Dan Snow's History Hit - Sitting Bull and the Battle of Little Bighorn

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

The Battle of the Little Bighorn - also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass - was one of the most dramatic and important clashes in American history. In June 1876, on the rolling plains of Montana, Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry charged into a vast encampment of Lakota and other tribes — and were utterly destroyed by the superior native forces who fought to defend their sacred lands from the encroaching United States.In this episode, Dan is joined by former National Parks historian Paul Hedren to explore how this battle came to define the struggle between the U.S. government and the Plains tribes, what led to Custer’s fatal mistake, and how the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho achieved a stunning, if fleeting, victory.Paul's new book is called 'Sitting Bull's War: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom'.The terminology to use when exploring and discussing Indigenous and native peoples, history, and culture is sensitive and complex. You can find out more on language use here: https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/informational/impact-words-tipsProduced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the weeks before the battle of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull, the revered Hank Papa Lakota spiritual leader, experienced a powerful vision during a Sundance ceremony. The ceremony is the long and sacred ritual of self-sacrifice, prayer and prophecy. It's undertaken by a number of native tribes on the American Great Plains. Guided by holy men and spiritual mentors like sitting bull, the ceremony takes months in preparation. A sacred cottonwood tree is selected and felled and erected at the centre of a circular arena. This tree of life symbolises the axis mundi.

The axis that connects the earth and the sky serves as the focal point. Participants dance around it, the traditionally young men. They dance for days without food or water. water, an intense physical and spiritual test. The dancing is accompanied by sacred music, drumming, representing the heart of the universe and chanting. Throughout the ceremony, dancers and the community offer prayers for healing and guidance and well-being and the hope of survival for future generations. In June 1876, near the Rosebud River in present-day Montana, Lakota and northern Cheyenne were gathered in a large encampment

and they performed the Sundance to seek spiritual strength and guidance as they do so a US force advances against them part of a campaign of expansion which will cross sacred indigenous lands sitting bull in his forties known for his spiritual power he dances for two days without rest enduring pain and exhaustion to reach a trance-like state

According to multiple accounts, passed down through Lakota oral history, sitting bull cut over a hundred pieces of small flesh from his arms as an offering to Wakantanka, the great spirit. Then weakened, bleeding. He had his vision. He saw soldiers swarming into the Lakota camp like grasshoppers. Soldiers appeared to be overwhelmed and helpless, tumbling down from above, the Lakota stood unharmed.

Some versions say that a voice told him that soldiers would come but would not take any people away, and the Lakota would win a great victory if they stood together. Sitting Bull told the people what he'd seen. His words gave hope to the bands of the Lakota, Chayenne and Arapaho, who'd gathered in the plains that summer. They interpreted this vision as a promise from the spirits that they would triumph over the blue coats marching towards them in search of gold in their sacred black hills. A few weeks later, this vision did indeed come to pass.

On June the 25th, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and the 7th Cavalry of the United States Army attacked the native encampment on the Little Bighorn River. It was a disaster for the Americans, and Custer, who died in that battle. The vision came true, almost as Settigpool had described. The American soldiers were overwhelmed, they were surrounded and annihilated, falling in great numbers across the hills like grasshoppers. The Battle of Little Bighorn, or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, as it was remembered in Indigenous history, was an unusual, stunning victory for the Lakota and Sioux tribes in their long wars against US expansion, and the forcible removal of the tribes off their native lands. Despite that triumph, though, the victory was short-lived. The US government responded to the defeat in overwhelming force, pursuing the Lakota and Cheyenne

relentlessly in the months that followed. By 1877, most had been driven onto reservations or fled to Canada. The impact shapes the political geography of this region until today. To explain what happened in this crucial chapter of American history and talk about its legacy, I am joined by Paul Hedron. He spent four decades as a national park's historian. in. He worked in the Midwest and the Mountain West. He's written several books on the history. He's particular expert on the Sioux Nation. His newest book is called Sitting Bull's War.

And after hearing this episode, I know you're going to want to go and check that out. Before we started, to from a flag, this episode does use historic terms and some of the language that is now outdated, but was used at the time. You'll listen to Dan Snow's history yet, and this is the story of Sitting Bull and the Battle of Little Big Horn. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black white unity till there is first than black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off and the shuttle has cleared the power. Good to say, Paul. Thanks coming on the show. You're very welcome. Let's get the geography sorted. That's the whole point. Where are these great plains and why are they so great? Well, these great planes are the very heart of America, North America.

