Lost Bird
N 43° 32.241 W 096° 43.627
14T E 683638 N 4822999
In 1890, an accidental firing of a rifle by a Lakota Sioux POW led to the 7th cavalry killing 250 Lakota men, women & children. A lone infant was found in a snowbank several days later and became Genl. Colby's trophy of war.
Waymark Code: WMC81
Location: South Dakota, United States
Date Posted: 05/09/2006
Views: 40
In the spring or summer of 1890, Lost Bird was born somewhere on the prairies of South Dakota. Fate took her to Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation on Dec. 29, 1890.
On that tragic day, hundreds of Lakota men, women and children died in a confrontation with U.S. troops and the woman who likely was the child’s mother was among them. But as she was dying, she and her baby found some scanty shelter from the bitter cold and wind in the bank of a creek.
Four days after the massacre, a rescue party found the infant, miraculously alive, protected by the woman’s frozen body.
The infant was passed from one person to another and her sensational story attracted the attention of powerful white men. Eventually, this living souvenir of Wounded Knee ended up in the hands of a National Guard general.
Lost Bird was adopted by Gen. Leonard Colby and, without her knowledge or consent, his suffragist wife, Clara Bewick Colby. The baby’s original name died on the killing field, along with her chance to grow up in her own culture. She became. literally and figuratively, Zintkala Nuni, the Lost Bird.
She attended All Saint's School for girls in SIoux Falls. She did well in her first year but Colby failed to pay her tuition after that so she could not continue.
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