Why Sitting Bull Was Killed by Indian Agency Police at His Cabin on the Standing Rock Reservation

On December 15, 1890, Major James McLaughlin of the United States Indian Service wired a telegram back to headquarters in Washington, D.C. He had stunning news: On his orders, Lakota resistance leader Sitting Bull was dead.

“The Indian police arrested Sitting Bull at his camp, 40 miles northwest of the agency, this morning at daylight. His followers attempted his rescue, and fighting commenced. … Eight Indians were killed, including Sitting Bull and his son, Crow Foot, and several others wounded,” McLaughlin wrote in the telegram, which was reprinted in the Chicago Daily Tribune.

“Sitting Bull’s followers, probably 100 men, deserted their families and fled west up the Grand River,” he continued. “The police behaved nobly, and great credit is due them. Particulars by mail.”

But McLaughlin’s neutral language and lack of details obscured much about the showdown on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, as well as the years of conflict and resistance that preceded that fateful, frigid morning.

Sitting Bull, also known as Tatanka Iyotake, was born around 1831. He was known for his opposition to U.S. encroachment on the northern Great Plains, the ancestral homelands of the Lakota people. He rejected integration with white settlers and became known as a leader of the “non-treaty Indians.”

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Not least because of his role in the infamous defeat of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer at the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull was an avowed enemy of men like McLaughlin, who led the U.S.’s attempts to integrate, assimilate and rule Native Americans by force.

In his 1910 memoir, My Friend The Indian, McLaughlin called Sitting Bull “crafty, avaricious, mendacious and ambitious. … He was by far the most influential man of his nation for many years.”

Indigenous influence and unity particularly worried the federal Indian Service, especially after a revived Ghost Dance spiritual movement reached the Lakota in 1890. Premised on an intense communal dance, the movement suggested that adopting ancestral traditions would deliver Indigenous Americans to a pre-European state of bliss, peace and freedom.

As the U.S. Army tried to crush the movement before it spread further across the country, McLaughlin linked Sitting Bull to the Ghost Dance—a perfect justification for his immediate arrest and removal from the reservation.

“Sitting Bull had gone with zest into the business of promoting the new religion,” McLaughlin alleged. “Knowing his people, and utilizing the mysticism with which he habitually preyed on their superstitions, he established himself as the high priest of the cult.”

On December 14, McLaughlin ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull in a letter to Lieutenant Bull Head, a Native American member of the Indian police. “P.S.,” McLaughlin added. “You must not let him escape under any circumstances.”

The next morning, Sitting Bull was awoken by officers knocking on the door of his cabin on the Grand River. He let them in. The naked, half-asleep leader “looked wholly insignificant and breathed none of the defiance that might have been expected under the circumstances,” historian Robert M. Utley wrote in The Last Days of the Sioux Nation.

Bull Head told Sitting Bull that he was under arrest. Sitting Bull acquiesced, dressing and coming quietly out of his cabin. But his wife began to shout, and dogs from the village, woken by the dawn raid, barked, waking a gathering crowd.

In the chaos, Sitting Bull began to call out, too. Then shots were fired.

Piecing together the true story of what happened next is difficult because accounts from McLaughlin and the police are predominant. But when it was all over, Sitting Bull, his son, Bull Head and five others were dead.

Panic spread across the reservation, and Lakota began to flee. Some made for the Pine Ridge Reservation, where, just two weeks later, they would be stopped and slaughtered by the U.S. Army in the Wounded Knee massacre.

Sitting Bull’s death, McLaughlin wrote triumphantly, put “a stop forever to the domination of the ancient regime among the Sioux of the Standing Rock reservation.”

But Sitting Bull’s legacy, contrary to McLaughlin’s wishes, did not diminish. As Sitting Bull’s great-grandson told Smithsonian in 2007, “I speak of my great-grandfather with reverence and respect because he cared for his people and he was one of many Natives that exhibited love, care and compassion for them.”

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Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.