‘The Last Sovereigns’ Review: Across the Medicine Line

Sitting Bull played only a small part in the engagement with the Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876—at 45, he was beyond prime fighting age—and at several moments during the melee he even urged his compatriots to let some of the U.S. soldiers escape so that they might carry home word of their defeat. Nevertheless, as Mr. Utley writes, because of Sitting Bull’s staunch resistance to white encroachment, “his name had been well-known to the American people for nearly a decade,” and so “he was now the man to get.” Pursued relentlessly that fall and winter, Sitting Bull headed for the Medicine Line, the Indians’ name for the U.S.-Canada boundary, so called because of the safety it conferred from American troops. In May 1877, the chief led roughly one thousand of his people into what is now Saskatchewan.

He was met there by Maj. James Morrow Walsh of Canada’s North-West Mounted Police. The scarlet-clad 300-man constabulary had been deployed to the frontier in 1874, charged with “Canadianizing” the West and preparing it for peaceful and orderly white settlement. By contrast, in the 1870s the United States spent $20 million each year in prosecuting its Indian Wars, more than Canada’s entire federal budget. Walsh laid out for Sitting Bull the terms by which he and his fellow Sioux could remain in the land of the White Mother (Queen Victoria): namely, by following her laws and not crossing back into the United States. Walsh’s congeniality and reassurance meant that he soon became, according to Mr. Utley, “the only white man the legendarily resistant Sitting Bull ever trusted.” And yet the closeness of the two, as well as the major’s penchant for self-aggrandizement—he relished referring to himself as “Sitting Bull’s boss”—bred resentment among Walsh’s peers. For this reason and others, Canadian officials recalled him in 1880.

Notwithstanding the terms offered by Walsh and later endorsed by his superior, authorities in Ottawa took a very different view of the matter. While they were willing to offer temporary protection to the refugees, they were adamant that the Lakotas should eventually repatriate. For one thing, they feared diplomatic strain with their Washington counterparts, given the American insistence that the Indians disarm, return to the United States and accept confinement on a reservation. More urgently, in Saskatchewan as elsewhere the number of buffalo was in steep decline, and government observers worried that competition for resources would mean conflict between the Sioux and Canada’s own indigenous peoples.

In the end, it was the danger of starvation that caused Sitting Bull to give up and go back home. Facilitating his surrender was a Canadian trader named Jean Louis Legaré, who, moved by compassion for the destitute Sioux, provisioned them on their journey to Fort Buford in the Dakota Territory, where they presented themselves on July 19, 1881. Eventually, Sitting Bull and his followers were resettled on the Standing Rock Reservation in what is now South Dakota, where—save for a few months in 1885 when he toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—he spent the rest of his life. He was killed, at age 59, during an attempted arrest by federal agents on Dec. 15, 1890, another tragic casualty of protracted hostilities between settlers and Native peoples in the region, including violence that culminated with the Wounded Knee Massacre two weeks later.

Mr. Utley is a good stylist and a natural storyteller. But in some respects “The Last Sovereigns” harks back to the early 1990s—and Mr. Utley’s earlier exploration of Sitting Bull’s life—with its hoary references to “the white man” or “traditional” intertribal animosities. Such frictions between tribes are better understood as part of the all-consuming contest over access to horses and bison. Moreover, Mr. Utley seems to have studiously avoided excellent recent scholarship on the U.S.-Canada borderlands, which has shown that the Sioux exploited the international boundary for years before 1877 and that the Métis—people of mixed Native-white ancestry, whom Mr. Utley almost entirely ignores—were Sitting Bull’s most redoubtable Canadian foes.

And yet, however dated it might appear, Mr. Utley’s book contains flickers of contemporary salience, none more poignant than Sitting Bull’s own words as he pleaded his case for remaining in Canada to a white newspaper reporter in 1879. Of the Sioux offspring born in exile, the chief asked: “Will [Queen Victoria] drive her children from the country where they were born? . . . Will she separate them from their fathers and mothers?” Many readers will no doubt hear the echo of such anguish in the current humanitarian crisis unfolding on America’s border with Mexico. Likewise, the matter of sovereignty raised by Mr. Utley’s subtitle hangs like a cloud over the continuing struggle between Native peoples and energy developers over the Dakota Access Pipeline, which passes under the Missouri River not far upstream from Sitting Bull’s final resting place.

Mr. Graybill is a professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.