Sitting Bull: The Assassination at Standing Rock, December 15, 1890

Fourteen days before Wounded Knee, the most recognizable living symbol of Lakota resistance was dead.

Sitting Bull, Tatanka Iyotake, was the Hunkpapa Lakota leader who had refused to sign the eighteen eighty-eight agreement that reduced the Great Sioux Reservation by more than half. He had fled to Canada after the Battle of Little Bighorn in eighteen seventy-six. He had toured with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show for four months in eighteen eighty-five, because he needed the money, and then he had returned to Standing Rock Reservation and continued refusing.

In the fall of eighteen ninety, government Indian agents became alarmed by the spread of the Ghost Dance movement among the Lakota. Sitting Bull, though not himself a Ghost Dance leader, was seen as a figure whose presence encouraged resistance. An arrest order was issued.

In the early morning of December fifteenth, approximately forty to forty-three Indian police officers arrived at his log cabin on the Grand River. His followers came out to block the arrest. In the melee that followed, two policemen shot Sitting Bull: once in the left side, and once in the head. Seven of his followers were also killed. Six policemen died in the same exchange. He was approximately fifty-nine years old.

Fourteen days later, at Wounded Knee Creek, Spotted Elk's band was disarmed and fired upon. Lakota historians and scholars have documented the sequence: the elimination of leadership before a forced disarmament. The Standing Rock Reservation still carries his name and his history.