Dan Snow's History Hit - Sitting Bull: the Life and Death of a Native American Chief

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

Sitting Bull, best known for his initiative and victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn, is a greatly revered Native American Chief. But he was more than a fierce leader of his people. Bestowed the name ‘Sitting Bull’ at only 14 by his father, he showed characteristics of courage, perseverance, and intelligence beyond his years - traits that would come to define him, and the relationship between Native Americans and the US government for generations. In this episode, James from the Warfare Podcast is joined by Professor Jeff Olster, who specialises in the impact of the United States on Native Americans between the 18th to 20th centuries. Together they discuss who Sitting Bull was, the journey that led him to Little Bighorn, and the injustices inflicted upon the Native American people by the US Government.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Down Snow's History. He's probably the greatest indigenous commander, Native American commander that the US Army faced in the 19th century. There were some pretty impressive ones in the 17th and 18th centuries, but in the 19th century, Sitting Bull became a legend. He's best known for his victory at what Americans call the Battle of Little Bighorn, what the Lakota Sioux, the Northern Cheyenne, the Arapaho call the Battle of Greasy Grass. Custer's last stand when the 7th Cavalry, regiment of the US Army, was annihilated at the hands of Native Americans. Sitting Bull deserves a huge amount of credit for that victory, but he was so much more than the warrior leader.

He was named that at 14 by his father, because apparently he showed his characteristics even then of courage, perseverance, but it was also intelligence, contemplation, wisdom beyond his years. And in this podcast, we're running a sibling episode of Downside History. We've got Warfare with James Rogers. He's joined by Professor Jeff Ulster, who specialises in the impact of the United States on Native Americans between the 18th and 20th centuries. They're going to talk about Slitting Bull, they're going to talk about his journey to Little Bighorn, what happened in that battle, and of course, what happened in the aftermath, the injustices inflicted upon the Native American people by successive US governments. If you want to watch TV shows about

American history, we've got plenty of history at TV. We just had our box office blockbuster, Don Wildman, TV legend over in the States there, talking about Pearl Harbor and its impact on his family, his community, his city, and the US in general. That was for the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Great to have welcomed Don to the channel. If you wish to watch documentaries like that, if you wish to listen to back episodes of the podcast, you can do so. History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. It's the world's best history channel.

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What's not to like? It's great. So thanks for doing that. But in the meantime, everyone, here is James talking to Prof Jeff Ulster about Sitting Bull. Enjoy. That day at the Little Bighorn there, I think the, the, the, the, as I always say, when you're walking towards a dog and he's backing up, could be the most friendliest dog around, but his tail touches the wall. He knows he can't back up no more.

He's going to come at you. And I think this is what happened at the battle of Big Horn because the people were pushed to the limits. And they had to retaliate. But they went against the vision of my great-grandfather. That was Ernie LaPonte,

Sitting Bull's great-grandson, talking in his own words about how Sitting Bull and his fellow Native Americans were driven to battle by the United States government in June 1876. This was at the Battle of Little Bighorn. And after the battle was over, my grandfather rode through there. My great-grandfather rode through the battlefield. He knew what was going to happen. half of the road through the battlefield, he knew what was going to happen. He already knew what was in store for his future generations because they went against the vision. The vision said

leave them as they lay. Do not take anything that belongs to them, their scalp, their food, clothes, nothing. Do not cut them open or nothing, but they did. And he knew what was in store. His future generations are going to suffer at the descendants and the relatives of these soldiers who were mutilated here. So this is what lay in store for us.

Ernie Leponte is talking about Sitting Bull's post-battle realisation, that moment of clarity that he had when he realised that Native Americans were now at risk of being persecuted by the United States government. The Battle of Little Bighorn was a massive victory for the Native Americans, but it led to decades of oppression, confining of Sitting Bull's people to the reservations, Sitting Bull's eventual death, and generational upheavals that can still be felt now this week I'm joined by Professor Jeff Ulster to talk about the life and death of Sitting Bull and the impact that this battle the battle of Little Bighorn had on Native Americans. Hi Jeff welcome to the History Hit

Warfare podcast how are you doing today? Good how How are you? I am good. Yes, it is completely pitch black here in Europe by about 3pm in the afternoon. Is it the same for you? Where are you in the world? I'm out on the west coast of North America in Oregon, and it's about eight in the morning. So we have just after pitch black, we're now starting to get some light in the sky. I used to live on the West Coast in California, but I have never for my sins been to Oregon. What is the one thing we should know about Oregon? Oregon is a very diverse geographical state.

