Sitting Bull was a Dakota Indian from the Hunkpapa Band and a respected medicine man. The word Dakota means united by compact, and there were several united tribes who collectively called themselves the Dakotas. Sitting Bull was born near an old army station, Fort George, on Willow Creek, and his father was Jumping Bull.
In North Dakota, at this time, there were great herds of buffalo, and the largest of them were the bulls. These were the leaders when a herd was running, swimming a river, or jumping across a gully. Even when a lad, Sitting Bull’s father could hunt for buffaloes, and quickly jump the deep gullies so frequent in that country, always with his bow in his hand, so his uncle, an Indian chief, named him Jumping Bull.
His son was a strange boy. His hair was straight like an Indian, but of a reddish-brown color. His head was very large and his features were more regular in form than that of the Indian. He was so odd in his looks and his ways, keeping much by himself, thinking and planning how best to have his own way, that his father named him when quite young, “Sacred Stand.”
Once, at ten years of age, he went with some hunters on a wild chase for buffaloes and came back to his father’s wigwam very happy and proud, for he had succeeded in killing a buffalo-calf; but he did not have a new name till four years later. Then he waylaid an Indian, an enemy of his people, and shot him with an arrow.
After this he frequently made drawings of his totem, what we might call his family coat-of-arms. This was a buffalo-bull settled back on his haunches in a sitting posture, and from it the boy was named “Sitting Bull.”
