Sitting Bull

Guide Note:

Sitting Bull was a chief of the Hunkapa Lakota Sioux in the mid-1800s. He fiercely resisted white settlement and speculation on Sioux lands and an attempted raid by General George A. Custer in 1876 on Sitting Bull's people resulted in the decimation of the U.S. 7th Cavalry forces under General Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Fast Facts:

1. Born: ca. 1831, in present-day South Dakota
2. Tatanka Iyotake, his Sioux name, means "buffalo bull sit down"
3. Wars: Dakota War of 1862, Red Cloud's War, Black Hills War
4. Performed in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show
5. Discouraged Ghost Dance movement which led to his death
6. Died: December 15, 1890 of gunshot to head

Born around 1831, Sitting Bull was recognized as a shaman and visionary in his twenties. When tensions erupted into war during the Dakota War of 1862, Sitting Bull began leading his Hunkapa warriors into battle against U.S. soldiers. Sitting Bull also went on to participate in Red Cloud's War and the Black Hills War of the early 1870s.

In 1876, Sitting Bull had amassed his followers, and allied warriors, on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in present-day Montana. General George A. Custer, in an attempt to subdue Sitting Bull, who had fiercely resisted white encroachment on Sioux lands, moved on the encampment. Unfortunately for Custer's detachment, the General was unaware that 3,000 Sioux warriors lay in wait, and every soldier in Custer's force was killed. Sitting Bull fled after the battle, but eventually surrendered.

In the 1880s, Sitting Bull settled onto the reservation carved out for him by the U.S. Army, and traveled for a time with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as an attraction. In 1890, the Standing Rock Reservation where Sitting Bull dwelled became the center of a passionate Ghost Dance movement which promised that whites would vanish if a certain ritualistic dance were performed enough. In an effort to put a halt to the apocalyptic dance, police entered the reservation on December 15, 1890, arrested Sitting Bull for not stopping the dance, and after gunfire erupted, Sitting Bull was shot in the head and killed.