Only four men joined him: two Cheyenne, a Hunkpapa named Gets the Best Of, and Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull. Despite the near-constant barrage of bullets, the Lakota chief seemed unperturbed. “Sitting Bull was not afraid,” White Bull marveled, “he just sat and looked around and smoked peacefully,” even as the others, their “hearts beating fast,” puffed away at a furious rate. Once the pipe had been smoked out, Sitting Bull paused to clean the bowl with a stick, and even as bullets continued to chop up the ground around his feet, he “walked home slow.” His performance that day “counted more than counting coup,” remembered White Bull, who called it the “most brave deed possible.” Sitting Bull might not be leading the Hunkpapa into battle anymore, but his courage could no longer be questioned.
The following year, in 1873, Custer and the Seventh Cavalry had two brief encounters with the Lakota. What impression Custer, whose flowing locks earned him the Lakota name of Pehin Hanska, meaning Long Hair, made on Sitting Bull is unknown. We do know, however, that the Hunkpapa heard Custer’s brass band. Prior to launching a decisive charge, Custer ordered the band to strike up “Garry Owen.” “The familiar notes of that stirring Irish air acted like magic,” wrote Samuel June Barrows, a reporter traveling with the regiment that summer. “If the commander had had a galvanic battery connecting with the solar plexus of every man on the field, he could hardly have electrified them more thoroughly. What matter if the cornet played a faltering note, and the alto-horn was a little husky? There was no mistaking the tune and its meaning.”
Given Sitting Bull’s renown as a composer and singer of songs, it is tempting to speculate on his reaction to the boisterous strains of Felix Vinatieri’s band. Having once sung of his own bravery and daring as he sprinted toward the Crow chief, he would have known exactly what Custer was attempting to accomplish as the notes of “Garry Owen” echoed up and down the valley of the Yellowstone.
That fall, America was gripped by the Panic of 1873, and the following summer Custer led his expedition into the Black Hills, known as Paha Sapa to the Lakota. Both the Lakota and the Cheyenne revered the Black Hills as a source of game, tepee poles, and immense spiritual power. It had been here, within this oasislike region of stone, pine, and clear lakes, that Sitting Bull had heard the eagle sing to him about his destiny as his people’s leader.
The Black Hills were certainly sacred to the Lakota, but from a practical standpoint the people spent relatively little time in this mountainous and forbidding land. In the summer of 1875, by which time Custer’s discovery of gold had flooded the region with prospectors, government officials were hopeful that the promise of a lucrative financial offer might persuade the Lakota to sell the hills.
For the last few years, Sitting Bull had been plagued by the catchy sloganeering associated with the policy of iwashtela. He now developed a powerful slogan of his own. All Lakota were familiar with the food pack: a container of dried meat, vegetables, and berries that enabled them to get through the lean months of winter. The Black Hills were, Sitting Bull insisted, the food pack of the Lakota. It was an image that quickly began to resonate with many of his followers. “At that time I just wondered about what he had said,” the young Minneconjou warrior Standing Bear later remembered, “and I knew what he meant after thinking it over because I knew the Black Hills were full of fish, animals, and lots of water, and I just felt that we Indians should stick to it.”
After years of losing more and more of his people to the netherworld of reservation life, Sitting Bull now had an issue that finally put into focus where they all stood. Without a food pack, a Lakota would starve in the winter. Without the Black Hills, the Lakota had no future as an independent people. It was as simple as that.
By the spring of 1875, Frank Grouard had left Crazy Horse and moved to the Red Cloud Agency, where he offered his services to government officials seeking to win Lakota support for the sale of the Black Hills. Grouard had found the transition back to white society surprisingly difficult. Several years on an all-meat diet had made it almost impossible for him to digest bread. He also had trouble with the language. “It was two or three months before I could talk English without getting the Indian mixed up with it,” he remembered.
