The summer of 1876 brought the moment for which Sitting Bull is most widely remembered, though his own role in it is often mischaracterized.
In the weeks before the battles of that summer, Sitting Bull conducted a Sun Dance — a ceremony of sacrifice and prayer central to Lakota religious practice, involving fasting, suffering, and extended prayer over multiple days. During this ceremony, he received a vision: he saw soldiers falling from the sky, head-first, into a Lakota camp. He interpreted this as a prophecy of military victory, and the vision spread through the assembled camp.
The camp on the Little Bighorn River in what is now Montana was enormous — an estimated ten thousand or more Lakota and Cheyenne people, gathered in a loose coalition that represented one of the largest Native military assemblages of the nineteenth century. When Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry attacked the camp on June 25, 1876, they were vastly outnumbered. Custer’s immediate command was destroyed. He and the five companies with him died on the ridges above the Little Bighorn.
Sitting Bull did not personally lead the charge that destroyed Custer’s command. He was older than many of the warriors, and his role in the battle was primarily that of a spiritual and strategic leader. He had organized the defense of the camp, directed the protection of women and children, and sustained the morale of his people through the vision he had shared. The fighters who overwhelmed Custer — including Crazy Horse and many others — did so within the framework of leadership and spiritual preparation that Sitting Bull had provided.