People think that it mainly rains here all the time. There's a kind of rainy part on the West side, but we also have a very dry interior, really a desert. Ah, okay. I'm adding this to my list. This sounds like one of those places where you can go and visit all the different types of geography and have kind of 50 holidays all in one. Incredibly scenic in different ways. Perfect. And of course, famous for being the end of the Oregon Trail.

Now this ties, I suppose, a little bit into the history we're going to talk about today because I know you've worked for a long time as a professor on the impact of the United States on Native Americans from around the 1700s to the 1900s. But it's within that broader, fascinating history that I want to focus on one great man today, and that is Sitting Bull. So tell us, who was Sitting Bull? Sitting Bull. So tell us, who was Sitting Bull? Well, Sitting Bull was a major leader of the Lakota people. The Lakota people are one of what is known as the seven council fires in their own language, the Oceti Chacoan. And that includes people that were Dakota speakers, Nakota speakers, and Lakota speakers. And so Sitting Bulls people, Lakotas, were the farthest west geographically of the seven council fires. And let's say by the time

of the Oregon Trail, which you mentioned in the 1840s, the Lakotas were a very powerful nation. They controlled a large part of central North America, known as the Great Plains, states that become, in areas that will eventually become the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, parts of Wyoming, parts of Montana, parts of Nebraska. And so he, to begin with, is a major leader of one of the most powerful indigenous nations of North America. I see. And is this where he comes from? Is this where he was born? Yeah, he would have been born, I think, in Montana in early 1830s. So, you know, 10 years or so before the Oregon Trail. And this is where he was born and where his people,

you know, the Lakotas controlled a very large area, as I just said. And his particular group of Lakotas, known as Hunkpapa Lakotas, were fairly far in where the Oregon Trail was going through. The Oregon Trail actually was cutting through southern Lakota territory and affecting other Lakota groups, but not really his. So when he was born in the 1830s and then came of age as a young man in the 1840s, and we're thinking about conflict, we're thinking about war. His people weren't really so much concerned or having to deal with the United States or U.S. Americans. They were mostly concerned with other Native nations and particularly the Crows and the Assiniboines. So when Sitting Bull went to war for the first time, he was only 14 years old. It was on a raid against Crow Indians in Montana.

And that was when he counted his first coup, which was, you know, by touching an enemy, was celebrated for this by his father. And that's how he got his name. His father's name was Sitting Bull. And he gave his son that same name then. This is 18, you know, the mid 1840s or so. And he's a young, you know, a young boy, 14 is all. Wow, that is a great honour for your father to bespore his name down onto you. What was his name before this? He was given his birth name was Jumping Badger. I'm not quite sure why he got that name.

Apparently... It's a great name. Yeah, it's kind that name. Apparently... It's a great name. Yeah, it's kind of a cool name. It's a cool name. Apparently, though, according to, you know, information that was later given by associates of Sitting Bull, relatives and friends, he was known by his, you know, youthful comrades before he got the name Sitting Bull as Slow. That was his nickname. And the reason, I guess, is that he moved in a kind of slow and deliberate fashion. I don't know that they were making fun of him exactly by that. There may have been a little element of teasing.

I think I prefer Sitting Bull or Jumping Badger over Slow. And it's a big name. It's a big name to bear at the age of 14. You know, it conveys the kind of person that he will become, which is particularly as a warrior, which is, you know, it's mimetic, right? I mean, you are to be and have the attributes of a sitting bull. So that means courage, but it also means an immovability and an endurance. And later in his life, there's stories about him when he's fighting the United States where, you know, he is a warrior as a sitting bull, or he does those kinds of things. There's one story about him, I think it dates from the early 1870s. So jumping ahead quite a bit, you know, he's maybe 40 by this time, and is a veteran

many times over, we might say. At that time, the United States really is encroaching on Hunkpapa Lakota territory, and it's in the form of a railroad in the early 1870s coming out of the east and on its way ultimately to the Puget Sound area where Seattle is now. And Hunkpapas didn't want that railroad to go through. And so at one point, there are soldiers who were there because Hunkpapas are raiding the railroad and harassing surveyors and killing some of them. So soldier U.S. troops are there. And at one point, there's an engagement where they're firing on Sitting Bull and some of his comrades. And Sitting Bull goes to a certain spot. It's a kind of hill,

