Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Sitting Bull and the Battle of Little Bighorn About this episode The Battle of the Little Bighorn - also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass - was one of the most dramatic and important clashes in American history. In June 1876, on the rolling plains of Montana, Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry charged into a vast encampment of Lakota and other tribes — and were utterly destroyed by the superior native forces who fought to defend their sacred lands from the encroaching United States.
In this episode, Dan is joined by former National Parks historian Paul Hedren to explore how this battle came to define the struggle between the U. S. government and the Plains tribes, what led to Custer’s fatal mistake, and how the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho achieved a stunning, if fleeting, victory.
Paul's new book is called 'Sitting Bull's War: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom'.
The terminology to use when exploring and discussing Indigenous and native peoples, history, and culture is sensitive and complex. You can find out more on language use here: https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/informational/impact-words-tips
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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0:36 Dan Snow? In the weeks before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull, the revered Hunkpapa Lakota spiritual leader, experienced a powerful vision during a sundance ceremony. The ceremony is a long and sacred ritual of self-sacrifice, prayer and prophecy. It's undertaken by a number of native tribes on the American Great Plains. Guided by holy men and spiritual mentors like Sitting Bull, the ceremony takes months in preparation. A sacred cottonwood tree is selected and felled and erected at the centre of a circular arena. This tree of life symbolises the Axis Mundii, the axis that connects the earth and the sky.
1:21 Dan Snow? It serves as the focal point. Participants dance around it, the traditionally young men. They dance for days without food or water, an intense physical and spiritual test. The dancing is accompanied by sacred music, drumming, representing the heart of the universe, and chanting. Throughout the ceremony, dancers and the community offer prayers for healing and guidance and wellbeing and the hope of survival for future generations.
1:52 Dan Snow? In June 1876, near the Rosebud River in present-day Montana, Lakota and northern Cheyenne were gathered in a large encampment, and they performed the Sundance to seek spiritual strength and guidance. As they do so, a US force advances against them, part of a campaign of expansion which will cross sacred indigenous lands. Sitting Bull, in his 40s, known for his spiritual power, he dances for two days without rest, enduring pain and exhaustion to reach a trance-like state.
2:26 Dan Snow? According to multiple accounts passed down through Lakota oral history, Sitting Bull cut over a hundred pieces of small flesh from his arms as an offering to Wakantanka, the Great Spirit. Then, weakened, bleeding, he had his vision. He saw soldiers swarming into the Lakota camp like grasshoppers. Soldiers appeared to be overwhelmed and helpless, tumbling down from above while the Lakota stood unharmed. Some versions say that a voice told them that soldiers would come but would not take any people away, and that Lakota would win a great victory if they stood together. Sitting Bull told the people what he'd seen.
3:10 Dan Snow? His words gave hope to the bands of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho who'd gathered in the plains that summer. They interpreted this vision as a promise from the spirits that they would triumph over the bluecoats marching towards them in search of gold in their sacred black hills. A few weeks later, this vision did indeed come to pass. On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and the 7th Cavalry of the United States Army attacked the native encampment on the Little Bighorn River. It was a disaster for the Americans and Custer, who died in that battle. The vision came true, almost as Sitting Bull had described. The American soldiers were overwhelmed, they were surrounded and annihilated,
3:55 Dan Snow? falling in great numbers across the hills like grasshoppers.
4:03 Dan Snow? The Battle of Little Big Horn, or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, as it was remembered in Indigenous history, was an unusual, stunning victory for the Lakota and Sioux tribes in their long wars against US expansion and the forcible removal of the tribes off their native lands. Despite that triumph, though, the victory was short-lived. The US government responded to the defeat in overwhelming force, pursuing the Lakota and Cheyenne relentlessly in the months that followed. By 1877, most had been driven onto reservations or fled to Canada. The impact shapes the political geography of this region until today. To explain what happened in this crucial chapter of American history and talk about its legacy, I am joined by Paul Hedren. He spent four decades as
4:47 Dan Snow? a national parks historian. He worked in the Midwest and the Mountain West. He's written several books on the history. He's a particular expert on the Sioux Nation. His newest book is called Sitting Bull's War, and after hearing this episode, I know you're going to want to go and check that out. Before we start, this episode does use historic terms and some of the language that is now outdated but was used at the time. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, and this is the story of Sitting Bull and the Battle of Little Big Horn.
5:36 Dan Snow? Good to see you, Paul. Thanks for coming on the show.
5:38 Speaker 01 You're very welcome.
5:39 Dan Snow? Let's get the geography sorted. That's the whole point. Where are these Great Plains? And why are they so great?
