Sitting Bull Crystal Caverns Sitting Bull Crystal Caverns Sitting Bull Crystal Caverns is a limestone cave complex nine miles south of Rapid City, South Dakota on the way to Mount Rushmore and by the Wind Cave National Park. For eight decades, the cave was open for the public to tour daily from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend. The cave was discovered by the Duhamel family, Alex and Mamie and their sons, Bud and Pete, in 1929, at their property in Rockerville Gulch. The gulch is a red rock canyon east of Rockerville. They organised tours and a Sioux Indian Pageant to promote
Sitting Bull Later historians and ethnologists have refuted this concept of authority, as the Lakota society was highly decentralized. Lakota bands and their elders made individual decisions, including whether to wage war. Sitting Bull's band of Hunkpapa continued to attack migrating parties and forts in the late 1860s. When in 1871 the Northern Pacific Railway conducted a survey for a route across the northern plains directly through Hunkpapa lands, it encountered stiff Lakota resistance. The same railway people returned the following year accompanied by federal troops. Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa attacked the survey party, which was forced to turn back. In