not a high one, but a kind of rise in the landscape. And with some of his guys, and he says, you've got to come with me. And he goes and sits down like a sitting bull and lights his pipe and passes it around to this group of maybe four, five, six, seven of his fellow fighters and just sits there while bullets are, you know, shooting past them. None of them get hit. And after a period of time, he gets up and walks back. So it's really sort of demonstration of his courage. But also, if I guess you might say, it's also a demonstration of his faith, we could put it in those terms, in spiritual power, because anytime Lakotas went to war, they, of course, depended on themselves and their skills that they had. They depended on others in the group, but they also depended on the spiritual

powers of the universe, I guess we could put it that way, for assistance in war and in success, and certainly protection in this case is the assistance that he would have gotten. So you spoke a little bit about this encroachment by the US government. Is this what brought Sitting Bull head to head with the US army in some of his first battles? Yeah, so in Sitting Bull's early, early career, like I said, in the 1840s, and really into the 1850s, most of his fighting is with other native nations. And some of the southern Lakota groups do start, there's violence between them and United States troops in the 1850s, but not really with the northern groups, the Hunk Papas and others, because it's really the U.S. is going through southern Lakota territory in the

1850s with the Oregon Trail, and then of course the California Trail, and that leads to conflict down there. But farther up north, it's really not until the 1860s and 1870s that the United States starts to encroach on northern Lakota territory, and it's at that point that Sitting Bull starts to clash with U.S. forces. And one of the key aspects, the points of contestation here, was the fact that the US government wanted to move a number of the Native Americans onto reservations. And this is something that Sitting Bull just wouldn't abide. No, he wouldn't abide that. And what you've asked about here, James, raises an important point, out here, James, raises an important point, which is that as the U.S. encroaches more on Lakota territory, understandably, Lakota people become divided about how to deal with that. And for a

variety of reasons, some Lakotas take an approach of what I would term accommodation. It's not that they want to become fully assimilated, you know, give up their total waste of life, give up their language, give up their culture, and become like white Americans. I mean, white American policymakers envision that that's what they would like to happen ultimately, or at least some of them envision that. So we're not talking about total assimilation, but we are talking about a strategy of accommodation. And by that, I mean Lakotas who believe that it really isn't possible to prevail militarily over the United States. And so that you have to read some kind of arrangements with them where some of Lakota lands can be preserved, where Lakota people have enough food to eat, and where U.S. officials aren't able to assert substantial authority over

Lakota ways of life, cultural and religious. And so those people do go on to reservations in the 1870s and, of course, the 18s, and try to make a reservation system work for them on their terms. Now, Sitting Bull and many others posed this strategy. Sitting Bull believed, you know, into the 1870s that it was possible, you know, to prevail militarily against the United States and to hold the line and prevent them from further encroachments into Lakota territory. And, you know, he once made a statement, I believe, to a newspaper reporter who, you know, was there and Sitting Bull said, you know, to the accommodationists, he said something like, you know, you want to make yourself slaves to a piece of fat bacon. You know, this was sort of,

the government was providing provisions to people who had gone on to the reservation. And he, you know, basically said, I'm not going to do that. And it really expressed a kind of contempt on his part for the accommodationists. But the US government had also kind of pulled the wool over the eyes, some of those that come into the reservations, right? Because of course, as there was more and more encroachment by the US government and those looking for resources and gold and the such, there was also far more killing of buffalo. And that was a vital food source for the Native Americans. So many felt that they had to go into these reservations to guarantee food for their families. But is it the case that once they were on the reservations,

they were somewhat politically leveraged for that food, or the food was cut off at points if the tribes were doing things that the US government didn't agree with? Yeah, very, very much so, James. One, I think, very important example of this dynamic is in the mid-1870s, and we might talk about the Battle of Little Bighorn, but right around that time, and Sitting Bull was involved in that battle, really the most famous of all the engagements. But during that time, the United States has decided that it wants to take the Black Hills from the Lakotas. And the Black Hills was really the center of the Lakota world, both geographically, but also spiritually. The Black Hills were a place of economic resources, but they were also a place where

there were a lot of powerful stories about the origins of animals, about the origins of the Lakotas themselves. It was a place where Lakotas practiced many of their sacred rituals. The Sundance was one of them. Young men going on vision quests was another one of them. And the Black Hills were very important for those kinds of things. And because gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, the United States wanted to gain control of the Black Hills and did so. Now, the way the United States did this was by trying to get Lakota leaders to sign an agreement giving up the Black Hills. And so what they did is they went to the reservations and they went up to the leaders of the accommodationists who had gone on to the reservations and, as you say, had become dependent by this time on the government for food because by

