[RERUN] EPISODE 55 Sitting Bull (Part 2)

·1 hr 52 min·8 clips

Sitting Bull declares 'The whites may get me at last, but I will have good times until then' — defiant acceptance of doom without surrender.

1. History on Fire episode 55 continues a five-part series on Sitting Bull, picking up from the late 1860s through the eve of the Little Bighorn in June 1876. 2. Host Daniele Bolelli, a university history professor and martial artist, narrates solo without guests, drawing on primary sources including White Bull's later testimony and Wooden Leg's accounts. 3. The episode's core thesis is that Sitting Bull's life embodied a deliberate choice to live freely on one's own terms even against impossible odds — encapsulated in his quoted declaration 'The whites may get me at last, but I will have good times until then.' 4. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty appeared to give the Lakota a decisive victory: the US sued for peace, abandoned forts, and required 75% Lakota consent for any land transfer. 5. Yet within years, repeating rifles had transformed professional buffalo hunting, undermining the ecological base of Lakota life, while political divisions emerged between reservation leaders like Red Cloud and free-riding leaders like Sitting Bull. 6. At the 1869 Hunkpapa council attended by Crazy Horse and others, Sitting Bull's uncle Fourhorns stepped down and nominated Sitting Bull as chief for all non-reservation Lakota bands — an office with no prior precedent. 7. Inter-tribal warfare continued alongside conflict with the US: in one episode, after Crow warriors killed a Lakota boy, Sitting Bull led approximately 100 warriors through deep snow in winter to find a Crow party of 30, killing all of them at the cost of 14 Lakota lives including one of Sitting Bull's uncles. 8. Sitting Bull attempted to adopt a mixed-heritage mail carrier named Ephraim Groard in 1869, just as he had previously adopted a young Assiniboine boy; the relationship ended when Groard defected to the Oglala and later served as an army scout against the Lakota. 9. By 1872, Congress and President Grant sought to build the Northern Pacific Railroad through Lakota hunting grounds; General Sherman privately hoped the railroad would provide justification to abandon the Peace Policy and conduct what he called 'a final solution' to the Indian problem. 10. In the 1872 railroad survey standoff, after a warrior publicly questioned his courage, Sitting Bull walked alone to within a quarter mile of the army's guns, sat down, and smoked his pipe; his nephew White Bull later recalled him cleaning the pipe slowly and deliberately while bullets raised dust around him. 11. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874 triggered an invasion of miners into territory the Lakota considered sacred; when 300 Lakota warriors arrived at the negotiating council chanting 'The Black Hills is my land and I love it, and whoever interferes will hear this gun,' the federal commissioners quickly departed. 12. In November of an unspecified year, Grant convened a White House meeting with the Secretary of Interior, the Secretary of War, Sheridan, and Crook, at which they agreed to quietly stop enforcing the Fort Laramie Treaty and to issue a January 1876 surrender ultimatum they knew was physically impossible to meet in mid-winter. 13. The resulting three-pronged campaign — General Terry from North Dakota, Colonel Gibbon from Montana, General Crook from Wyoming — was described as the largest US military mobilization since the Civil War. 14. Crook's March 1876 surprise attack on a camp of Cheyenne, Oglala, and Minneconjou was guided by Sitting Bull's former adoptee Frank Groard, who had become an army scout; survivors escaped with their lives but lost all belongings to sub-zero temperatures. 15. At the 1876 Sundance at Deer Medicine Rocks, Sitting Bull had Jumping Bull cut 50 pieces of flesh from each of his arms over more than half an hour; after collapsing while staring at the sun, he described a vision of soldiers falling face-down into an Indian camp. 16. On June 17, 1876, a large Lakota and Cheyenne force rode out to engage General Crook's column — an unprecedented tactical choice — and fought for hours; Crook claimed victory but one of his own officers called it 'a humiliating defeat,' and Crook withdrew his troops from the area. 17. The episode's tone is intimate and impassioned; Bolelli regularly pauses to contextualize Lakota spiritual practices such as flesh offerings and vision quests for non-native listeners, drawing on sources like John Fire Lame Deer's autobiography. 18. Bolelli's narration is emotionally engaged without being sensationalist — he presents Sitting Bull's choices as strategically coherent and morally consistent rather than romanticized. 19. People interested in Native American history, 19th-century US–Lakota conflict, or character studies of leaders under impossible conditions will find this episode compelling. 20. Listeners who want a fast-moving survey or who have no context for Lakota history and spirituality may find the episode's pace and level of detail demanding.

As heard by us

A reflective take on Sitting Bull's defiance as the end closes in.

History on Fire treats Sitting Bull, the Ghost Dance, and Wounded Knee as one story of a leader watching the circle close and still refusing to give up his dignity. Daniele Bolelli keeps the lens on resistance.

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Press play for the second part of a five-part Sitting Bull series, where the episode follows his defiant resolve as the circle closes in.

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