09/16/2023
Sioux Chief Long Wolf & Family", ca. 1880.
~ βA Stranger Hears Last Wish of a Sioux Chief
Long Wolf went to London with Buffalo Bill's show and died there in 1892. Thanks to the struggles of a British homemaker, his remains will be returned home.β
May 28, 1997 |WILLIAM D. MONTALBANO
TIMES STAFF WRITER
BROMSGROVE, England β βAfter a restless century in a melancholy English graveyard, the remains--and the spirit--of a Sioux chief named Long Wolf are returning to his ancestral home in America because one stranger cared.
The stranger is a 56-year-old English homemaker named Elizabeth Knight, who lives in a small row house with her husband, Peter, a roof repairer in this Worcestershire village near Birmingham.
"I am a very ordinary sort of person," she said.
The sort who writes letters, not e-mail, who makes no long-distance phone calls, has no fancy degrees, has little worldly experience, who never gets her name in the papers. The sort who turns detective and historian and raises a transatlantic fuss because her heart is moved and her sense of fair play is outraged.
This is the story of how heirs of Middle England and the Wild West have joined forces to fulfill a dying wish made more than a century ago.
For Knight, the story began the day in 1991 that she bought an old book in a market near her house. There was a 1923 story by a Scottish adventurer named R. B. Cunninghame Graham that began this way: "In a lone corner of a crowded London cemetery, just at the end of a smoke-stained Greco-Roman colonnade under a poplar tree, nestles a neglected grave."
In the grave, under a stylized cross and the howling image of his namesake, lies Long Wolf. He died at 59 in a London hospital on June 11, 1892, the victim of bronchial pneumonia contracted in what was then a crowded, dark, gloomy, industrial city as far as anywhere on Earth from the Great Plains of North America.
"I was moved. I kept taking the book down, imagining Long Wolf lying there amid the ranks of pale faces.
