Sitting Bull

About Sitting Bull

Overview

Sitting Bull is a 1954 American-Mexican Eastmancolor Western film directed by Sidney Salkow and René Cardona that was filmed in Mexico in CinemaScope. In a greatly fictionalised form, it depicts the war between Sitting Bull and the American forces, leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Custer's Last Stand. It was the first independent production to be filmed in the CinemaScope process. Featuring sympathetic portrayals of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, The New York Times called it a "Crazy Horse opera". Plot Major Robert Parrish (Dale Robertson) of the 7th Cavalry is considered by some to be his own worst enemy because he's not a "team player". Formerly one of the youngest Colonels in the Union Army during the American Civil War, he is now a company commander under Lt. Colonel (formerly Brevet Major General during the Civil War) George Armstrong Custer (Douglas Kennedy). His fiancée Kathy (Mary Murphy), daughter of Parrish's commanding general, breaks off their engagement because he has not risen in rank. Parrish gains no friends amongst the civilian community when he chastises them and threatens to "break heads" when they violate Sioux lands. Custer and Parrish's exasperated General and once prospective father-in-law reassigns Parrish and his company to the Bureau of Indian Affairs where Parrish is outraged at the treatment of the Indians and refuses to carry out the orders of the Indian Agent to shoot his escaping charges. Parrish is court martialed and visits his former commanding general—now President of the United States--Ulysses S. Grant—who demotes him to Captain. Parrish convinces the President to come to the Western frontier to meet Sitting Bull and prevent a war. Back in the West, now Captain Parrish meets Kathy who has announced her engagement with Charles Wentworth (William Hopper), a former major and now a war correspondent. Using captured Indians, including Sam, a former slave now a Sioux, Parrish meets with Sitting Bull (J. Carrol Naish) who agrees to meet the President in a secret meeting. Further conflicts with the Sioux lead Custer to lead his Regiment out assigning Parrish to guard supplies.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.”
— As quoted by Charles Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918)
“You come here to tell us lies, but we don't want to hear them. If we told you more, you would have paid no attention. That is all I have to say.”
— As recorded by reporters covering a speech made by Sitting Bull to U.S. military officers at a conference between the military and the Sioux who had retreated to Canada. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 196.
“I hardly sustain myself beneath the weight of white men's blood that I have shed. The whites provoked the war; their injustices, their indignities to our families, the cruel, unheard of and wholly unprovoked massacre at Fort Lyon … shook all the veins which bind and support me. I rose, tomahawk in hand, and I have done all the hurt to the whites that I could.”
— Recorded by the Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet after a council with Sitting Bull on June 19,1868. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 79-80.
“Look at me, see if I am poor, or my people either. The whites may get me at last, as you say, but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee.”
— Also told to Charles Larpenteur at Fort Union in 1867. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 73.
“I am nothing, neither a chief nor a soldier.”
— Recorded by a reporter after Sitting Bull's retreat to Canada after being defeated in the Black Hills War, originally published in the New York Herald on November 16, 1877. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 190.
“I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.”
— Recorded by James M. Walsh, inspector in the Northwest Territory of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at a conference with Sitting Bull on March 23, 1879. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 206.

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.