By 1953 Sitting Bull's grave at Fort Yates, North Dakota, had lain neglected for sixty years beside the old agency, and the Oahe reservoir was coming that would lap at the bluffs below it. Clarence Grey Eagle, a relative of Sitting Bull by marriage and, by an irony nobody missed, the son of one of the Indian police who had gone to arrest him in 1890, joined a group of Mobridge businessmen who wanted the chief reburied on the South Dakota side, nearer the Grand River where he was born. They got a letter from the Bureau of Indian Affairs saying the family should decide where he lay, and on the night of April 8, 1953, they drove to Fort Yates, dug up the grave and drove back with what they found.
They reburied the remains here, on a bluff on the Standing Rock Reservation looking east across the water to Mobridge, and sealed them under concrete. Korczak Ziolkowski, the sculptor of the Crazy Horse carving, cut the head that marks the grave from a block of granite off the Crazy Horse mountain, and when the state staged a dedication later that year with the governor presiding, he stayed away, saying the ceremony made political use of a man whose family had asked for none. The monument was listed on the National Register in 2006, and its keepers have pledged not to turn it into a business.
Beside it stands a white obelisk to Sakakawea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman who traveled with Lewis and Clark, raised in the late 1920s with money collected by Mobridge schoolchildren in the belief that she died at Fort Manuel, upriver, in 1812. Where she is buried is argued as hotly as the question of whose bones lie under Sitting Bull's head.
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