The Beaded Cap                                           

One of the intriguing details of Lost Bird’s story is the beaded cap she was wearing when she was found. The cap, decorated with tiny white, blue, brown, red and black glass beads, features tipis, American flags and the outline of mountains.

For many years, no one knew what had happened to the cap. Then, in 1990, some Pine Ridge students on a visit to Bacone College in Muskogee, Okla., "found" the cap - in a Lakota exhibit at the school’s Ataloa Lodge Museum along with a picture of Lost Bird and adoptive father Gen. Leonard Colby, a Ghost Shirt with bullet holes, a headdress, whistle, prayer fan and other items.

According to museum officials, the cap was donated to the museum by a Seminole chief.

It is possible that Colby, the lawyer for several tribes in Oklahoma from the 1890s into the next century, gave the cap and photograph to the Seminoles.