the mid-1870s, most of the bison populations had been destroyed. There were very few buffalo left. This was the main means of support for Lakotas. It was no longer available. They had become dependent on the government for food. Like you say, when they had first gone on to the reservations, there wasn't really a sense on their part, or at least they hoped, that the government would use that circumstance against them, but they did. And so when the government wanted to get Lakota leaders to sign this agreement, to give up the Black Hills, basically what they said is, if you don't sign this agreement, we will not feed you anymore. So leaders are really between a rock and a hard place. What are you going to do? Not sign and risk the possibility that your family members, your people that you're responsible for, that you need to take care of, are going to starve and die. And they face that as a real possibility at that point. So under that pressure, a number of leaders do sign. It's in 1876,

that seats Black Hills. So that's an example of, I think, the dynamic that you're identifying. So that's an example of, I think, the dynamic that you're identifying. It certainly is, and it shows quite a lot why Sitting Bull was so sceptical. And is it in this context, then, that we start to see the preamble for the Battle of Little Bighorn? You mentioned it. Tell us all about it. The real context for the Battle of Little Bighorn, and it's in the same year as this effort to try to take the Black Hills gets underway, 1876 is the year. For quite a long time before that,

Sitting Bull and others had really been trying to defend their territory against U.S. encroachment. And the 1860s, there were a number of whites who came up through Nebraska and into Wyoming on their way to goldfields in Montana. And the goldfields themselves weren't in Lakota territory, but the route to the. Civil War, 1865, 66, 67. And Lakotas had fought the United States Army, which had built forts to protect those prospectors going through. So there was an effort to hold off encroachment in that area. In the meantime, there's also an effort to hold off encroachment from the railroad, as I was mentioning earlier, coming through to the north. Then in 1873, George Armstrong Custer, who had become a rather famous general, young man during the Civil War, was known as the boy general, very flamboyant figure. He cultivated the press, he had sort of long curled hair, you know, which he perfumed. And he was the young West Point graduate, wasn't he, Jeff? Yeah, he wasn't a particularly,

you know, great student, but he had gone there, you know, was a very striking figure and a publicist for himself. And as I say, was able to cultivate a newspaperman with, you know, to convey a certain image of a sort of dashing heroic general. And he was chosen to lead an expedition into the Black Hills in 1873. There were about a thousand troops that went in there. And James, that was actually a treaty violation because the United States had signed a treaty with Lakotas in 1868. And it was really to put an end to the conflict that was going on over the prospectors going into Montana. The United States and the Lakotas signed a treaty, which was really a peace treaty from a Lakota perspective, that really guaranteed security to their lands. And the Black Hills was within that treaty,

to their lands. And the Black Hills was within that treaty, those treaty lands. And it was really a treaty violation for such a large military expedition to go in. They did it and they did find gold. They suspected it was there and they did find it. And then it was publicized widely. And then a large number of prospectors came in over the next few years. And the United States, of course, then decides that it wants the Black Hills. And it's really at that point that Lakotas in Wyoming, Montana, and including Sitting Bull, but also other very famous Lakotas like Crazy Horse, who is an Oglala from a different group than Sitting Bull, decided that they really had to defend the Black Hills. And they had been doing this for a while, but, you know, they decided that they would really be willing to fight really to the death to defend the Black Hills against further encroachment and

takeover. And so the United States government recognized this. And what they did is in the winter of 1875-76, government officials ordered all Lakotas to go onto the reservation and to go into the agencies. And the government said that if they refused to go in, that they'd be declared, quote, hostiles and then subject to U.S. military action. And of course, the people like Sitting Bull were not about to obey this edict, which they saw as unwarranted. There was no basis for them to have to do this in any treaty that had ever been signed or anything like that. And so they refused. So then the United States did send troops out in the spring of 1876. And Lakotas defeated, first of all, a military force under the command of George Crook. Then a few weeks later, defeated Custer himself, who had led his 7th Cavalry trying

to attack a large group of Lakotas and Cheyennes and some Arapahos. And Sitting Bull was present at the Little Bighorn and played a significant role in the lead up to it and into the fighting. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we've got an episode of the Warfare podcast about Sitting Bull. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Custer really walked himself into a bit of a massacre, didn't he? Because am I correct in thinking that he had around 600 troops and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, on the other hand, had managed to gather around 10,000 peoples at least together. It's so interesting to think that Sitting Bull had spent his youth fighting other Native Americans and by this point had brought

so many different peoples together in their unity against the US government's violation of already signed tribes. But here they are, they're sitting all together by the Little Bighorn River. And it's at this point that Custer comes through. What was he aiming to achieve here? Was it just a poor intelligence mission? Or was he really that arrogant and ignorant about his abilities? I think there has to be hubris and overconfidence here at work. You know, it's clear that he wanted to gain fame in this engagement. And so hubris over eagerness, there were native scouts with him, there were crows with him, you know, who had been