5:44 Speaker 01 Well, these Great Plains are the very heart of America, North America, stretched from Mexico nicely into Canada and comprise really the center of what are today's United States. From, boy, imagine from the Mississippi River, splitting this nation in half, to the Rocky Mountains. Everything between comprises the Great Plains.
6:08 Dan Snow? And what is it about their ecology, their geography that has given rise to certain types of human use of those, like the way that people have lived in that space? How are they determined by that environment?
6:19 Speaker 01 Well, this is an increasingly a dry environment. It's a grassy environment. Well, species evolved in this environment from the smallest creatures and fed on distinctive grasses to the greatest of the creatures, you know, the American buffalo. And they in turn are kind of what drew people into this country. We're talking 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century in this country, around this land. And so to our story, this is the homeland of American Indian people who thrived in this environment, in this distinctive environment.
6:57 Speaker 01 Horses had been introduced to them and evolved a buffalo culture, a life way centered on the plains, centered in this grasslands and thriving on American buffalo. And they in turn had developed this interconnected relationship with this animal. They thrived on this animal. They ate this animal. Its skins made their clothing, made their lodges, made their teepees, provided all manner of things important to a life way. The life way evolving on the southern plains is just a little different from the northern plains. You add the dimension of weather and whatnot on the northern plains, it just gets increasingly colder as you reach northward.
7:40 Speaker 01 But it's an independence that evolved this culture that thrived in this country, this landscape for centuries. And among the native peoples, they too moved constantly, the culture that we care so greatly about presently, and I write about all the time, the Lakota people, they are northern plains people. We have the southern plains, we have the central plains, we have the northern plains. And in each of those landscapes, different cultures evolved. Still centered on the buffalo, but different cultures, different tribes, different peoples. But not necessarily connected with one another and often not friendly with one another.
8:23 Speaker 01 The people on the northern plains, these are Lakota peoples in the era I care about. There were people earlier than them on the northern plains. Also, the northern Cheyenne people, there are Southerse. So it's a complicated world, but driven by buffalo, driven by a life and an accommodation on a rugged, grassy landscape. That's, I think, the point, the bottom line.
8:47 Dan Snow? And how big are these groups? Let's take the Lakota. How large would you expect to find these groups operating in?
8:54 Speaker 01 My focus has been on the Western Sioux, the Lakota people. There are Eastern Sioux, there are other Sioux. They speak a common language, they have some common origins, living in different sectors of this world. But across the northern plains, the focus of my studies all these years, Lakota people, numbering at their height, fifteen thousand people, divided into subgroups. There are the tribes, they called it the Oyat, it was their word, Oyat. The Oyats, the seven Oyats of the Lakota people are the Western Sioux. And occupying this northern plains that we're talking about here.
9:40 Dan Snow? Are they quite hierarchical? Are they a bit democratic? How do they organize themselves, these smaller groups, as they're traveling around?
9:47 Speaker 01 They speak a common language, they intermarried. There was a real fluidity in all of this. If you're a southern Lakota, or you're a Brulay, you're an Oglala, and you're a man and you fancied a Minacoju woman and chose to marry her, your chances are you became a Minacoju. There was just this kind of fluidity. In the way they live, they focus their lives, but they had favorite landscapes. There are seven of these oyats or seven of these tribes in each occupying distinctive segments of this northern plains that we're talking about with common bounds. And for governance, you know, an individual is pretty well free to do what he pleased, could move as he pleased and do as he pleased.
10:32 Speaker 01 And yet, among his people, his familial groups, they chose and got quite familiar with certain segments of these plains. The Sitting Bull people that are such the focus of this latest work of mine are people that were borderlands, American borderlands people. They lived in the upper Missouri country of Montana and Dakota, but crossed into Canada from time to time.
10:57 Dan Snow? So you mentioned Sitting Bull there. Let's talk more about him. Do we know where he was born and where?
11:02 Speaker 01 Well, we do relatively. It is said that he was born on the Grand River, which is a tributary of the Missouri River in this northern bound of the plains that we're talking about in 1831 or thereabouts. We say 1831, we say on the Grand. He was a great warrior in his younger days, so is said, but he became something of less a warrior and more of a mystic, a reverential man or a reverend in his this adulthood of his. He exhibited the Lakota cardinal virtues of wisdom and fortitude and whatnot and was
11:45 Speaker 01 just by example became this leader among his people. And his counsel was invariably good. He was a devout person of the plains, dedicated to this culture of in the buffalo country, doing as our ancestors did. I mean, to the last that man was dedicated to the traditional values of the Lakotas. And I think others around him, I mean, they came to understand that this man is a man of good counsel. This is a man that we believe what he believes, we're traditional people too.
