kind of contested authority that would continue to mark everything associated with his name for the next century and more.

The Morning of December 15, 1890

By 1890, Sitting Bull was living on the Standing Rock Reservation in what is now North Dakota, having returned from Canada — where he had led a portion of his people after the Little Bighorn — and having eventually surrendered to U.S. authorities in 1881.

He had spent time as a kind of attraction in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, an experience that illustrated with particular clarity the American appetite for a version of Sitting Bull that was spectacle rather than person.

In the fall of 1890, the Ghost Dance movement was spreading across the Plains reservations.