Sioux Chief Gall

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In the summer of 1872, surveyors from the Northern Pacific Railroad were seeking the best route for the nation’s northern transcontinental line through the Yellowstone River valley. Because this pristine area was one of the important hunting grounds for the formidable Lakotas (Sioux), the railroad surveyors were given military escorts. Protecting one group of surveyors coming from the west was a force under Major Eugene M. Baker, and protecting another coming from the east was a force under Colonel David S. Stanley. A band led by Gall, a war chief of the Hunkpapas, the northernmost of the seven Lakota tribes, was the first to encounter the soldiers under Stanley. He reported Colonel Stanley’s presence to fellow Hunkpapa Sitting Bull, who had already successfully dealt with Baker’s smaller force 160 miles away.

Gall attacked Stanley’s men twice in the wilderness area where the Powder River joins the Yellowstone. During their second encounter, at the Battle of O’Fallon’s Creek, Gall, now fighting in coordination with Sitting Bull, was driven back by Stanley’s Gatling guns. The Sioux City Daily Journal proved that Gall was already gaining a fearsome reputation when it boasted about Colonel Stanley’s decisive counterattack. ‘If Mr. Big Gaul [sic] ever again attacks any party crossing the plains, he will…first look sharply to see if they got any Gatlins [sic] with them.’

Gall enhanced his new notoriety when he followed Stanley’s 17th Infantry column back to Fort Rice on the Missouri River. With approximately 100 warriors, the ever-alert Hunkpapa war chief’s band, which was always on the lookout for stragglers, caught and killed two white officers and Stanley’s mulatto cook; each of these men had foolishly gone out to hunt alone. One of the officers was 2nd Lt. Lewis Dent Adair, a first cousin to President Ulysses S. Grant’s wife, Julia Dent Grant. Gall also horrified many of Stanley’s men by displaying the scalps of at least two of these victims on a hillock near Fort Rice. Because of the prominence of Lieutenant Adair and the open defiance of Gall, Lt. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan decided in 1873 to send a much larger force — more than 1,500 soldiers, including most of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry — back to the Yellowstone. Although Gall’s name had appeared in federal records as early as 1866, he became a truly national figure by his bold escapades during the 1872 campaign.

The close cooperation between Gall and Sitting Bull in opposing the U.S. Army’s 1872 and 1873 Yellowstone expeditions was a factor in the Northern Pacific’s decision to delay for six years the construction of its transcontinental rail line through Montana Territory. The railroad’s financial collapse, which triggered the national Panic of 1873, was a much more important factor. Nevertheless, the alliance of these two Hunkpapa leaders was impressive — and it actually went back well before the early ’70s.Sitting Bull was 9 years old when Gall was born in 1840 on the banks of the Moreau River in what would become South Dakota. For more than two decades, he watched young Gall grow into an increasingly powerful and fearless warrior. The older man would eventually become a mentor to the fatherless Gall. They both belonged to a prestigious warrior society, the Strong Heart Society, and together they organized an even more prestigious warrior society for their Hunkpapa comrades.

Although Gall’s and Sitting Bull’s early exploits as warriors were largely confined to counting coup against such traditional tribal enemies as the Crows and Assiniboines, the encroachment of white settlers into their hunting lands in Dakota Territory created a new set of enemies for them. During the early stages of America’s Civil War, a bloody Sioux war called the Minnesota Uprising was put down by the state’s first governor, Henry H. Sibley. In 1863 Sibley and Alfred Sully, both of whom had been made brigadier generals by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, invaded the Dakota country. They were in pursuit of the routed followers of the chief Sioux leader of the Minnesota Uprising, Little Crow, who was killed at the Battle of Wood Lake in Minnesota. Sitting Bull and Gall’s Hunkpapas, joined by other Lakota tribes, soon became involved in a series of battles on the side of their Sioux brethren from Minnesota. In the summer of 1864, Gall and Sitting Bull fought against a large force of blue-coated soldiers under Sully’s command in the bitterly contested Battle of Killdeer Mountain near the Badlands of North Dakota. Two weeks later, both were involved in an attack on a wagon train carrying 150 emigrants to the gold fields of western Montana Territory.

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Tags: Historical Figures, Native American History, The Wild West, Wild West

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