(1831?-90)
Hunkpapa military, religious, and political leader
Sitting Bull was probably born in 1831 on the Grand River in present-day South Dakota. His father bore the name Sitting Bull; his mother, Her-Holy-Door. They named their son Jumping Badger.
Jumping Badger inherited his father's name at age fourteen as part of the ceremonies celebrating his accession to warrior status. Accompanying a raiding party, he had counted a first coup on a Crow warrior, thus earning the coveted measure of bravery in combat. His new name connoted a stubborn buffalo bull planted firmly on his haunches.
As young Sitting Bull matured into adulthood, he accumulated a superlative war record in fighting with Assiniboins, Crows, Flatheads, Blackfeet, and other enemy tribes. This led in 1857 to his designation as a tribal war chief. At the same time, he mastered the sacred mysteries of the Lakotas and rose to eminence as a holy man. Profound spirituality characterized his entire life, and scars on his chest, back, and arms testified to repeated sacrifices in the Sun Dance. The Hunkpapas came to look on him as the embodiment of the cardinal virtues of the Lakotas—bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom. His name and fame spread to all seven Lakota tribes.
Sitting Bull's name captured the attention of white people, too, as growing numbers intruded into the Hunkpapa domain. In the 1860s white gold seekers came up the Missouri River headed for the mines of western Montana, and at the same time shock waves from the Dakota Sioux uprising of 1862 rolled west from Minnesota. In fighting with the armies of Generals Henry H. Sibley and Alfred Sully in 1863 and 1864, Sitting Bull emerged as the leading Hunkpapa war chief. When the army planted forts along the river, he waged a deadly war on them that lasted for five years.
Sitting Bull rose to more powerful leadership as the seven Lakota bands confronted the provisions of the Treaty of 1868. This accord, which few of the signatory chiefs truly understood, defined a "Great Sioux Reservation" embracing all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River. Here all Lakotas promised to reside. For those who wished to delay, however, the treaty identified an "unceded territory" west and north of the reservation. Portions of each Lakota band settled on the reservation and grew dependent on government rations. Others remained in the buffalo ranges of the Powder and Yellowstone Valleys.
These "nontreaties" who continued to follow the buffalo accorded allegiance to Sitting Bull and the powerful Oglala war chief Crazy Horse. A staunch foe of government programs, Sitting Bull wanted no part of treaties, agents, rations, or any course that would interfere with the old life of following the buffalo and warring against enemy tribes. The people designated him supreme chief of all the Lakotas, a post that had never before existed and that ran counter to the loose Lakota political structure. When all the band chiefs gathered in council, however, they recognized Sitting Bull as the one "old-man chief" entitled to deference.
With the firm support of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull broke off the war against the upper Missouri forts but vowed to defend the buffalo ranges to the west against all white intrusions. When intrusions occurred, his warriors fought back. In 1872 and 1873, they skirmished with troops escorting surveyors of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the Yellowstone Valley.
The most damaging intrusion took place on the Great Sioux Reservation itself, when the discovery of gold in the Black Hills set off a rush that blatantly violated the treaty of 1868. The government tried to buy the hills, but the Indians would not sell. From this dilemma sprang a comprehensive military campaign aimed ostensibly at punishing the Sitting Bull bands for aggressions against tribes friendly to the United States, but which in reality was aimed at forcing them to give up their freedom and settle on the reservation.
The Great Sioux War of 1876 featured the stunning disaster to U.S. troops at the battle of the Little Bighorn. But "Custer's last stand" prompted a massive offensive that ended Lakota freedom. Most of the "hostiles" surrendered and settled on the reservation. Sitting Bull and a diehard remnant took refuge in Canada. As the buffalo dwindled, starvation set in. On July 20, 1881, Sitting Bull surrendered at Fort Buford, Dakota Territory.
After two years as a prisoner of war, Sitting Bull settled on the reservation at the Standing Rock Agency in present-day North Dakota. Here he resisted the government's objective of transforming the Lakotas into imitation whites. At the same time, he sampled innovations that he thought beneficial. He became a successful farmer and stockman, and he sent his children to government schools. In 1885 he traveled with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.
The reservation years gave Sitting Bull leisure to enjoy his family, to all of whom he was deeply devoted. His first wife had died in childbirth in 1857. Of two successors, he had expelled one from his tipi, and the other had died. Finally, in 1872, he married sisters, Four Robes and Seen-by-the-Nation. Of many children by these wives, he especially treasured in his final years a son, Crow Foot, and a daughter, Standing Holy. Sitting Bull's father had been killed by a Crow warrior in 1859, but his mother was a powerful presence in his tipi until her death in 1884.
Sitting Bull's last years found him in the familiar stance of opposing government aims. He battled the land agreements of 1888 and 1889, which threw half the Great Sioux Reservation open to white settlement and divided the rest into six separate reservations. When this and other grievances laid the groundwork for a powerful religious revitalization movement, he emerged as the leading apostle of the 1890 Ghost Dance on the Standing Rock Reservation. Agent James McLaughlin urged his removal from the reservation. On December 15, 1890, Indian police stormed into his cabin on the Grand River and took him into custody. His followers intervened, and in a bloody shootout police fire cut him down; he was shot and killed, ironically, by men of his own race garbed in blue uniforms.
Today Sitting Bull is remembered as one of the greatest of all Indian chieftains, a man of power and renown among his own people, an uncompromising foe of white encroachments on his land and his way of life. His rocklike dedication to the principles that ordered his life ensured failure in the great purpose he set for himself but also awarded him stature as one of American history's greatest patriots.
See also
Sioux.
Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1993); Stanley Vestal, Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957).
Robert M. Utley
Moose, Wyoming