America, stretched from Mexico and nicely into Canada and comprise really the center of what are today's United States, from, boy, imagine from the Mississippi River, splitting this nation in half to the Rocky Mountains. Everything between comprises the Great Plains. And what is it about their ecology, their geography that has given rise to certain types of human use of those, like the way that people have lived in that space? How are they determined by that environment? Well, this is an increasingly dry environment. It's a grassy environment.

Well, species evolved in this environment from the smallest creatures and fed on distinctive grasses to the greatest of the creatures, you know, the American buffalo. And they in turn are kind of what drew people into this country. We're talking 16, 17, 18th, 19th century in this country. We're on this land. And so to our story, this is the homeland of American immune people who thrived in this environment, in this distinctive environment. Horses had been introduced to them and evolved a buffalo culture, a lifeway centered on the plains, centered in this grasslands, and thriving on American buffalo. And they in turn had developed this inner connected relationship with this animal.

they thrived on this animal. They ate this animal. Its skins made their clothing, made their lodges, made their tepees, provided all manner of things important to a lifeway. The lifeway evolving on the southern plains just a little different from the northern plains. So you add the dimension of weather and whatnot on the northern plains. It just gets increasingly colder as you reach northward. But it's an independence that evolved this culture that thrived in this culture. country, this landscape for centuries. And among Native peoples, they too moved constantly. The culture

that we care so greatly about presently and I write about all the time, the Lakota people, they are Northern Plains people. We have the Southern Plains. We have the Central Plains. We have the Northern Plains. And in each of those landscapes, different cultures evolved. Still centered on the Buffalo, but different cultures, different tribes, different peoples, but not necessarily connected with one another and often not friendly with one another. The people on the Northern Plains, these are Lakota peoples in the era I care about. There were people earlier than them on the Northern Plains, also the Northern Cheyenne people that are southerish. So it's a complicated world, but driven by Buffalo, driven by a life and an accommodation on a rugged, grassy landscape. That's, I think,

point, the bottom line. And how big are these groups? Let's take the Lakota. How large would you expect to find these groups operating in? My focus has been on the Western Sioux, the Lakota people. There are Eastern Sioux. There are other Sioux. They speak a common language. They have some common origins living in different sectors of this world. But across the northern plains, the focus of my studies all these years, Lakota people numbering, at their height, 15,000 people divided into subgroups. There are the tribes, they called it the Oyat. It was their word oet. The Oyates, the seven oyates of the Lakota people or the Western Sioux and occupying this Northern Plains that we're talking about here. Are they quite hierarchical? Are they a bit

Democratic? How do they organize themselves these smaller groups as they're traveling around? They speak a common language. They intermarried. There was a real fluidity in all of this. If you're a Southern Lakota, you're a brule, you're an Oglala, and you're a man and you fancied a Minokosu woman and chose to marry her, chances are you became a Minikosu. There was just this kind of fluidity in the way they live, they focused their lives. But, they had favorite landscapes. There are seven of these oyots or seven of these tribes in each occupying distinctive segments of this northern plains that we're talking about with common bounds. And for governance, you know, an individual is pretty well free to do what he pleased, could move as he

pleased and do as he pleased. And yet among his people, his familial groups, they chose and got quite familiar with certain segments of these planes. The Sitting Bull people that are such the focus of this latest work of mind are people that were borderlands, American Borderlands people. They lived in the Upper Missouri country of Montana and Dakota, but crossed into Canada from time to time. So you mentioned Sitting Bull there. Let's talk more about him. Do we know where he was born and where? Well, we do, relatively. It is said that he was born on the Grand River, which is a tributary of the Missouri River, in this northern bound of the plains that we're talking about. In 1831, or thereabouts, we say 1831, we say on the grand,

he was a great warrior in his younger days, so as said, but he became something of less a warrior and more of a mystic, a reverential man or a reverent in this adulthood of his, this adulthood of his. He exhibited the Lakota cardinal virtues of wisdom and fortitude and whatnot. And it was just by example, became this leader among his people. And his counsel was invariably good. He was a devout person of the plains dedicated to this culture in the Buffalo country doing as our ancestors did. I mean, to the last, that man was dedicated to traditional values of the Lakotas. And I think others around him, I mean, they came to understand that this man is a man of good counsel. This is a man that we believe what he believes. We're traditional people too.

