Sitting Bull killed, 1890

15 December 2026

On 15 December 1890, Sitting Bull was killed outside his cabin on the Grand River, on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, by police of the Indian agency that had him under watch. He was a Hunkpapa Lakota leader who had never signed a treaty or moved onto a reservation, and he was in his fifties.

The United States Indian Service agent at Fort Yates, James McLaughlin, ordered the arrest. He believed Sitting Bull would join the Ghost Dance, a religious movement that had reached the Lakota that year and that the government treated as a threat. On 14 December 1890 McLaughlin wrote to Lieutenant Bull Head of the Indian police with a plan to take Sitting Bull at dawn, and added a postscript: “You must not let him escape under any circumstances.”

Around 39 police officers and four volunteers reached the cabin at about 5.30 in the morning. Sitting Bull let them in, dressed and came outside quietly. Then his wife began to shout, the dogs woke the village, and a crowd gathered. As the police tried to force him onto a horse, a Lakota man named Catch-the-Bear shot Bull Head; Bull Head fired his revolver into Sitting Bull’s chest, and Red Tomahawk shot him in the head. A close-quarters fight followed, and when it was over Sitting Bull, his son Crow Foot, Bull Head and five others were dead.

McLaughlin’s telegram that day reported eight Indians killed, “including Sitting Bull and his son, Crow Foot”. Lakota accounts gathered later put the total at 14 dead, among them eight policemen. The record is dominated by McLaughlin and the police, and historians still disagree about who fired first.

Sitting Bull was the spiritual leader of the Lakota camps that destroyed Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn in 1876. He did not fight that day; he told the warriors where to go. He took his people to Canada and stayed until 1881, when he surrendered at Fort Buford, and in 1885 he toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Two weeks after his death, soldiers killed Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek in the hundreds.

Sources

• National Park Service, “Sitting Bull”, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument
• National Park Service, “Hunkpapa and Sihasapa”, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument
• Smithsonian Magazine, “Why Sitting Bull Was Killed by Indian Agency Police at His Cabin on the Standing Rock Reservation”, 15 December 2025

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