enemies of Lakota's and were, you know, willing to some degree to support the United States as a matter of strategic survival. There were crow scouts who counselled and told him that it was a very large camp and that it might not be a good idea for him to attack, but he went ahead anyway. And so foolishness, overconfidence clearly is part of the mistake that he made. I would say too that, you know, it's also important to recognize exactly what Sitting Bull and the others, all of the Lakota people there, had accomplished and what it took for them to do what they did. So to back up just a little bit, you mentioned one of the key elements was that they had managed to bring in a very large number of people. And I think you gave a figure of about 10,000. That

sounds about right to me of total numbers. People were talking not about just fighters or something like that. It wasn't that there was just an army there. There was a whole community of people, men, women, children, everybody was there. But they had recruited Cheyennes, were also deeply opposed to U.S. encroachments, many of them, and they had an alliance with Lakotas. Cheyennes played a very important role, some Arapahos as well. But they had also recruited a lot of young men from the bands that lived on the reservation, bands that were led by the accommodationists that that Sitting Bull was leading. So that was very important that they were able to mobilize those people, fighters out of those, out of the reservation communities to come up north and join them. Another thing that I think is important is that, and Sitting Bull

played a particularly key role in this, was to prepare themselves spiritually, if you will. So one of the important stories, I think, is how Sitting Bull had a couple of visions, one before Crook attack, but another one sometime before Custer attack. And in the vision that he had for Custer attack, the vision was of soldiers, U.S. soldiers falling to earth upside down, indicating that they would be killed. And so, you know, just kind of the basic level, I think, gave people courage, made it so that they were ready, that they knew that something was going to happen and that they were quite confident in the outcome. And so I think that vision was also quite important in the kind of background to understanding what actually happened on that day. And they were right to be confident. I'd say let's go into detail about this battle step by step, how it played out. But it lasts for less

than an hour. And truth to be told, Custer and his detachment of 300 that were with him at that point were all killed relatively rapidly. Custer has a shot to the chest and one to the temple, and there's still debates going about whether or not he committed suicide or not, rather than be taken in and scalped by the Native American warriors. But that's pretty much the end of it, isn't it? It's Crazy Horse jumping down with 3,000 men and really massacring Custer's troops. Right. So that's kind of the central focus of Little Bighorn is the massacre of Custer's troops themselves. To back up just a little, of course, when Custer, you know, the 7th Caval little, of course, when Custer, you know, the 7th Cavalry came in on the camp and started, you know, charged the camp, Custer actually

divided his force into three. And so the first force was under Captain Reno, and they were pinned down alongside the creek early on. There was then a second detachment under Benteen that was kind of to come up behind. And then Custer sort of went near a ridge more to the east of the river itself. And it was there that he was isolated and then got pinned down and slaughtered. So none of his immediate men there survived, but some of the others did survive. Some of Reno's men survived and some of Benteen's. So it was, as you say, I've heard a number more like 270, but 300 may be the correct number for those who were killed right there with Custer. involvement in the battle. Later, some Lakotas who wanted to disparage him for various reasons in the 1880s before he died did say that Sitting Bull had not participated in the battle and had

not shown courage. That seems not to be true. I think the evidence is fairly clear that he did fight. You know, I mean, by this time, he was in his mid-40s, but many men in their mid-40s did fight and he was among them. And I think most of the fighting he did was with Reno's men early on. Another thing that he did, which was an important thing that was occurring during the fighting, was to make sure that Custer's men didn't kill non-combatants. That is to say that they had to protect women and children. And so, you know, they had ways of, you know, were evacuation plans, but there were a lot of people there that you had to get out of harm's way quickly in a rapidly developing dangerous situation.

