[1] Satanta was born the son of Chief Red Tipi and a Spanish captive and spent his youth south of the Arkansas River enjoying the peaceful alliance between the Kiowa and Comanche tribes.

Satanta would counter Carson's bugler with trumpeted commands of his own, on a day where the Plains Tribes managed to drive a US Army detachment from the field.

[citation needed] Without his binding personal leadership, Kiowa unity dissolved as a number of subchiefs, Tene-angopte, and, on the other side, Satanta and Guipago (Gui-pah-gho, Lone Wolf), struggled for power and to fill his place.

[citation needed] In one instance Satanta and a joint Kiowa-Comanche war party raided into the Texas panhandle and, after killing James Box, captured the man's wife and four children, whom they sold to the army at Fort Dodge, Kansas.

[6] Immediately prior to that attack, the Indians had allowed an Army Ambulance with a small guard to pass unharmed; in it was General William Tecumseh Sherman, but Mamanti, the medicine man, had advised the other chiefs to wait for a richer loot.

Satanta foolishly bragged of his, Satank (Sitting Bear), and Ado-ete (Big Tree)'s involvement of the raid, and, in spite of Guipago's intervention (the head chief came in well equipped with loaded rifles and revolvers, fit to fight for his friend's liberty, but had to surrender in front of the massive presence of military troops) Sherman personally arrested him.

[7] General Sherman ordered the trial of Satanta and Big Tree, along with Satank making them the first Native American Leaders to be tried for raids in a US court.

Satank had no intention of allowing himself to be humiliated by being tried by the white man's court, and told the Tonkawa scouts before the three were to be transported to Fort Richardson that they should tell his family they would be able to find his body along the trail.

He began singing his death song, and when his hands were free, stabbed one of his guards with a knife he had secreted in his clothes, and managed to wrestle the man's rifle from him.

[7] Governor Davis, under enormous pressure from leaders of the so-called Quaker Peace Policy, decided to overrule the court and the punishment was changed to life imprisonment.

[1] After a long and hard dealing with the U.S. government officers, in 1872 Guipago was allowed to meet his friend Satanta and the young war chief Ado-ete in St. Louis, and only after this he accepted to go to Washington with some other Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Wichita, and Delaware chiefs and talk about peace with President Ulysses S. Grant; after Satanta and Ado-ete were temporarily paroled, Guipago led the Kiowa delegation to Washington in September 1872, and got Indian Commissioner E. P. Smith's promise to release the two captives.

Soon after their release, Satanta and Ado-ete, along with Guipago and Tsen-tainte (White Horse) were involved in attacking buffalo hunters and were present at the raid on Adobe Walls.

He became sullen and broken in spirit, and would be seen for hours gazing through his prison bars toward the north, the hunting grounds of his people.Satanta is reported to have killed himself while incarcerated by jumping from a window on 11th October, 1878.

[10] The character of Blue Duck in Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove was partially based on the life and death of Satanta.

[11] The actor Rodolfo Acosta played Satanta in 1959 in the third episode of the ABC western television series, The Rebel, starring Nick Adams.