Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake — Sitting Bull — was born around 1831 in what is now South Dakota into the Hunkpapa branch of the Lakota people. As US settlers and the Northern Pacific Railroad pushed across the Great Plains, he refused to sign the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie and emerged as the principal political and spiritual leader of the resistance. In June 1876, on the eve of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, he had a vision of soldiers falling 'like grasshoppers' into the Lakota camp; days later, on 25 June, Crazy Horse and other warriors annihilated five companies of the US 7th Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer in less than an hour. Sitting Bull led his people into Canada to escape the inevitable American reprisal but eventually surrendered in 1881. He toured briefly with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, returned to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and was killed by Indian Agency police on 15 December 1890 in an attempt to arrest him as a Ghost Dance ringleader — two weeks before the massacre at Wounded Knee.
All Figures
Hunkpapa Lakota Holy Man · War Chief
Sitting Bull
c. 1,831 CE – 1,890 CE
The Lakota holy man and war chief who united the Plains tribes against US encroachment, won the day at Little Bighorn, and was killed by tribal police on the reservation fourteen years later.
Lifetime
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