Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull (1831?–90) Sioux Indian chief. Sitting Bull became an Indian warrior at the age of fourteen; he also won renown as a buffalo hunter and as a holy man. In the 1860s, Sitting Bull began to actively resist white incursions into Indian territory, leading his tribe against army forts on the upper Missouri. As some Indian tribes signed treaties with the government, Sitting Bull allied himself with those who refused to yield, and after the Treaty of 1868 he became the leader of the nontreaty Indians, or “hostiles.” In 1871 Sitting Bull decreed that the Indians would fight only when attacked or when their territory was being invaded; thus they attacked the military commands accompanying workers who arrived to build the Northern Pacific Railroad, which cut through their hunting lands. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, the U.S. government ordered the Sioux onto the Great Reservation; they refused, and the result was the Great Sioux War of 1876. The army sent three columns into Sioux territory and attacked; the Sioux regrouped and, in 1876, wiped out Gen. George Armstrong Custer and five companies of his regiment at Little Bighorn. In the wake of this defeat for the army, the government sent in masses of troops, and Sitting Bull fled to Canada, where his dwindling group of followers and inadequate food supplies forced him to surrender (1881). After two years in prison, he settled into reservation life and toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show for one season. In 1890, he was killed by soldiers sent to arrest him for leading the Ghost Dance religion, which foretold the expulsion of whites from Indian territory.