12:22 Dan Snow? Now, let's talk about those white people of European origin or descent coming to that huge space. Give me some rough dates. When would the Lakota, for example, have first made contact with you or had contact made with them by these people?
12:34 Speaker 01 Well, I suspect it was in the days of Lewis and Clark. People point that way. Lewis and Clark knew that they were talking to Siouxan people, these Western Sioux, these hunters, these great buffalo people. People mostly, as they are ascending the Missouri River, are people to the west, out in this very country we're talking about, these northern plains. The matters of pressure and the matters of intrusion, which really drives the stories of warfare out here, it's settlement across the plains and continual pressure out of the east. We speak of the Trans-Mississippi settlement and the Trans-Missouri settlement.
13:16 Speaker 01 There's just this constant encroachment of people out of the east, seeking their own fortunes and their own prosperity and their own independent life ways. And so you've got that on the margins of this Indian country all the time. And then, of course, there's the Oregon Trail. There's reasons to go west, both to settle a alluring landscape and after gold in California in 1849, to go to the gold country. And if you were a citizen of this country and looking for your future, whether it's good farmland in Oregon and Washington, or whether it's gold in California, I mean, you could go around the horn, you
13:59 Speaker 01 know, you could take an ocean voyage there. Or there were these pathways across the heart of this country that had been known since the days of mountain men, you know, the fur traders in this land. And it involves the Oregon Trail and the California Trail, the Utah Trail, which bisected this very land of the buffalo.
14:25 Speaker 01 And if you happen to live in that landscape, you were impacted immediately. All of a sudden, there's these trains going west of settlers. They didn't want much to do with you. They were concerned about you and Indian as a threat. Mostly, they tried to avoid each other. If you're an Indian, you're watching this. It's this constant parade of traffic. And that brought the military into the landscape. And all of a sudden, you've got a permanent establishment in the middle of your prairie wonderland. Inevitably, gold is the root of all trouble out here, at least as I see it. This is the story of the 1860s. It's bringing us into this time of the 1870s,
15:10 Speaker 01 which is the ultimate time of change out here.
15:13 Dan Snow? And sitting Bull, roughly speaking, he's a warrior. He's a hunter. As you've mentioned at the beginning, he's starting to have these divine revelations as he believes. What is his politics? If you like, his strategy is unrelenting opposition. What is he becoming known for?
15:30 Speaker 01 Well, he's at first and almost through much of the story of this 1870s war, the Custer War. He's an opponent to all of this. He's threatened by all of this. But his prime counsel constantly was to avoid contact. Just stay away from them. If we can help ourselves, we'll fight to defend ourselves. If attacked, if we are immediately threatened, but mostly let's not engage at all. Let's just simply stay away. And that was a common view among many people, among many Lakotas. Now, there are some Lakotas that saw it quite differently in the story of the Bozeman Trail War.
16:12 Speaker 01 Fought, just desperately fought to evict these people, to stop this traffic to Montana, to get those posts abandoned and get those people out of there. A stable strategy was more commonly to avoid this. Now, not that he couldn't pick a fight, because once in a while, he certainly could. And sometimes it was to demonstrate an act of bravado to inspire his own people. I'm willing to put my life on the line. I don't want this. I don't like these people. I mean that we should stay away from these people, but I'll do this too, if that's what it means.
16:52 Dan Snow? So there are these wars going on, like the Bozeman Trail War that you've mentioned. These are wars in various parts of this gigantic landscape waged by these native peoples against encroachment. When does war really come to Sitting Bull and the Lakota?
17:10 Speaker 01 There's a kind of a calm. There's a treaty signed at Fort Laramie. The government thought that it solved the Sioux problem. Sooner or later, it had prescribed a reservation of these people would go to a reservation and this landscape would be kind of clean and you couldn't quite settle it, but you know, that would be a conversation for another day because of course they were going to settle it. For Sitting Bull and his people who were observers of this, they weren't signatories to this treaty for the most part. They weren't involved in that war for the most part. That which hit them hardest began in the early 1870s. And the government, we're building railroads now.
17:55 Speaker 01 The first transcontinental railroad in America was completed in 1869. It followed a central route across the continent. And it was a great success. One thing begets another and begets another. And in course, a southern railroad was plotted and a northern railroad was plotted. And that railroad crossed Sitting Bull country. It crossed the very heart of this northern plains that was this homeland of these Lakota people. And there were surveyors of this railroad, of this northern Pacific railroad that began
18:37 Speaker 01 moving and operating in this country in 1871. Indian people were well aware of this. Métis, mixed blood people from Canada that these Lakotas traded with from time to time were especially concerned. They had their own attitude about about whites and white settlement. They had their own troubles in Canada and were very freely expressing this to these American Lakotas to resist that railroad. Nothing good comes there.
