Resumption of Hostilities
In February 1869, only a few months after proclamation of the Fort Laramie Treaty, the War Department violated the provision that allowed Indians to hunt in the unceded land. It issued a statement declaring that Indians traveling beyond the reservation were subject to military jurisdiction and would be considered hostile.
With the Bozeman Trail forts dismantled, Sitting Bull concentrated on the upper Missouri River area. A large number of Sitting Bull’s pictographs from this period show his increasing military focus on Euroamericans.2 Just a few months after the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty, Sitting Bull led a raid against Fort Buford in northwest North Dakota—a fort he had especially resented since its construction in the mid-1860s as an intrusion into Hunkpapa territory. The attack killed 3 men, wounded 3 others, and captured more than 200 cattle. Sitting Bull followed this action with additional harassing raids against Fort Buford as well as raids against Forts Rice, Stevenson, and Totten, the latter in the Devil’s Lake region of northeast Dakota Territory.
Another significant attempt to harm Fort Buford took place in September 1870. With a Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, and Cheyenne force numbering 200, Sitting Bull attacked the cattle herd attached to a camp of woodsmen working for Durfee and Peck, the company hired to supply wood to the fort. One of the men, Charles Teck, was driving oxen about 500 yards from the camp and was cut off. Teck made a heroic stand, shooting several of his attackers until he ran out of ammunition. He then used his rifle as a club, but was soon overwhelmed.
Shifts in Strategy
After this attack on the woodcutters, Sitting Bull made a strategic decision to adopt a more defensive posture. In Robert Utley’s words, he shifted his military policy from being the lance of his people to being their shield.3 He would fight the Euro-Americans, but only when they posed an immediate threat to the welfare of the Lakotas.
By this time, the nonreservation Lakota area had shifted westward, pushed by the carving out of reservations toward the east and pulled by the migration of the buffalo to the west. Lakotas now viewed their territory as stretching westward from the Powder River to the Bighorn and north to the Missouri River, then northwest to the Musselshell. However, it was an area not long left to their control.
One of the wisest of the Hunkpapa leaders, Sitting Bull’s uncle Four Horns, recognized that resisting the Euro-Americans required more unity than the Lakotas had traditionally exercised. A new type of war pitted them against a highly organized enemy, and the Lakotas must adapt, he believed, if they were to survive. In response, Four Horns devised a plan to unify all of the Sioux still resisting U. S. government expansion under one supreme leader, Sitting Bull, who had been a war chief since about 1857. He was a proven leader, courageous warrior, accomplished hunter, and revered Wichasha Wakan. He was the one man, Four Horns believed, who could lead successfully in this new and necessary position.
Although the precise date of Sitting Bull’s elevation to supreme leader is uncertain, it likely took place after the Fort Laramie conference, in 1869, on the middle Rosebud Creek in Montana.4
Sitting Bull's Bravest Act
As much as Sitting Bull wanted to be left alone by the Euro-Americans, that was not to be. An especially obtrusive incursion was that of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was planned to run directly through Lakota hunting grounds to connect St. Paul, Minnesota, with Seattle, Washington. Trains frightened buffalo, seriously undermining the Lakotas’ very survival. U. S. government and military officials knew the provocative nature of the railroad—and they recognized that the Lakotas surely would resist it.
In the fall of 1871 when the U. S. cavalry and a party of railroad surveyors appeared along Yellowstone River (which the Lakotas called the Elk River), Sitting Bull paid close attention but did not immediately attack. In the summer of 1872, two additional groups of Northern Pacific engineers returned, accompanied by two sizable military forces: 600 soldiers under Colonel David S. Stanley out of Fort Rice, and 500 soldiers under Major Eugene M. Baker from Fort Ellis near Bozeman, Montana.
In August, warriors from several Lakota tribes had come together at the Powder River in southeastern Montana for a Sun Dance to prepare for a military expedition against their Crow enemies. The large force started moving west to engage the Crows. Then scouts reported soldiers nearby on the north bank of the Yellowstone near the mouth of Arrow Creek. This party consisted of Major Barker’s troops plus 20 railroad workers.
While chiefs discussed whether to continue after the Crows or confront the soldiers, a number of young warriors escaped the notice of the akicitas who were trying to prevent any unsanctioned attacks and made the decision for the chiefs. The soldiers and railroad employees took refuge in a dry riverbank while these Lakotas fired from higher ground and raced “daring lines” past the shooting soldiers.
