Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull, in Lakota Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, was a Hunkpapa Lakota leader and holy man who led his people's resistance to the expansion of the United States onto the northern Great Plains. He was the central figure of the great camp that destroyed George Armstrong Custer's command at the Little Bighorn in 1876, spent four years in exile in Canada, and was killed by reservation police in 1890. He became one of the best-known Native American leaders in history, a symbol of refusal to give up land and a way of life.

Sitting Bull was born sometime between about 1831 and 1837; the exact year is not known. Family tradition places his birth along the Yellowstone River in what is now Montana, while other accounts put it near the Grand River in present-day South Dakota. As a boy he was called Jumping Badger. His father and two uncles were respected leaders of the Hunkpapa, one of the seven divisions of the Lakota, the westernmost branch of the people outsiders called the Sioux.

At about fourteen he joined a raid on a Crow camp and counted coup, striking an enemy at close quarters, which was the highest form of battlefield honour among the Plains peoples. His father celebrated by giving him his own name, Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, usually translated as "Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down", and took another name himself. Sitting Bull went on to lead the Strong Heart warrior society and to earn a reputation not only for courage but also for generosity and spiritual insight. He was a wičháša wakȟáŋ, a holy man whose visions and prayers carried great weight.

The Hunkpapa first fought American soldiers in the 1860s. After the Dakota War of 1862 in Minnesota, the US Army sent punitive expeditions onto the plains while the American Civil War was still being fought. Sitting Bull fought at Killdeer Mountain in 1864 and was wounded in a skirmish later that year. During Red Cloud's War of 1866 to 1868 he raided forts along the upper Missouri.

The Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 created the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills, and set aside further hunting lands. Many Lakota leaders moved to the agencies and came to depend on government rations. Sitting Bull refused to sign or to settle, and he became the leading figure among the "non-treaty" bands who wanted to keep living by the buffalo hunt. Some later writers called him supreme chief of all the Sioux, but historians reject this: Lakota bands were independent and made their own decisions. His authority came from prestige, not from any formal office.

In the early 1870s his followers attacked surveyors for the Northern Pacific Railway, which was planned to run across their hunting grounds. Then in 1874 Custer led an army expedition into the Black Hills and announced the discovery of gold. Prospectors poured in, in breach of the treaty. When the Lakota would not sell the Hills, the government of President Ulysses S. Grant ordered all bands to report to the reservation by the end of January 1876 and declared those who stayed out to be hostile.

Through the first half of 1876, Lakota and Northern Cheyenne families gathered around Sitting Bull's camp for safety, until it held many thousands of people; estimates range from about 6,000 to more than 10,000. In June he performed the Sun Dance, offering more than a hundred pieces of flesh cut from his arms, and afterwards described a vision of soldiers falling upside down into the camp, which his people took as a promise of victory. On 17 June warriors fought General George Crook to a standstill at the Rosebud.

On 25 June 1876 Custer's 7th Cavalry attacked the great village on the Little Bighorn River, which the Lakota call the Greasy Grass. Sitting Bull, then in his forties, did not lead the fighting himself; he helped protect the women and children while war leaders including Crazy Horse and Gall led the counterattack. Custer and every man in the five companies with him, about 210 soldiers, were killed, and the rest of the regiment was besieged on the bluffs until relief arrived. It was the worst defeat the army suffered in the Plains Wars.

The victory brought overwhelming retaliation. The army flooded the region with troops, and over the following winter most bands, hungry and hunted, surrendered. In 1877 Congress took the Black Hills without the consent the treaty required, a seizure the US Supreme Court ruled unlawful in 1980, awarding compensation that the Lakota have refused to accept.

In May 1877 Sitting Bull led his band north across the border into the North-West Territories of Canada, settling near Wood Mountain in what is now Saskatchewan. Major James Walsh of the North-West Mounted Police told him the Lakota could stay if they obeyed the law, and the two men became friends.

Canada, however, refused to grant the Lakota a reserve or rations, and the buffalo were fast disappearing. As hunger grew, families drifted back south. On 19 July 1881 Sitting Bull and his remaining 186 followers surrendered at Fort Buford in Dakota Territory, where he had his young son hand over his rifle to the commanding officer.

Instead of being sent to the Standing Rock Agency as promised, Sitting Bull was held as a prisoner of war at Fort Randall for nearly two years. In 1883 he was allowed to join his people at Standing Rock, where he clashed constantly with the agent, James McLaughlin, who wanted to break the power of traditional leaders. He opposed the government's efforts in 1888 and 1889 to break up the Great Sioux Reservation and sell much of it, which went ahead nonetheless.

His fame made him a celebrity. In 1884 he toured eastern cities, and there he met the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, whom he adopted as a daughter and named Little Sure Shot. In 1885 he spent four months with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, then returned to his cabin on the Grand River.

In 1890 the Ghost Dance, a religious movement begun by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, reached the Lakota reservations, promising the return of the dead and of the buffalo. Sitting Bull allowed dancers to gather at his camp, though it is unclear how far he believed in the movement. Fearing he would lead an uprising or flee, McLaughlin ordered his arrest. Before dawn on 15 December 1890, Lakota policemen entered his cabin and pulled him outside. His supporters gathered, a man named Catch-the-Bear shot the police lieutenant Bull Head, and Bull Head and another officer, Red Tomahawk, shot Sitting Bull. He died on the spot, and in the fight that followed seven of his supporters and eight policemen died.

Two weeks later, on 29 December, US soldiers killed some 250 or more Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee, among them refugees from Sitting Bull's band, an event usually taken as the end of armed resistance on the plains. Sitting Bull was buried at Fort Yates in North Dakota; in 1953 relatives moved what were believed to be his remains to a site near Mobridge, South Dakota, though which grave holds them is still disputed.

To white Americans of his time Sitting Bull was the archetypal hostile chief; to the Lakota he was a protector and spiritual leader who never gave up his people's claims. Today he is remembered as a defender of Native sovereignty, and the dispute over the Black Hills that shaped his life remains unresolved in the History of United States. Read alongside the story of Tecumseh, his life shows the long pattern of Native American resistance to westward expansion.