The Dakota Memorial Association — a group organized by Mobridge, South Dakota businessmen, with Walter Tuntland as its leader — argued that Sitting Bull should be memorialized more prominently on the South Dakota side of the Missouri River, near where he had been born and where he had lived much of his life. The group obtained support from some parties and moved ahead without the permits that North Dakota officials said were required.
In the early morning hours of April 7, 1953, the group crossed into North Dakota, exhumed what they believed to be Sitting Bull’s remains from Fort Yates, and transported them across the river to a site on a bluff overlooking Mobridge, South Dakota. A concrete burial vault was prepared. The remains were interred, and approximately twenty tons of concrete were poured over the site — reportedly to prevent anyone from repeating the operation in the other direction.
North Dakota officials protested. Standing Rock tribal authorities contested the removal. The legality of the operation was disputed — the land deed for the South Dakota site was reportedly of questionable authenticity. But the twenty tons of concrete made any reversal extremely difficult as a practical matter, and the political will to pursue the issue faded.
What has never been definitively resolved is whether the bones exhumed from Fort Yates in 1953 were actually Sitting Bull’s. The identification of the specific remains was not rigorously documented. People began raising doubts almost immediately after the exhumation. A thigh bone believed to be Sitting Bull’s had reportedly been removed from the Fort Yates site by two soldiers decades before the 1953 operation. Some tribal members disputed whether anyone at the scene of the 1953 exhumation actually knew which set of remains was which.