That summer Grouard accompanied a delegation to the camp of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The officials hoped to convince the two leaders to attend negotiations at the Red Cloud Agency. Crazy Horse seemed surprisingly receptive, telling Grouard he would abide by “whatever the headmen of the tribe concluded to do after hearing our plan.” Sitting Bull, on the other hand, responded to both the message and the messenger with unbridled scorn. “He told me to go out and tell the white men at Red Cloud that he declared open war,” Grouard remembered, “and would fight them wherever he met them from that time on. His entire harangue was an open declaration of war.”
Although neither Sitting Bull nor Crazy Horse participated in the negotiations that September, a leading Oglala warrior named Little Big Man did his best to convince the government’s commissioners that the Black Hills were not for sale. On September 23, 1875, there were an estimated seven thousand warriors gathered around the commissioners, who were huddled inside a canvas tent set up on a dusty plain between the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies. Tensions were already high when Little Big Man, resplendent in war paint, with a Winchester rifle in one hand and cartridges in the other, pushed his way through the crowd and rode up to the commissioners. He had come, he announced, “to kill the white men who were trying to take his land.” The day’s negotiations were quickly called to a halt as the commissioners, fearing an outbreak of violence, were packed into wagons and rushed to safety. That fall, they returned to Washington with an unsigned agreement.
A little over a month later, on November 3, 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant met in the White House with Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler, Assistant Secretary Benjamin Cowen, and Generals Philip Sheridan and George Crook. Grant had called them together to discuss the Black Hills, where there were now an estimated fifteen thousand miners despite Crook’s halfhearted attempts over the summer to keep them out. Unless the army was willing to take up arms against U.S. citizens, such attempts were doomed to failure. But the Lakota refused to sell. Grant chose what he felt was the lesser of two evils. He decided to wage war on the Indians instead of on the miners.
Less than a week later, newly appointed Indian inspector Erwin C. Watkins, a former Republican Party hack from Michigan who had served under both Sheridan and Crook during the Civil War, filed a report that gave Grant the excuse he needed to take up arms against the Lakota. Sitting Bull and his followers, Watkins claimed, were raising havoc—not only killing innocent American citizens but also terrorizing rival, peace-loving tribes. Without mentioning the Black Hills once, Watkins spelled out a blueprint for action that might as well have been (and perhaps was) written by Sheridan himself.
The true policy in my judgment, is to send troops against them in the winter, the sooner the better, and whip them into subjection. . . . The Government owes it . . . to the frontier settlers who have, with their families, braved the dangers and hardships incident to frontier life. It owes it to civilization and the common cause of humanity.
On December 6, Indian Commissioner E. P. Smith instructed his agents at the various Lakota agencies to deliver an ultimatum to the camps of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and all the other nonreservation Indians. They must surrender themselves to the agencies by January 31, 1876, or be brought in by force.
Up until this point, the Lakota had, despite enormous provocation from the miners in the Black Hills, remained remarkably peaceful. Watkins’s report was false. To expect the Lakota to journey to the reservations in January, when blizzards often made travel impossible, was absurd. Sheridan privately admitted that the order would most likely “be regarded as a good joke by the Indians.”
But on March 17, 1876, on the upper reaches of the Powder River, a village of Cheyenne, Oglala, and Minneconjou learned that the government
’s ultimatum was no laughing matter.
The army might have never found that village in March of 1876 without the help of Frank Grouard, who had signed on as a scout with General Crook. After weeks of pointless searching through the heaping snowdrifts of a frigid Montana winter, just when it looked as if Crook’s force might have to return south for provisions, Grouard—the scout no one trusted since he’d been on such intimate terms with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—finally convinced Crook that the Indians were not, as previously reported, on the Tongue River but on the Powder.
Grouard’s years with the Lakota had given him an instinctual familiarity with the land. “I went over the ground so many times,” he remembered, “that I fairly carried a map of the country in my mind, and could close my eyes and travel along and never miss a cut-off or a trail.” By adopting the Grabber as his brother and not, as he had threatened, killing him after his first betrayal, Sitting Bull had unwittingly provided the army with the only person capable of not only finding the village but, just as important, eluding the scouts who were guarding it. As he and several companies of Crook’s regiment approached the village in an icy fog, Grouard even recognized several of the Indians’ horses as belonging to some of his former Oglala friends.
