Sioux Spirit Finds Its Way Home -- English Stranger Crusades To Bring Long Wolf's Remains To Rest

BROMSGROVE, England - After 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.

Usually, it is foreign governments and institutions with special interests who rake through Britain's past. What makes Long Wolf's case so remarkable is that it was waged as the crusade of one British housewife.

For Elizabeth Knight, the story began one day in 1991 when she bought an old book in a market near her house. There was a 1923 story that began: "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 London.

"I was moved. I kept taking the book down, imagining Long Wolf lying there amid the ranks of pale faces, the grave desolate and unkempt. It was so sad I said to myself, `I have to do something,' " said Knight.

She went looking for his grave.

Long Wolf died in Victorian England, when the sun never set on the Union Jack.

Family legend says Long Wolf, an Oglala Sioux, fought at the Little Big Horn and in later battles.

Long Wolf came to England as a performer. By 1892, he was chief of the Sioux braves who noisily, dramatically and profitably lost all the battles - two performances a day - in Col. William Cody's Wild West Show.

Long Wolf was the oldest performer for the 1892 season, when Cody's 200-member troupe, included 11 Sioux "prisoners of war" released by the U.S. government to his custody.

Knight went to the graveyard on May 1, 1992; the poplar tree was gone and so was his name from the rough white stone.

But the neophyte historian eventually found Long Wolf's grave, confirming it in cemetery records. Still visible is the image of a lone wolf - just like the one the chief sketched as his epitaph before he died.

Knight remembers vowing she would find the forgotten chief's family.

"It was the custom to return a body home because the Sioux believe that otherwise a person's spirit wanders without rest," Knight said.

His descendants say that as Long Wolf's illness worsened and he realized that he would die, he told his wife, Wants, that he wanted to be buried at home. Nonetheless, he ruled out any attempt to take his body back: Three Sioux had died on the voyage to Europe and were buried at sea; Long Wolf believed a sea burial would mean his spirit would wander forever, his descendants say.

In the end, it fell to Cody to do what could be done for the chief.

"Bill said he would take care of Long Wolf, and he did," Knight said.

Long Wolf was laid to rest at 10:30 a.m. on June 13, 1892, in a grave that Cody had purchased at Brompton Cemetery.

After finding Long Wolf's grave, Knight began to search for his family with the help of George Georgson, who publishes the quarterly magazine "American Indian Review" in London.

From Bromsgrove, Knight spread the news to societies and journals in America that a Sioux chief lay unclaimed in London. Then one day in 1993 her mail campaign paid off.

John Black Feather, a great-grandson of Long Wolf, read of Knight's quest in a South Dakota newspaper.

The family knew Long Wolf had been buried in London, his great-grandson says, but that was scant comfort. "We checked it out and found London was a big town. There must be so many cemeteries. We had no money to go over there and we didn't know how to go about tracking a body down. Suppose it wasn't a marked grave?" he said.

In the fall of 1993, Knight and her husband visited Long Wolf's family at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Now, a long paper and money chase is at last ending. Black Feather won official permission to return the remains to America.

This month, Georgson got final approvals for transport and exhumation from the British government and the Archdiocese of London, which is responsible for the cemetery.

Knight is quietly amazed at the international flurry. "I had no idea it would escalate so," she marveled.