The DNA evidence came from a lock of hair, and it pointed to a living man. For more than a century, the story of America’s most famous Native American leader had seemed settled. A known grave. A family documented on paper.

But that hair had been cut from his corpse without permission by an army surgeon, then hidden in a museum under the surgeon’s name. The truth kept changing. The latest change ends at a grave that two states fought over. Most headlines skip the next part.

Most of that braid no longer exists. When the hair finally returned to Sitting Bull’s family, they burned most of it in a spiritual ceremony. Smoke, sage, then it was gone. Only one small piece was kept.

Five to six centimeters long, about two inches. That fragment was all science had to work with, and before any scientist was allowed near it, there was a different kind of test. The geneticist who requested the hair, a Danish professor named Eske Willerslev, was told he must ask permission from the great-grandfather himself. So on a December night in the basement of a house in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the lights were turned off.

A Lakota man called upon the spirit of Sitting Bull to ask for guidance. The scientist sat in the dark and listened. The answer, apparently, was approval. The hair was another matter.

It took fourteen years to extract anything readable from it. So what could a two-inch clipping, taken from a man dead for more than a century, possibly hide? It begins on the morning the clipping was taken. This is what the scene most likely looked like.

December 15, 1890. Before the first light of dawn, a sixteen-year-old boy is riding his father’s horse home along the frozen Grand River. He passes the cabin of his famous uncle. Then he hears the sound of hooves.

A large group of Indian police from the Standing Rock Agency arrives on horseback at the door. The boy lies flat in the bushes. He cannot see much. He hears voices.

He hears the cries of his uncle’s two wives, then shouting, then gunfire, then wailing. Not far away, two troops of Captain Edward Fechet’s cavalry wait with a Gatling gun and a Hotchkiss gun in case the police need help. The agent at Standing Rock, James McLaughlin, had ordered the arrest because he feared the man inside would support the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement spreading through Lakota country. When the shooting stops, seven of the uncle’s supporters and four of the policemen are dead.

The uncle has been shot in the chest by Lieutenant Bullhead and in the head by Red Tomahawk. His name was Sitting Bull. Imagine what happened next, because almost no one does. The police throw Sitting Bull’s body into a wagon.

Then they place their own dead on top of him. The wagon heads north toward Fort Yates, crossing a new boundary, the line that had just divided the Standing Rock reservation between the newly created states of North and South Dakota. At the fort, before any burial takes place, the post surgeon intervenes. His name is Horace Deeble.

He has no permission. He has no authority. He removes the cloth trousers from the corpse. And he takes a lock of hair, the braid near the crown of the head that had held Sitting Bull’s feather, as souvenirs.

Now stop at the photograph the Smithsonian Institution later took of that braid. A lock of dark hair placed alone before the camera with a catalog number beside it. EL00226. This is not an artifact.

This is a part of a murdered man, preserved like a spoon. And not just any man. His real name was Tatanka Iyotake, meaning “Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down. ” He led the Hunkpapa Lakota against United States policy for years.

In 1876, he was at the heart of the Lakota victory over Custer at Little Bighorn, the battle the Lakota called the Greasy Grass Fight. He was killed fourteen years later. This is a story about who has the right to own a dead man, his hair, his blood, and his bones. And the first owner was a stranger with a scalpel.

On June 19, 1896, Horace Deeble loaned the braid and the trousers to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Then the story went quiet. The hair sat for over a century at room temperature inside a glass box. The museum’s records said the pieces were on loan from a man named Deeble.

No first name that anyone knew. Bill Billeck, who later ran the repatriation office at the National Museum of Natural History, said they did not know who he was. In 1997, the lock of hair surfaced in the National Anthropological Archives, and a British anthropologist connected it to Sitting Bull. Billeck’s investigations finally revealed the surgeon’s identity.

Even the Deeble family themselves never knew what he had stolen. No history book ever recorded that the hair and trousers were taken from the corpse. America’s most famous Native American leader sat in a museum storage room under the name of the man who had cut him. Under federal law, that hair is classified as human remains.

Human remains go home. But to whom? In 1999, the Smithsonian sent letters to Lakota tribes looking for Sitting Bull’s closest living relatives. In February 2001, a man named Don Tonuso filed a claim for the hair.

He said he descended from One Bull, the nephew Sitting Bull had adopted as his son. Sitting Bull’s family tree was tangled. Four wives, an adopted son, and branches each claiming descent. But in one family’s account, One Bull was not a loyal son.

