Sitting Bull instigator. Alarm spread to nearby white settlements as the Sioux added a new feature to the dance – shirts that were said to stop bullets. In 1890, James McLaughlin, the U.S. Indian Agent at Fort Yates on Standing Rock Agency, feared that the Lakota leader was about to flee the reservation with the Ghost Dancers, so he ordered the police to arrest him. On December 14, 1890, McLaughlin drafted a letter to Lt. Henry Bullhead (noted as Bull Head in lead), an Indian agency policeman, that included instructions and a plan to capture Sitting Bull. The plan called for the
Sitting Bull who counted twelve people in the Hunkpapa leader's immediate family. Forty-one families, totaling 195 people, were recorded in Sitting Bull's band. The military decided to transfer Sitting Bull and his band to Fort Randall, to be held as prisoners of war. Loaded onto a steamboat, the band of 172 people was sent down the Missouri River to Fort Randall (near present-day Pickstown, South Dakota) on the southern border of the state. There they spent the next 20 months. They were allowed to return north to the Standing Rock Agency in May 1883. In 1883, rumors were reported that Sitting Bull