19:10 Speaker 01 And so you've got surveyors in 1871. There wasn't great troubles then, although they were keenly aware of this threat. But those surveyors reached deeper into Indian country in 1872, and deeper yet in 1873, and Lakotas resisted. It was different from what came, yet the Minakju Band happened to be hunting in the proximity of surveyors. They fought back. Ultimately, it shortened the 72 survey greatly. You know, this is Indian threat, even if there was a military contingent accompanying them, protecting them, and they turned back because of this Indian
19:51 Speaker 01 resistance. In 1873, Brings Custer, he's leading the military contingent that is protecting that set of surveyors that came out of the east. They're operating in the Yellowstone Valley. This is the very heart of Indian country. And it's the story of railroaders and the intrusion of railroaders, compounded by in 1874, Custer going to the Black Hills. And under the pretense of inside of the 1868 treaty, the government saw, we have a vulnerability here in the way we garrison the
20:35 Speaker 01 plains. And they knew where their forts were, and their forts circled this northern plains, Sioux country. And the government made its own case that we need a military post in the middle of that country. And the middle of that country is this Black Hills country. And that's why Custer sent. I think this is an incorrectly told story often in America. It was something that was prescribed by the treaty. It was allowed, and Custer goes there. Well, Custer also had a couple of practical miners in that complement of soldiers, serving for a military post. Gold
21:15 Speaker 01 had been rumored in the Black Hills for a long time, for decades. The country was undergoing a Great Depression, the Panic of 1873. There is nothing that was more magical in relieving a depressed economy than the next gold strike. And here was a chance for one.
21:38 Speaker 01 And don't you know, those practical miners find gold. And Custer, if you find gold, you're gonna spread the word. It's in the nation's interest to do this. Well, Custer surely did this. He's in the Central Hills, his miners find gold, reportedly paying gold. And he knows where the nearest telegraph post is, and the nearest telegraph line is. That's at Fort Laramie. He dispatches a rider, a courier to Fort Laramie to announce gold. He triggers a gold rush, and it ensues immediately.
22:21 Speaker 01 Well, the Black Hills are another of these little anomalies in the middle of, not little, it's a sizable anomaly, in the middle of this Great Plains country. It's in the middle of Sioux country. It was reverential land to the Sioux people. Practically, they hunted it, they got teepee poles from it. They would climb the highest peaks and they would pray. It was just this enormous personal treasure, as far as those people saw it. And all of a sudden, there's miners invading our countryside. For the Lakota people, it was the final straw.
22:55 Dan Snow? So this feels existential now?
22:56 Speaker 01 Well, it truly does. Now, if you're Grant, and you're the American Army, you've done this before, and here is just the next something you gotta do. Before, meaning in the decade before this, the people of the Central Plains, the people of the Southern Plains have been engaged and swept off that landscape. And the reservation people, you know, they get moved to the Indian Territory. And now you've got this resistance on the Northern Plains, resistance to a railroad, resistance to a potential gold mine, a literal gold mine. And how do we handle it?
23:37 Speaker 01 We sweep those people off the plains and get them out of the way. We created a reservation forum, put them on that reservation, and make them white men, transform them through a cultural activities. And thus, we have war. It's the standard way the story is told. There's this resistance. There are these people that live in the Buffalo. They want to live the traditional way in the Buffalo country and are in our way. And we'll sweep them out of the way. And thus there is war. I'm pretty beholden to Sitting Bull and I'm pretty beholden to the Northern Cheyennes,
24:17 Speaker 01 the allies of these Lakota people and to a life way and the righteousness of a life way on the plains. So I choose to tell the story of those people. I understand how war has come about, but I care to follow not the story of army commanders so much this time, but the way Indian people resisted these army commanders in the mid 1870s.
24:45 Dan Snow? Was Sitting Bull an alliance builder? Was he particularly successful in building a coalition of mobilizing these people against the incursions of the American military?
24:52 Speaker 01 He truly was. Again, he's a charismatic man. He's a devout man. He's a visionary. As war breaks, they turn to him for this, you know, kind of guidance in a resistance. And he becomes that ultimately in the course of this 1870s war. Now this Custer War, he becomes the foremost figure that is rallying these people, that the people look to because he's a man of good counsel and he's a man of a spiritual vision. And his vision was, we can do this. We can sustain this life way. And there are many who chose to believe that.
25:35 Dan Snow? More on Sitting Bull after this.
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27:40 Speaker 02 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
28:19 Dan Snow? Let's talk about the totemic battle that does seem to offer some hope to these people, the Little Big Horn. How exactly is this battle initiated? Is it Custer with the US military moving towards those Black Hills again? Tell me.
