He had surrendered only four months earlier, bringing with him a community of followers who had remained in resistance longer than almost anyone.

His surrender had come without military defeat.

He had remained, throughout the reservation period, a figure of independent authority — someone who had not fully accepted the limitations of reservation life and who had not performed the deference that reservation life required.

His death came quickly after his arrival at Fort Robinson, and the circumstances of it — the confusion about the purpose of his presence at the fort, the struggle at the guardhouse, the bayonet wound — were not understood by the Lakota community as anything other than a killing, deliberate or carelessly provoked, of their most significant recent war leader.

The grief and anger within the Lakota community was significant.