The Story Behind the
Photograph
This antique photo is the most expensive and I think the
most interesting one in my collection.
It’s an Imperial—which means a giant version of the cabinet card-- and
measures about 7 by 10 inches; an albumen print mounted on decorative
board. It was taken in Beatrice,
Nebraska by a photographer named Taylor.
As you can see, the photograph shows a handsome, stern-looking
military officer in a general’s uniform holding an adorable Native American
baby. The officer is Gen. Leonard
Colby who adopted this baby and had the photograph taken—as a public relations gesture.
This baby girl was found alive beneath the frozen body of
her mother four days after the killing of hundreds of Lakota men, women and
children on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota on Dec. 29, 1890, in
what came to be known as the Massacre of Wounded Knee.
She was named “Zintkala Nuni” -- “The Lost Bird” by the
tribe’s survivors, who tried to get custody of her, but she was adopted –also as
a public relations move -- by
Brigadier General Leonard W. Colby, whose men came to the killing field
after the massacre was over.
Over the protests of the Lakotas, he adopted the child,
claiming that he was a full-blooded Seneca Indian. He promised to bring food to the surviving tribe members if
they’d give him this living souvenir of Wounded Knee. Then he had this photograph
taken. On the back Colby wrote in
lead pencil on the black cardboard, words which are now nearly
indecipherable: “…..baby girl found on the field of
Wounded Knee…mother’s back on the fourth day after the battle, was found by
me. She was about 4 or 5 months
old and was frozen on her head and feet, but entirely recovered. The battle occurred Dec. 29, 1890,
about fifteen miles walking from Pine Ridge, South Dakota.”
Gen. Colby adopted the baby without even consulting his
wife, Clara Bewick Colby, who was in Washington D.C. at the time, working as a
suffragette activist, lecturer, publisher and writer. The well-meaning adoptive mother brought the infant to
Washington where Zintka, as they called her, grew up, buffeted by all the
current social trends of the time—women’s suffrage, rejection by her own
people, exploitation of her background by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, early
silent films and vaudeville.
As an adolescent, longing to return to the West to learn
more about her origins. Zintka went
to Beatrice, Neb., to live with Colby, who by then had left his wife and
daughter and married her former nanny.
The girl may have been sexually abused by her adoptive father, because
she became pregnant under his care and was shipped off to a prison-like home
for pregnant women. Her infant son
was stillborn but the girl was confined to the reformatory for another year.
Zintka returned eventually to her mother in Washington, then
married a man who infected her with syphilis. She tried different careers, including working with Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West show, which exploited her Native American background. She tried to work in vaudeville and the early movie
business—dressed as an Indian, of course-- and reportedly may have worked as a
prostitute as well.
Zintka had two more children—one died and she gave the other
to an Indian woman who, she felt, could take care of him better, because she
and her ailing husband were desperately poor.
She fell ill in February of 1920 during an influenza
epidemic, and on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, “Lost Bird” died at the age of 29 of
the Spanish flu complicated by syphilis.
She was buried in a pauper’s grave in California.
The only bright light in Zintka’s story is that her bones
were exhumed in 1991, seventy-one years after her death, by the Wounded Knee
Survivor’s Association, to be returned to the battlefield and buried with great
ceremony while news media and hundreds of Native American descendents
watched. A Lakota woman said,
“Lost Bird has returned today to the same place she was taken from. This means a new beginning, a process
of healing is completed. We can be
proud to be a Lakota. To our
sacred children, this means a beginning.”
The story of Lost Bird is so steeped in irony that it reads
as a fable of the exploitation and torture of the Native Americans by the white
invaders. On her own trail of
tears, during her short life, Zintka was robbed of her name and her mother and
any opportunity to learn about her own culture. Despite her adoptive mother’s love and good intentions, she
was terribly unhappy—prevented from going back to the West to find her kin and
then sexually abused when she did return to the West. She was exploited and
stereotyped by the film and entertainment world, eventually to die before she
reached 30.
Lost Bird’s story has been told by Renee Sansom Flood in the
1998 book “Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota”, and Ms. Flood also
spurred the effort to find Zintka’s grave and bring her home. The author was a social worker in South
Dakota when a colleague showed her a faded photograph that set her out on her
years of research and writing.
That photo, found by the woman working with Renee Flood in an old trunk
in her late father’s attic, was the same photo I own today—with Colby’s writing
on the back. Renee Flood became so
obsessed with telling Lost Bird’s story and bringing her home to be buried with
her people that she had recurring dreams of the little girl until she fulfilled
her obsession.
.
I know that owning this historic photograph is a serious
responsibility. I, too, would like
to spread the story of
Zintka’s sad life. The story of Lost Bird is a vivid illustration
of how a faded old photograph, over a century old, can have the power to move people
to make discoveries long after the subject and the photographer are dead.
