KILLDEER MOUNTAIN BATTLEFIELD STATE HISTORIC SITE
Battlefield — Killdeer, Dunn County, North Dakota
Status: Closed · Access: Restricted access
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/killdeer-mountain-battlefield-state-historic-site-killdeer-north-dakota/

Battlefield documented in historical or public cultural sources.

Killdeer Mountain Battlefield State Historic Site is a battlefield in Killdeer, North Dakota. Battlefield documented in historical or public cultural sources. The archive files it under dark history and battlefields. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Closed to the public, but not to the record.

Killdeer Mountain is the battle the Army won and the village lost — the July 28, 1864 fight where General Alfred Sully's 2,200 troops hit a Lakota and Dakota encampment of some 1,600 lodges and eight thousand people in the Killdeer Mountains. It was Sully's punitive campaign after the 1862 Minnesota Uprising, and the village — Hunkpapa, Sihasapa, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, and Yanktonai families, many of whom had nothing to do with Minnesota — was preparing for winter, not war.
The Army's howitzers and formation overwhelmed the defenders; Sitting Bull, Gall, and Inkpaduta were among the warriors who fought the first battle in which they'd faced artillery. Sully lost a handful of men; the village lost everything — seven hundred soldiers spent the next day burning the tipis, the food stores, and the winter supplies, and the survivors fled into the Badlands. Fanny Kelly, a captive who watched from the retreating village, left the account that survives.
The file keeps Killdeer Mountain: Sully's campaign, the village that was destroyed rather than defeated, and the battlefield that is also the site of a famine the Army made.
Killdeer Mountain is the archive's punitive-expedition file — Sully's 1864 campaign, the burned village, and the winter the Army created.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
Killdeer Mountain is the archive's punitive-expedition file — the largest Army campaign against the Plains tribes, Sitting Bull's first artillery battle, and the destroyed encampment.
A battlefield that was a village keeps its ground — the file's suggestion being that Killdeer's hold is the asymmetry: the Army's victory that was a village's destruction, and the winter starvation that was the real weapon.

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· On July 28, 1864, Sully’s troops attacked a large Indigenous gathering; many inhabitants had not participated in the 1862 war. Ground with a documented war record gives the file real substance; this entry is part of it. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. 'Killdeer Mountain Battlefield State Historic Site' documents the entry. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Killdeer Mountain Battlefield State Historic Site — State Historical Society of North Dakota
  https://www.history.nd.gov/historicsites/kmb/

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