“I’ll die with you. Because I’m not a coward.”

Little Crow was actually an ousted leader and he was hurting from that at the time that they came to him and asked him to lead. The warrior faction couldn’t get any of the people to lead them. They had said no, this is foolish. But they didn’t quit.It’s like over in the Mideast countries; they don’t quit, they’re going to keep on until somebody comes and helps them, and the United States is doing that. But they had the soldiers who wanted to go to war; they decided that they were going to go to war, but they didn’t have a leader. They had to have a political leader to say, "Okay, the people are behind you." And the political leader is the one who goes before the people and talks to them and says we are going to have to go to war here, and he explains it to them. And finally, by consensus, they agree; okay, then we’ll go to war. And consensus in those days meant anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of the people agreed with it because they knew that a simple majority was not going to work. That’s what we got in the United States, you know, a 51 percent majority and you gotta go. And that means half of your people disagree with it and half agree. You’ve got a divided country, and divided people will not stand. They knew that, and so you’d have to get 80 or 90 percent of your people that would vote in favor of it before you did something like that. And so they needed that, and they didn’t have any way of convincing the people that they could go to war. They couldn’t even convince the leaders that people had asked. So they went to Little Crow, though he was the ousted leader. They went to him and asked him to be the leader. And he told them, “Go to the man you elected.” Because he was smarting from the loss of that election, because he thought sure he was going to win. But they said, “He’s a coward, he won’t lead us. He doesn’t want anything to do with it.” So he argued with them and told them, this is useless, you guys know better than this. And yet they kept at him until they called him a coward. “The only reason you don’t want to lead us is because you’re a coward.” And that’s the ultimate insult you could give a Dakota at that time, and probably now, is to call him a coward, because that’s the most treasured of their four values, is bravery. And to have someone tell you you’re not a very brave person, or to have somebody come and say, “That was a very brave thing you did,” that makes you feel good. And so bravery was a high value, one of the most treasured values. And to have someone call you a coward, well it is enough to prompt you to do something, and so he did.