Sitting Bull: Last of the Great Chiefs

Sitting Bull was the last of the great Indian chiefs to surrender his free way of life and settle on a government reservation. He belonged to the Hunkpapa tribe of the Lakota Sioux. The Lakotas numbered seven tribes, loosely affiliated, with similar ways of life, and each with its own chiefs. It fell to Sitting Bull to bring them even closer together.

Born in 1831 on Grand River in what is now South Dakota, he first bore the name “Slow.” The path to distinction among the Lakotas was war—war with the Crows, Assiniboines, Flatheads, and ultimately the White people. At the age of fourteen, Slow joined a war party seeking enemy Crows. They found a Crow war party and attacked. Slow brought down a galloping Crow with his hatchet, and thus at this young age earned a “first coup,” which entitled him to wear a white eagle feather in his hair. His father was so proud of his son that he gave him his own name, Sitting Bull, Tatanka-Iotanka, which symbolized a bull buffalo firmly planted on his haunches defying assault.

As Sitting Bull rose to adulthood, he achieved a superlative record in war. But war alone did not elevate the young man in the eyes of his people. He mastered and practiced the four cardinal virtues of the Lakota people: bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom. This combination, together with his war record, earned him the rank of war chief of the Hunkpapa tribe and in the same year, 1857, head chief of the Hunkpapa tribe. In 1869, as the Lakotas had begun fighting with the wasicus, the White people, the venerated chief Four Horns, Sitting Bull’s uncle, arranged a ceremony in which his nephew was chosen chief of all the Lakota people, a rank that had never existed before.

A treaty signed a year later created the Great Sioux Reservation, the western half of the present state of South Dakota. The government sought to settle all the Lakotas on the reservation and issue them rations until they learned to live like White people. But not all of the Lakotas wished to give up the old free way of life. As Sitting Bull lectured a group of visiting tribesmen, “Look at me . . . See if I am poor, or my people either. The whites may get me at last, as you say, but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee.”[1]

Sitting Bull and those of like mind gathered to the northwest, where the mountains and prairies drained by the Powder and Yellowstone Rivers formed country with which they were familiar. Here they continued to live as they always had lived, hunting the buffalo, and moving around the country in small bands. They came to be known as the “winter roamers.” They owed fealty to Sitting Bull as an “Old Man Chief.” Old Man Chiefs were so valuable to their people that they were expected to stay out of harm’s way and share their wisdom. The winter roamers had a war chief, who was younger than Sitting Bull but worked well with him in tandem. He was the indomitable Crazy Horse, a legend in his own time.

Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had made war on the White man in his forts along the Missouri River and his wagon trains laboring westward to the Montana gold fields. After the divisive treaty of 1868, they resolved to remain in the Powder and Yellowstone River country, chase the buffalo, and refrain from any more raids against the soldier forts. But they would fight if their country was invaded by soldiers. It was the life they had always lived, made all the more pleasant by friends from the reservation joining them for several summer months.

The defensive posture of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse applied mainly to soldiers, not the settlers filling up the prairies and mountains drained by the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers north of Yellowstone Park. They raided these people repeatedly and also, in 1872 and1873, fought soldiers who guarded workers preparing the route for a railroad planned for the Yellowstone Valley. One of the soldiers they fought in 1873 was “Long Hair” Custer, who in 1874 led soldiers into the Black Hills, a special place to the Indians. These hostilities, publicized in newspapers all over the country, made Sitting Bull’s name well known as the Indian who should be captured or killed.

Sitting Bull was a holy man as well as a chief. In May 1876, as he and his followers were moving up the Rosebud River, he climbed nearby mountains and prayed until he fell asleep and had a vision of soldiers advancing on his people. He promised Wakantanka, the Great Mystery, that he would hold a sun dance and give his flesh for protection against the soldiers. The sun dance occurred on June 6. Lodges were erected and a sun dance pole rose above the valley floor. Sitting Bull sat with his back to the pole while Jumping Bull, his adopted brother, carved Sitting Bull’s flesh. With an awl, Jumping Bull cut fifty pieces of flesh from each arm. With blood streaming down his arms, Sitting Bull danced around the pole while staring at the sun. He then fell to the ground and dreamed. When he opened his eyes, he told Chief Black Moon what he had dreamed: soldiers attacking the village, but they and their horses were all upside down, their feet in the sky, their heads pointed at the earth, and their hats falling off.

“These soldiers do not possess ears,” a voice proclaimed. “They are to die.”[2]

And they did, three weeks later. Again, they fought Long Hair Custer on the Little Bighorn River, which the Lakotas called the Greasy Grass. They killed Long Hair and 210 soldiers in a bitter contest that the White people called Custer’s Last Stand. As an Old Man Chief, Sitting Bull did not fight but remained with the women and children.

Even so, the White generals and the White citizens blamed Sitting Bull for the “massacre” of the famed war hero and his troopers. The army set forth to kill or capture Sitting Bull. They failed because Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapas escaped across the “medicine line,” the border with Canada. Here Sitting Bull established cordial relations with the Northwest Mounted Police, and especially Major James Walsh. Sitting Bull and Walsh became good friends, although both the Canadian and United States governments wanted him and his people to go back and settle on reservations.

Sitting Bull wished to live in Canada, and he and his people resisted the efforts of both governments to force them back. They would have had to give up their guns and horses and live like White people. That was unacceptable to people who still regarded the free life of the plains as the only proper way to live. Aside from the attempts of both the governments to persuade Sitting Bull and his people to live on American reservations, the buffalo were declining, and the Hunkpapas were increasingly hungry. Moreover, the Canadian Indians regarded them as interlopers, eating the buffalo that properly belonged to them. Hostilities between the two broke out as the American Indians went increasingly hungry and finally were beset by starvation. Finally, in 1881, four years after they had crossed the medicine line, they struggled back across the line and surrendered at Fort Buford, Dakota.

However, instead of settling the people at the Standing Rock Reservation, where they would live with other Lakotas who had already surrendered, Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapas were held as prisoners of war and confined at Fort Randall, far down the Missouri River from Standing Rock. After two years, in 1884, they were loaded on a steamboat and taken back up the river to Standing Rock and settled in their new homes.

Standing Rock was the kind of place Sitting Bull had feared and resisted throughout his four years in Canada. An agent told him and his people what they could and could not do. Farmers taught them how to farm. Pastors instructed them in the White man’s religion, and Indian police and Indian judges enforced a “List of Indian Offenses,” which were regarded as uncivilized practices of the old life.

Sitting Bull had lost the old way of life that he treasured, and he would never regain it. For five years he resisted some practices and accommodated to others. However, in 1889 a new religion swept all the Indian reservations. It was called the Ghost Dance religion, in which people danced, fell into a trance, and visited a new land in which all their ancestors lived, and which would roll over and destroy the White man’s world. Although not entirely convinced, Sitting Bull served as a priest for dancers who lived in his neighborhood.

The army, fearing it had a war to confront, believed that certain “trouble-making” chiefs should be imprisoned for the duration. Sitting Bull, of course, was a “trouble-maker.” But the agent did not want to use the army to arrest Sitting Bull, he wanted the Indian police to perform that task. It went badly, and Sitting Bull was shot and killed by the police, three of whom were also killed.

Sitting Bull was the greatest of the Sioux chiefs, perhaps the greatest of the western Indian chiefs, and the last of the free tribal chiefs of the West to be settled on a reservation. He left an indelible mark on history.