28:35 Speaker 01 In the story of the Great Sioux War, or for my purposes Sitting Bull's War, or Custer's War, there are 22 battles and skirmishes in this totality. So this is over the course of 18 months, that's a lot of engagements. At the very heart of it is the Little Big Horn, the greatest of all of these battles. It's just barely after the Battle of the Rosebud. Those people have moved to the Little Big Horn Valley. They're thinking that we've turned those soldiers away. There are soldiers we know on the Yellowstone, but they don't seem to be moving our way.
29:19 Speaker 01 And they thought for a moment, for a moment, that this was going to be okay, and maybe we can survive this. They hunted, they did what Indian people did. The horses were fed, grazed, you know, they just, almost it was a normalcy to the life. This is mid-June 1876. Well, they thought that those soldiers on the Yellowstone weren't moving their way. Those soldiers on the Yellowstone were well aware that there were people south. They had been sending their own scouts, small compliments of soldiers,
30:02 Speaker 01 to follow Indian trails, to see what is going on here. And the commander there, Custer's not the commander of this column of soldiers on the Yellowstone. He is the commander of the cavalry contingent of this body of soldiers. That commander sends Custer to chase these Indians that they have been alerted to.
30:26 Speaker 01 He sends a regiment, a full regiment, twelve companies of US cavalry, Seventh Cavalry, up the Rosebud to chase those Indians, to find those Indians. Meantime, that commander's going to come from a different direction and we're going to meet that village on the same day, more or less, and, you know, we'll attack from the north and we'll attack from the south. Attacking a village was what the Indians chose always to avoid, what the army always sought, was to attack those villages, not to kill people so much as to disrupt a life, to destroy a life way, capture ponies, take away their foodstuffs, force them to
31:08 Speaker 01 flee. Well, left with nothing, where are they going to flee but to that agency, which is where we want them anyway. And Custer chases, you know, Custer very aggressively moves. You can debate forever that did he move, you know, just a little too fast? Was he ahead of that commander out of the north? I think Custer moved the way a cavalry commander's going to move. He's an aggressive officer. He demonstrated that in the Civil War. He's impetuous. He is going to seize an opportunity. An opportunity is always, there's a glory and a good, successful engagement. He lived that. He relished that from his days in the
31:50 Speaker 01 Civil War and elsewhere on the plains. And circumstances forced his hand as he's moving south, because Indian people, they're not out there with their eyes closed. Indian people have their own wolves, their own scouts, paying attention to the landscape. And those wolves discovered him. And it didn't harass, but so much as they saw it, there was an opportunity. There was, in his pack train, somehow, his pack train dropped a crate of army crackers. And Indian people, these scouts, these wolves from the Great Camp, they come
32:30 Speaker 01 onto this crate of crackers and they know what it is and they open it and are eating, just kind of, what an opportunity. And soldiers are sent back to retrieve this crate of crackers and they exchange shots. Well, those Indian people flee. Word gets to Custer that Indian people know we're here. And that even further hastens an impetuous man seeking an opportunity forward. The trail is as wide as a highway. The Indian people have just only days before been on this same trail. Their travel to the Little Big Horn.
33:15 Speaker 01 So the trail was plain as day and Custer chased it and he chased it hard.
33:21 Dan Snow? Are we talking Lakota? Are we talking some Cheyenne? Who's in this group of Native Americans?
33:27 Speaker 01 The village is comprised of just under 5,000 people are associating with Sitting Bull now. There have been these earlier battles. He has called for all traditionals to join him and they have. And so if there are 12, 15,000 Lakota people, there's many Lakota that didn't want war. There are many people that are quite acculturated already. But then there are these people and he drew them together and they are all there. They had Sundance just days earlier. Sitting Bull had another of these extraordinary visions of his.
