The people whites called the “Sioux” were not a single entity but rather a collection of tribes, bands, and villages loosely bound by language, custom, and kinship. In 1862, the largest major division, the Lakota, numbered over twenty thousand people and lived farthest west, up to and beyond the Missouri River, including the lands they called the Pahá Sápa, or the Black Hills. The Yankton and Yanktonais made up the Western Dakota and generally lived between the Missouri River and the Red River of the North, which divided the state of Minnesota from the Dakota Territory. These three are part of the multitudinous group known to white history as the Plains Indians, the buffalo-hunting tribes into which Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Black Elk, and Red Cloud were born.
The peoples most involved in the Dakota War, the Eastern Dakota, lived in Minnesota in a very different ecosystem made of tallgrass prairie and deciduous woodlands. Here the soil was rich and black and the waters hospitable to great quantities of fish and game. Moving roughly west to east down the length of the Minnesota River, the four major bands of Eastern Dakotas were called the Sissetons, Wahpetons, Mdewakantons, and Wahpekutes. In Eastern Dakota bands, individual villages were often known to whites by the name of their best-known and most influential residents: Wabasha’s village, Shakopee’s village, Little Crow’s village, and so on.
The name of “Sioux” was given to the Dakota by the Ojibwe, their longtime rivals for the northern woods and waterways, before the word was co-opted by whites. While many Dakotas in the nineteenth century used the term themselves, I have given preference to the term Dakota and the various band names (for example, Mdewakanton), reserving “Sioux” only for quoted material. I have also sometimes used “Indian” as a descriptor rather than the more accurate “Native American,” “American Indian,” or “First Peoples,” simply because that trio of terms was not generally in use in 1862. I recognize that times and terminology have changed.