Now, let's talk about those white people of European origin or descent coming into that huge space. Give me some rough dates. When would the Lakota, for example, of first made contact with the, or had contact made with them by these people? Well, I suspect it was in the days of Lewis and Clark. People point that way. Lewis and Clark knew that they were talking to Siouxan people, these Western Sioux, these hunters, these great buffalo people. People mostly, as they are ascending the Missouri River,

people to the west out in this very country, we're talking about these northern plains. The matters of pressure and the matters of intrusion, which really drives the stories of warfare out here. It's settlement across the plains and continual pressure out of the east. We speak of the trans-Mississippi settlement and the Trans-Missouri settlement. They're just this constant encroachment of people out of the east, seeking their own fortunes and their own prosperity and their own independent lifeways.

And so you've got that on the margins of this Indian country all the time. And then, of course, there's the Oregon Trail. There's reasons to go west, both to settle a alluring landscape and after gold in California, in 1849, to go to the gold country. And if you were a citizen of this country and looking for your future, whether it's good farmland in Oregon and Washington or whether it's gold in California, I mean, you could go around the horn. You know, you could take an ocean voyage there, or there were these pathways across the heart of this country that had been known since the days of mountain men, you know, the fur traders in this land, and evolves the Oregon Trail and the California Trail, the Utah Trail, which bisected this very land of the Buffalo. And if you happen to live in that landscape, you were impacted immediately. All of a sudden, there's these trains going west of settlers. They didn't want much to do with you.

They were concerned about you and Indian as a threat. Mostly, they tried to avoid each other. If you're an Indian, you're watching this. It's this constant parade of traffic, and that brought the military into the landscape, and all of a sudden you've got a permanent establishment in the middle of your Prairie Wonderland. Inevitably, gold is the root of all trouble out here, at least as I see it. This is a story of the 1860s bringing us into this time of the 1870s, which is the ultimate time of change out here.

And Sittling Bull, roughly speaking, he's a warrior, he's a hunter. As you've mentioned at the beginning, he's starting to have these divine revelations. as he believes. What is his politics, if you like, his strategy is unrelenting opposition? What is he becoming known for? Well, he's at first and almost through much of the story of this 1870s war, the Custer War, he's an opponent to all of this. He's threatened by all of this, but his prime counsel constantly was to avoid contact. Just stay away from them if we can help ourselves. We'll fight to defend ourselves if attacked, if we are immediately threatened, but mostly let's not engage at all. Let's just simply stay away. And that was a common view

among many people, among many Lakotas. Now, there are some Lakotas that saw quite differently in the story of the Bozeman Trail War fought, just desperately fought to evict these people, to stop this traffic to Montana, to get those posts abandoned and get those people out of there. A city bowl strategy was more commonly to avoid this. Now, not that he couldn't pick a fight because once in a while he certainly could. And sometimes it was to demonstrate an act of bravado to inspire his own people. I'm willing to put my life on the line. I don't want this.

I don't like these people. I mean that we should stay away from these people, but I'll do this too, if that's what it means. So, there are these wars going on, like the Bozeman Trail War that you've mentioned. These are wars in various parts of this gigantic landscape waged by these native peoples against encroachment. When does war really come to Sitting Bull and the Lakota? There's a kind of a calm. There's a treaty signed at Fort Laramie. the government thought it had solved the sue problem sooner or later it had prescribed a reservation

of these people would go to a reservation and this landscape would be kind of clean and you couldn't quite settle it but you know that would be a conversation for another day because of course they were going to settle it for sitting bull and his people who were observers of this they weren't signatories to this treaty for the most part they weren't involved in that war for the or Spark. That which hit them hardest began in the early 1870s. And the government were building railroads now. The first transcontinental railroad America was completed in 1869. It followed a central route across the continent. And it was a great success. One thing begets another and begets another. And, uh, in course, a southern railroad was plotted and a northern railroad was

plotted. And that railroad crossed sitting bull country. It crossed the very heart of this northern plains that was this homeland of these Lakota people. And there were surveyors of this railroad, of this northern Pacific railroad that, uh, began moving and operating in this country in 187. India people were well aware of this. Métis mixed blood people from Canada that these Lakotas traded with from time to time were especially concerned. They had their own attitude about whites and white settlement. They had their own troubles in Canada and were very freely expressing this to these American Lakotas to resist that railroad. Nothing good comes there.