The encounter, known as the Battle of Arrow Creek, did not prove decisive for either party. In the end, the attackers, faced with the U. S. military’s usual superior firepower, withdrew. Yet the railroad employees were so badly
Sun Dance
Among all Lakota religious ceremonies, the Sun Dance was the most significant. The Sun Dance, which was held in honor of Wi, the sun god, occurred annually, typically around June, and was designed to foster spiritual and social rebirth for the Lakotas. The buffalo god, Tatanka—god of ceremonies, health, and provision—also figured importantly in the ceremony. After the dance was finished, the tribe would set out on its buffalo hunts.
The central portion of the Sun Dance (preparation of the Sun Dance Lodge and the dancing itself) took four days, with the actual dancing occurring on the third and fourth days. This period was preceded by eight days of reflection, instruction, and preparation. The Sun Dance took place in a dance lodge specially constructed for that purpose. The dancing area consisted of the open, middle portion of the lodge.
The Sun Dance Pole, made from a cottonwood tree, was the most important structural element in the Sun Dance Lodge. The pole was erected in the middle of the inner circle, surrounded by stakes driven into the ground. Male dancers were tied to the stakes, with the Sun Dance Pole reserved for an individual seeking to establish his special holiness and qualifications to be a holy man (a Wichasha Wakan). Two sets of parallel slits would be cut in the dancer's chest, or sometimes in the back, and two wooden skewers inserted under the skin. A rope then was tied to each skewer and connected to the pole or a stake. The dancer would dance until he pulled free, his skin ripping open in the sacrificial act.
The Sun Dance involved many rituals and symbols, including fasting requirements, painting of bodies and clothing in colors that conveyed spiritual meanings, and ritualistic use of a buffalo head and a sacred pipe.
Shaken by the encounter that they turned northward to the Musselshell River rather than continue down the Yellowstone, returning as quickly as possible to Fort Ellis.
The battle was most memorable for a display of courage by Sitting Bull unlike anything that either side had ever seen. It resulted from the need for Sitting Bull to reestablish his authority over the young warriors who were inclined to let their impetuosity overrule their better judgment. He set aside his weapons and, picking up his pipe and tobacco pouch, strolled into the area between the two warring forces. With bullets kicking up dust around him, he struck fire with his flint and steel, lighted his pipe, and calmly smoked. Then he invited others to join him. White Bull, another Lakota named Gets the Best of Them, and two Cheyennes reluctantly accepted. After finishing his smoke, Sitting Bull carefully cleaned out his pipe, then returned at a leisurely pace while the other four raced to safety in such a hurry that Gets the Best of Them forgot his arrows, which White Bull retrieved. It was, according to White Bull, the bravest act ever by Sitting Bull.5
Custer in the Black Hills and Other Incursions
Rumors of gold in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, an area within the Great Sioux Reservation, had circulated for some time. In July 1874, Colonel George Armstrong Custer, under the direction of General Philip Sheridan, led an exploratory expedition that included miners and newspaper correspondents. The official reason for the expedition was that Custer was merely searching out a good site for a fort that could support the reservation Indians at the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies in northern Nebraska and also protect the railroad.
The correspondents, who wanted to please their editors with stories that would sell papers, sent out glowing reports of the rich deposits just waiting to be excavated. Custer, always anxious to enhance his fame, proclaimed that the area was replete with “gold among the roots of the grass.” Not surprisingly, given these promises of riches in the face of the still-raging economic depression of 1873, prospectors and mining companies rushed to the area.6
The Black Hills were of great importance to the Lakotas. Known as the Paha Sapa (“The Hills That Are Black”), the area also was called a “Meat Pack” by Sitting Bull because of all the game that lived there. The Black Hills also offered valleys protected from the wind and a seemingly inexhaustible store of firewood. Lodgepole pine supplied strong, straight poles for tipis. Although Sitting Bull preferred the Plains as his primary home because he could hunt buffalo there, he valued the Black Hills as a ready supply of food and wood when needed. He also sensed a mystical presence in the hills to which many young Lakota men went for their first vision quest and certainly had no intention of turning them over to the U. S. army or miners.
