FARGO — Paul Hedren grew up in a part of Minnesota where the Dakota War of 1862 was ignited when starving Dakota renegades raided the Lower Sioux Agency and white settlements along the Minnesota River.
Born in New Ulm, his family later moved to Olivia. Those surroundings kindled his interest in Sioux history, which led to a lifelong obsession about the Great Sioux War that followed the Minnesota uprising, a bloody conflict that culminated in Lt. Col. George Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
Hedren’s interest in history evolved into a 37-year career with the National Park Service as a historian and superintendent . His administrative postings included overseeing the Fort Union National Historic Site near Williston, North Dakota, a replica of a major fur-trading post close to the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.
Besides his administrative duties, Hedren also indulged his interest in history and became one of the leading experts on the Great Sioux War, writing more books on the subject than any other author.
Sitting Bull was the leading figure in the Lakota resistance during the Great Sioux War. He led the Lakotas and Cheyennes who refused to be confined to a reservation and clung to the traditional life of chasing buffalo herds.
Although Little Bighorn and other battles of the Great Sioux War have been extensively written about, Hedren was bothered that nobody had written about the entire war from the perspective of the Lakotas and Cheyennes.
His response to that omission is his latest book, “Sitting Bull’s War,” just published by Pegasus Books.
“It’s the right way to tell such a story,” drawing upon the accounts of Native American participants, with their motivations and reactions at the forefront, Hedren said.
“Nobody’s done this,” he added, recalling the impetus for the book. “How come nobody’s done this? It’s a story that’s never been told.”
The book’s subtitle on the cover crystallizes Hedren’s theme: “The Battle of the Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains.”
Custer’s shocking defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn still captures the nation’s imagination, and that battle has overshadowed the long, desperate struggle by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and others who wanted to keep their freedom and independence.
“It’s a day in two years of fighting inside of 10 years to maintain a homeland,” Hedren said.
Not long after defeating Custer, the alliance Sitting Bull put together splintered as they fled the retribution they knew was coming. Ultimately, Sitting Bull and his most ardent followers sought asylum in Canada. At first, buffalo were plentiful and life was good.
But when the herds bordered on extinction, Sitting Bull and his followers faced starvation, and were forced to surrender at Fort Buford in 1881, ending his long struggle to maintain his freedom.
Sitting Bull’s favorite hunting lands were the Little Missouri River country that includes what today is Theodore Roosevelt National Park. “That was his home country,” Hedren said.
“He never favored the Missouri River,” which was heavily traveled by steamboats and lined with forts, making it a congested neighborhood.
But as settlers pushed westward, buffalo were driven further west, into Montana and Wyoming, where Sitting Bull and those like him followed — where they were pursued by an army determined to subdue them and drive them onto reservations.
“To understand the war is to understand the prairie alliance’s reliance on buffalo,” a great vulnerability as the herds became increasingly scarce, Hedren said.
For the government, “The prime objective is to destroy a lifeway, a way to sustain yourself for another season,” he said.
At first, the army was stymied. The Lakotas and Cheyennes were expert cavalry soldiers. Faced by superior numbers, the warriors attacked using guerilla techniques. And when they were attacked, they proved an elusive enemy.
As a result, the army turned to more brutal methods, attacking tipi villages before dawn, with indiscriminate fire killing noncombatant women and children. Then, after taking a village, they burned their lodges, dried meat and robes, leaving them hungry and destitute.
“What wins here is starvation,” Hedren said. “The whole thing is just a sad story. It is what it is. The government achieved its purposes,” forcing the holdouts to submit to reservation life.
That was Custer’s objective when he attacked an enormous village gathered by Sitting Bull on the Little Bighorn. His aim was to capture women and children, forcing a surrender, but he ran into overwhelming opposition.
The tragic devastation of a once-proud way of life is something that has long tugged at Hedren.
While posted at Fort Union in the 1980s, he often visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where he heard a program from a ranger who recited Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Buffalo Dusk,” which mourned the loss of the vast buffalo herds and those who relied on them.
“It played straight into several lifelong themes central to my own studies of the American West, the buffalo of the Great Plains, the Indian people who built lives around those majestic creatures, and, further, that time when, for buffalo and Indians, their world turned upside down,” Hedren wrote in the preface of “Sitting Bull’s War,” his 14th book.
“No other historian has mined American Indian accounts of a war with the U.S. government more thoroughly than Mr. Hedren has here,” a reviewer for the Wall Street Journal wrote. “As an encyclopedic recounting of the battles, skirmishes and other encounters of the Great Sioux War and of its antecedents, however, ‘Sitting Bull’s War’ succeeds admirably, and is a worthwhile addition to the literature on the Indian Wars of the West that students of that era will welcome.”
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