- [Narrator] Sitting Bull sits in a fort
with the US Army officers
telling them that he is done living in exile.
Canada has been hard. His followers are hungry and ill.
Three-fourths are women and children,
and he himself has developed an eye condition so severe
he must protect them with green tinted goggles.
He then tells the officers
that he has brought his grandson with him
and wishes for the boy to be educated
in the ways of white Americans.
He hands his Winchester to the boy
to surrender to the soldiers.
"I wish it to be remembered," he says,
"That I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle."
But Sitting Bull has not surrendered entirely.
Not truly, not in his heart.
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In the chaos after Little Bighorn,
Sitting Bull's Coalition of Plains Tribes basically broke.
Many, some who had just joined the group to hunt
and had not meant to enter a battle,
went back to the reservations,
again appealing to the agencies for support.
Others broke off in their own bands.
It was in fact logistically impossible
for the buffalo hunting lifestyle
to keep such a large group supplied and fed,
especially with herds dwindling.
So it was only a few hundred that crossed the border
with Sitting Bull into Canada
where they starved for two years.
Now, the Canadian government
was not hostile to them overall.
In fact, Sitting Bull felt he had better relations
with Canadian officials and even gifted one his war bonnet.
But because the Canadian government said
they were not based in Canada
and were occupying territory set out
for Canadian-based tribes,
it would not issue them food or supplies.
And even that far north, the buffalo still dwindled.
So eventually, he returned and surrendered,
or rather he appeared to surrender.
He handed his rifle to his grandson who then surrendered it,
and that wasn't lost on his followers.
Sitting Bull would try this path,
but was keeping his options open.
Afterwards, he boarded a riverboat,
the first time he'd ridden one rather than shot at it,
and visited his first major American town,
the citizens of which upon seeing the man who killed Custer,
the leader of the resistance against the US cavalry,
promptly threw him a huge party.
Oh yeah!
Because after Little Bighorn,
everybody had become kind of obsessed with Sitting Bull.
And I mean, everyone.
Biographies of him were published
in both England and France.
And American journalists chased every rumor
that would explain his victory over US forces.
The myth that they settled on
was that Sitting Bull was not culturally Lakota at all,
but rather raised among white Americans,
was university educated and graduated from West Point.
Supposedly he'd even studied in France
and was a devotee of Napoleon.
In fact, a book of poetry and letters,
"The Works of Sitting Bull",
was falsified and entered into the Library of Congress.
It suggested he not only spoke English,
but also Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.
This narrative was actually soothing
for the American public, believe it or not.
Because think about it,
if Sitting Bull was a university educated proponent
of Western tactics, it meant that the American public
didn't have to reckon with the fact that the 7th Cavalry
had been absolutely bodied by a native warrior
that they considered racially and intellectually inferior.
The wealthier a foe Sitting Bull seemed,
the better the US Army
and its dead hero Custer could appear.
On his way to government confinement,
he signed autographs for a dollar a piece.
He had been taught to sign his name in Canada
and sold personal items to souvenir collectors,
though he never kept the money for himself, mind you,
always using it to support the Hunkpapa band
that remained with him.
For the next two years of confinement in government custody,
living in various times at the Standing Rock Reservation
and Fort Randall, Sitting Bull would receive letters
from as far away as Europe,
as well as visitors from the Hunkpapa and other tribes.
Photographers also came to take his portrait
and interview him, but then other letters arrived, also,
letters asking him to go Wild Westing.
See, as the Indian Wars wrapped up,
those living in the large cities of the East Coast
and Midwest wanted to experience both the conflict
and the already disappearing lifestyle of the pioneer era,
but, you know, not truly.
They wanted a window into a world
that cast the native people whom they'd fought
as noble savages that were part of a vanishing race
and European forces as the embodiment of progress.
This way of thinking was essentially a victory celebration
meant to glamorize, sanitize, and legitimize the bloody
and morally complex process of manifest destiny.
Because in their eyes,
it turned an act of conquest into an act of charity,
while also presenting naked entertainment as educational.
And the most successful impresario of this form
was the former scout and bison hunter Buffalo Bill Cody,
who began trying to put a show together,
exhibiting Sitting Bull
almost the second he arrived at Standing Rock.
However, it was actually Sitting Bull's
own Indian agent, James McLaughlin,
the man who was supposed to oversee his custody,
welfare, and rehabilitation,
who began exhibiting him on stage for the first time
in major Western cities.
And it was during these tours
that Sitting Bull first met Annie Oakley,
the petite ambidextrous trick shooter
who would thrill audiences with her ability
to blast a cigarette out of her father's lips
or hit targets from long distances.
Sitting Bull took a shine to Oakley immediately,
believing her skills indicated great spiritual power,
nicknaming her Little Sure Shot,
a name she'd monetize in her show career long afterward.
