BILLINGS, Mont. - Sitting Bull will be on familiar ground should his remains be re-interred at Little Bighorn Battlefield.

He knew eastern Montana well. The Lakota recognized no state boundaries in their nomadic world. Sitting Bull often camped north of the Yellowstone in the winter and hunted south of it during the summer. He prayed here, sought visions here and did battle here for nearly 30 years. At midlife, the legendary Sioux war chief and spiritual leader forged the mightiest alliance of Indian forces on the Northern Plains and won his greatest victory here.

Montana knew him at the height of his power, before his sad subjection and violent death.

Sitting Bull was born along the Grand River in what is now South Dakota sometime in the 1830s. Euro-Americans were already trickling toward the frontiers of the Northern Plains, displacing native populations as they advanced. The Lakota were feeling the pressure as they roamed a huge territory that included the Dakotas and parts of Nebraska, Montana and Wyoming. As they ranged westward, the Lakota increasingly clashed with other tribes in ever-shrinking Indian Country.

As a teenager, Sitting Bull counted his first coups on the Powder River in an attack on a Crow hunting party. A year later, he was wounded on the Musselshell when Flatheads attacked a Sioux camp. Twenty years before the Little Bighorn, in an encounter with the Crow near the Yellowstone high country, he suffered a wound to one of his feet that left him with a lifelong limp.

Sitting Bull was already a respected warrior and incipient holy man when rumors of gold lured white men to Montana in 1862. To get there, the prospectors had to go through the heart of Sioux country. As settlers and miners migrated west, so did thousands of soldiers. No one resented the intrusion more or fought harder to stop it than Sitting Bull.

According to Sitting Bull's biographer, Robert. M. Utley, in "The Lance and the Shield," a loose confederation of the Sioux bands anointed Sitting Bull its leader sometime in 1869, most likely at Montana's Rosebud Creek. Crazy Horse, one of Sitting Bull's strongest allies, was present. Sitting Bull's uncle, Four Horns, performed the rituals.

A few miles northeast of Billings on the banks of the Yellowstone River, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse made it clear to a Northern Pacific Railroad survey party that laying track across Indian hunting grounds would generate deadly resistance.

In the early morning of Aug. 14, 1872, the survey party, under the protection of Maj. E.M. Baker and 370 troops, clashed with a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne. The battle lasted for hours, although much of the firing was long-range and casualty numbers were not high.

But 1876 was the pivotal year for Sitting Bull. It was the year of his greatest victory, and the year his world fell apart.

On June 24, 1876, the eve of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull crossed the river and climbed along a ridge above the camp to pray. He sang and lit his pipe asking Wakantanka to guard his people against danger.

The next morning broke hot and sunny, and Sitting Bull rested in a lodge in the Hunkpapa camp circle with his family. Soldiers arrived that afternoon. Custer, commanding the column advancing on the village, divided his forces and sent Maj. Marcus Reno and his men hurdling across the river to begin the attack.

The Hunkpapa circle at the end of the vast village was Reno's immediate target. Responding quickly, warriors drove Reno's men back across the river and pinned them down on bluffs about six miles from where Custer and his direct command were being wiped out by an enraged confederation of tribes. Custer and the last of his troops fought to the death on the hill where Sitting Bull had prayed the night before.

After the battle, the Indian camp broke and moved toward the Big Horn Mountains. Tribal groups began to go their separate ways. As fall approached, Sitting Bull and his bands journeyed back toward the Yellowstone in search of buffalo.

But the means of his demise were already in motion. In the aftermath of the Little Bighorn, Col. Nelson A. Miles would pursue Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse across Montana through the terrible cold of the 1876-77 winter. Sitting Bull and his band, low on food and provisions, crossed into Canada in May 1877.

Sitting Bull surrendered to the U.S. Army at Fort Buford in North Dakota on July 20, 1881.