What Became of Lost Bird

As the little girl grew she was paraded before whites as a special attraction, later appearing in the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco. (It should be noted that General Colby, who later became Assistant Attorney General of the U.S., arrived after the massacre to claim his “war trophy”.) The story is a long tragic tale of a child who never quite fit in; too white for her own people and too Indian for whites. She ended up on the streets of San Francisco where she died at the age of twenty-nine. In 1991 Lost Bird’s grave was located and her bones carefully dug up to be transported back to Wounded Knee Cemetery where she was reburied during a tribal ceremony beside the fence that today surrounds the trench-grave where her mother had lain waiting for 101 years.