 The first piece was published on December 20, 1890, five days after the killing of the Lakota Sioux holy man, Sitting Bull.The piece opined that with Sitting Bull's death, "the nobility of the Redskin" had been extinguished, and that the safety of the frontier would not be established until there was "total annihilation" of the remaining Native Americans, who, he claimed, lived as "miserable wretches.