Bethel Patch: Buffalo Bill's Rough Rider Will Be Leaving Danbury, 112 Years Later
For more than 100 years, Albert Afraid of Hawk has been resting in a grave between a dirt road and wooded hills in Danbury's Wooster Cemetery. Now, finally, he is getting ready to go home.
Afraid of Hawk, a rough rider with the Buffalo Bill Wild West exhibition, was an Oglala Sioux, today better known as a member of South Dakotas Oglala Lakota tribe. Back then, many Lakota traveled with the show, which returned each year to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to bring home tribal members, and to enlist new ones for the worldwide tour of Buffalo Bill Codys exhibition.
In the year 1900, the exhibition came through Danbury, as it had in years before and after. Cody was friends with PT Barnum, who was living in Bridgeport, and helped Cody with his travel scheduling. The exhibition even performed with the Bailey Circus.
But on this particularly fateful trip, Afraid of Hawk never made it past the Danbury stop. A handsome, tall, 20 year old, he fell victim to a bad can of corn and died in Danbury Hospital. The newspaper's sub-headline read, Corn More Deadly Than Bullets, referencing that others had also become quite ill.
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