The picture concerns Sitting Bull (J. Carrol Naish) , celebrated chief and mystic of the Hunkpapa Sioux and Major Robert Parrish (Dale Robertson) . Parrish clashes Colonel Custer (Douglas Kennedy) and his superiors . He's degraded and sent an Indian reservation where the starving natives are mistreated and suffering extreme famine . Meanwhile , being developed a loving triangle between his girlfriend (Mary Murphy) and a war journalist (William Hooper) . Later on , he is appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant (John Hamilton) to achieve a peace treatise with Sitting Bull to attempt to prevent the bloodshed and he then fights a dangerous duel against Crazy Horse (Iron Heyes Cody) . Parrish helps Indians and is accused as a traitor , being court-martialed for "collaborating" with the enemy . Chief Sitting Bull of the Sioux tribe is forced by the Indian-hating General Custer to react with violence , resulting in the known Last Stand at Little Bighorn .
This exciting movie contains western action , romance , shoot-outs and spectacular battles . The yarn was shot outside of Mexico City and in the Churubusco Azteca studios . Washed-out print , the film needs urgently a perfect remastering . It appears as a technical adviser and designer Indian costumes , a secondary actor named Iron Eyes Cody , usual player as Indian roles (Great Sioux Massacre , A man called Horse) , though with Sicilian origin . The motion picture was regularly directed by Sidney Salkow .
The film is a fiction , but partially based on real events . The reality happened in December 1873 when the Commissioner of Indian Affairs directed all Sioux bands to enter reservations by the end of January 1876 or be declared hostile . Many bands of Sioux did not meet this deadline and were attacked by US troops . Crazy Horse and his Oglala people moved north to join forces with Sitting Bull , by the spring of 1876 some 3000 Teton Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors had assembled at Sitting Bull's camp in the valley of the Little Big Horn in Montana. On 25 June 1876 Crazy Horse and other war chiefs led the allied warriors against General Custer and his seventh Cavalry , Custer and all the man under his direct command were killed . This victory , however , brought relentless retaliation from the army and Sioux were scattered . Sitting Bull and his followers fled to Canada and stayed there until July 1881 , when he returned to the US and surrendered at Fort Buford , Montana . After he was placed on a South Dakota reservation . For a year Sitting Bull went a tour with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show . He continued to regard himself as chief of his people and he earned the enmity of an Indian agent . On 25 December 1890 , Indian policemen went to take the chief , his followers tried to prevent this and in the struggle he was shot dead .