And so you've got surveyors in 1871. There wasn't great troubles then, although they were keenly aware of this threat. But those surveyors reached deeper into Indian country in 1872, and deeper yet in 1873. And Lakota's resisted. It was different from what came yet. Minacojo band happened to be hunting in the proximity of surveyors. They fought back. Ultimately, it shortened the 72 survey greatly.

You know, this is an Indian threat, even if there was a military contingent accompany them, protecting them. And they turned back because of this Indian resistance. In 1873, Brinks Custer, he's leading the military contingent that is protecting that set of surveyors that came out of the east. They're operating in the Yellowstone Valley. This is the very heart of Indian country. And it's the story of railroaders and the intrusion of railroaders, compounded by, in 1874, Custer, going to the Black Hills. And under the pretense of inside of the 1868 treaty, the government saw, we have a vulnerability here in the way we garrisoned the planes. And they knew where their forts were, and their forts circled this Northern Plains suit country.

And the government made its own case that we need a military post in the middle of that country. And the middle of that country is this Black Hills country. And that's why Custer sent. I think this is an incorrectly told story often in America. It was something that was prescribed by the treaty. It was allowed. And Custer goes there. Well, Custer also had a couple of practical miners in that complement of soldiers, surveying for a military post.

Gold had been rumored in the Black Hills for a long time, for decades. The country was undergoing a great depression, the panic of 1873. There is nothing that was more magical in relieving a depressed economy than the next gold strike. and here was a chance for one. And don't you know, those practical miners find gold. And Custer, if you find gold, you're going to spread the word. It's in the nation's interest to do this. Well, Custer surely did this.

He's in the Central Hills, his miners find gold, reportedly paying gold. And he knows where the nearest telegraph. Post is nearer's telegraph line is that's at Fort Laramie. He dispatches a rider, a courier to Fort Laramie to announce gold. He triggers a gold rush. And it ensues immediately. Well, the Black Hills are another of these little anomalies in the middle of, not a sizable anomaly, in the middle of this Great Plains country. It's in the middle of Sioux country. It was reverential land to the Sioux people. Practically, they hunted it, they got tepee poles from it, they would climb the highest peaks, and they would prey. It was just this enormous personal treasure as far as those people saw. And all of a sudden, there's miners invading our countryside. For the Lakota people, it was the final straw.

So this feels existential now? Well, it truly does. Now, if you're Grant and you're the American Army, you've done this before. And here is just the next something you've got to do. Before, meaning in the decade before this, the people of the central planes, the people of the southern plains have been engaged and swept off that landscape and the reservation people. You know, they get moved to the Indian territory. And now you've got this resistance on the northern plains, resistance to a railroad, resistance to a potential gold mine, a literal. gold mine. And how do we handle it? But we sweep those people off the planes and get them out of the

way. We created a reservation for them, put them on that reservation, and make them white men, transform them through cultural activities. And thus, we have war. It's a standard way the story is told. There's this resistance. There are these people that live in the Buffalo. They want to live the traditional way in the Buffalo country and are in our way and we'll sweep them out of the way and thus there is war. I'm pretty beholden to city and pull and I'm pretty beholden to the Northern Cheyenne's, the allies of these Lakota people and to a life way and the righteousness of a lifeway on the plains. So I choose to tell the story of those people. I understand how war has come about. But I care to follow not the story of army commanders so much this time, but the way

Indian people resisted these army commanders in the mid-1870s. Was Sitting Bull an alliance builder? Was he particularly successful in building a coalition of mobilizing these people against the incursions of the American military? He truly was. Again, he's a charismatic man. He's a devout man. He's a visionary. As war breaks, they turn to him. for this, you know, kind of guidance in a resistance. And he becomes that ultimately in the course of this 1870s war. Now, this Custer War, he becomes the foremost figure that is rallying these people that the people look to because he's a man of good counsel and he's a man of a spiritual vision.

