Sitting Bull was about forty-five years old, his legs bowed from a boyhood of riding ponies, his left foot maimed by an old bullet wound that caused him to amble lopsidedly as he searched the top of the butte for a place to sit, finally settling on a flat, moss-padded rock. He’d been only twenty-five years old when he suffered the injury to his foot as part of a horse-stealing raid against his people’s hated enemies, the Crows. During a tense standoff, he had the temerity to step forward with his gun in one hand and his buffalo-hide shield in the other and challenge the Crow leader to a
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