6A
Tuesday, March 28, 1995
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Sioux Indians plea for remains of famous chief
The Associated Press
TEMPE, Ariz. — More than a century after Chief Long Wolf died in London while performing with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, descendants of the Oglala Sioux warrior have found his neglected and long-forgotten grave.
Now they want to bring his remains back to the grassy plains of South Dakota so that his spirit can finally rest.
Long Wolf, believed by his family to have fought in the Battle of Little Big Horn, died of pneumonia at age 59 in 1892 and was buried in a cemetery among the Victorian homes of West London.
The location of that grave became lost over time.
The Sioux believe a dead person's spirit cannot rest until the body is buried on tribal land, and Long Wolf's descendants were troubled by his fate for generations until the discovery of a poetic lament over a lonely grave.
"I'm glad we found him," said his great-grandson John Black Feather, 58, a retired automobile test driver in this Phoenix suburb. "We don't care what happened in the past. We just want to bring him home."
As a child, Black Feather listened to his mother's stories of Long Wolf, an Indian dancer covered with battle scars. In the 1880s, as federal troops were herding thousands of Sioux onto reservations, William Cody recruited Long Wolf and 10 others to perform in his traveling show, recreating battles.
Four years ago, a lover of old books, Elizabeth Knight of Bromsgrove, England, read a
1920s essay by Scottish adventurer Robert Cunninghame Graham lamenting the fact that the English climate had obliterated the writing on the headstone of a Sioux chief.
"I in a lonel corner of a crowded London cemetery, just at the end of a smoke-stained, Graeco-Roman colonnade, under a poplar tree, nestles a neglected grave," begins the essay, "Long Wolf."
Graham, a friend of Cody's,
wrote: "Whether his children,
if he had any, talk of his death in
the strange city ... remains a
problem never to be solved."
"It struck a chord in me that it's so sad," Knight said. "I said to my husband, 'I've got to do something about this, because it's bothering me.'"
Knight drove 90 miles to find the grave marker with a barely discernible image of a wolf. She wrote a plea for information, which Black Feather eventually saw in the Indian Country Today newspaper.
Black Feather's family and Oglala Sioux tribal officials are planning a trip to London, possibly in late May. The family is trying to raise $20,000 to pay for the travel and reburial on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Two caskets are buried on top of Long Wolf's, that of an Englishman and a 2-year-old Sioux girl named Star Ghost Dog, who was killed when she fell from a horse in Cody's show. The girl will be buried near Wounded Knee and the Englishman will be reburied elsewhere.
The plot belonged to Cody, whose descendants quickly gave permission for the casket removal.
Serb fighting prompts U.N. threat
NATO may bomb to protect civilians from further attack
The Associated Press
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Unable to stop the intensifying war in Bosnia, U.N. peacekeepers warned yesterday that NATO may need to bomb Serb forces to prevent them from targeting civilians.
The threat came as Serbs reported the fiercest fighting yet on a northeastern battlefront where troops of the Muslim-led government have been gaining control. The Serbs also said they launched a major counterattack on government troops in central Bosnia. And Croatian Serbs threatened to cross the border to help their ethnic kin in Bosnia.
"Events are spinning out of control," said Colum Murphy, a spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping force. "Our worst fears could become reality in the not-too-distant future."
Murphy warned the Serbs that the new commander of the peacekeeping force, Lt. Gen. Rupert Smith, would call for NATO air strikes if they the deliberately shell civilians.
"There are no hollow threats," he
Smith's predecessor, Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Rose, was criticized for opposing the use of air power on Serb artillery pounding the U.N. "safe area" of Bihac in northwest Bosnia late last year.
said. "Attacks that deliberately target civilians will meet a determined response, including use of air power."
A week of intense fighting has all but shattered an already tenuous three-month truce. Each warring side has blamed the other for spurning a political settlement in favor of more combat.
The increasingly confident Bosniian government army has seized 35 square miles of Serb-held territory as well as a vital communications tower in central Bosnia. A second tower in the northeast was virtually surrounded.
In apparent retaliation, Serbs shelled the government-held towns of Gorazde and Mostar over the weekend, killing a child and wounding about 20 civilians.
The Bosnian army said Serb gunners also killed three people on a mountain road that is the only overland route in and out of besieged Sarajevo. Sniper fire in the Bosnian capital yesterday killed a man in his mid-60s.
Bosnia fighting
Recent Serb attacks on government-held towns:
The Bosnian Serb news agency, SRNA, quoted Serb military sources as saying the government yesterday unleashed the fiercest attack yet of its eight-day offensive in the mountains near the northeast city of Tuzla. U.N. peacekeepers confirmed increased fighting in the area but had no details.
On the other major front, north of Travnik in central Bosnia, SRNA said Serb forces launched a counterattack after checking a government offensive on Sunday. Large numbers of government troops reportedly were surrounded on snow-covered mountain slopes.
Croatian Serbs, who like Bosnian Serbs have carved out a self-proclaimed republic, also threatened to join the fighting in Bosnia if government offensiveives continue.
Milan Strabac, the Croatian Serb's deputy information minister, warned the Bosnian government army against moving its strike near Tuzla farther north toward a Serbheld corridor across northern Bosnia.
The Posavina corridor is the only land passage linking Serb-bled territories in Croatia and western Bosnia with eastern Bosnia and Serbia.
"The corridor represents life for us," Strabac said. "If it is in any way threatened, we would respond decisively."
The Bosnian war has left more than 200,000 people dead or missing since April 1992.
Gunman's target wasn't Clinton, attorneys say
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The man who hit the White House with semiautomatic rifle fire in October wasn't shooting the weapon in the most accurate and efficient way, a former FBI weapons experts testified yesterday.
The gunman grasped the weapon under his arm — a technique the military has abandoned because "it proved over the years to be very inaccurate," said Robert Taubert, now a consultant.
Attorneys for the gunman — Francisco Martin Duran, 26, of Colorado Springs, Colo. — argue that their client shouldn't be convicted of attempted assassination
because he didn't aim his weapon at anyone and didn't intend to hurt anybody, including President Clinton.
Duran vented his anger at the government by firing at a symbol of American government, the White House, defense attorneys A.J. Kramer and Leigh Kenny have said. They've also called Duran a paranoid schizophrenic.
Prosecutors, however, have said Duran was an anarchist who wanted a revolution.
Duran is being tried on 10 counts, including attempted assassination, which could send him to prison for life if he's convicted. He is accused of pulling a semiautomatic rifle from under his trench coat and firing at the White House from a Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk on Oct. 29.
The best way to fire the type of weapon Duran used is from a prone position, because the rifle is not considered very accurate, Taubert said. From a standing position, it's best to mount it on the shoulder while looking through the rifle's sight, he said.
Moving the rifle back and forth also will reduce accuracy, Taubert said.
During testimony last week, a Richmond, Va., man who was near the White House during the shooting told jurors he saw Duran firing haphazardly, moving the gun back and forth.
Also yesterday, two former platoon sergeants testified that Duran received military firearms training while he was an Army medic in Hawaii.
And Duran's father-in-law, Wayne Warner, testified that Duran became frustrated with the government after he was accused of drunken driving and running down a woman with his car while stationed in Hawaii.
Duran was court-martialed, imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth and ejected from the Army with a dishonorable discharge, Warner said.
"He said, 'The government's messed up. We've got to change it.'" Warner said.