Ernie LaPointe, a Lakota man from South Dakota, said One Bull was the one who betrayed his uncle. That is family testimony, not settled history. But it shows how sharp this dispute became. Billeck spent five years searching for the family.

In 2002, he contacted LaPointe, who told him there were four of them, himself and three sisters. Anyone who objected had thirty days to contest. LaPointe walked into the National Museum of Natural History on December 5, 2007, and the braid came home. In Copenhagen, Willerslev read about it in a magazine and, by his own account, nearly choked on his coffee in surprise.

Sitting Bull had been his hero since childhood. He wrote to LaPointe asking to compare Ernie’s and his sisters’ DNA with the hair. Then the trouble began. Sitting Bull’s lineage reaches Ernie through Ernie’s mother through her daughters.

Mitochondrial DNA passes from mothers, so Sitting Bull never passed his on. The Y chromosome passes from father to son, and that line runs through women. Both standard tools were useless. Worse, initial tests found almost no original DNA.

The hair had degraded for a century, and it had likely been treated with inorganic arsenic compounds, a routine museum practice of that era that no one had documented. The preservation had poisoned the evidence. After filtering, the team could read only 0. 8% of Sitting Bull’s genome.

Imagine trying to identify a book from a few torn scraps of its letters. Fourteen Lakota volunteers spat into tubes. After excluding a half-brother, thirteen unrelated people remained. But only five, including Ernie, had no mixed European ancestry.

The calculations required unmixed samples. That left 2,259 points of comparison. Every existing method failed. So two researchers on the team, Ida Moltke and Thorfinn Sand Korneliussen, built a new method from scratch.

The first test worked. The hair’s DNA clustered with Native American groups. It was indeed the hair of an Indigenous person. Now the only remaining question was which family.

The new method reduces everything to a single number. If two people are unrelated, the number should be close to zero. If one is the great-grandson of the other, it should reach about 0. 125, one-eighth.

The results from the other four unmixed Lakota volunteers came in below 0. 002. Ernie LaPointe’s came in at 0. 114.

This is the image worth pausing on. In the published paper, there is a graph with two humps of bars. One hump, piled at zero, shows what thousands of simulated cases of unrelated strangers look like. The other hump, to the right, shows simulations of descendants.

Inside that right hump sits one thin red line, representing Ernie. The team ran 100,000 simulations. The chance that an unrelated man would produce his result was less than 0. 4%.

The paper was published in Science Advances on October 27, 2021. Its authors described it, to their knowledge, as the first published case connecting a living person to a historical figure through a small amount of ancient DNA via relatives this distant. Because Ernie had an obvious personal interest, the paper stated it plainly. He never touched the data analysis.

A dead man had acknowledged his heir. Ernie LaPointe was 73 at the time, a Vietnam veteran living in the old mining town of Lead, South Dakota. He had lived his entire adult life with people doubting him. Many had tried to question the kinship between him and his sisters and Sitting Bull, he said.

Now his name was on the paper as a co-author, alongside William Billeck of the Smithsonian, the man who first tracked down the surgeon. The braid that had left the family in a wagon in 1890 now pointed straight back at them. Ernie, Marlene Little Spotted Horse Anderson, and Ethel Little Spotted Horse Bates, their blood confirmed by a keepsake. Willerslev said the result matches exactly what one would expect from a grandson’s descendant.

The authors even mentioned who might be next for this kind of approach, such as the Romanov family, Richard III, and Jesse James. But one line in the paper’s opening paragraph changes the real purpose of this test. The authors wrote that LaPointe wanted to confirm the kinship, in part to help settle concerns about Sitting Bull’s final resting place. To have the right to decide the fate of the grave, he had to prove he was family.

Because there is no single grave. There are two. One at Fort Yates, North Dakota. Another at Mobridge, South Dakota.

Both official. Both visited. LaPointe believes the bones are at Mobridge, in a place he says has nothing to do with Sitting Bull. And before any bones are moved, the researcher said, they should be tested the same way the hair was.

The reason there are two graves goes back to Fort Yates, in 1890, right after the surgeon finished his work. Soldiers wrapped Sitting Bull’s body in cloth and placed it in a wooden coffin. There was no funeral ceremony, no family. Four military prisoners dug the hole in the fort’s cemetery.

