Sitting Bull Surrenders

Sitting Bull holding a peace pipe, around 1884.

(Library of Congress)

Sitting Bull, the most famous of the Plains Indians, was a steadfast enemy of the white soldiers and settlers who came streaming into the American West in the latter half of the nineteenth century. When he surrendered to the U.S. Army on July 20, 1881, 125 years ago today, it symbolized, as much as did any other moment act, the white man’s victory over our country’s original inhabitants.

At the time of the first white settlers, the Lakota (French explorers and traders gave them the name Sioux) lived in the forest country of Minnesota. In the late seventeenth century they began moving westward, splitting into three groups: the Santee, the Yankton, and the westernmost Teton. The Teton consisted of seven tribes, of which one, the Hunkpapa, was Sitting Bull’s. The Teton Lakota were nomadic hunters. Ranging over the northern Great Plains, they pursued many animals but chiefly the millions of buffalo that populated the Plains. They were warriors; of their cardinal virtues the highest was bravery in battle.

Born probably in 1831, Sitting Bull (Tatanka-Iyotanka in Lakota) was a precocious hunter and fighter who participated in his first hunt when he was 10 and his first battle four years later. By the time he was in his twenties his name had spread across the Plains, striking fear into the hearts of enemies. To intimidate their foes, Hunkpapa warriors riding into battle would shout, “Tatanka-Iyotanka he miye” (“Sitting Bull, I am he!”).

Sitting Bull was also a Wichasa Wakan, or holy man, whose people believed he could foretell the future. He had a charismatic presence, “some indefinable power,” a Christian missionary said, “which could not be resisted by his people, or even others who came in contact with him.” A Canadian officer who came to know him well called him “the shrewdest and most intelligent Indian living [and] brave to a fault. He is respected, as well as feared, by every Indian on the plains. In war he has no equals; in council he is superior to all. Every word said by him carries weight, is quoted and passed from camp to camp.”

Especially after the Civil War, settlers poured into the American West. In their wake, to ensure the nation’s westward expansion, came the U.S. Army. The first fight between Plains Indians and soldiers came in 1854, when Lakota warriors overran a band of cavalrymen near Fort Laramie in what is now Wyoming. Sitting Bull’s first encounter with the army didn’t happen until 10 years later, when General Alfred Sully led a force of 2,200 men against the Hunkpapa, routing them. As Sitting Bull would learn in many subsequent engagements, braves on horseback were usually no match for the white man’s increasingly efficient war machine.

In 1868 the Treaty of Fort Laramie created a Great Sioux Reservation, the western half of what is now South Dakota. Most of the Lakota, some 17,000 people, moved onto it. Three thousand did not. These included Sitting Bull, who scoffed at reservation life. “You are fools,” he told reservation-bound Lakota, “to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hardtack, and a little sugar and coffee.”

Later that year, Lieut. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry raided a Cheyenne camp in what is now Oklahoma and killed more than 100. Alarmed, the Lakota and Cheyenne decided to unite under a single leader, Sitting Bull. His uncle Four Horns, an honored elder statesman, addressed him: “Because of your bravery on the battlefield, and your reputation as the bravest warrior of all our bands, we have elected you . . . head war chief. When you say ‘fight,’ we shall fight. When you say ‘make peace,’ we shall make peace.”

In 1874 an expedition led by Custer confirmed the presence of gold in the Black Hills, in Lakota territory. As prospectors moved in, Sitting Bull protested. “We want no white men here. The Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them, I will fight.” In response, President Ulysses S. Grant’s government ordered Sitting Bull and all other free Lakotas onto the Sioux reservation by January 31, 1876.

A series of encounters followed, culminating in Custer’s terrible defeat at the Little Bighorn River in June 1876. Sitting Bull led the allied Indian forces, some 3,000 to 4,000 strong, but he didn’t participate in the fighting himself. The newspaper writers who churned out story after story about the Battle of the Little Bighorn couldn’t conceive of a “red savage” routing the brave Custer. Sitting Bull, some of the newspapers decided, was actually a white man who had studied at West Point and abandoned white society.

In the wake of the Little Bighorn, President Grant boosted the number of U.S. soldiers on the northern Plains. The plan was to harry and pursue the free Indians, breaking their resistance and forcing them onto reservations. Most of the Lakota, even the great warrior Crazy Horse, surrendered, but not Sitting Bull. Nelson Miles, a U.S. colonel who met Tatanka-Iyotanka, said that the chief “declared that God Almighty made him an Indian and did not make him an agency [reservation] Indian either, and he did not intend to be one.”

In May 1877 Sitting Bull and about 300 Hunkpapa crossed the border into Canada. The Canadians told him that he and his people were free to remain but could expect no help from the government. In earlier times, Sitting Bull’s refugees might have survived in Canada indefinitely, feeding on the buffalo that migrated north across the border. But now the buffalo were being hunted by the white man to the brink of extinction. Wholesale slaughter of the animal had become part of the U.S. government’s Indian policy; as one Canadian observer put it, “Washington deliberately destroyed the buffalo in order to force the Sioux . . . to sue for peace and mercy because of starvation.”

Group after hungry group of Sitting Bull’s band crossed back into the states and onto the reservation. Finally, in July 1881, Sitting Bull presented his prized war bonnet to a Canadian officer he had befriended. “Take it, my friend, and keep it,” he said. “I’m through with fighting.” On July 19 he and 187 Hunkpapa surrendered at Fort Buford, in what is now Montana. American soldiers couldn’t believe that these bedraggled, hungry-looking souls were the feared Hunkpapa Sioux. “They are some of them literally naked, and with most of them the clothing is falling off from pure rottenness,” wrote Major David Brotherton, Fort Buford’s commander. The warriors gave their rifles to the soldiers. Only Sitting Bull kept his, explaining that he wanted to turn it in at a formal surrender.

On the morning of the July 20, in front of American and Canadian soldiers and a Minnesota newspaperman, Sitting Bull had his eight-year-old son, Crow Foot, hand Brotherton his Winchester rifle. “I surrender this rifle to you through my young son,” said the chief, “whom I [thereby] desire to teach . . . that he has become a friend of the Americans. . . . I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.”

Sitting Bull and his people were taken to the Great Sioux Reservation. For the rest of his life, except for a bizarre interlude as an attraction in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, he was a reservation Indian, a captive. At about the time of his surrender, he composed a song, whose words were, “A warrior/I have been/Now/It is all over/A hard time/I have.”

—Tony Scherman is a writer who lives in Nyack, New York.