Kin of Sitting Bull Ally Seeks Payment

More than a century has passed since Canadian fur trader Jean Louis Legare risked his life and nearly bankrupted himself getting Chief Sitting Bull to surrender.

But now his descendants have taken up a cause that consumed Legare in the years afterward--getting the U.S. and Canadian governments to fully compensate him for the thousands of dollars he spent caring for the chief and his followers.

“If he turned his back on the situation at the time, our family would probably have been large ranchers,” said Legare’s great-grandson, Edward Legare of Regina, Canada. “We would like some summation to the thing.”

Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers fled to Canada after the destruction in 1876 of George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry forces at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Sitting Bull spent five years in exile until Legare did what the U.S. and Canadian governments could not--coax Sitting Bull and his starving band to return to the United States and surrender.

Legare “got a raw deal from the United States,” said Sitting Bull biographer Robert Utley. “He performed a signal service for the U.S. government with the implicit understanding that his expenditures would be reimbursed and that there would be a compensation on top of that.”

Legare (pronounced lay-guh-RAY), one of the few whites whom Sitting Bull trusted, periodically fed the 50 to 60 Indians to prevent them from starving and put himself in personal danger by pressing the desperate band to follow him to their surrender in what is now North Dakota in 1881, Utley said.

Legare subsequently asked the Canadian government for $48,000 and the U.S. government for $13,412 to pay for the food, supplies, horses and wagons he used.

After years of litigation, the U.S. Claims Court gave him $5,000 in 1902. The Canadians gave him $2,000.

“It was an injustice that he should have even had to have been put through that process,” said Utley, former chief historian for the National Park Service. “It was insulting and shameful to the United States that he was granted only a pittance of what the claim amounted to.”

Legare’s motivation wasn’t mercenary, said Utley, who researched a stack of depositions filed in connection with the compensation claim. “He felt an intense identification with and sympathy for these people and their plight.”

At Utley’s suggestion, Legare’s great-grandson recently wrote North Dakota’s two senators for help in securing additional compensation. Letters to the State Department and Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton also failed.

Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) plans to refer the descendants to the Justice Department.

“Frankly it’s about 94 years late,” Dorgan said in an interview. “I doubt very much that there is any merit to the claim in that a court reviewed it in 1902.”

The descendants want, at the least, an explanation of why Legare didn’t get all the $13,000, said Edward Legare. They have made similar requests to the Canadian government with no success.

“He offered his help to his fellow man and was looking for monies to replenish what he had spent,” the great-grandson said.