The Death of Sitting Bull

  On this day in 1890 at about five-thirty a.m. the Lakota leader Sitting Bull and his wife were just getting up. Knocking on the door of their cabin on the Standing Rock Reservation were several reservation police officers, themselves members of the Lakota tribe. They were coming to arrest Sitting Bull who the Indian Agent James McLoughlin suspected was arousing the Lakota to resistance through his involvement with the Ghost Dance.

  The Ghost Dance was a ceremony started among the Paiute in Nevada. The dance was supposed to unite the living with the dead. It initially proclaimed a message of universal love. The ceremony spread rapidly throughout the western U.S. Different tribes would adapt the ceremony to their own needs. The Lakota just then were having a bad time with the government. 

  The U.S. had just broken a treaty in order to give large parts of the reservation to white settlers. The herds of bison the Lakota had formerly fed themselves with had been pretty much exterminated. The Lakota were supposed to become farmers, but this part of Dakota Territory was semi-arid. For some reason the government just then decided to cut in half the food supplies they had been sending to the reservation.

  It's not surprising that when the Lakota danced the Ghost Dance, they foresaw a return of former days. The Lakota holy man Lame Deer said, "The earth would roll up like a carpet with all the white man's ugly things...sheep and pigs, and fences, the telegraph poles, the mines and factories. ...The white men will be rolled up, disappear, go back to their own continent."

  It's understandable that the authorities were nervous. Custer's debacle at Little Bighorn had occurred just 14 years earlier. But as sometimes happens, the authorities overreacted. The Indian Agent McLoughlin had told the leader of the police to put Sitting Bull in a wagon and get him away before a crowd gathered. The police officer, Lt. Bullhead, decided he would have Sitting Bull ride a horse back to headquarters. It's much easier to force a man into a wagon than onto a horse. A crowd of Sitting Bull's supporters soon gathered.

  An angry supporter shot Bullhead who in turn shot Sitting Bull in the side. After much shooting, Bullhead and eight other officers were dead and dying. Sitting Bull and seven of his supporters were dead or dying. Sitting Bull died about noon. His body was brought to nearby Fort Yates in present day North Dakota and was buried. In 1953 some of Sitting Bull's relatives, without authorization, dug up what they thought were his remains, encased them in concrete and buried them near his birthplace in Mobridge, South Dakota. Both sites claim to have the true remains.

  After Sitting Bull's death, the government continued to overreact. Fearing an uprising, McLoughlin called in several thousand more soldiers who, two weeks after Sitting Bull's death, made their way to a Lakota camp at Wounded Knee Creek where they would carry out the largest massacre in American history to prevent the spread of the Ghost Dance.

  Twenty Congressional Medals of Honor were issued to soldiers who took part in the massacre. Agent McLoughlin was promoted and went to work in Washington DC. When he died in 1923, he was buried in the town named after him. McLoughlin, South Dakota is the largest town on the Standing Rock reservation.

 In 1892, Sitting Bull's cabin was taken to the Colombian Exposition in Chicago. The exposition commemorated the arrival of Columbus in America.  The unhappy events I have described would likely have occurred whether it was Columbus who got here first or someone else.