Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull was born in 1831 near the Grand River, in what is now South Dakota, into the Hunkpapa band of the Lakota Sioux ^[1]. His father, a respected warrior also named Sitting Bull, first called the boy Jumping Badger. Relatives noticed his careful, deliberate manner as a child and nicknamed him Hunkesni, meaning slow, a reference to thoughtfulness rather than dullness ^[2].

The boy grew up in a society organized around the buffalo hunt, seasonal movement across the northern Plains, and warrior honors earned in raids against rival nations such as the Crow. He killed his first buffalo at age ten. At fourteen he joined a war party against the Crow and counted his first coup, striking an enemy in combat. His father marked the occasion by transferring his own name to his son, so the young man became Tatanka Iyotake, usually translated as Sitting Bull or, more precisely, a buffalo bull sitting on its haunches ^[1].

Alongside his growing record as a fighter, Sitting Bull trained in the spiritual practices of his people. He became a wichasha wakan, a holy man, credited with the ability to interpret dreams and visions and to lead ceremonies such as the Sun Dance ^[3]. This combination of battlefield courage and religious authority set the pattern for his entire adult life.

Anyone asking who was Sitting Bull in the 1860s would have heard about a rising Hunkpapa leader hardened by his first fights against the United States Army. He took part in attacks connected to the aftermath of the 1862 Dakota conflict in Minnesota, and in 1863 and 1864 he skirmished with troops under General Alfred Sully, including the fight at Killdeer Mountain in 1864 ^[2]. These encounters convinced him that accommodation with the Americans would cost the Lakota their land and their way of life.

Sitting Bull refused to sign the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which created the Great Sioux Reservation and drew many Lakota leaders, including Red Cloud, into a reservation system ^[1]. He chose instead to remain in the unceded buffalo country of the Yellowstone and Powder River valleys with the bands later called the non-treaty or northern Lakota. Around 1869 the leaders of these hunting bands recognized him as the principal chief of the alliance, an unusual honor in a society where authority was normally dispersed among many band headmen ^[3].

His standing rested on more than war honors. Contemporaries described a man of striking generosity who distributed horses and food to the poor, composed songs, and spoke with a dry, cutting wit. His prestige as a holy man gave his political judgments a weight that few other leaders could match ^[2].

The crisis that defined Sitting Bull's life began with gold. In 1874 an expedition led by George Armstrong Custer confirmed gold deposits in the Black Hills, land guaranteed to the Lakota by the 1868 treaty and sacred to them as Paha Sapa ^[4]. When the government failed to buy the hills and prospectors poured in, Washington ordered all Lakota to report to reservation agencies by January 31, 1876. The hunting bands, wintering far from the agencies, did not comply, and the Army moved against them.

In early June 1876, Sitting Bull sponsored a Sun Dance on Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory. He offered one hundred pieces of flesh cut from his arms and, after dancing, reported a vision of soldiers falling upside down into the Lakota camp, which his people read as a promise of victory ^[3]. Days later, on June 25, 1876, Custer's Seventh Cavalry attacked the great village on the Little Bighorn River. Warriors led in the field by men such as Crazy Horse and Gall destroyed Custer's immediate command of roughly 210 men ^[4]. Sitting Bull, then in his mid forties, took the role of elder and protector of the noncombatants rather than a front-line fighter, but the victory was widely credited to the power of his vision.

The triumph was brief. A shocked government flooded the region with troops, and Congress forced the sale of the Black Hills in 1877. Pursued through the winter, most bands surrendered. Sitting Bull refused. In May 1877 he led his followers across the border into Canada, settling near Wood Mountain in present-day Saskatchewan ^[2].

Canada gave Sitting Bull safety but not subsistence. The North-West Mounted Police, notably Major James Walsh, treated him with respect, and he in turn kept the peace ^[2]. Yet the Canadian government refused to grant his people a reserve or rations, and the northern buffalo herds were collapsing under commercial hunting. Each year more of his followers slipped back across the line to surrender at American agencies.