And it seems that Sitting Bull was involved in trying to protect non-combatants during the engagement as well. And overall, this is a resounding victory for Sitting Bull and for Crazy Horse. But we've got to remember here that this is also called Custer's last stand. A US hero has been killed. And like you say, one that's pretty much a quite famous self-publicist here that the media are very much engaged with. So although there's an immediate victory, what are the retaliations here? Because I can't imagine that either the US government or the US Army are going to take this lying down. Well, you know, absolutely not. And of course,

the efforts to get the Black Hills, which are going on simultaneously, are ratcheted up, you get lots of angry speeches and some resolutions passed in Congress. Some U.S. officials basically say, why are we even trying to get an agreement with Lakotas to cede the Black Hills? Let's just take them and stop with all of this trying to get their agreement. There are calls for extermination and so on. So there's a great deal of anger and an immediate sort of sense that Custer is a martyr. You know, there's comparisons that develop then and that continue for many years of Custer as, you know, a Christ-like figure who gives his life and, you know, comparisons of that sort develop. There's also a sense among at least many sections of the American public, and this shows up in media, people start saying, well, I don't know that Indians by themselves could have actually pulled this off, that we could have suffered such a terrible defeat to a fighting force of Native Americans. And so it must be the case then that Sitting Bull was actually trained at

West Point or something to that effect, or that, you know, maybe he really isn't a Native person at all, but, you know, he's descended from the French or something of that sort. And so ideas like that kind of circulated, that gives some sense of kind of the climate and what a national disaster this was for the United States. You know, this came, of course, just days before the United States was about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. You know, this was in late June, news traveled slowly. In those days, it wasn't immediate, but news got to Philadelphia right on the eve of July 4. And, you know, it soured the national mood, you might say. That is really fascinating to hear, because you've got to take

into account the moment that that information is released. And that slow line of travel means that it is released at the prime time to have a national impact. I'm sure that wasn't deliberate, but it means that the politicians have to have a reaction. So how does Sitting Bull's story progress from this? Because he is responsible, along with other Native American leaders, for thousands of people now. These are not just warriors. These are women and children. They're a whole society of people. are women and children. They're a whole society of people. How does Sitting Bull manage to get away, if at all, from these advancements by the US government? Well, the United States was quite quick to send out new forces. And so Crook, who had been defeated earlier, is still on the scene. And he organizes new, you know, regroups, I guess you would say, and other generals come out with new forces, particularly General Nelson Miles.

And this is really the first time that the United States goes after Lakotas during the winter. And so starting in November and then into January and February, there are troops all over Lakota territory. And even though the Lakotas had defeated the United States at the Little Bighorn as a great victory, there was always a fear that if they got surprised at some point or, you know, something happened to where U.S. troops attacked them, that it wouldn't just be a battle, that it would actually be a massacre. And I think that's something important to really recognize is that, you know, the Little Bighorn could have been a massacre, Lakota's, you know, but it wasn't. But that was always a possibility. And so here you have in the winter of 1876-77, large numbers of U.S. troops for the first time in Lakota territory in the winter at a time normally where you can

regroup. Now you have to be on guard. You maybe have to move. And keep in mind too that the buffalo populations have declined and there are some buffalo, particularly the farther north you go, there are more buffalo. So it's possible to find them, but it's increasingly difficult. And as you say, the responsibility of Sitting Bull and other Lakota leaders is to care for their people, to find enough food for them, to protect them from being slaughtered. And so what do you do under those circumstances? And so there are intense debates within the Lakota camps. They've kind of dispersed after the little bighorn.

They can't stay together as a group of 10,000. They dispersed into smaller groups and there are intense discussions within those camps about what to do. Now, some Lakotas eventually decide they really have no choice but to go into the agencies and essentially to surrender, give up the fight. Eventually, to the agencies and essentially to surrender, give up the fight. Eventually, Crazy Horse is one leader who does that quite reluctantly. But in May of 1877, Crazy Horse surrenders in Nebraska, and then a few months later is assassinated, is killed. Sitting Bull decided on a different approach. And what he decided was to go into Canada, which of course is part of the British Empire at the time, to seek refuge there with Canadian officials. There isn't really a lot of

settlement in Mississippi, southern Saskatchewan. There's not really very much settlement there. There are a lot of Native people there. And so Sitting Bull actually decides in 1877 to cross the border with a number of his people to see if they can survive with some degree of autonomy and some way of still living in the way that they had been doing for many decades, where they've essentially been able to support themselves through buffalo hunting. And how does that turn out? Are they able to sustain there? The problem really for this strategy is the same problem that we've encountered many times already in our discussion, which is that the bison populations are declining up there as well. So when Sitting Bull first gets up into Canada in 1877, there are, you know, some bison populations there in the Cypress Hills area, Wood Mountain, but they're declining and they will decline over the

next few years. And there are other native people in the area, and they're not so happy about having more people in the region who are going to compete for resources. So at first, some Canadian officials are fairly friendly to Sitting Bull. You know, Canadian officials are pretty sympathetic to the idea that the United States government has been mistreating Indian people. Sitting Bull has much to talk about along those lines, of course. But ultimately, pressure comes on Canadian officials to try to force Sitting Bull and his people to go back to the United States. And ultimately, the pressures are such that in 1881, so it's really only a few years that Sitting Bull is in Canada, that he does go back to the United States. And there's a kind of set of complicated diplomatic arrangements that