They caught the village by complete surprise. There were about a hundred lodges of northern Cheyenne, Oglala, and Minneconjou, who immediately fled from their tepees and took refuge in the surrounding hills, where they watched the soldiers torch the village and take their horses. While their warriors pursued the retreating soldiers south and eventually retrieved almost all the horses, the old people, mothers, and children returned to the burnt-out ruin of their village and collected what little had not been consumed by fire.
“We were . . . at peace with the whites so far as we knew,” remembered the Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg, who was then eighteen. “Why should soldiers come out . . . and fight us?”
In the days ahead, a thaw turned the snow and ice into slush, and on March 23, after four days of slow and messy travel, Wooden Leg’s people found Crazy Horse’s village of just thirty lodges. The village was not large enough to provide the refugees with the food and clothing they desperately needed, so they decided to move together as a group to Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa village about forty miles to the northeast, where they arrived on April 2.
The Hunkpapa were almost strangers to Wooden Leg’s people, the northern Cheyenne. As the Cheyenne straggled into the village, Sitting Bull made sure to provide a positive first impression. Two huge lodges were erected in the middle of the village, one for the women and one for the men. Hunkpapa women fired up their cooking pots and were soon distributing armloads of steaming buffalo meat. The herald shouted out in a booming voice, “The Cheyennes are very poor. All who have blankets or robes or tepees to spare should give to them.”
“Oh, what good hearts they had!” remembered Wooden Leg, who was given a buffalo blanket by a ten-year-old girl. “I never can forget the generosity of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa Sioux on that day.”
It was not clear to anyone why the soldiers had attacked. Among the Lakota, young warriors in search of glory often did their best to confound the attempts of their more conservative leaders to rein them in. Crazy Horse theorized that President Grant, whom they called the “grandfather,” had run into similar problems with his army. “These white soldiers would rather shoot than work,” he said. “The grandfather cannot control his young men and you see the result.” The sad truth was that the white soldiers were acting under the explicit, if evasively delivered, orders of the grandfather.
One thing was clear, however. After years of watching his influence decline, Sitting Bull had finally come into his own. “He had come now into admiration by all Indians,” Wooden Leg remembered, “as a man whose medicine was good—that is, as a man having a kind heart and good judgment as to the best course of conduct.”
Sitting Bull, it seemed, had been right all along. The only policy that made any sense was to stay as far away as possible from the whites. If the soldiers were willing to attack a solitary village in winter, who knew what they might do to the thousands of Indians on the reservations. As the Cheyenne had learned back in 1864 at the brutal massacre called the Battle of Sand Creek, soldiers in search of a fight were perfectly capable of attacking a village of peaceful Indians, since they were always the easiest Indians to kill.
—SETTING BULL’S VILLAGE, March 17-June 7, 1876—
Sitting Bull determined that the best strategy was strength in numbers. As the village migrated north and west, he sent out runners to the agencies telling the Lakota to meet them on the Rosebud River. “We supposed that the combined camps would frighten off the soldiers,” Wooden Leg remembered. Keeping with the policy of the last few years, this was to be a defensive war. They would fight only if attacked first. To those young warriors, such as Wooden Leg, who longed to revenge themselves on the white soldiers, Sitting Bull and the other chiefs insisted on restraint. “They said that fighting wasted energy that ought to be applied in looking only for food and clothing,” Wooden Leg remembered.
By the end of April, the new spring grass had begun to appear. The buffalo were abundant, and when in early June they camped forty-five miles up the Rosebud from its junction with the Yellowstone, the village had grown to about 430 lodges, or more than three thousand Lakota and Cheyenne.
