1578: Sitting Bull Quotes by Year (1881–1883): Senate Records and Contemporary Accounts
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/28
How does a year-by-year chronology anchored in Sitting Bull’s 1883 Senate Select Committee testimony and his c.1882 “life of freedom” statement clarify his claims to the Black Hills and expose popular misquotes?
1876: “I want to know what you are doing, traveling on this road. You scare all the buffalo away. I want to hunt in this place. I want you to turn back from here. If you don’t, I will fight you again. I want you to leave what you have got here and turn back from here. … I am your friend — Sitting Bull. I need all the rations you have got and some powder.”
c. 1877: “If you have one honest man in Washington, send him here and I will talk to him.”
1881: “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.”
c. 1882: “The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country and live in our fashion.”
1883: “If a man loses anything, and goes back and looks carefully for it he will find it, and that is what the Indians are doing now when they ask you to give them the things they were promised them in the past.”
1883: “I consider that my country takes in the Black Hills, and runs from the Powder River to the Missouri, and that all of this land belongs to me.”
1883: “When you have a piece of land, and anything trespasses on it, you catch it and keep it until you get damages, and I am doing the same thing now.”
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