He represented a specific vision of what reservation life should accomplish: the transformation of Lakota people into settled farmers, Christians, and English speakers, integrated into the economic and social structures of mainstream American life.

Sitting Bull represented, in McLaughlin’s view, an obstacle to that transformation — a man whose continued authority among his people depended on maintaining the traditional patterns of Lakota life and governance that the reservation system was designed to displace.

The specific conflict between McLaughlin and Sitting Bull over the Ghost Dance movement in 1890 needs to be understood within this longer history of antagonism.

McLaughlin had been looking for an opportunity to remove Sitting Bull from the reservation for years.