Battle of Dead Buffalo Lake

In the summer of eighteen sixty-three, Brigadier General Henry Hastings Sibley led more than two thousand soldiers west from Minnesota in a punitive expedition against the Dakota people who had fled after the war of the previous year. On July twenty-sixth he camped near a small lake in what is now Kidder County, North Dakota. More than a thousand Sioux warriors, including Hunkpapa reinforced by the young Sitting Bull, appeared on the surrounding hills.

The warriors tried to cut off the army's pack train but could not break through, and they withdrew. Sibley pressed on, and two days later engaged them again at Stony Lake, then again at the Missouri River crossing. The battles pushed the Dakota deeper onto the northern plains.

It was the second chapter in a war that had far from ended.