Killdeer Mountain Battlefield State Historic Site

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.