Only Agent McLaughlin and three officers stood by to watch. According to J. F. Wagner, who helped build the coffin, the soldiers poured quicklime inside before sealing it, a caustic powder that hastens the body’s return to dust.

Then, in 1903, the federal government closed the fort and moved every military grave in that cemetery, except his. They left Sitting Bull behind in an abandoned burial ground. At some point, the remains were exhumed, placed in a wooden box, and reburied in the same spot under a thin slab of concrete. No one ever explained who did this or why.

Decades later, Sitting Bull’s relatives still seethed that strangers had tampered with their grandfather’s remains. Into that gap flowed the stories. One rumor said the soldiers never buried him at all, that the body had been dissected. Another said the remains were secretly dug up and hidden elsewhere.

Two boys claimed they had tunneled to the grave and taken out two bones. Then there is the account carried by Lakota oral history, important enough to be mentioned in the DNA paper itself. The paper says his supporters moved his remains to an unknown place in Canada shortly after burial. The choice of that country was not random.

Sitting Bull had lived for years in exile in Canada after the Battle of Little Bighorn, in the place the Lakota called Grandmother’s Land, and in 1881 he returned to the United States declaring this to be his country. If his people wanted him somewhere no army could follow, the north was where they knew. Imagine men slipping north through the snow with a bundle no soldier ever saw. That is legend, not proof.

No one ever confirmed it. No one ever disproved it either. Now it is 1953. Remember the sixteen-year-old boy who was in the bushes?

His name was Clarence Grey Eagle, and he is now an old man. He sits in the offices of the North Dakota Department of Health in Bismarck, beside his interpreter Ray Claymore, and three businessmen from Mobridge, Walter Tintland, George Walters, and Ray Miles, who had formed what was called the Dakota Memorial Association. For years they had begged for care of the grave. Nothing.

The sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who was carving the Crazy Horse monument in the Black Hills, inspected the Fort Yates site and was disgusted by its condition. He chose a new site himself, a remote windswept bluff above the Missouri River. The state historian Russell Reid and health official Dr. R.

O. Saxvik refused his request. Sitting Bull was too important a historical figure to be handed over. But Grey Eagle held a document in his favor, a power of attorney signed by members of Sitting Bull’s own family.

The Department of the Interior had also told him the decision belonged to the nearest relatives. So on the night of April 8, 1953, they drove north through a blizzard. With the help of the reservation superintendent Charles Spencer, they broke through the concrete slab and dug down to the bones. They took out the large bones first, then sifted the frozen soil for the small ones.

Watching it all was Al Miles, a licensed undertaker in both Dakotas. The New York Times later described a photograph from that night, showing the undertaker holding a cigarette in one hand and a human femur in the other. They drove back across the border, heading south along the west bank of the Missouri. The bones were placed in a steel casket, the casket was buried in a grave on the bluff across from Mobridge, and the whole thing was covered with twenty tons of concrete.

North Dakota woke up furious. The front page of the Bismarck Tribune called the South Dakotans “grave robbers” who had stolen Sitting Bull’s bones. Grey Eagle replied through his interpreter that he was tired of bureaucracy, so they went and got him. Fort Yates responded with its own claim: the raiders had dug up the wrong target.

All they got, they said, was horse bones, or the remains of an unknown settler buried near the surface, because Sitting Bull had been buried deep in quicklime. Then Fort Yates covered its grave with a concrete slab, a large rock, and protective posts, as if something worth stealing was still underneath. Three days after the raid, on April 11, large crowds gathered at the new grave for a memorial, sixty-two years after his death. Among them were three of Sitting Bull’s granddaughters.

Rapid City wanted the bones too. Montana proposed moving them to Little Bighorn. And the Mobridge account of the raid contains a detail almost no one mentions. The group that moved the bones included a descendant of Sitting Bull and one of the officers who had arrested him.

So DNA could finally settle it. Test the Mobridge bones against the hair and you will know the truth. But the last page of the research paper carries a surprise. The samples used in the study are owned by Ernie LaPointe, and at his request, they were destroyed.

The physical locks of hair the scientists worked on no longer exist. What remains is the genetic sequence data, which is also legally his, archived in Copenhagen by Willerslev on his behalf. Anyone who wishes to use Sitting Bull’s genetic data needs Ernie’s permission. His contact address is printed right there in the paper.

