A confrontation developed.

Shots were fired.

Sitting Bull was shot and killed, along with several others on both sides.

The circumstances of who fired first and what the sequence of events actually was have been disputed in accounts recorded at different times and by people with different relationships to what happened.

What is not disputed is that Sitting Bull was dead at approximately fifty-nine years of age, killed by Indian Police in an arrest ordered by a federal reservation agent, on the reservation where the U.S. government had required him to live.

What happened to his body in the hours and days that followed is where the story of his belongings — including his hair — begins.