sort of broker his surrender. And he's in prison for a couple of years, and then is released and then goes to the Standing Rock Reservation a little bit later and spends the rest of his life, eventually killed in 1890 on the Standing Rock Reservation. And is this a period of, well, apart from the point that he's killed on the Standing Rock Reservation. And is this a period of, well, apart from the point that he's killed on the Standing Rock Reservation, is this subsequent 10 years then when he's exchanged his liberty for the amnesty of his people and they've been moved on to a reservation? Is this a period of relative peace? Yeah, it's a period of relative peace. The fighting between the United States and Lakotas really does end in 1877. And so, you know, you've got a new system of order with the kind of will sometimes leave the reservation without permission of U.S. officials to go visit other nations. Lakotas are, for example, trying to make peace with crows.

They go visit the crow agency. They have relatives there. There's been some intermarriage between crows and Lakotas. There's been captives that have been taken over the years. And so there's opportunities for trading horses and visiting and so on. So it's not a system of total control, but it is a system that is becoming oppressive. And the government officials do try now to really control Lakota movements. And they try to do some things to really stamp out Lakota ways of life. They pass laws that say, you know, you can't do the Sundance, for example, anymore. And it's the old familiar thing. They go to Lakota leaders and they say, you can't have a Sundance this year. Lakota leaders say, but we have to have a Sundance. It's our way of life. And if we don't have one, the world will end, literally. And the agents say, well, I'm sorry, but you still have to do it. And if you don't, we'll cut off your supply of food, right? So it's the same kind of thing that we've seen before. So they're using these kinds of tactics to establish control

over Lakotas. And certainly they're doing this with Sitting Bull's particular group of people on the Grand River on the Standing Rock Reservation. And not surprisingly, although, you know, Sitting Bull now cannot go to war to stop this, he certainly is opposed to it. And so he is involved in a great deal of back and forth conflict with the government official who is in charge at Standing Rock. James McLaughlin is his name. And, you know, they are fighting a great deal about the future. Sitting Bull wants to retain as much of the old ways as possible, as much autonomy. And McLaughlin wants to get him to move toward a kind of approach of assimilation.

human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So is it during this point and during these renewed troubles as the US government tries to suppress, corral, cajole, control the Native American peoples that we see Sitting Bull killed? Is it part of this unrest that leads to Sitting Bull being shot? this unrest that leads to Sitting Bull being shot? No, that's right, James. What happens is that in the late 1880s, there's major, I think of it as resistance movement and anti-colonial movement that spreads through lots of reservations in the American West, including Lakota's but many other tribes. It actually originates in the teachings of a Paiute prophet whose name is Jack Wilson. His Paiute name is Wovoka. And Wovoka predicted that there could be

an apocalyptic event. This would be as a result of supernatural power that would result in either the destruction of all white people, or at least some white people, and their removal from Indian lands, and the kind of reversal of all that had happened in the last 30, 40, 50, 60 years. The idea was that animals, including the bison, would return, that dead ancestors would return to life, and you would have a kind of restoration of the old ways. And Wovoka was prophesying that an event like this could happen, provided that people adhered to the proper ways of life, the teachings that he was giving them, and provided that they performed a particular ritual that became known as the ghost dance. So this was the movement of the late 1880s that spread through much of western

North America under the United States. And it spread to Standing Rock. It spread to the Lakota reservations, including Standing Rock. And many of Sitting Bull's people participated in it. It's hard to know for sure whether Sitting Bull himself was a believer in the movement. He certainly didn't oppose the movement. Many Lakota leaders did oppose the movement. They thought it was wrong and dangerous. Sitting Bull certainly gave it support, whether he was a believer or not. I'm not sure anybody really knows. But from the standpoint of Sitting Bull's agent, McLaughlin, the fact that Sitting Bull was giving the movement some support, the fact that Sitting Bull had always been an opponent of McLaughlin's effort to, quote, civilize the Lakotas, meant that McLaughlin wanted to move against Sitting Bull and his people in this context of trying to suppress what McLaughlin thought of as a very dangerous movement, the Ghost Stands. And so what McLaughlin did in 1890 was he sent a native police force. This was

a police force that he had created out of Huckpapas and other bands at the Standing Rock Reservation. Some of the members of this police force had been really enemies of Sitting Bull personally over the years. And McLaughlin sent that police force in early December of 1890 out to Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River. And the idea, at least the stated idea, was that they would try to arrest Sitting Bull and bring him in. What happened, in fact, was that the police killed Sitting Bull and some of the others in his home. And so he died as a result of that. I think it can be fairly seen as a political assassination. There's obviously controversy about that. And there's a great deal of controversy on the exact sequence of events.

