Zintkala Nuni
Zintkala Nuni, who was found as an orphaned infant on the bloody grounds of Wounded Knee died of the flu contracted from her husband on this day in 1920.
Her story is uniformly tragic.
She was found by an Army burial detail still tied to the back of her dead mother. She was raised at first by members of her tribe, who named her "Lost Bird", but was soon taken into the home of Gen. Leonard Wright Colby who referred to her, at first, as a "curio" of the massacre. Colby and his wife Clara Bewick Cody adopted her in 1891, with Clara, a suffragette and publisher of Women's Tribune principally raising her.
When she was five, her adoptive father abandoned Clara and Zintkala and married Zintkala's nanny, thereafter moving to Beatrice, Nebraska. Her childhood was rough as an Indian child raised among the white privileged. Like many Indian she was educated in Indian boarding schools for part of the time, in part because Clara was so busy. At age 17 the rebellious Zintkala was sent to live with Gen. Colby and became pregnant soon thereafter. The father of her child is unknown but some historians suspect Colby of sexual abuse of her. After she became pregnant Colby committed her to a reformatory for unwed mothers, where the child was born stillborn.
She then returned to Clara's home and married, leaving her husband after a few weeks of marriage and after having contracted syphilis from her husband. The Spanish Flu ultimately brought about her death.
On the same day Konstantin Konstantinovich Mamontov, former Imperial Russian General and then serving as a White Russian General, a Don Cossack, died of typhus at age 50.
Konstantin Mamontov
And in Chicago, the League of Women's Voters was founded.
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