And his vision was, we can do this. We can sustain this life way. And there are many who chose to believe that. More on Sitting Bull after this. Let's talk about the totemic battle that does seem to offer some hope to these people, the little big horn. How exactly is this battle initiated? Custer with the U.S. military moving towards those Black Hills again? Tell me. In the story of the Great Sioux War, or for my purposes, Sitting Bulls War or Custer's War,

there are 22 battles and skirmishes in this totality. So this is over the course of 18 months, that's a lot of engagements. At the very heart of it is the Little Bighorn, the greatest of all of these battles. It's just barely after the Battle of the Rosebud. Those people have moved to the Little Bighorn Valley. They're thinking we've turned those soldiers away. There are soldiers we know on the Yellowstone, but they don't seem to be moving our way. And they thought for a moment, for a moment that this was going to be okay. And maybe we can survive this. They hunted. They did what Indian people did. The horses were fed, the grazed, you know, they just almost, it was a normalcy to the life. This was mid-June 1876. Well, they thought that those soldiers on the

Yellowstone weren't moving their way. Those soldiers on the Yellowstone were well aware that there were people south. They had been sending their own scouts. It's small complements of soldiers to follow Indian trails to see what is going on here. And the commander there, Custer is not the commander of this column of soldiers on the Yellowstone. He is the commander of the cavalry contingent of this body of soldiers. That commander sends Custer to chase these Indians that they have been alerted to. He sends a regiment, a full regiment, 12 companies. of U.S. Cavalry, 7th Cavalry, up the Rosebud to chase those Indians, to find those Indians.

Meantime, that commander is going to come from a different direction, and we're going to meet that village on the same day, more or less, and we'll attack from the north and we'll attack from the South. Attack in a village was what the Indians chose always to avoid. What the army always sought was to attack those villages, not to kill people so much. as to disrupt a life, to destroy a life way, capture ponies, take away their foodstuffs, force them to flee. Well, left with nothing, where are they going to flee but to that agency, which is where we want them anyway. And Custer chases, you know, Custer very aggressively moves.

You can debate forever that did he move, you know, just a little too fast? Was he ahead of that commander out of the north. I think Custer moved the way a cavalry commander's going to move. He's an aggressive officer. He demonstrated that in the Civil War. He's impetuous. He is going to seize an opportunity. An opportunity is always, there's a glory and a good, successful engagement. He lived that. He relished that from his days in the Civil War, elsewhere on the plains. And circumstances has forced his hand as he's moving south because Indian people, they're not out there with their eyes closed, Indian people have their own wolves, their own scouts, paying attention to the landscape, and those wolves discovered him. And it didn't harass, but so much as they saw

there was an opportunity that was in his pack train, somehow, his pack train dropped a crate of army crackers. And Indian people, these scouts, these wolves from the great camp, they come onto this crate of crackers and they know what it is and they open it and are eating and just kind of, what an opportunity. And soldiers are sent back to retrieve this crate to crackers and they exchange shots. Well, those Indian people flee. Word gets to custer. that Indian people know we're here. And that even further hastens an impetuous man seeking an opportunity forward. The trail is as wide as a highway.

The Indian people have just only days before been on this same trail. Their travel to the little big horn. So the trail was playing as day. And Custer chased it and he chased it hard. Are we talking Lakota? We're talking some Cheyenne. Who's in this group of Native Americans? The village is comprised of just under 5,000 people are associating with Sitting Bull now.

There have been these earlier battles. He has called for all traditionals to join him, and they have. And so if there are 12, 15,000 Lakota people, there's many. Lakota that didn't want war. There are many people that are quite acculturated already. But then there are these people. And he drew them together. And they are all there. They had sun danced just days earlier. Citiable had another of these extraordinary visions of his. So they're feeling empowered. And they are on a little big horn. Army methodology is to find these villages and attack them at dawn when they're surprised, when they're least aware.

