His father was a mystic. One night he sitting by a fire with three other warriors. He heard a strange noise that sounded vaguely like speech. It was coming from a buffalo bull that had wandered into their camp. The bull was saying Sitting Bull, Jumping Bull, Bull Standing With Cow, and Lone Bull. He took this to mean that the bull was offering him new names to take for himself or to give to others. He took Sitting Bull for himself.
At 14 years old, Slow counted his first coup. He tagged along with a 20-man war party to capture horses from the Crows. When he came within sight of the Crows he charged ahead of the warriors and rode straight toward one of the Crows. Before the man could fire his arrow, Slow struck him with his coup stick and galloped far out of range. His father heard of his bravery and immediately gave him his name Sitting Bull.
His first war wound occurred during a horse stealing raid from the Crow. They got a large number of horses that they stole at night. The Crows caught up in the morning. Sitting Bull was wounded in the left foot by a Crow chief. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life after that. In return Sitting Bull killed him.
Sometime in the 1860s, he was appointed the chief of the Hunkpapas. It was an important time because the whites were encroaching and in fact had disturbed some of the best buffalo grounds. By 1868, the government was ready to make peace. They picked out a huge reservation that would put the northern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and the Sioux in the western half of present day South Dakota. The Powder River country immediately west of the reservation would remain as unceded Indian territory where no whites would be allowed to settle. Red Cloud and some other chiefs accepted the terms.
Meanwhile Sitting Bull and his people lived in the unceded land. In 1872, the Northern Pacific Railroad came out to survey for tracks from Duluth, Minnesota to the Pacific. The Sioux led several attacks against the survey teams and their army guards. Fortunately for the Sioux, a financial panic put off the railroad for another year. But in 1875, the army sent Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer to find a suitable site to build a fort to protect the railroad crews. The site he found had traces of gold and soon a new gold rush was on. The Sioux were very angry as the Black Hills were a sacred site.
