In March 1884, Sitting Bull sat in a St. Paul, Minnesota theater watching a 23-year-old woman do impossible things with a rifle. She split playing cards edge-on from 30 paces. Shot corks off bottles. Snuffed candles with bullets. All while standing barely five feet tall. Eight years earlier, Sitting Bull had led the warriors who destroyed George Custer's cavalry at Little Bighorn. He was the most feared Native American leader in America. Now he was mesmerized by a woman named Annie Oakley. After the show, Sitting Bull sent $65 to her hotel—a small fortune—hoping to purchase an autographed photograph. Annie sent back his money. But she kept her word: she arrived at his door the next morning with the photograph as a gift. What happened next stunned everyone who knew their history. Sitting Bull, moved by her skill and character, symbolically adopted Annie as his daughter. He gave her a Lakota name: Watanya Cicilla—Little Sure Shot. And then he gave her something priceless. The moccasins he had worn at the Battle of Little Bighorn. They had been made by his own daughter, who died shortly after the battle. Annie was about her age. "He had asked me to take the place of the daughter he lost," Annie later wrote. "When he gave me the moccasins he so prized." Their friendship deepened in 1885 when Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. For four months, the Lakota chief and the Ohio sharpshooter performed together across America. In a time when Native Americans and white Americans were often at war, they found common ground in mutual respect. Annie would describe Sitting Bull as "dear, faithful, old friend." She understood him in ways few white Americans did. "He fought justly," she wrote, "for his people had been driven from their God-given inheritance and were living upon broken promises." When Sitting Bull was killed in 1890, Annie's response was blunt: "If Sitting Bull had been a white man, someone would have hung for his murder." She carried the name Little Sure Shot with pride for the rest of her life—a gift from a Lakota chief who saw past the divisions of his time to recognize something extraordinary. Two people from vastly different worlds—one the spiritual leader of the Sioux, the other a sharpshooter from Ohio—proved that respect and friendship know no boundaries. Even when history says you should be enemies. #LittleSureShot #AmericanLegends