And Custer, this episode with the Hard Crackers and his discovery, that's occurring in late morning of June 25, and it only hastens his movement to attack that village before it disperses, before it can get away. We pretty much know where it is from a high point in that divide between the Rosebud Creek and the little bachorn place called a crow's nest. supposedly his scouts could see that village. They could see those horses on that rise on the other side of the village. Custer couldn't quite see it, but his scouts that morning said we could. And then you get this news from his backside, and he hastens forward. And leading to one of the greatest battles in the history of American Indian wars, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which does play favorably to this man Custer,

because while those people were surprised, they rose up. There are in 5,000 people, there's 1,500 of them are good fighting warriors, and Custer's leading a command of 600 men, and furthermore, deploys in an odd way. I mean, I think in somewhat of a defense of Custer, he approaches that village maybe as he's conventionally done anyway, which is to divide his complement to make sure that we're attacking from this side as well as that side, and we're guarding in case they choose to flee in that direction. So he divides his command as he's making this hasty approach toward the village into three segments, three major segments, and he leads a company behind with that pat train,

too, with those crackers. One of those compliments doesn't much engage at all, not until the end of the fight. One engages heavily to precipitate the fight, and Custer leading another of those contingents in the largest one in a different direction to attack from another sign they know it's a big village their own scouts of all of this and the trail was such that suggested it as well the indian people in this village they were at least suspecting an attack in the afternoon of june 25 that day it started calmly for them their wolves were out that word hadn't gotten back to the village that soldiers had been discovered. And so the attack that afternoon came as a surprise, but they rose up instantly and defended themselves. And the attacking force on the south side, we know that.

They didn't know this, but we know that as the force led by Marcus Reno, a major leading three companies of cavalry. Reno's orders were to attack the village from the south. And we'll support you from the east, we custer. And Reno attacks. And the initial pattern of gunfire and bullets striking lodges was startling in the middle of the afternoon. I mean, he couldn't believe what was happening. And there's some instant casualties too. And Sitting Bulls village, Sitting Bulls camp in the middle of this big camp, he's on the south side. It's his people that are attacked first. His lodge is exposed first, and he steps out, ushers women and children to safety. I mean, he's concerned always about that. But then it's his counsel to defend ourselves.

And, of course, that's exactly what everybody did instinctively is to rally to people attacking. Chargers. They always call them chargers or blue coats. They didn't know who was attacking. It was just, in fact, they might have thought it was those soldiers. They had just defeated eight days earlier that were back south, and it resumed that that's what they thought, or many of them thought. And the ably deflected that attacking force from the south. They were just bewildered by what rose up to press them instead of they pressed that village. They never swept the village. They got to the southern margins of the camp, and that's where they stopped.

And they formed a skirmish line, and they withdrew their horses to timber. to safety, and they were repulsed from that skirmish line. The defense rose up so vigorously out of that camp. Do you think Sitting Bull played a part in the fighting, or was he a symbolic figurehead? No, he never took any part in the fight. Sitting Bull is that man that encouraged, and more than once, and there's wonderful Indian accounts of him, here's what he did. I mean, he's caring for the old people. I mean, his interests and his concerns are so multiple that he is ushering, making sure that the vulnerable ones are care for and sent this way, and that warriors are rallying to the defense this way.

That's his role, providing good counsel. He had sun danced eight days earlier, eight, six, eight days earlier. And in that dance, he had foreseen a great victory. And that became the common vision of this. camp well sitting bull had seen and so all he needed to do is you know not to inspire them to now defend ourselves because this was going to lead to that great victory and of course we know the end the climax at the little big horn coming up after this So Custer then attacks from the other side of the camp, the southern attack having been repelled?

There's a simultaneousness to this. So Custer, meanwhile, is threading his way in a different direction to attack from another side. He doesn't know this landscape. He's never been on this landscape, so he doesn't exactly know where that opportunity, where that other side is, whether it's on the very northern end of the village or at its side. Well, it turns out he comes to a draw that leads straight to the camp. at its side. And he starts threading, he makes his way to that draw, medicine tail coolly is what it's called. And he starts threading his way or sends some of his complement that way. That's discovered by people in the village. And they spread the word instantly, first off to defend themselves from that threat that seems to be coming immediately their way and almost ready to cross. A couple of Custer's companies were almost on the verge of crossing the river, or at least

appearing to be crossing the river. And they stopped that. You know, there's gunfire. There's firing instantly. And then others in that camp are spreading the words to those people now that the troops in the South had been stopped. The pressure was so great that they withdrew from their skirmish line and they went to their horses in the timber. And the pressure there was so great that they only determined to get the hell out of there. And they flee to the south from more or less a direction they had come. Not exactly, but more or less. And they see some high country as they're fleeing.

