Sitting Bull was born in what is now South Dakota, probably in 1831, son of a respected Sioux warrior named Returns-Again. The child wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps but showed no particular talent for warfare, so he was given the name “Slow” until he could earn a better one. At age 14, during a fight with rival Crow Indians, he managed to “count coup,” or strike the body of an opposing warrior with a coup stick, and was re-named “Tatanka Yotanka,” or Sitting Bull, in honor of his feat.

Before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw many soldiers, “as thick as grasshoppers”, falling upside down into the Lakota camp, which his people took as a foreshadowing of a major victory in which many soldiers would be killed. About three weeks later, the confederated Lakota tribes with the Northern Cheyenne defeated the 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer on June 25, 1876, annihilating Custer’s battalion and seeming to fulfill Sitting Bull’s prophetic vision. Sitting Bull’s leadership inspired his people to a major victory. 

In response, the U.S. government sent thousands more soldiers to the area, forcing many of the Lakota to surrender over the next year. Sitting Bull refused to surrender, and in May 1877, he led his band north to Wood Mountain, North-West Territories (now Saskatchewan). He remained there until 1881, when he and most of his band returned to U.S. territory and surrendered to U.S. forces.

After working as a performer with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, Sitting Bull returned to the Standing Rock Agency in South Dakota. Because of fears that Sitting Bull would use his influence to support the Ghost Dance movement, Indian Service agent James McLaughlin at Fort Yates ordered his arrest. 

During an ensuing struggle between Sitting Bull’s followers and the agency police, Sitting Bull was shot in the side and head by Standing Rock policemen Lieutenant Bull Head (Tatankapah, Lakota: Tȟatȟáŋka Pȟá) and Red Tomahawk (Marcelus Chankpidutah, Lakota: Čhaŋȟpí Dúta), after the police were fired upon by Sitting Bull’s supporters. His body was taken to nearby Fort Yates for burial. In 1953, his Lakota family exhumed what were believed to be his remains, reburying them near Mobridge, South Dakota, near his birthplace.

According to en.wikipedia.org;.pbs.org