I hardly sustain myself beneath the weight of white men’s blood that I have shed. The whites provoked the war; their injustices, their indignities to our families, the cruel, unheard of and wholly unprovoked massacre at Fort Lyon…shook all the veins which bind and support me. I rose, tomahawk in hand, and I have done all the hurt to the whites that I could.
– Sitting Bull
Recorded by the Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet after a council with Sitting Bull on June 19, 1868.