And that became their objective, it's just to get to the high country. And there's other soldiers there. They knew of these other commands that were operating. And so sooner or later there's help there, too. Inside the village, they're watching and they're deeply engaged in this on the south side when word comes that there are soldiers attacking from the east side. And precious few Indian people, warriors remain harassing this Reno compliment, and they

withdraw and take on Custer. And so there are already some there. Now the rest of them show up. And they press in so many different ways. And Custer, Custer, the aggressor to the last. I mean, there's a moment where he had to wonder just who am I commanding anymore. He's always in the lead, and the lead compliment, the lead soldiers were the least impacted by all this. I can't pick that at the backside. And if I can't cross here because of Indian resistance, he continues northward to the next horizon. and Horizon suggesting there's a crossing opportunity north yet.

He continues northward. His command behind him is splintering and getting picked at and spread out and constantly engaged from the rear and from the right and the left and are just being picked to literal death. And that complement the soldiers with Custer. They make it to a point on the Custer battlefield today, there's the revered landscape where most of them now these guys died, Custer 2, last stand hill. It make it to last stand hill, but at that point it's not their end because now they

start to spy, if we just hit in this direction, it looks like a crossing there. And they turn off a last stand hill. If you were the soldiers behind and you look in this way, you're thinking, well, that's what his destination. And then all of a sudden, he keeps veering off and heading in a different direction. And it's after veering off. And Indian resistance just constantly swarming and finally swarming him too. And where he had to have this realization as he's looking around and who am I commanding? And he's got these few soldiers with him, but less than half of the command he had started with because the rest of them are strung out and being picked to literal death

behind him. And where he turns, he stops, the pressure in front of him is so great, he stops and retreats to what becomes last stand hill behind him, the high ground behind him. Wasn't good defensive ground, but it was, by golly, the only defensive ground available to him. And that's where his story ends. Killed to a man, that unit. Killed to a man, yes. 260. 63 soldiers in that command, five companies, every one of the killed. And yet, it was a tactical victory, but it didn't affect the strategic direction of the war. The consequences are enormous. It's a tactical victory for the sitting bowl people.

They've wiped out the heart of a cavalry regiment now. They don't know that it's Custer yet. They didn't know exactly who they were fighting. And a couple of Cheyenne women at the end thought they recognized this man and that were spread among their people, but it didn't spread among the camp. And it was among the Cheyenne's not a known, particularly no name, any of these were people that had had some contact with him in the South. For the Indian people, this is, wow, what has happened to us? We defended ourselves well today. It was a cause to celebrate later.

The casualties on their side were rather substantial to not nearly like the 7th Cavalries. For the government, the loss of Custer and the heart of a cavalry regiment was the final straw. And they redoubled their effort to achieve their intents. They had a capacity to share it and to send more troops. It's as simple as that. Sidneyville didn't have a capacity to grow more Indians. He had what he had. The Army's way was completely different, and they redoubled their effort.

The campaigns were unrelenting. They continued. Nelson Miles came on the scene. He was an infantry commander, every bit as aggressive in a personality type as was Custer. And he's an infantry officer, no less. These Indian people hated infantry because they walked. They didn't ride. They couldn't get away.

They fired different weapons that were far more dangerous than cavalry weapons. And this man proved the ability that take the war to the Indian people in the wintertime. And he did. And again, a lifeway so thoroughly disrupted anyway and now constantly harassed all winter long too. and he struck villages, including sitting bulls at one point. And imagine losing your home and your horses and your food stuff such as you had food stuffs and fleeing in the winter with the clothing on your back, and that's it. And that was their fate.

And yet, sitting bull, there were just those people like him that were, we are people. of the prairie, I am not going to an agency, and they resisted. They fled. They found one another. They found solace in, you know, those that hadn't been struck, another village, another place, and they communed and just agreed to continue and to continue. They're the ones that fled to Canada, and ultimately several thousand American Sioux rally with him in Canada. And for a moment they thought, a different government and a different view of Indian people, native peoples, and they thought they had finally found home. But that didn't last because the buffalo disappeared. The buffalo predated by Canadian people already, and a smaller dimension of the great northern buffalo herd

anyway, they didn't care about the boundary when buffalo needed to eat. They went to a grass. And if the grass was on this side of the line, the Canadian-American line, well, they did what they did instinctively. The Canadian Indians could travel into America to hunt Buffalo. The American Indians could not, because Miles waited for them at the border, and they too starved. And that's what led them to come home. 1881, he finally surrenders. The last band of people to come back to America for. from Canada were sitting bull's people in July 1881.