With hundreds, if not thousands, of Indians headed in their direction from the agencies to the east and south, hopes were high that this already sizable village might soon become one of the largest gatherings of Indians ever known on the northern plains. However, not all of those present were there under their own free will.
Kill Eagle was the fifty-six-year-old chief of the Blackfeet band of the Lakota. He lived at the Standing Rock Agency on the Missouri River, but that spring, the government failed to provide his people with the promised rations. He decided that he had no alternative but to leave the agency to hunt buffalo; otherwise his people would starve. He knew that the soldiers were planning a campaign against Sitting Bull, but he hoped to return to the agency before trouble started.
In May, he and twenty-six lodges were camped near the Tongue River when they were approached by warriors from Sitting Bull’s village. The warriors told him that he should “make haste” to Sitting Bull’s camp, where “they would make my heart glad.” Soon after his arrival at the village, he was presented with a roan horse and some buffalo robes. But when Kill Eagle decided it was time to leave, he and his followers soon discovered that they’d been lured into a trap. Almost instantly they were surrounded by Hunkpapa police, known as the akicita, who escorted them to the next campsite up the Rosebud River. Like it or not, the Blackfeet were about to attend Sitting Bull’s sun dance.
The sacred tree, with two hide cutouts of a man and a buffalo attached to the top, stood at the center of the sun dance lodge. Buffalo robes had been spread out around the tree, and Sitting Bull sat down with his back resting against the pole, his legs sticking straight out and his arms hanging down.
He’d vowed to give Wakan Tanka a “scarlet blanket”—fifty pieces of flesh from each arm. His adopted brother Jumping Bull was at his side, and using a razor-sharp awl, Jumping Bull began cutting Sitting Bull’s left arm, starting just above the wrist and working his way up toward the shoulder. Fifty times, he inserted the awl, pulled up the skin, and cut off a piece of flesh the size of a match head. Soon Sitting Bull’s arm was flowing with bright red blood as he cried to Wakan Tanka about how his people “wanted to be at peace with all, wanted plenty of food, wanted to live undisturbed in their own country.”
A few years before, Frank Grouard had endured a similar ordeal. “The pain became so intense,” he remembered, “it seemed to dart in streaks from the point where the small particles of flesh were cut off to every portion of my body, until at last a stream of untold agony was pouring back and forth from my arms to my heart.” Sitting Bull, however, betrayed no sign of physical discomfort; what consumed him
was a tearful and urgent appeal for the welfare of his people.
Jumping Bull moved on to the right arm, and a half hour later, both of Sitting Bull’s punctured arms, as well as his hands and his fingers were covered in blood. He rose to his feet, and beneath a bright and punishing sun, his head encircled by a wreath of sage, he began to dance. For a day and a night, Sitting Bull danced, the blood coagulating into blackened scabs as the white plume of the eagle-bone whistle continued to bob up and down with each weary breath.
Around noon on the second day, after more than twenty-four hours without food and water, he began to stagger. Black Moon, Jumping Bull, and several others rushed to his side and carefully laid him down on the ground and sprinkled water on his face. He revived and whispered to Black Moon. Sitting Bull, it was announced, had seen a vision. Just below the searing disk of the sun, he had seen a large number of soldiers and horses, along with some Indians, falling upside down into a village “like grasshoppers.” He also heard a voice say, “These soldiers do not possess ears,” a traditional Lakota expression meaning that the soldiers refused to listen.
That day on the Rosebud, the Lakota and Cheyenne were joyful when they heard of Sitting Bull’s vision. They now knew they were to win a great victory against the white soldiers, who, as Sitting Bull had earlier predicted, were coming from the east.
On the other side of the Rosebud, on a rise of land about a mile to the west, were the Deer Medicine Rocks, also known as the Rock Writing Bluff. This collection of tall, flat-sided rocks was covered with petroglyphs that were reputed to change over time and foretell “anything important that will happen that year.” That day on the Rosebud, a new picture appeared on one of the stones depicting “a bunch of soldiers with their heads hanging down.”