Sitting Bull Trivia
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49 free Sitting Bull trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sitting Bull led the Hunkpapa Lakota through the last great resistance to United States expansion on the Plains, and this trivia quiz follows his whole life. It starts with the boy called Jumping Badger and nicknamed Slow, the coup counted at 14 that earned him his father's name, the fights with Sully's columns and the forts of the upper Missouri, and his refusal to sign the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Then come the Black Hills gold rush, the Sun Dance vision of soldiers falling into camp and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The later questions cover the four years of exile at Wood Mountain in Canada, the surrender at Fort Buford in 1881, the Fort Randall imprisonment, the friendship with Annie Oakley, the season with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the Ghost Dance panic, the botched arrest of December 1890 and the disputed graves at Fort Yates and Mobridge. There are also questions on his legacy, from Sitting Bull College and the 1989 stamp to the DNA study that confirmed his great-grandchildren. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on Sitting Bull, the Great Sioux War, the Little Bighorn and related topics, and each question links to its source. Try our Native American History and American West quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the name of Sitting Bull's band, Hunkpapa, mean in Lakota?
Head of the Circle
Head of the Circle, also rendered "at the entrance": by tradition the Hunkpapa pitched their lodges at the opening of the camp circle whenever the Sioux met in council.
Q 02What was Sitting Bull named at birth?
Jumping Badger
Jumping Badger. The name soon gave way to a nickname, Slow, and the boy who carried it killed his first buffalo at the age of ten.
Q 03How did Sitting Bull, at 14, earn his father's name?
Counting coup on a Crow warrior
Counting coup on a Crow warrior. He rode ahead of a raiding party to strike an enemy at close range, and his father marked the deed with a feast, an eagle feather and his own name.
Q 04What does the Lakota name Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake roughly translate to?
Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down
Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down. To the Lakota it called up a stubborn bull planted on its haunches and refusing to budge; Americans simply shortened it to Sitting Bull.
Q 05Which leader's band surrendered in 1877 about 40 miles short of Canada, where they hoped to join Sitting Bull?
Chief Joseph
Chief Joseph. His Nez Perce had fought a 1,170-mile retreat from Idaho before the army trapped them in the Bear Paw Mountains; a few hundred slipped through the lines and did reach Sitting Bull.
Q 06At which 1864 battle in Dakota Territory did Sitting Bull face General Alfred Sully's howitzers?
Killdeer Mountain
Killdeer Mountain. Sully's 2,200 soldiers were sent to punish the Sioux for the 1862 Minnesota uprising, in which Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa had taken no part; shellfire drove them from their village.
Q 07Which Black Hills peak, on land Sitting Bull fought to keep, was named in the 1880s after a visiting New York lawyer?
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore. Charles Rushmore was checking mining claims when he asked what the granite peak was called; told it had no name, his companions named it after him on the spot.
Q 08Sitting Bull refused in 1868 to "sell any part of my country", rejecting which treaty?
The Treaty of Fort Laramie
The Treaty of Fort Laramie. The Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet carried the peace offer to his camp, and Gall went on to sign for the Hunkpapa, but Sitting Bull kept raiding the upper Missouri forts.
Q 09During Sitting Bull's exile, what did the Lakota call Canada, in honour of Queen Victoria?
Grandmother's Land
Grandmother's Land. Victoria's red-coated police promised that American soldiers could not follow the Lakota there, so long as they kept the Queen's laws and never raided back across the border.
Q 10Which railway's survey parties did Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa attack in 1871-73?
The Northern Pacific
The Northern Pacific. The surveys led nowhere for years: the Panic of 1873 bankrupted the railway's backer, Jay Cooke, and halted construction.
Q 11Who led the 1874 army expedition that announced gold in the Black Hills, triggering the rush that led to war?
George Armstrong Custer
George Armstrong Custer. Two years before the Little Bighorn he marched into hills that an 1868 treaty had reserved for the Sioux, and his reports of gold drew prospectors in their thousands.
Q 12Which president ordered every Sioux band onto the reservation by January 31, 1876, or be treated as hostile?
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant. The deadline fell in the dead of winter, when moving a village hundreds of miles across the plains was close to impossible, and the army was sent after the bands that stayed out.
Q 13In his vision before the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull saw soldiers falling into camp like what?
Q 21Sitting Bull named a son after a chief of which nation, old enemies he made peace with in Canada?
The Blackfoot
The Blackfoot. Their chief, Crowfoot, saw that the Lakota had come as refugees, and when Sitting Bull sought peace between the old enemies he gladly accepted the offered tobacco.
