Sitting Bull was first called Slow, for his careful nature
The Lakota leader known as Sitting Bull was born Jumping Badger and nicknamed Slow, because he did things deliberately and without hurry. At fourteen he rode ahead of older warriors in a horse raid on a Crow camp, and his proud father handed down his own name: Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down.
Sitting Bull was born sometime between 1831 and 1837 in land that later became Dakota Territory; family oral tradition places it along the Yellowstone River in present-day Montana. After his first act of courage, touching an enemy in battle, a gesture called counting coup, his father held a feast and presented him with an eagle feather, a warhorse and a buffalo-hide shield, then took the name Jumping Bull for himself.
As the United States pressed west, Sitting Bull became a leader of Hunkpapa resistance. He supported Red Cloud's War in the late 1860s with raids on several forts, and when other Lakota representatives signed the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, he refused, telling a Jesuit envoy he would sell no part of his country. A later historian claimed he was named supreme chief of all the Sioux, but scholars reject this, since Lakota bands made their own decisions.
In June 1876 he had a vision of soldiers falling upside down into the Lakota camp, as thick as grasshoppers. About three weeks later, allied Lakota and Northern Cheyenne defeated George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn, apparently fulfilling it. Washington poured in thousands more troops, and many Lakota surrendered. Sitting Bull refused, leading his band north to Wood Mountain in what is now Saskatchewan in 1877, and staying until 1881, when he returned and surrendered.
He later toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show before settling at the Standing Rock Agency. In 1890, fearing he would back the Ghost Dance movement, the agent James McLaughlin ordered his arrest, and Sitting Bull was killed by Lakota agency police in the struggle that followed. In 1953 his family moved what were believed to be his remains to a site near Mobridge, South Dakota, close to his birthplace.
Source: Sitting Bull