34:10 Speaker 01 So they're feeling empowered and they are on the Little Big Horn. Our methodology is to find these villages and attack them at dawn when they're surprised, when they're least aware. And Custer, this episode with the hard crackers and his discovery, that's occurring in late morning of June. Twenty-five, and it only hastens his movement to attack that village before it disperses, before it can get away. We pretty much know where it is from a high point in that divide between the Rosebud Creek and the Little Bighorn, place called the Crowsnest. Supposedly, his scouts could see that village. They could see those horses on that rise on the other
34:55 Speaker 01 side of the village. Custer couldn't quite see it, but his scouts that morning said we could. And then you get this news from his backside, and he hastens forward, and leading to one of the greatest battles in the history of American Indian Wars, the Battle of Little Bighorn, which does play favorably to this man Custer, because while those people were surprised, they rose up. There are in 5,000 people, there's 1,500 of them are good fighting warriors, and Custer's leading a command of 600 men, and furthermore deploys in an odd way. I mean, I think in somewhat of a defense of Custer, he approaches
35:40 Speaker 01 that village, maybe as he's conventionally done anyway, which is to divide his complement to make sure that we're attacking from this side as well as that side, and we're guarding in case they choose to flee in that direction. So he divides his command as he's making this hasty approach toward the village into three segments, three major segments, and he leaves a company behind with that pack train too, with those crackers. One of those complements doesn't much engage at all, not till the end of the fight. One engages heavily to precipitate the fight, and Custer leading another of those contingents in the largest one, in a different direction to attack from another side. They know it's a big village,
36:25 Speaker 01 their own scouts have called it this, and the trail was such that suggested it as well. The Indian people in this village, they were at least suspecting an attack in the afternoon of June 25. That day had started calmly for them. Their wolves were out. That word hadn't gotten back to the village. That soldiers had been discovered. And so the attack that afternoon came as a surprise, but they rose up instantly and defended themselves. And the attacking force on the south side, we know that, they didn't know this, but we know that as a force led by Marcus Reno, a major leading three
37:10 Speaker 01 companies of cavalry. Reno's orders were to attack the village from the south. And we will support you from the east, we Custer. And Reno attacks. And the initial patter of gunfire and bullets striking lodges was startling in the middle of the afternoon. I mean, he couldn't believe what was happening. And then there's some instant casualties too. And Sitting Bull's village, Sitting Bull's camp in the middle of this big camp, he's on the south side. It's his people that are attacked first. His lodge is exposed first. And he steps out, ushers women and children to safety. I mean, he's concerned
37:51 Speaker 01 always about that. But then it's his counsel to defend ourselves. And of course, that's exactly what everybody did instinctively is to rally to people attacking, chargers. They always called them chargers or blue coats. They didn't know who was attacking. It was just, in fact, they might have thought it was those soldiers they had just defeated eight days earlier that were back south. And it resumed that that's what they thought, or many of them thought. And they ably deflected that attacking force from the south. They were just bewildered by what rose up to press them instead of they press that village. They never swept the village. They got to the southern margins of the camp, and that's
38:36 Speaker 01 where they stopped. And they formed a skirmish line and they withdrew their horses to timber for to safety. And they were repulsed from that skirmish line. The defense rose up so vigorously out of that camp.
38:49 Dan Snow? Do you think Sitting Bull played a part in the fighting? Or was he a symbolic figurehead?
38:54 Speaker 01 No, he never took any part in the fight. Sitting Bull is that man that encouraged. And more than once, there are wonderful Indian accounts of him. Here's what he did. I mean, he is caring for the old people. I mean, his interests and his concerns are so multiple that he is ushering, making sure that the vulnerable ones are cared for and sent this way. And that warriors are rallying to the defence this way. That's his role. Providing good counsel. Well, he had sundanced eight days earlier, eight, six, eight days earlier. And in that dance, he had foreseen a great victory. And that became the common vision of this camp.
39:39 Speaker 01 Well, Sitting Bull had seen. And so all he needed to do is, you know, not to inspire them to now defend ourselves. Because this was going to lead to that great victory. And of course, we know the end.
39:54 Dan Snow? The climax of the Battle of Little Big Horn coming up after this.
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40:45 Dan Snow? So Custer then attacks from the other side of the camp, the southern attack having been repelled.
40:49 Speaker 01 There's a simultaneousness to this. So Custer meanwhile is threading his way in a different direction to attack from another side.
40:59 Speaker 01 He doesn't know this landscape. He's never been on this landscape, so he doesn't exactly know where that opportunity, where that other side is, whether it's on the very northern end of the village or at its side. Well, it turns out, he comes to a draw that leads straight to the can at its side. And he starts threading, he makes his way to that draw, Medicine Tale Cooley is what it's called, and he starts threading his way or sends some of his complement that way. That's discovered by people in the village. And they spread the word instantly, first off, to defend themselves from that threat that seems to be coming immediately their way and almost ready to cross. Couple of Custer's companies
41:40 Speaker 01 were almost on the verge of crossing the river, or at least appearing to be crossing the river. And they stopped that, you know, there's gunfire, there's firing instantly. And then others in that camp are spreading the word to those people now that the troops in the south had been stopped. The pressure was so great that they withdrew from their skirmish line and they went to their horses in the timber. And the pressure there was so great that they only determined to get the hell out of there. And they flee to the south from more or less the direction they had come. Not exactly, but more or less. And they see some high country as they're fleeing, and that became their objective
42:24 Speaker 01 is just to get to the high country. And there's other soldiers there, they knew of these other commands that were operating. And so sooner or later, there's help there, too. Inside the village, they're watching and they're deeply engaged in this on the south side. When word comes that there are soldiers attacking from the east side, and precious few Indian people, warriors, remain harassing this Reno complement, and they withdraw and take on Custer. And so there are already some there. Now, the rest of them show up. And they press in so many different ways. And Custer...
