Fort Buford: Where Sitting Bull Surrendered

The site of Fort Buford sits just east of the Missouri-Yellowstone confluence, and several original buildings from the post still stand. The Army built Fort Buford in eighteen sixty-six using timber salvaged from the dismantled Fort Union, and for the next two decades it served as the military anchor of the upper Missouri, a garrison meant to control the river corridor and push the Plains nations onto reservations.

On July nineteenth, eighteen eighty-one, the most famous act in Fort Buford's history took place. Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader who had guided his people to victory at the Little Bighorn five years earlier and into exile in Canada afterward, walked into the post with one hundred eighty-six starving followers and surrendered. He handed his rifle to his young son Crow Foot and instructed the boy to give it to the commanding officer, saying, as it was reported later, that he wished it remembered that he was the last man of his tribe to surrender his rifle.

The surrender ended four years of refuge in Canada, where the promised food and support from the Canadian government never fully materialized. Sitting Bull was not broken by military defeat but by starvation. His people could not hunt enough buffalo to survive another winter north of the border.

After surrender, he was held for nearly two years as a prisoner of war at Fort Randall, South Dakota, before being released to the Standing Rock Agency. He was killed there in December eighteen ninety, during an attempted arrest, fourteen days before the Wounded Knee Massacre.

The state historic site at Fort Buford preserves the officers' quarters and a military cemetery. The grounds are quiet now, just riverbank grass and cottonwoods, but the weight of what happened here in the summer of eighteen eighty-one settles in as soon as you know to look for it.