By 1881 hunger left him no choice. On July 19, 1881, Sitting Bull rode into Fort Buford in Dakota Territory with fewer than two hundred remaining followers. He had his young son Crow Foot hand over his Winchester rifle, saying that he wished to be remembered as the last of his people to surrender his gun ^[1]. Despite a promise of pardon, the Army held him as a prisoner of war at Fort Randall for nearly two years before allowing him to join his people at the Standing Rock Agency in 1883 ^[3].

At Standing Rock he settled on the Grand River, close to his birthplace, where he farmed, kept horses, and remained the leading voice of the Hunkpapa in dealings with the agent, James McLaughlin, who saw him as an obstacle to assimilation ^[2].

Sitting Bull married several times over his life, in keeping with Lakota custom for a man of his standing, and fathered numerous children ^[1]. His household on the Grand River in the 1880s included two wives, Seen by the Nation and Four Robes, along with children and other relatives. Family losses shadowed him: a son from an early marriage died young, and his adopted brother figure and nephew One Bull remained among his closest companions and later an important source for his life story ^[3].

In 1884 and 1885 he entered an unexpected chapter, appearing in exhibitions in eastern cities and then touring for a single season with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show in 1885. Audiences sometimes hissed the man newspapers blamed for Custer's death, but Cody paid him well and the two men parted on good terms; Cody gave him a performing horse as a farewell gift ^[5]. During the tour he became friends with the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, whom he admired and called Little Sure Shot. Observers noted that he gave away much of his show earnings to the poor children who gathered around him ^[5].

He never learned to accept the premises of the reservation system. When commissioners came in 1888 and 1889 seeking to break up the Great Sioux Reservation and open millions of acres to settlement, Sitting Bull opposed the agreement, though the government secured enough signatures to carry it in 1889 despite him ^[2].

Anger over the 1889 land agreement, cut rations, drought, and epidemic disease prepared the ground for the Ghost Dance, a religious movement promising the return of the buffalo and departed relatives. When the dance reached Standing Rock in 1890, Sitting Bull allowed his followers on the Grand River to take it up. Agent McLaughlin, who had long wanted him removed, portrayed him as the head of the disturbance and pressed for his arrest ^[6].

Before dawn on December 15, 1890, dozens of Indian agency policemen, themselves Lakota, surrounded his cabin and pulled him from bed. As they led him out, his supporters gathered and a follower named Catch the Bear fired at the police. In the exchange that followed, policemen Bullhead and Red Tomahawk shot Sitting Bull, killing him. His seventeen-year-old son Crow Foot and roughly a dozen others, including several police, died in the fight ^[6]. Two weeks later, on December 29, 1890, troops of the reconstituted Seventh Cavalry killed some 250 Lakota, many of them women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek, an event inseparable in memory from his death ^[4].

He was buried at Fort Yates, North Dakota. In 1953 relatives and Mobridge, South Dakota promoters moved remains identified as his to a bluff above the Missouri River near Mobridge, where a granite bust by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski marks the site, though the question of exactly where he rests has never been fully settled ^[7].

Any honest Sitting Bull biography has to reckon with how thoroughly his reputation has changed. In his lifetime much of the American press cast him as the villain of the Little Bighorn. Modern historians, led by Stanley Vestal in the 1930s and Robert Utley in the 1990s, rebuilt his story from Lakota testimony and government records and presented a leader of unusual integrity, consistent in his refusal to sell land or trade independence for rations ^[3][2].

Among Sitting Bull achievements, the greatest was holding together a coalition of hunting bands, across nations and band lines, long enough to inflict the most famous defeat the United States Army suffered in the Plains Wars ^[4]. He was also a composer of songs, an artist who drew autobiographical pictographs of his war deeds, and a religious leader whose Sun Dance vision of 1876 remains one of the most cited spiritual events in American Indian history ^[3].

His memory is active rather than settled. In 2007 descendants and supporters issued declarations in his name, his image appears on murals, stamps, and classroom walls, and in 2021 scientists using DNA from a lock of his hair confirmed Ernie LaPointe of South Dakota as his great-grandson, the first time genetic evidence linked a living person to a historical figure from such limited remains ^[8]. Basic Sitting Bull facts, his birth on the Grand River in 1831 and his death there in 1890, frame a life that began and ended on the same stretch of land he spent decades defending.