They surrendered at Fort Beaufort, and they were fed. Now, for those people, they were fed, but of course, his travails only continued. Let's spool through to the end of his life now. Tell me about the winter of 1890. What happens? Oh, my goodness. Well, they become reservation people. That's the end of the Lakotas that are the Buffalo people.

the buffalo get wiped out, hide hunters destroy the southern herd, just cleanse the plains of buffalo because you can't tame them, you can't hurt them, and you can't process them like you can cattle. And it was the zeal of Americans to not have that menace on the prairie, but to get rid of them and make it cattle country. On the northern plains, the same thing. They were just wiped out. The landscape is occupied by soldiers, and these people became reservation people. And bureaucracies run slowly, the promise of food, you know, half the time there wasn't sufficient foodstuffs. It was just a bad time.

And the imposition of the acculturation, the activities of acculturation, forced education, the introduction, the introduction of Christian religion, the introduction of Christian religious, the banning of their own religious courses. It just became an increasingly difficult time for people on the reservation. And there occurred, this is broadly writ across Indian country in the American West. There was a prophet in Nevada who spoke of a new religion for you forlorn people who have nothing else. Here is something to be beholden to, to embrace. And this religion, if you dance, if you wear certain types of clothing, if you just truly believe, there will come the day when the white people disappear and the buffalo will return. The old ways will return. The dance was the ghost dance. It spread to disciples from the Great Sioux Reservation, from the agencies on the reservation, found this man in Nevada and came. back and said, well, here's what I've heard. And they believe it. We have nothing else. And they came to

believe it increasingly too. And Citibol got caught up in this in 1890. After he surrendered, he was shipped away for a while and he was allowed to come back to that Uncle Papa landscape. He settled on the Grand River, where he was born with his immediate families, followers around him, and absent any other hope, he embraced this too. And he's an influential man. People believed him. They always have. And that was greatly distressing to that local agent that we have this man that, to God, if he's embracing this and this is this thing that is just pervading the agencies and it's threatening to us and maybe there'll be a warfare again and things will just go to hell in Indian country and he sought his arrest and removal. That was a standard way of handling Indian people.

These kind of prominent leaders pick them up, move them away, get them out of the way, remove that influence among their people, and he sought his arrest, and it was a botched arrest, and the Sitting Bull was killed in 1890. Among his followers, they fled. They united with some Minicoju people who were also subscribers to this, and equally determined to believe absent anything else, and they fled, and they were cornered at Wounded Knee. And, you know, the greatest tragedy in American history is what occurred at Wounded Knee in December, late December, 1890. Sidney Bull caught up earlier in the same story. Sad ending.

Sad ending. What was his legacy? Can we still see the impact of his life and his teaching advice today? We've grown a little bit as a country and as a people. Reservations are still tough places in America. Unemployment is rampant. There are people that subscribe still to kin and a life here in a home country, as kin now have known it. And so in a certain way, one still kind of senses as you go there.

You go into Indian country today, whether up into City Bowl country or down here into Red Cloud and Crazy Horse. country, that kinship and a lifeway is still strong, and people are still there and they're very proud, but the whole business of kinship and family and tribe remains very strong across all of American reservations, and particularly these Sioux reservations. And in a certain way, doesn't that kind of reflect what Sitting Bull is all about also? Paul, what's your new book called? Sitting Bulls War, the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the fight for Buffalo and freedom on the plans. Go and get it, folks, when it comes out.

Thank you very much, Paul, for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan. Thank you very much to Paul for that incredible and very thorough account of this extraordinary, sensitive, but crucial history. And there's an interesting addendum to this story. A few weeks back I learned that there's an indigenous-led initiative by the intertribal Buffalo Council. And it's been working to reintroduce the buffalo back to the ancestral grazing lands across the Midwest and now further afield into place like Oklahoma. So once again, several hundred American bison roam as they once did centuries ago. And hopefully as this

program continues, their numbers will grow. I think that's very cool. Thank you very much listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, please hit follow and don't miss another episode. Bye for now. Thank you.