Existing comment:
Sitting Bull, c 1831-1870
As America's frontier expanded across the Missouri River, Sitting Bull united the Lakota tribes of the northern plains against territorial onslaught. Named Tatanka-Iyotanka ("a buffalo bull sitting intractably on its haunches"), he became head chief of the Lakota nation in 1868. War between the Lakota and the U.S. Army broke out after an expedition led by General George Armstrong Custer confirmed that gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, and the subsequent rush overran Lakota land. With Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn in 1876, Sitting Bull escaped with his tribe to Canada. Granted amnesty, he returned to the Black Hills and, after appearing briefly with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, spent the last years of his life at the Grand River settlement where he was born.
Bailey, Dix, and Mead, 1882 |