He symbolically adopted her as a sign of favor,
though eventually relations with McLaughlin who was,
to be clear, corruptly exploiting a prisoner, soured.
And he managed to later get permission to travel
with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.
His salary there would be $50 a week
and he'd retain the rights
to sell his autograph, photo, and memorabilia.
And what would he do in this new show? Nothing.
When the show set up in a new city,
he would ride into the arena in a carriage
at the head of the procession,
and then sit in a VIP spot on the grandstand
and watched the proceedings.
He was literally just there to be looked at.
And that was enough.
There, he watched staged scenes of Native Warriors
attacking a pioneer cabin and fort
and even a recreation of the battle of Little Bighorn,
all of which these settlers and Army won, of course,
but to Sitting Bull, this was worth it,
for while the show ostensibly let Americans learn
about the Plains Tribes,
Sitting Bull himself was also learning
about the culture and power of the government
that he'd been fighting.
The cities of the East Coast were massive,
their populations teeming,
and new people were getting off the boat
from Europe every day.
His people had not been fighting one nation, he realized,
but rather a nation that was importing settlers
and soldiers from other nations.
And he was shocked and upset by the poverty of these cities.
Generosity, one of the four virtues of the Lakota Warrior,
meant that even if a family was poor,
it never had to beg.
Yet here, he was followed by shoeless children
who learned that the kind chief would give them coins.
Once, he stopped in front of a woman begging
and having no money, on the spot,
sold three of his signatures and placed all $3 in her hands.
So if he'd wanted to learn about the United States,
he was successful.
But one of his other aspirations did fall flat.
He wanted to meet President Grover Cleveland
and plead the Lakota's case,
but the audience was brief and he barely got to speak
before Cleveland was swept along to another meeting.
Nothing would come of it.
Sitting Bull, disappointed and dejected,
decided to go back to Standing Rock.
With him, he brought a gift from Buffalo Bill,
an enormous white horse from his show
that had been trained to dance at the sound of gunfire.
And this was a fitting gift
since a new movement called the Ghost Dance
was sweeping the depleted native populations
of the Great Plains.
Now, the Ghost Dance is difficult to explain
since the religion of the Plains tribes is based
on personal interpretations of spiritual experiences.
So it may have meant different things
to different practitioners.
But put simply, it was an attempt to use ritual dance
and prayer to restore the world to how it had been
before European colonization of the Americas.
See, nothing in Lakota religion was ever really destroyed.
The herds of buffalo, the plants,
and the many, many dead family members
all still existed inside of the earth
from where they'd originally emerged.
It was believed that should the Plains Tribes
join the dance, the buffalo and dead would return
and the whites would go back to Europe.
At its core, it was a nonviolent movement,
a thing to do now that armed resistance had failed.
But the increased gatherings of Plains Tribes people
performing the dance on reservations,
appeared to Indian agents and government officials
like a brewing rebellion.
After all, most dances, such as the Sun Dance,
had already been banned on reservations in the 1880s.
So participation was an act of spiritual resistance.
Newspapers around the country,
many based on erroneous or even fabricated reports,
said that the reservations were full of violent revolts.
And the one question on everyone's mind in 1890
when the first dances were held at Standing Rock was,
would Sitting Bull be joining the dance?
It was unclear whether Sitting Bull
believed in the Ghost Dance,
though he was a very spiritual man
and appeared to have at least respected it as a movement.
In fact, while he never voiced support,
when the dance came, he did join.
And that was enough for McLaughlin.
For years, he'd been writing letters,
calling Sitting Bull stubborn, rebellious,
and criticizing how he refused to learn to farm.
So he sent two native policemen to arrest Sitting Bull,
just in case of an uprising.
But when they reached his house,
Sitting Bull, true to his name, refused to get up.
When they forced him, a Lakota man shot one of the policemen
who then fired a shot through Sitting Bull's chest,
with a second fired into his head.
Sitting Bull lies on the ground.
Above him is the open sky
and the faces of his people looking down.
He's bleeding, exhausted, in excruciating pain.
For nearly three decades,
he has resisted the US government,
handing it its greatest defeat in the Indian Wars
and forcing it to examine its own character,
giving all to his people
until there was no more left to give.
Within a day, his followers, panicked,
will flee to join a Cheyenne party
who had already decided to move
to the Pine Ridge Reservation and the shelter of Red Cloud.
Instead, they'll be massacred by the vengeful 7th cavalry
at Wounded Knee.
But that is still in the future.
Right now, Sitting Bull's eyes close
and nearby, a towering white stallion
hears the shots that killed him and begins to dance.
Now I'm not gonna lie here,
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I think you can actually hear it a little bit in my voice
in those last few sentences,
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