NOTE: This story contains culturally sensitive information that may be distressing for some readers. Caution is advised.
WASHINGTON — In the summer of 1889, a group of cynical Chicago crime reporters organized itself as the Whitechapel Club, taking the name of the London district where serial killer Jack the Ripper found his victims.
They rented rooms in a back-alley saloon, and in keeping with the club’s macabre theme, they decorated the walls with relics of war and crimes: revolvers, knives, hangman’s ropes.
“I suppose the gruesome [sic] connotations of the name led to our practice of collecting relics of the tragedies we were constantly reporting,” member Brand Whitlock recalled in his 1914 memoir, “Forty Years of It.”
John C. Spray, the former superintendent of the county’s mental asylum, donated skulls which Whitechapel member Chrysostom “Tomb” Thompson converted into tobacco jars, drinking cups and shades for gas lamps.
Illustration of Native American "relics" at the Whitechapel Club, Chicago, published in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Sunday, April 20, 1890.
Whitechapel member and Chicago Herald writer Charles Goodyear Seymour was among the correspondents who covered the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of as many as 300 Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota men, women and children in South Dakota. He returned home with a collection of war relics, including a woman’s ghost shirt — white cotton, embroidered with yellow — and Native American skulls, according to Brand.
Seymour also traveled to the Blackfeet and Piegan reservation in Montana, recounted in a May 12, 1891, article for the Herald titled, “How to Steal a Skull.” Seymour described how he and an Army infantry lieutenant sneaked into a graveyard at night and managed to retrieve two skulls.
“There is not much fun in robbing a graveyard,” he wrote, “even if it is an Indian graveyard.”
'A large collection'
The Whitechapel Club’s reputation helped grow its ghastly collection.
“It became the practice of sheriffs and newspapermen everywhere to send anything of that kind to the Whitechapel Club. The result was that within a few years, it had a large collection of skulls of criminals,” Whitlock would later write.
Among Seymour’s contributions was the skull of an “Unc’papa [Hunkpapa Lakota]” woman, described by Whitechapel member George Frank Lydston as “the wife of one of the leading malcontents in the recent outbreak” at Wounded Knee.
Lydston was a Chicago urologist and professor of criminal anthropology at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. He was also a staunch eugenicist who believed that the shape of people’s skulls indicated intelligence or “undesirable” traits such as criminality and other forms of “degeneracy.” Lydston, who was a member of the Whitechapel Club, used some of the skulls to support his research.
A screenshot from "The Diseases of Society" by G. Frank Lydston shows an illustration of a skull alleged to have belonged to a Hunkpapa woman who died at Wounded Knee.
The Wounded Knee skull was among several that Lydston presented in a 1904 book, “The Diseases of Society: The Vice and Crime Problem.”
He concluded little about the Hunkpapa skull, other than that she had an elongated and symmetrical head and was likely “as intelligent as the average of the better class of her people.”
So, who was she and what happened to her skull? Did she really die in the massacre, or had Seymour invented her identity to add to the skull’s grisly appeal?
Shortly before his death in 1920, Joseph Horn Cloud, a Miniconjou Lakota Wounded Knee survivor who later co-founded the Wounded Knee Survivors Association, compiled a list of individuals who survived or were killed in the massacre.
In 2019, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe's West River Eagle published a separate list, date unknown.
Most were Miniconjou followers of Spotted Elk from the Cheyenne River Reservation or Hunkpapa followers of his half-brother Sitting Bull from the Standing Rock Reservation.
General Nelson A. Miles and staff view what National Archives records refer to as an "Indian Camp" near Pine Ridge, South Dakota, on Jan. 16, 1891, 18 days after the Wounded Knee massacre.
Comparing both lists, VOA was able to identify three Hunkpapa women who died in the massacre: Zintaikiwin (Bird’s Belly), Itewakanwin (Sacred Face), and Wannawega tawicu (Wife of Breaks Arrows with Foot). Two women died later of wounds received in the massacre: Wowacinyewin (Dependable) and Kicinajinwin (Wife of Stands With).
It is not known if their bodies were recovered by their families or buried in the mass grave at Wounded Knee.
From Chicago to Washington
In May 1891, Lydston traveled to Washington to present his findings at the annual convention of the American Medical Association. He brought with him a trunk full of skulls, The Washington Post reported, including that of the Hunkpapa woman.
Lydston boasted that it was he, not Seymour, who had been sent to Wounded Knee and retrieved the skull, adding that while he was there, he had been taken prisoner and held for more than three weeks. He did not say by whom.
“He was allowed just enough to live on, and was a walking skeleton when released,” the Post reported.
Lydston told the newspaper he was donating the skulls to AMA.
“Dr. Lydston says the club did not want to give up these specimens, but he persuaded the members into doing so,” the Post concluded. “He says that no amount of money would buy the specimens now in the hall of the Whitechapel Club.”
VOA reached out to AMA about the Hunkpapa skull.
“Based on a review of AMA’s archives, the AMA neither currently nor in the past possessed human tissue or specimens,” a spokesperson responded via email. “In official proceedings, there are mentions of exhibits that contained human remains, but these were presented at meetings and then went on tour or home with the exhibitor.”
The AMA says one of those exhibits at its Chicago headquarters was dismantled in 1935 and its contents donated to the city’s Museum of Science and Industry.
Kathleen McCarthy, head curator at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, told VOA, “We have no record of a donation of skulls from the American Medical Association in 1935. In all my time here, I have not heard of or seen any skulls in the collection.”
What if Lydston did not donate the Whitechapel Club skulls as he claims and kept them for himself?
Illustration from "Over the Hookah: The Tales of a Talkative Doctor" by G. Frank Lydston, 1914.
After the club dissolved in 1895, Lydston published “Over the Hookah: The Tales of a Talkative Doctor” in which an aging “Dr. Weymouth” relates a series of anecdotes to a young medical student.
Though it is a work of fiction, Lydston acknowledges in the preface that the tales are “taken from life.”
In one chapter, the student describes a large cabinet in the older doctor’s library. It contains a collection of “curious and ghastly skulls” that were “the doctor’s pride.”
Lydston died of pneumonia in 1923. In his last will and testament, he left all property to his wife. But there is no record of the contents of that property.
The 1990 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA, requires museums and federal agencies to take an inventory of all human remains and funerary objects in their collection and work with tribes to return them. Updated rules give them until 2029 to comply.
“The law is very clear that institutions do not own native bodies or cultural items unless they can prove a right of possession,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and CEO and attorney for the Association on American Indian Affairs. “That means that there had to have been voluntary consent at the time of taking of the Native ancestor or other cultural items.”
Nor did Congress provide a remedy for cases in which private collectors or non-federally funded organizations hold Native American remains and related artifacts.
If the Lydston family donated the Hunkpapa skull to a medical school or other public institution covered by the law, she may one day be returned to her lineal descendants and the Hunkpapa community.