Standing Rock

The arrest order went out because Sitting Bull was dancing. In the fall of 1890 the Ghost Dance had reached Standing Rock — the religion that promised the buffalo would return and the white man's world would end — and Agent James McLaughlin at Fort Yates decided the Hunkpapa leader had to be removed before the dance spread. On the night of December 14, troops left Fort Yates for Sitting Bull's camp on Grand River; at daybreak on the fifteenth, the Indian police went into his cabin and pulled him out.

What happened in the next minutes is still the file's center: Sitting Bull's followers surrounded the police, Catch-the-Bear fired, and the police answered — Sitting Bull was shot in the head and chest by his own people, the Lakota policemen sent to arrest him. Thirteen died in the exchange — eight of Sitting Bull's band and four policemen. The old chief's body was brought back to Fort Yates and buried in the post cemetery in an unmarked grave, without ceremony, on the grounds of the agency that had ordered his arrest.

The killing set off the last act of the Plains wars — the Ghost Dance followers who'd fled Standing Rock joined the band intercepted at Wounded Knee two weeks later, and the massacre that ended the Indian Wars happened because Fort Yates had decided the dance was a threat worth stopping.

Standing Rock's history didn't end in 1890 — the reservation was the site of the 2016 pipeline protests that made 'Water Protectors' a national movement — but the fort's ground is where the old century's last page was written: the agency where the man who'd beaten Custer was killed by the men the government had deputized to do it.