Alfred Sully

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Alfred Sully (22 May 1821 - 27 April 1879), was a military officer during the American Civil War and during the Indian Wars on the frontier. He was also a noted painter.

Sully was the son of the portrait painter, Thomas Sully, of Pennsylvania. Alfred Sully graduated from West Point in 1841. During and after the American Civil War, Sully served in the Plains States and was widely regarded as an Indian fighter. Sully, like his father, was a watercolorist and oil painter. Between 1849 to 1853, he became chief quartermaster of the U.S. troops at Monterey, California, after California came under American jurisdiction. Then, Sully created a number of watercolor and some oil paintings reflecting the social life of Monterey during that period.

Sully headed US troops out of Ft. Leavenworth in June 1861 as captain and occupied the city of St. Joseph, Missouri declaring martial law. Violent seccesionist uprisings in the city during the early civil war prompted Sully's occupation.

Sully was commissioned colonel of the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry on February 3, 1862 and served in that rank until promoted to brigadier general on September 26, 1862.

Stationed at Fort Randall, South Dakota during the Minnesota Sioux Uprising (also known as the Dakota War of 1862), he met a young French-Indian girl of the Yankton Sioux tribe who reminded him of his young Mexican wife whom he had lost to cholera during an epidemic in California. This marriage made him the son-in-law of Saswe also known as François Deloria (Saswe being the Dakota pronunciation of François), a powerful Yankton medicine man and chief of the "Half-Breed band". His daughter, Mary Sully, was known as "Akicita Win" (Soldier woman). She later married Episcopalian minister, Rev. P. J. Deloria, Tipi Sapa (Black Lodge). Tipi Sapa is featured as one of the 98 Saints of the Ages at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC as the first Dakota minister to his own people. Among their descendants are Vine Deloria, Jr. and Ella Deloria, noted Yankton Sioux scholars and writers.