Buffalo Bill's Rough Rider Will Be Leaving Danbury, 112 Years Later
An Oglala Lakota man from South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation will be accompanied home by Danbury Museum's Robert Young.
Albert Afraid of Hawk was photographed and had his portrait painted, which hung in Washington. While so far, no one knows why his image was captured so often, it is assumed by the Danbury Museum that he was a young man of some importance. Credit Christine Rose
from: newtown.patch.com
By Christine Rose
July 2, 2012
For more than 100 years, Albert Afraid of Hawk has been resting in a grave between a dirt road and wooded hills in Danbury's Wooster Cemetery. Now, finally, he is finally getting ready to go home.
Afraid of Hawk, a rough rider with the Buffalo Bill Wild West exhibition, was an Oglala Sioux, today better known as a member of South Dakota’s Oglala Lakota tribe. Back then, many Lakota traveled with the show, which returned each year to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to bring home tribal members, and to enlist new ones for the worldwide tour of Buffalo Bill Cody’s exhibition.
An Oglala Lakota man from South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation will be accompanied home by Danbury Museum's Robert Young.
Albert Afraid of Hawk was photographed and had his portrait painted, which hung in Washington. While so far, no one knows why his image was captured so often, it is assumed by the Danbury Museum that he was a young man of some importance. Credit Christine Rose
from: newtown.patch.com
By Christine Rose
July 2, 2012
For more than 100 years, Albert Afraid of Hawk has been resting in a grave between a dirt road and wooded hills in Danbury's Wooster Cemetery. Now, finally, he is finally getting ready to go home.
Afraid of Hawk, a rough rider with the Buffalo Bill Wild West exhibition, was an Oglala Sioux, today better known as a member of South Dakota’s Oglala Lakota tribe. Back then, many Lakota traveled with the show, which returned each year to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to bring home tribal members, and to enlist new ones for the worldwide tour of Buffalo Bill Cody’s exhibition.
Robert Young of the Danbury Museum felt compelled, and worked diligently, to see that Afraid of Hawk was returned to his homeland.
Credit Christine Rose
In the year 1900, the exhibition came through Danbury, as it had in years before and after. Cody was friends with PT Barnum, who was living in Bridgeport, and helped Cody with his travel scheduling. The exhibition even performed with the Bailey Circus.
But on this particularly fateful trip, Afraid of Hawk never made it past the Danbury stop. A handsome, tall, 20 year old, he fell victim to a bad can of corn and died in Danbury Hospital. The newspaper's sub-headline read, Corn More Deadly Than Bullets, referencing that others had also become quite ill.
The article in News Times read, “There was a strange scene at the hospital in this city last Thursday night, when two Indian chiefs, full blooded Sioux, arrayed in their native costumes, their faces still smeared with battle paint, stood over the corpse of their tribesman and pleaded with the Great Spirit to take his soul safely over the unknown river, upon the farther shores of which the happy hunting ground lies.”
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