In Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision of the falling soldiers, a voice had announced that the Lakota and Cheyenne must not touch the bodies of their enemies or take the spoils. As the smoke and dust cloud over the battlefield thinned in the northerly breeze, Sitting Bull could see that the warriors were ignoring the pronouncement. “The dead soldiers were quite plain,” remembered the Brulé woman Julia Face, who was also watching from a distance, “as the Indians would strip them and their skins would shine in the sunlight.”

