Battle of Big Mound

Battle of Big Mound
Part of Sioux Wars, American Civil War
Big Mound battlefield
Date July 24, 1863 Location Dakota Territory Present-day Kidder County, North Dakota Result U.S. victory
Belligerents
United States of America	Santee Sioux Yankton, Yanktonai and Teton Sioux
Commanders and leaders
Henry Hastings Sibley	Inkpaduta Standing Buffalo
Strength
2,056 soldiers 60 mixed-blood and Sioux scouts	1,000-1,500
Casualties and losses
3 killed, 4 wounded	uncertain, 9 or more killed

The Battle of Big Mound was a United States Army victory in July 1863 over the Santee Sioux Indians allied with some Yankton, Yanktonai and Teton Sioux in Dakota Territory.

The defeat of Little Crow in the Dakota War of 1862 caused the widespread dispersion of the Santee Sioux or Eastern Dakota. Of the 6,300 Santee, 2,000 were taken prisoner. About 700 of the Lower Sioux from the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands remained at large. Most of the 4,000 Upper Sioux from the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands, who had been reluctant participants in the war, also remained free. A few of these refugees from the war fled to Canada, but more than 4,000 congregated in the summer of 1863 in a large encampment in present-day Kidder County, North Dakota. They were joined in the camp by an unknown, but probably sizeable, number of their Teton, Yankton, and Yanktonai relatives.

Despite the defeat, however, Santee raids continued in 1863, resulting in more than a dozen white deaths in Minnesota. To protect the frontier, Henry Hastings Sibley, appointed brigadier general of volunteers, was ordered by his superior, General John Pope, to lead a military expedition to punish the Santee. On June 16 Sibley departed from near Fort Ridgely and marched into the Dakota Territory. His army initially numbered 3,320 men, the largest military force ever assembled to combat Indians.

Sibley’s ponderous column proceeded very slowly northwestward, hampered by drought, heat, and a lack of potable water. After a month of travel without having seen a single Indian, Sibley was informed by a group of buffalo hunters, mostly Métis Chippewa, of the location of a large Santee encampment of 600 lodges. With a stripped-down army of 2,056 men – 1,436 infantry, 520 cavalry, and 100 artillery plus 60 mixed blood and Sioux scouts – Sibley located the Santee encampment on July 24. He halted nearby and sent scout and interpreter Joseph LaFramboise, one-half Sioux, to the Indian camp to propose a meeting with Upper Sioux leader Standing Buffalo. Sibley believed, probably correctly, that Standing Buffalo and his followers favored peace with the whites. However, Inkpaduta, believed to be implacably hostile to whites, and his band were also in the Indian camp.

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