and much honored, in
1908, aged seventy-nine, and was buried there near the Niobrara, in
ancient Ponca country, where his ancestors slept. He had saved his
tribe.

CHAPTER XXIV

SITTING BULL THE WAR MAKER (1876-1881)

AN UNCONQUERED LEADER

The treaty that Chief Red Cloud at last signed in the fall of 1868 was
half white and half red. The white part made the Sioux agree to a
reservation which covered all of present South Dakota west of the
Missouri River. Here they were to live and be fed. The red part, put
in by Red Cloud, said that the whole country west of the reservation to
the Big Horn Mountains of northern Wyoming, and north of the North
Platte River, should be Indian country. Here the Sioux and their
Indian friends were to hunt as they pleased.

This closed the road, and gave the Powder River region to the Sioux.
They might chase the buffalo, from central Wyoming up across Montana
clear to Canada, and no white man could interfere. It was their own
game reserve--and the best game reserve in the United States.

The Sioux numbered thirty thousand. Many of them preferred living in
their hunting grounds instead of upon the reservation. That was their
natural life--to hunt and to war. Besides, they found out that the
United States was not doing as had been promised. There were to be
cows, seeds, farm tools, teachers, and so forth, for the reservation
Indians--and scarcely a third of these things was supplied.

The Indians upon the reservation did not live nearly so comfortably as
those who did as they pleased, in the hunting grounds.

So the treaty did not work out well. The hunting-ground Indians were
perfectly free. They had guests from other tribes; and in the passing
back and forth, white men were attacked. The Crows of western Montana
complained that the Sioux invaded them, and that they might as well go
to war, themselves, as try to stay at home.

The Government had intended that the Sioux should settle upon the big
reservation, and from there take their hunting trips. Speedily, or in
1869, General Sherman, head of the army, declared that the Indians
found outside of the reservation might be treated as hostiles, and
brought back.

Nevertheless, by the terms of the Red Cloud treaty, the Sioux had a
right to be in this country, which was all theirs, if they behaved
themselves.

Among the leaders of the hunting-ground Sioux, Sitting Bull ranked with
the foremost. He was a Hunkpap