As miners and settlers rushed into the Black Hills, Sitting Bull was primarily occupied with developments farther west. Sitting Bull’s old enemy, the Crow, continued to be an irresistible magnet for hostilities. Sitting Bull’s men repeatedly harassed the Crow agency in southern Montana. They stepped up their attacks in the summer of 1875, when the agency was moved farther away from Fort Ellis, near Bozeman, Montana, to a site about 14 miles south of the Yellowstone near Stillwater River. Sitting Bull’s war parties regularly hit wagon trains hauling supplies for construction of the new agency on the premise that government agents or anyone else assisting the Crows also made themselves enemies of the Lakotas.
Sitting Bull also faced intrusions into his Montana lands by organized groups determined to make their fortune either by prospecting or by trading. In February 1874, a large party of some 150 men heavily armed with rifles and two cannons and calling itself the Wagon Road and Prospecting Expedition set out from Bozeman, Montana, down the Yellowstone in search of gold, crossing the iced-over river below the mouth of the Bighorn. On April 4, Sitting Bull led several hundred warriors against the intruders’ camp, but the prospecting expedition, which primarily consisted of experienced frontiersmen, was able to repel the attackers. Three times, Sitting Bull attacked but was
Compelled to retreat. The Lakota attacks caused few casualties among the would-be prospectors but took a heavy toll on their livestock. Coupled with bad weather, the fighting led the Yellowstone Wagon Road and Prospecting Expedition to abandon its plans and return to Bozeman.
A second Bozeman expedition, led by Fellows D. Pease, moved into Lakota land in the summer of 1875 with the intention of building a trading post near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn Rivers. Pease and his party proceeded to build several log huts connected by a protective wall of tall wooden posts. The Lakotas whittled away at Pease’s settlement, over time killing six members of his party and wounding many more through the winter of 18751876. Fort Pease, though, remained an annoying presence to Sitting Bull. It would not be completely abandoned until March 1876. By that time, the original trading plan had long since been discarded, and the site had become a precarious refuge for fewer than 20 wolfers who had to be rescued by a cavalry column out of Fort Ellis.
The Sun Dance of 1875
Continuing to face traditional Indian enemies as well as a variety of newer adversaries, including soldiers, miners, and settlers, Sitting Bull tried again to create a more unified force of native peoples in the summer of 1875. The agent of unification was an especially large Sun Dance that, Sitting Bull hoped, would more closely bind together his Hunkpapas, Spotted Eagle’s Sans Arcs, the Oglalas led by Crazy Horse and Black Twin, the Miniconjous of Makes Room and White Bull, and the Northern Cheyennes led by Little Wolf and a revered holy man named Ice.
Sitting Bull was both the primary force behind this remarkable Sun Dance and the principal performer at it. Ice had given him a black war horse, and Sitting Bull rode this mighty horse to the Sun Dance lodge. Streaks of white adorned the horse, and Sitting Bull, wearing only a breechcloth, moccasins, and war bonnet, had painted his own body with yellow clay. Strips of black paint covered his forehead and portions of his face, including his chin. His wrists and ankles were circled by black bands, and a black disk on his chest and a black crescent on his right shoulder representing the sun and moon indicated that he had received visions and been in communication with the spiritual world. All of this created an extraordinarily dramatic spectacle, with the black on Sitting Bull’s face symbolizing his past success in battle and the yellow covering his body representing destruction and violence. Those watching the ceremony knew that war was not far away.7
Following the Sun Dance, the large village moved to the Tongue River, likely near the state border in southeastern Montana northwest of present-day Sheridan, Wyoming. There in August 1875, Sitting Bull met a contingent of about 100 agency Indians accompanied by former friend Frank Grouard. This party had come to invite Sitting Bull and others resisting accommodation with the government to attend a council at Red Cloud Agency in northwestern
Nebraska in September, the goal of which was to negotiate a sale or long-term lease of the Black Hills.
At a council meeting the following morning, a series of speakers opposed going in to the agency. Crazy Horse, the great Oglala warrior, refused even to talk about the invitation, leaving Little Hawk to speak on his behalf. Sitting Bull, according to Grouard, gave a long speech in which he declared that he was no agency Indian, would never sell the Black Hills, and was prepared for war: “He told me to go out and tell the white men at Red Cloud that he declared open war and would fight them wherever he met them from that time on.”8
World History