Q 22What finally drove Sitting Bull out of Canada and into surrender in 1881?
Hunger, as the buffalo vanished
Hunger, as the buffalo vanished. Canada refused the Lakota both a reserve and rations, and he crossed back with fewer than 200 followers.
Q 23At which army post did Sitting Bull surrender in July 1881?
Fort Buford
Grasshoppers
Grasshoppers. The soldiers were falling upside down into the Lakota camp, which his people took as the promise of a great victory, and the battle came within weeks.
Q 14What sacrifice did Sitting Bull make at the Sun Dance weeks before the Little Bighorn?
A hundred cuts to his arms
A hundred cuts to his arms: fifty small pieces of flesh from each. He then danced without water until he collapsed into the trance that brought his vision of victory.
Q 15Which nation camped and fought beside the Lakota at the Little Bighorn?
The Cheyenne
The Cheyenne. The nation's northern branch, with some Arapaho, shared a village that had swelled all spring as bands left the agencies and gathered around Sitting Bull for safety in numbers.
Q 16What do the Lakota call the river and battle Americans know as the Little Bighorn?
Greasy Grass
Greasy Grass. The Lakota remember a victory there, not a last stand, and in 1991 Congress renamed the battlefield and ordered an Indian Memorial built near Last Stand Hill.
Q 17Which Oglala war leader led warriors into the fight that destroyed five cavalry companies at the Little Bighorn?
Crazy Horse
Crazy Horse. A week earlier he had helped fight General Crook's column to a standstill on the Rosebud; the next year he surrendered and died of a bayonet wound in an army guardhouse.
Q 18Sitting Bull's camp on the Little Bighorn, attacked on June 25, 1876, stood in which present-day state?
Montana
Montana. The battlefield now lies inside the Crow Indian Reservation, home of the Lakota's old enemies, whose scouts rode with the cavalry that day.
Q 19What did Plains peoples call the Canadian border, where US soldiers chasing Sitting Bull's people had to stop?
The Medicine Line
The Medicine Line. The boundary seemed to hold a power of its own, since cavalry in pursuit pulled up at it as if stopped by magic, and Sitting Bull spent four years beyond it at Wood Mountain.
Q 20Which North-West Mounted Police officer rode into Sitting Bull's camp in 1877 and became his lifelong friend?
James Morrow Walsh
James Morrow Walsh. American newspapers called him "Sitting Bull's Boss", and in 1880 Ottawa, deciding the friendship was keeping the Sioux in Canada, transferred him away.
Fort Buford. Fifteen years earlier he had led the attacks on the newly built post; now he rode in with a hungry band to give himself up to its commander.
Q 24Who handed over Sitting Bull's Winchester rifle at the surrender ceremony?
His young son Crow Foot
His young son Crow Foot. Sitting Bull had the boy pass the rifle to the post commander, then asked to be remembered as the last man of his tribe to surrender his rifle.
Q 25How was Sitting Bull's band taken to Fort Randall as prisoners of war in 1881?
By river steamboat
By river steamboat. The army shipped them down the Missouri aboard the General Sherman, away from the newly surrendered bands it feared he would stir up, and held them for 20 months.
Q 26Which sharpshooter did Sitting Bull 'adopt' in 1884, naming her 'Little Sure Shot'?
Annie Oakley
Annie Oakley. He watched her shoot in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was so impressed that he symbolically adopted her as a daughter; she kept the name he gave her for the rest of her career.
Q 27How much a week was Sitting Bull paid to ride once around the arena with Buffalo Bill's show in 1885?
About $50
About $50 a week, handsome pay in 1885, and he made more on the side by selling his autograph and picture to the crowds.
Q 28What did Sitting Bull do with most of his Wild West pay?
Gave it away
Gave it away. In his four months with the show a fellow performer saw most of it go into the pockets of small, ragged boys; he could not understand how white men could ignore their own poor.
Q 29At a railway celebration, what is Sitting Bull said to have declared in Lakota, untranslated?
"I hate all White people"
"I hate all White people." By the story he went on to call them thieves and liars, while the interpreter read out the friendly speech prepared for him and the crowd rose to applaud.
Q 30News of Sitting Bull's victory at the Little Bighorn reached the East as Americans were celebrating what?
The nation's 100th birthday
The nation's 100th birthday. Word of the defeat arrived in the first days of July 1876, in the middle of the centennial celebrations, and the public shock sent thousands more soldiers to the plains.