And if he is not available, the paper says, ask his descendants. There is a second line almost no one read. The researchers never asked permission from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Sitting Bull’s modern-day tribe. They emailed the tribal chairman and the heritage preservation officer in August 2020 to inform them of the study.

The tribe never replied. The paper places restrictions even on the genetic data of the volunteers themselves. It can only be used to verify this one family matter and nothing else. The author’s position was blunt.

Under American repatriation law, direct descendants come before the tribe. The key to Sitting Bull’s grave has become a digital file, and one man holds it. The tribe’s response came later, and publicly. John Eagle, the heritage preservation officer at Standing Rock, said removing Sitting Bull’s remains would be a great insult.

LaPointe said he would petition the state to exhume the Mobridge bones and examine them, and that if he got them, they would not stay in Mobridge. His family pressed for reburial at Little Bighorn, the place of Sitting Bull’s greatest vision. Meanwhile, the Mobridge grave had fallen into neglect. When the Missouri River was dammed to create Lake Oahe, the bridge traffic was rerouted, and the monument was left isolated.

Vandals broke the nose of the stone face, smashed the carved pipe, and scratched the inscriptions. In 2005, two local men, Brian Defender and Rhett Albers, bought the forty acres beneath the grave to restore it, working with the sculptor’s daughter, Monique Ziolkowski. Lakota visitors still leave sage there. Albers said that for him, it does not really matter where the bones are.

The next year, the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The tribe spoke of building a Lakota cultural center near the bluff, while the old plot in North Dakota got its own cleaning and its own marker. Two graves, two markers, one family. Which brings us back to that document in Grey Eagle’s pocket.

At Fort Yates, the bronze plaque above the old grave admits only that Sitting Bull may have been exhumed in 1953 at the request of four of his descendants. Four. But the record of names actually signed includes three women, three granddaughters of Sitting Bull: Nancy Kicking Bear, Sarah Little Spotted Horse, and Angeline Spotted Horse LaPointe. Nancy was the one who asked Ziolkowski to carve her grandfather’s face.

Angeline, also known as Angelique, was the daughter of Standing Holly, Sitting Bull’s youngest daughter. She was Ernie LaPointe’s mother. The grave Ernie wants to open exists because his mother signed the approval for it when he was about five years old. And that is the part that turns the story upside down.

That little boy grew up on a certain rule. Angeline made him swear total secrecy. Never tell anyone you are Sitting Bull’s grandson. Ernie was born in 1948 on the Pine Ridge reservation and raised in Rapid City.

He described what happened when he was five. On a Rapid City street, a daughter of one of the bulls attacked his mother for claiming blood kinship with Sitting Bull. That was almost the same year the bones were buried under the concrete. Then imagine a television studio in New York.

October 1, 1958. The game show I’ve Got a Secret on CBS, the night Roy Rogers was the celebrity guest. The episode listings for that broadcast include a contestant whose secret was that she was Sitting Bull’s granddaughter, and Ernie’s biography indicates his mother appeared on the show that October. The pattern was simple.

The contestant whispered the secret to the host. The words flashed on the screen for everyone at home to see. A panel of celebrities tried to guess the secret, and each member who failed earned the contestant ten dollars. On the same night’s list was another contestant whose secret was a family connection to General Custer.

If that contestant was Angeline, then she told the whole country what she had forbidden her son to say on the street. Shortly afterward, Angeline died of cancer. Ernie was ten years old. Before she died, she told him a day might come when it would be important to set things right.

Sixty-three years after that broadcast, a braid her grandfather had lost to an army surgeon did exactly that. Back at the lamp in Copenhagen, the braid is no longer there. It was burned with the sage, and the last fragment of it was then deliberately destroyed. Along the Missouri River from Fort Yates, on that windswept bluff, a granite face twice the size of a human face looks out over the water.

Korczak Ziolkowski, the sculptor who began work on Crazy Horse Mountain, carved it from the mountain’s own stone and placed it there on August 26, 1953. The inscription on the base reads, “Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull. ” The nose is broken. Beneath it, under twenty tons of concrete, is a steel casket holding bones no scientist has ever examined.

Sealed there on the word of a woman who kept a secret, then confessed it before the entire country, according to her son’s account. Her son holds the file that could put a name to those bones. If that concrete is ever broken, will there still be something left that Sitting Bull’s own hair would recognize?