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Pionerd is a daily Minnesota history podcast. Every day, one story drawn from the people, places, and moments that shaped the state we call home. From the Iron Range to the Mississippi headwaters, from the Twin Cities to the small towns most maps forget, Minnesota's history is richer and stranger than most people realize. Join us every day and find out what happened here.
INTRO: Sitting Bull’s 1884 Visit to St. Paul
In March 1884, icy winds swept across the cobblestones of downtown Saint Paul. Streetlights flickered against towering brick facades as horse-drawn carriages rattled through the snow. Into this bustling Gilded Age capital stepped Tatanka Yotanka, known in English as Sitting Bull. He came not as a conquered captive, but as a leader seeking food and survival for a starving Lakota nation. Standing Rock agent James McLaughlin invited Sitting Bull on a business trip to St. Paul, hoping the city’s apparent power and comforts would encourage assimilation. McLaughlin believed the sheer scale of modern industrial power would break the holy man’s traditional spirit. Sitting Bull saw a different path. He resolved to absorb the tools of a changing world without abandoning his Lakota identity.
ACT I: The Blueprint for "Civilization"
The aftermath of Little Bighorn brought relentless pressure from federal troops. Scarce game and hunger forced Sitting Bull and his remaining followers to surrender in 1881. After two years of confinement at Fort Randall, officials transferred him to the Standing Rock Agency at Fort Yates. Agent James McLaughlin viewed the chief as the ultimate obstacle to federal control. McLaughlin calculated that exposing him to Saint Paul’s factories and commercial wealth would crush his hopes for self-sufficiency.
On March 14, 1884, Sitting Bull and his nephew, One Bull, arrived at Union Depot. Thousands of curious citizens packed the platform, eager for a glimpse of the famous holy man. Officials quickly whisked the delegation into a horse-drawn sleigh, leaving the disappointed crowd behind in the bitter cold. They arrived at Colonel Alvaren Allen’s Merchants Hotel at Third and Jackson streets. Sitting Bull refused Western clothes. He walked the city streets wearing a buckskin shirt, beaded leggings, moccasins, a fox-head cap, and an eagle feather, while carrying a three-and-a-half-foot carved pipe.
To support his companions, Sitting Bull sold autographs on street corners for a dollar fifty, the equivalent of several days' wages for a working laborer at the time. Local reporters crowded his hotel quarters, expecting a defeated captive. Instead, Sitting Bull challenged federal policy directly. He asked why the Great Father sent so few rations while demanding payment for destroyed buffalo herds.
McLaughlin pushed his guest toward modern technology to prove the superiority of the industrial age. Workers set up an acoustic experiment using an early telephone. Sitting Bull and One Bull held receivers connected by one hundred feet of wire. Hearing his nephew’s voice through the earpiece, the chief grinned and exclaimed, "Wakan!"—a Lakota word for a sacred mystery. He recognized a powerful tool, yet he maintained his traditional ways.
ACT II: The Ironies of the Gilded City
The tour accelerated across freezing streets. Heavy snow slid from rooftops as horse-drawn carriages moved the delegation between commercial centers. In the wholesale district, Sitting Bull visited dry goods stores and the Patrick H. Kelly Grocery. He stepped onto a freight elevator, riding the platform above stacked grain and salted meat, a stark contrast to the empty warehouses and broken treaty promises on the plains.
Beyond the technological displays, Sitting Bull observed the harsh human realities of the Gilded Age. On a biting wind-swept corner, a beggar woman stretched out thin, blue hands for alms. Sitting Bull reached inside his red mackinaw blanket and handed her ten dollars in silver coins, nearly all the money he had made from autograph sales that morning. When tour manager John Burke questioned him for wasting cash, Sitting Bull pointed at the massive brick buildings. He noted the deep irony of a culture that built towering stone homes while letting its own women freeze and starve in the street.
It was during this period that Sitting Bull attended a performance by a young sharpshooter named Annie Oakley. Astounded by her precision and fierce spirit, he saw in her something noble. He sent her a portrait of himself, befriended her, and symbolically adopted her into the Lakota nation, bestowing upon her the name Watanya Cicilla or "Little Sure Shot." In a city attempting to showcase its dominance, Sitting Bull quietly formed an enduring bond based on mutual respect.