You know, did Sitting Bull resist being arrested? Or did the police just go in and basically murder him? There are different sources that say different things on points like that. Ah, so I didn't realise that. So there's a school of thought out there that says that Sitting Bull was assassinated much like Crazy Horse was. I mean, it's quite a symbolic death, really, isn't it, Jeff? symbolic death, really, isn't it, Jeff? Sitting Bull dies this violent death at a time when state violence returns to try and oppress and ensure the death of the older Native American ways for once and for all. Yeah, very much so. It does mark a very, you know, important and certainly

tragic moment in Lakota history. And then, of course, it's very near to another horrific event. In a way, Sitting Bull's killing helps trigger, which is the Wounded Knee Massacre, which happens about three weeks later. There are a lot of troops on the Lakota reservations to try to suppress the Ghost Dance. What McLaughlin was doing was just one element of that orchestrated effort on the part of the U.S. government to send troops against the Lakotas to try to suppress the Ghost Dance there. It was a very large military operation. It was actually the largest U.S. military operation since the Civil War. In all of the so-called Indian Wars, there hadn't really been a force this large that had been assembled. Several thousand troops

bringing the Lakota reservations. And in the course of efforts by those troops to suppress the ghost dance, and it turned out to be the 7th Cavalry again, intercepted a group of ghost dancers that was led by a Miniconjou chief named Spotted Elk. He's also, he's known more generally as Bigfoot. And a lot of the people from Sitting Bull's camp after Sitting Bull had been killed joined Bigfoot's people. And so there were Hunkpapas with Bigfoot. And the U.S. 7th Cavalry intercepted Bigfoot's people as they were coming into the Pine Ridge agency in the southern part of South Dakota, and the army tried to disarm them. I don't think they needed to do this. There was no real rationale for this, but I think it was punitive. They tried to disarm them. In the course of that disarming, a shot was

fired. I think it was fired because a soldier was trying to wrestle away a gun from a Lakota man who was deaf and probably couldn't hear what the interpreters were saying as they were trying to disarm them. And as the soldier wrestled away that gun, it fired. In any case, however it happened, as soon as that first shot was fired, the 7th Cavalry started firing indiscriminately against Lakotas. Again, we have a village. We have men, women, children, noncombatants, and many of them were slaughtered in the next several hours. Wounded Knee actually lasts quite a bit longer than Little Bighorn. You mentioned how brief, really, the action of Little Bighorn was. Wounded Knee lasts for several hours and there were people found several miles from where the firing started out. We're just basically trying to run and, you know, get out of harm's way and were hunted down by troops and killed point blank.

They're examples of that. So the number of people killed at Wounded Knee is probably 270 to 300 in that massacre. So that's a horrific event. And it's, you know, linked to the killing of Sitting Bull. So the violence spikes again after Sitting Bull's death and that long struggle continues. We'll have to get you back on, Jeff, to talk specifically about Wounded Knee. It definitely deserves its own episode. Thank you so much for your time today. Tell us, where can we read, learn more about this topic?

Well, I've written a short book that really centres on the issue of the Lakotas and the Black Hills, and it's just called that, the Lakotas and the Black Hills. You know, it has Sitting Bull in it, but it has an attempt to cover quite a bit of Lakota history, as we've been talking about. And also to take this struggle into the 20th century, because it doesn't really end with Wounded Knee or with the killing of Sitting Bull. late 19th century, have always fought and struggled in various ways to try to regain their autonomy, their independence, to gain healing from some of the traumas that have stemmed from this history. And one of the things they've tried to do is to regain the Black Hills, and they're still trying to do that. To this day, there's quite a bit of activism on that issue that's connected with a growing movement throughout North America

known as the Land Back movement, where lots and lots of Indigenous peoples are talking about Land Back. Well, thank you so much, Geoff, for bringing this history right up to date. And I really do look forward to talking again soon. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much, James. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Well, that, folks, was an episode of Warfare with Dr. James Rogers. We've extended the remit of Warfare to First and Second World War, but also the great wars of the 18th and 19th centuries. So I hope there'll be something in the warfare feed for you all to enjoy if you want to subscribe to warfare just head over to wherever you get your podcasts search warfare and feel free to

give it a rating and a review as well thank you you