43:09 Speaker 01 Custer, the aggressor to the last. I mean, there's a moment where he had to wonder just, who am I commanding anymore? He's always in the lead and the lead complement, the lead soldiers were the least impacted by all this. Pick that at the backside. And if I can't cross here because of Indian resistance, he continues northward to the next horizon and horizon suggesting there's a crossing opportunity north yet. He continues northward. His command behind him is splintering
43:47 Speaker 01 and getting picked at and spread out and constantly engaged from the rear and from the right and the left and are just being picked to literal death. And that complement the soldiers with Custer, they make it to a point on the Custer battlefield today, there's the revered landscape where the most of them now, these guys died, Custer II, last stand hill. It make it to last stand hill, but at that point, it's not, that's not their end because now they start to spy. If we just hit in this direction, it looks like a crossing there. And they turn off the last stand hill. If
44:30 Speaker 01 you were the soldiers behind and you're looking this way, you're thinking, well, that's what his destination. And then all of a sudden, he keeps veering off and heading in a different direction. And it's after veering off and Indian resistance just constantly swarming and finally swarming him too. And where he had to have this realization as he's looking around at who am I commanding? And he's got these few soldiers with him, but less than half of the command he had started with because the rest of them are strung out and being picked to literal death behind him. And where he turns, he stops, the pressure in front of him is so great. He stops and retreats to what becomes
45:12 Speaker 01 last stand hill behind him. The high ground behind him wasn't good defensive ground, but it was by golly, the only defensive ground available to him. And that's where his story ends.
45:26 Dan Snow? Killed to a man, that unit.
45:28 Speaker 01 Killed to a man, yes. Two hundred and sixty-three soldiers in that command, five companies, every one of them killed.
45:38 Dan Snow? And yet, it was a tactical victory, but it didn't affect the strategic direction of the war.
45:43 Speaker 01 The consequences are enormous. It's a tactical victory for the Sitting Bull people. They wiped out the heart of a cavalry regiment now. They don't know that it's Custer yet. They didn't know exactly who they were fighting. And a couple of Cheyenne women at the end thought they recognized this man, and that word spread among their people, but it didn't spread among the camp. And it was among the Cheyennes, not a known, particularly known name. And these were people that had had some contact with him in the South. For the Indian people, this is wow. What has happened to us? We defended ourselves well today.
46:24 Speaker 01 And it was a cause to celebrate later. The casualties on their side were rather substantial to not nearly like the Seventh Cavalry's. For the government, the loss of Custer and the heart of a cavalry regiment was the final straw. And they redoubled their effort to achieve their intents. They had a capacity to share them to send more troops. It's as simple as that. Sitting Bull didn't have a capacity to grow more Indians. He had what he had. The army's way was completely different, and they redoubled their effort.
47:05 Speaker 01 The campaigns were unrelenting. They continued. Nelson Miles came on the scene. He was an infantry commander, every bit as aggressive in a personality type as was Custer. And he's an infantry officer, no less. These Indian people hated infantry because they walked, they didn't ride. They couldn't get away. They fired different weapons that were far more dangerous than cavalry weapons. And this man proved the ability to take the war to the Indian people in the wintertime, and he did.
47:43 Speaker 01 And again, a life we so thoroughly disrupted anyway, and now constantly harassed all winter long too. And he struck villages, including Sitting Bull's at one point. And imagine losing your home and your horses and your foodstuffs, such as you had foodstuffs, and fleeing in the winter with the clothing on your back, and that's it. And that's was their fate. And yet Sitting Bull, there were just those people like him that were, we are people of the prairie. I am not going to an agency. And they resisted. They fled.
48:28 Speaker 01 They found one another. They found solace in, you know, those that hadn't been struck, another village, another place. And they communed and just agreed to continue and to continue. They're the ones that fled to Canada. And ultimately, several thousand Americans who rally with him in Canada. And for a moment, they thought, it was a different government and a different view of Indian people, native peoples. And they thought they had finally found home. But that didn't last because the buffalo disappeared. The buffalo predated by Canadian people already, and a smaller dimension of the great northern
49:12 Speaker 01 buffalo herd anyway. They didn't care about the boundary. When buffalo needed to eat, they went to a grass. And if the grass was on this side of the line, the Canadian American line, well, they did what they did instinctively. The Canadian Indians could travel into America to hunt buffalo. The American Indians could not, because miles waited for them at the border. And they too starved. And that's what led them to come home.
