These difficult times made many of the Lakota exiles homesick. A growing number were eager to join their families on the Great Sioux Reservation. Sitting Bull, however, was still opposed to surrendering to federal authorities; he did not want to leave Canada and live under a government he did not trust. In the summer of 1880, Gall, on one of those illegal buffalo hunts south of the border, encountered an old friend, Edwin H. Allison. Allison was driving cattle to Fort Buford in North Dakota. He wanted Gall to arrange a meeting for him with Sitting Bull so he could convince the Sioux leader to surrender. When Allison’s eventual meeting with Sitting Bull failed to achieve positive results, he won a pledge from Gall that he would bring 20 lodges of his people to Fort Buford for surrender.

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When Sitting Bull heard about Gall’s pledge, he heaped bitter criticism upon his old friend. Gall, who had a mercurial temper, exploded with rage. He insisted that the Hunkpapas at their Canadian camp should leave Sitting Bull and follow him to Fort Buford. In the end, the stubborn Sitting Bull was left with only 200 loyal followers, while Gall may have ultimately brought as many as 300 lodges to the fort. After this bitter incident, the two men were never again really close.

Gall’s surrender at the Poplar River Agency in northeastern Montana in January 1881 was not a happy one. The commanding officer at the agency, Major Guido Ilges, provoked hostilities in which eight Indians were killed. He had insisted that Gall and his people be escorted to Fort Buford immediately, despite heavy snows and temperatures 28 degrees below zero. The angry Gall arrived at Fort Buford after a four-day march, but his stay there was only temporary. In late May, he, along with most of the one-time Hunkpapa and Blackfeet Sioux exiles, were sent to their permanent reservation home at the Standing Rock Agency in Dakota Territory. Sitting Bull, who surrendered at Fort Buford in July 1881, was still considered too dangerous; the aging chief was forced to live under guard near Fort Randall for two years before he could join his kinfolk at Standing Rock.

When Gall reached Standing Rock on May 29, 1881, he found a new mentor in Indian agent Major James McLaughlin. McLaughlin, who had a talent for manipulating people, was married to a Sioux woman who helped him understand and control his Indian charges with great effectiveness. He believed in rapidly assimilating Indians into the nation’s economy as small farmers; Christianizing them was also a goal he shared with many advocates of Indian reform back East.

Gall proved to be exceptionally cooperative on almost all counts. He served as a district farmer to help educate his people in good agricultural practices. He presided as a judge on the Court of Indian Offenses to acquaint them with the new judicial procedures that would govern their lives. He eventually became a convert to the Episcopal Church, being baptized and later buried by priests from that church. Some historians have felt that Gall’s change of heart was clearly the result of opportunism on his part. Others believe that Gall, like so many other Lakota warriors, was just facing reality.

When Sitting Bull arrived at Standing Rock in 1883, he tended to resist McLaughlin’s drastic changes, becoming in the process the leader of the tribe’s traditionalists. To blunt Sitting Bull’s influence, McLaughlin elevated to leadership positions Gall, Crow King and a brilliant Blackfeet Sioux leader named John Grass. These men represented what some historians call the ‘progressive faction’ at Standing Rock, and were organized to oppose Sitting Bull’s more suspicious followers in the reservation’s tumultuous politics. This move further frayed the old friendship between Gall and Sitting Bull.

The schism between Sitting Bull and Gall was aggravated when McLaughlin persuaded John Grass and Gall to support the Sioux Act of 1889. This new law divided the Great Sioux Reservation into six smaller ones and opened up the reservation’s surplus acres to white homesteaders. Gall’s safety was soon menaced by Sitting Bull’s angry followers, who resented Gall’s support, albeit reluctant, of the controversial Sioux Act. When Sitting Bull embraced the Ghost Dance religion in 1890, a new divisive issue was introduced to complicate the strained relations between the two men.

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