"Sioux Chief Long Wolf & Family", ca. 1880.
May 28, 1997 William D. Montalbano. Times staff writer, Bromsgrove, England. “After a century of restlessness in a melancholy English cemetery, the remains and spirit of a Sioux chief named Long Wolf are returning to his ancestors in America because of a stranger who is interested.
The stranger is a 56-year-old English housewife named Elizabeth Knight, who lives in a small house with her husband, Peter, a roofer, in a Worcestershire village near Birmingham. “I’m a very ordinary kind of person,” she says. The kind who writes letters, not e-mails, who doesn’t make long-distance phone calls, who has no fancy degrees, has little world experience, who never knows her name on paper.
The kind who turns into a detective and a historian and makes a big fuss across the ocean because her heart is touched and her sense of fair play is outraged. This is the story of how the heirs of Middle England and the Wild West joined forces to fulfill a dying wish that had been fulfilled more than a century ago.
For Knight, the story began on the day in 1991 that she bought an old book at a market near her home. There is a 1923 story by a Scottish explorer named R. C. Cunninghame Graham that begins this way: “In a lonely corner of a crowded London cemetery, at the end of a smoky Greco-Roman graveyard under an ocean tree, lies an overlooked grave.”
In the grave, under a stylized cross and a howling image of his name, lies the Long Wolf. He died at the age of 59 in a London hospital on June 11, 1892, a victim of bronchial pneumonia in a crowded, dark, gloomy industrial city as far away on Earth as the Great Plains of North America. "I was moved. I kept putting the book down, imagining Long Wolf lying there among the ranks of pale faces