Crow Little was born about 1803 at the Dakota settlement of Kaposia (now South St. Paul), Minnesota, United States, the son of Little Crow IV. The name Little Crow, Chetan-wakan-mani, "the sacred pigeon-hawk that comes walking, " was held in succession by several chiefs of the Kapoja band of Mdewakanton Sioux, in southeastern Minnesota.
The Little Crow who appears in Pike's journal (1805 - 1806) and who signed the treaty ceding the ground on which Fort Snelling was built, is generally accounted the third of the dynasty. Wabasha, the head chief, told Pike that Little Crow III was "the man of most sense in their nation. " He appears frequently in the accounts of travelers of the time and always with praise. In 1824 he visited Washington. He was succeeded by Little Crow IV, known also as Big Thunder and Big Eagle. The accounts of his life are hopelessly conflicting. It is agreed that he died of an accidentally self-inflicted wound, but the dates given are widely divergent. Gen. H. H. Sibley, who was present at the death of the chief, says that he died in 1834, and that he was a good and wise man who taught his people agriculture and as an example to them worked in his own fields. On his deathbed he called in his eldest son and after reproving the young man for his evil ways and telling him that another son, recently killed by the Chippewas, had been intended for the succession, reluctantly gave him the chieftainship.
Little Crow V, according to Sibley, paid little heed to his father's reproof. He was a drunkard and a confirmed liar, with few redeeming qualities. He signed the treaty of Mendota, August 5, 1851, by which the Mdewakanton Sioux ceded most of their lands and withdrew to the upper Minnesota River, but he afterward used this treaty as an argument for stirring up antagonism to the whites. A persuasive orator, he was chiefly responsible for the outbreak which followed eleven years later. On August 18, 1862, incensed because of the non-arrival of the annuities provided for in the treaty and deluded by the belief that because of the Civil War no soldiers would be available for the defense of the settlements, the Sioux rose in revolt. Along a stretch of the frontier for more than two hundred miles they pillaged and burned the farm houses and villages and with an unparalleled ferocity tortured and massacred the inhabitants, nearly a thousand of whom are estimated to have perished. Little Crow commanded the force which unsuccessfully attacked Fort Ridgely, August 20-22, and also the force which was routed by General Sibley at Wood Lake, September 23.
After this decisive action he fled to his kinfolk farther west, but in the following year, with a young son, again ventured into the devastated territory, to which many of the settlers had returned. On the evening of July 3, while prowling about a farm near Hutchinson, McLeod County, he was shot and killed.
Little Crow V was a man of energy and determination. He possessed, however, no military talents, and he held power solely through his oratorical abilities.
He is said to have had twenty-two children and six wives.
