Reading and Book Signing with Ephriam Dickson Author of Sitting Bull Surrender Census

            Ken Sanders Rare Books is pleased to announce a reading and book singing with Ephriam Dickson, author of Sitting Bull Surrender Census on Wednesday, March 16th at 7:00 p.m. at our downtown bookstore (268 South 200 East). Copies of Sitting Bull Surrender Census ($49.95 Hardcover) will be available for purchase and signing at the event. This event is free and open to the public.
            In 1881, the famed Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull finally surrendered to the U.S. Army, after struggling to survive for nearly five years in exile in Canada. Having first crossed the international border with several thousand Lakota (Sioux) after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull’s surrender in 1881 marked the end of the Indian wars on the northern Great Plains.
            Sitting Bull Surrender Census provides an unparalleled portrait of the people who surrendered with Sitting Bull, as well as their relatives who had remained behind on the Standing Rock Reservation on the South Dakota-North Dakota border.Combing through thousands of original documents at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and Kansas City, Dickson uncovered a long forgotten census record recorded just weeks after Sitting Bull’s arrival at Standing Rock. The original document included nearly fifteen hundred pages listing the names of every man, woman and child on the reservation, spelled in Lakota as well as in English. For Lakota scholars, this new document provides valuable new information about native communities in the Dakotas and an intimate snapshot of Sitting Bull’s people. Dickson’s research on this document led to a second discovery. In 1880, the U.S. Census Bureau had attempted for the first time to count every American Indian within the continental United States. Until recently, most historians believed that this census effort had failed from lack of funding. However, Dickson discovered numerous documents showing that nearly every reservation submitted a census. Most of these records were lost in a fire at the census office in 1896. However, duplicate copies of the census had been created and many still survived buried within scattered reservation records such as those of Standing Rock. These census records open new avenues for research and provide deeper understanding to the responses of Indian communities as they were forced to settle on to reservations.
            Ephriam Dickson is curator at the Fort Douglas Museum in Salt Lake City and has published a number of articles on the Indian Wars on the northern Great Plains. Dickson will be speaking about his new book on March 16 at 7 p.m. at Ken Sanders Rare Books. He is currently working on a new book highlighting the social history of the frontier army in Utah.