Where did Sitting Bull grow up and live?

📍Grand River, Mobridge, South Dakota, USA

1831 – 1890

“I was born on the Grand River in what is now South Dakota, in the country of the Hunkpapa Lakota, and the land along that river was my home in the deepest sense — not a place I owned, but a place I belonged to, as the river belongs to its valley. I grew up learning to hunt buffalo on the open plain, counting coup on enemies in battle, and listening to the elders speak of the old ways. I understood that everything my people needed to live — the buffalo, the rivers, the sacred Black Hills — was being taken from us. After the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, where we defeated Custer's forces, I led my people into Canada rather than surrender.”

👍 LovedThe extraordinary freedom of the open plains before the reservation era — the buffalo migrations, the seasonal movements of the Lakota people, the deep connection between the people and the land.

👎 DislikedThe systematic destruction of everything that made Lakota life possible — the buffalo slaughtered to starvation, the land taken by treaty and by force.

Map showing where Sitting Bull lived — Grand River, Mobridge, South Dakota, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Utley, R. The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (1993), Henry Holt; Yenne, B. Sitting Bull (2008), Westholme Publishing