49:41 Dan Snow? Eighteen eighty-one, he finally surrenders.
49:44 Speaker 01 The last band of people to come back to America from Canada were Sitting Bull's people. In July eighteen eighty-one, they surrendered at Fort Beaufort, and they were fed. Now, for those people, they were fed. But of course, his travails only continued.
50:03 Dan Snow? Let's spool through to the end of his life now. Tell me about the winter of 1890. What happens?
50:09 Speaker 01 Oh, my goodness. Well, they become reservation people. That's the end of the Lakotas that are the buffalo people. The buffalo get wiped out. Tide hunters destroy the southern herd. Just cleanse the plains of buffalo. Because you can't tame them. You can't herd them. And you can't process them like you can cattle. And it was the zeal of Americans to not have that menace on the prairie, but to get rid of them and make it cattle country.
50:43 Speaker 01 On the northern plains, the same thing. They were just wiped out. The landscape is occupied by soldiers. And these people became reservation people. And bureaucracies run slowly. The promise of food, you know, half the time there wasn't sufficient foodstuffs. It was just a bad time. And the imposition of the acculturation, the activities of acculturation, forced education, the introduction of Christian religion, the banning of their own religious courses. It just became an increasingly difficult time for people on the reservation. And there occurred,
51:27 Speaker 01 this is broadly writ across Indian country in the American West. There was a prophet in Nevada who spoke of a new religion. For you forlorn people who have nothing else, here is something to be beholden to, to embrace. And this religion, if you dance, if you wear certain types of clothing, if you just truly believe.
51:54 Speaker 01 There will come the day when the white people disappear and the buffalo will return. The old ways will return. The dance was the ghost dance. It spread to disciples from the Great Sioux Reservation, from the agencies on the reservation, found this man in Nevada and came back and said, well, here's what I've heard. And they believe it. We have nothing else. And they came to believe it increasingly too. And Sitting Bull got caught up in this in 1890. After he surrendered, he was shipped away for a while and he was allowed to come back
52:36 Speaker 01 to that Uncle Papa landscape. He settled on the Grand River where he was born with his immediate family, his followers around him. And absent any other hope, he embraced this too. And he's an influential man. People believed him, they always have. And that was greatly distressing to that local agent that we have this man that kind of he's embracing this and this is this thing that is just pervading the agencies and it's threatening to us and, and maybe there'll be a warfare again and things will just go to hell in Indian country.
53:20 Speaker 01 And he sought his arrest and removal. That was a standard way of handling Indian people, these kind of prominent leaders. Pick them up, move them away, get them out of the way, remove that influence among their people. And he sought his arrest and it was a botched arrest and Sitting Bull was killed in 1890. Among his followers, they fled. They united with some Minokoju people who were also subscribers to this and equally determined to believe absent anything else and they fled.
54:05 Speaker 01 And they were cornered at Wounded Knee. And, you know, the greatest tragedy in American history is what occurred at Wounded Knee in December, late December, 1890. Sitting Bull caught up earlier in the same story. Sad ending, terrible ending.
54:24 Dan Snow? Sad ending. What was his legacy? Can we still see the impact of his life and his teaching advice today?
54:32 Speaker 01 We've grown a little bit as a country and as a people. Reservations are still tough places in America. Unemployment is rampant. There are people that subscribe still to kin and a life here in a home country as kin now have known it. And so in a certain way, one still kind of senses as you go there, you go into Indian country today, whether up into Sitting Bull country or down here into red cloud and crazy horse country, that kinship and a life way is still strong and people are still there and they're very proud.
55:11 Speaker 01 But the whole business of kinship and family and tribe remains very strong across all of American reservations and particularly these Sioux reservations. And in a certain way, doesn't that kind of reflect what Sitting Bull is all about also?
55:33 Dan Snow? Paul, what's your new book called?
55:35 Speaker 01 Sitting Bull's War: The Battle of the Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains.
55:42 Dan Snow? Go and get it, folks, when it comes out. Thank you very much, Paul, for coming on the podcast.
55:46 Speaker 01 Thank you, Dan.
55:49 Dan Snow? Thank you very much to Paul for that incredible and very thorough account of this extraordinary, sensitive, but crucial history. And there's an interesting addendum to this story. A few weeks back, I learned that there's an indigenous-led initiative by the Intertribal Buffalo Council, and it's been working to reintroduce the buffalo back to the ancestral grazing lands across the Midwest and now further afield into places like Oklahoma. So once again, several hundred American bison roam as they once did centuries ago. And hopefully, as this programme continues, their numbers will grow. I think that's very cool. Thank you very much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, please hit follow and don't miss another episode. Bye for now.
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