Baby Found Alive on Wounded Knee Battlefield
The Beautiful but Sad Story of Lost Bird
Bittersweet slab of gray granite in the Wounded Knee cemetery.
LOST BIRD was only six months old on January 2, 1891, when they found her frost bitten but still alive under her mother’s bullet-ridden corpse, three days after the Wounded Knee massacre.
LOST BIRD had been carefully bundled in a buffalo blanket, wore a warm beaded cap decorated with tiny white, blue, brown, red and black glass beads. She was dehydrated, her breathing labored, but somehow she managed to cry out just loud enough to be heard.
A Lakota doctor named Charles Eastman who accompanied the 7th Cavalry burial brigade to this grisly scene was the first to hear her cry. He yelled out, “Someone is a alive, a baby, a baby is alive.”
The same soldiers who gleefully murdered Lakota women, old men, and children frantically searched for her, it was a miracle that any human could survive for even a few hours in this sub zero weather.
Once LOST BIRD was found, Dr. Eastman rushed her on horseback to the agency at Pine Ridge where he revived and nurtured her back to good health.
Eastman was born to a fullblood Santee Dakota and European mother, he was a graduate of Dartmouth and the medical school at Boston University, the first and at that time only native American M.D.
Indians and whites alike who knew about LOST BIRD came forward to adopt her, some out of compassion, others because she was a war trophy who would bring them good fortune.
LOST BIRD was given four different names, baptized, stolen from tribal members, retrieved, and stolen again until she was officially adopted by Brigadier General Leonard Colby, Commander of the Nebraska Guard, who had simply taken her off the reservation to his home in Beatrice, Nebraska.
Colby, who claimed to be part Seneca, named her Zintkala Nuni (Lakota for LOST BIRD) and from the very beginning Colby’s wife, Clara, fell in love with Zintkala and became her devoted mother.
Shortly after the adoption, General Colby was appointed Assistant Attorney General of the United States, the family moved to Washington D.C. where they were very much a part of Washington society, even dining in the White with President Benjamin Harrison and his wife, Caroline Scott Harrison.
An ardent suffragist, friends with Susan B. Anthony, LOST BIRD’s adopted mother brought her up to be independent and strong willed.
You might think LOST BIRD lived a charmed life of special privileges, she went to private schools, traveled, wore fashionable clothes—but all was not well between Mr. and Mrs. Colby who frequently fought and eventually separated.
LOST BIRD was often sick, she caught colds easily, had allergies, came down with a severe cases of both the measles and mumps, suffered from headaches…she had trouble resisting diseases of the white world she was now living in.
Dark skinned, different, LOST BIRD was taunted at school, confused about her identity.
When LOST BIRD was a teenager, she ran away, was promiscuous and got pregnant.
Her father, General Coby, put her in a home for unwed mothers, a horribly abusive place—the home reported that her baby was stillborn.
As a young woman LOST BIRD had several troubled marriages and relationships. One of the men she married gave her syphilis.
LOST BIRD was only 29 when she fell victim to the Spanish Flu, which in 1919 killed over 500,000 Americans. She was buried where she lived, in Hanford, California.
Years later (1991) LOST BIRD was brought home to Wounded Knee. She lies here now and will never be moved again.