On March 18, a four-mule government ambulance carried him down Fort Road to Fort Snelling. He sat across from General Alfred Terry, the military commander who had pursued him after Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull did not beg for himself. He urged the general to carry a direct plea for food and treaty honor directly to the President.
ACT III: The Attempted Assassination of Sitting Bull at the Grand Opera House
Six months later, Sitting Bull returned to Saint Paul. Hotel manager Colonel Alvaren Allen now managed his public appearances, building momentum for an Eastern theater tour. On the afternoon of Thursday, September 4, 1884, Sitting Bull attended a matinee performance at the Grand Opera House at 320 Wabasha Street. Inside, the chief watched Louis Aldrich’s frontier drama, My Partner.
When the curtain fell, the venue cleared. Sitting Bull walked fourth in line as his delegation filed single-file through the foyer toward waiting street carriages. According to newspaper interviews with eyewitness W.R. Fish, a sudden threat stepped from the lingering crowd. A medium-built man in gray clothes and a black slouch cap moved behind the chief. Fish noted the man possessed a nose more hooked than John Wilkes Booth’s.
Without warning, the sober gunman drew a short, nickel-plated British Bulldog revolver. He leveled the barrel directly at Sitting Bull’s back, targeting the exact spot where President Garfield had been shot three years earlier. Under the bright electric lights of the lobby, witnesses froze.
Before the trigger moved, a brown-suited companion intervened with lightning speed. He struck down the gunman's arm, wrenched the revolver away, and shoved it into his own pocket. The companion whispered, "Don't make a fool of yourself". The assailant snarled back, "Give me the gun and let me shoot the damn SOB". Unaware of the averted danger, Sitting Bull boarded an omnibus wagon for the Merchants Hotel. The two strangers slipped into the street crowd and vanished, never to be identified.
ACT IV: Standing Rock, the Ghost Dance, and the Legacy of an Unbroken Chief
Word of the near-miss at the theater spread quickly through Saint Paul. A reporter from the Saint Paul Dispatch rushed to the Merchants Hotel, seeking an immediate interview. Promoter Alvaren Allen barred the entrance. Allen posted a guard at the door, refusing to let anyone near the chief so he would not be frightened before their Eastern tour.
On September 8, Sitting Bull boarded the train heading east, leaving Saint Paul behind. He was not returning home, but pushing deeper into the industrial heart of the country, taking the tour to Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. He traveled on his own terms, carrying his traditional resolve into the very center of the Gilded Age.
Sitting Bull utilized his elevated national profile to resist government overreach. In 1886, he refused to travel to England with Buffalo Bill Cody’s show, choosing instead to stay home and oppose federal efforts to break up the Standing Rock Reservation. When the Ghost Dance movement reached his village in 1890, McLaughlin urged Sitting Bull to stop the spiritual gathering, but Sitting Bull refused.
Fearing a broader uprising, McLaughlin dispatched Indian police to arrest the chief on December 15, 1890. During the violent confrontation at his cabin, Sitting Bull was shot and killed. In later writings, McLaughlin admitted that his efforts had failed to change the chief. Sitting Bull remained, in McLaughlin’s own words, an ‘unreconstructed Indian’, a leader who had not surrendered his traditional identity.
CONCLUSION: The Lasting Footprints of Tatanka Yotanka in Minnesota
Today, virtually all the Gilded Age sites Sitting Bull visited in Saint Paul have been demolished. Only Church of the Assumption still stands, a quiet, stone reminder of the week a Lakota holy man walked these streets on his own terms. In 1888, Sitting Bull declared that he would rather die an Indian than live as a white man, a steadfast commitment to his people's dignity. His life reminds us that true strength lies in navigating a complex, changing world without abandoning our core identity. Even amidst the noise of an emerging empire, Sitting Bull chose generosity over bitterness and principle over compliance. He walked through a shifting landscape with unyielding purpose, leaving an enduring blueprint of courage and integrity for us today.