While preparing for this week’s show on Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting
Bull, we hoped to find audio recordings of this legendary Lakota
leader talking or singing. We reached out to historian Bill
Yenne and Alexandra Shadid, an archivist at the University of
Oklahoma’s Western History Collections, which houses the papers
of Walter Stanley Campbell — better known by his pen name,
Stanley Vestal, one of the earliest biographers of Sitting Bull
whose source material is the foundation for much of the current
research being published on Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull’s
signature from a pictograph he drew in 1882. (Image courtesy of
the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History) Both
scholars informed us that they weren’t aware of any audio
recordings in Sitting Bull’s own voice, but Ms. Shadid did offer
up the transcripts of Vestal’s interviews and songs by Sitting
Bull. She also referred us to a recording housed at the
Minnesota Historical Society, just a five-minute walk from our
offices in downtown Saint Paul. Here,