Sitting Bull
Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota holy man and chief who led the resistance to United States expansion onto the northern plains. Born around 1831 near the Grand River in present-day South Dakota, he was called Slow as a boy for his deliberateness, and took his father's name after counting coup on a Crow warrior at fourteen. He became a leader of the Strong Heart warrior society and, by the 1860s, was recognised across Lakota bands as a war chief and wichasha wakan, a holy man. He fought the army during Red Cloud's War and refused to sign the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, though it recognised the Black Hills as Lakota territory. Gold was found in the Black Hills in 1874 after Custer's expedition, prospectors flooded in, and the government ordered all Lakota onto reservations by January 1876. Sitting Bull did not comply. At a sun dance that June he cut fifty pieces of flesh from each arm and had a vision of soldiers falling into camp upside down. Days later, on 25 June 1876, a combined force of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho under Crazy Horse and others destroyed five companies of the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn, killing Custer and about 268 men. Sitting Bull, then in his forties, was the political and spiritual authority rather than a field commander. The army's response drove him into Canada in 1877. Starvation forced his surrender in 1881. He spent time touring with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and returned to Standing Rock. Fearing his influence during the Ghost Dance movement, Indian agency police went to arrest him on 15 December 1890 and shot him dead.
- Lived: 1831 CE – 1890 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: chief, warrior
