The 1876 battle of the Little Bighorn marked the peak of the Sioux resistance; by 1877, the Army had forced the hostiles into exile or surrender. Sitting Bull and Gall fled to Canada with their band, staying several years. Crazy Horse, after brief confinement on a reservation, was killed while under military arrest. The Great Sioux Reservation was reduced; the different sub tribes assigned to different agencies on it. But deprived of freedom and purpose, the Indians adjusted badly to reservation life. In 1883, Sitting Bull returned to the reservation and remained there, except for one year with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, as the preeminent leader of his people. In 1890, a new messianic religion spread among the Sioux. Promising that whites would disappear and that buffalo and all the dead Indians would return to the Plains, it called upon Indians to perform the Ghost Dance. The reservation agent, alarmed by the Ghost Dancing, ordered Sitting Bull arrested, but the great Chief was killed in the process. This precipitated a crisis, culminating two weeks later in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. There, while disarming a Sioux band, the Army opened fire on several hundred men, women and children. On recalling that day, Sioux holy man Black Elk would later say, “the nation’s hoop is broken.”