"By coincidence," a BIA SWAT team was on maneuvers near the Jumping Bull property on the day of the shoot-out.  Perhaps it was also coincidence that, according to Edgar Bear Runner, paramilitary forces had been surrounding the Oglala region all that morning.  In fact, he says, he had been on the way to Oglala to warn the AIM camp that something ominous was taking place when he encountered Dick Wilson and an estimated twenty Indian police and goons on Highway 18, about three quarters of a mile east of the property.  Within another quarter mile, he had encountered a force of 150 white men - state troopers, U.S. marshals, SWAT teams - and by late afternoon at least 250 men were surrounding the area.  Bear Runner's account of the size of the operation was confirmed by The New York Times, which reported that FBI agents and armaments were being airlifted from Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, and even Quantico, Virginia within hours of the first shots fired that day.  The Indians claim that part of this force was already in the area when Coler and Williams drove onto the property.  Within a remarkably short time, reinforcements arrived that can only be called massive when set against a band of untrained men and boys armed mostly with .30-30 deer rifles and .22s.  Among those reinforcements was goon chief Duane Brewer.  The large detachments of Indian, state, and federal police were attended not only by idle goons but by white vigilante ranchers of the Civil Liberties Organization, a "patriotic" group that owned or leased most of the best reservation land.  Before the day was out, this small army was supplied with a spotter plane, a helicopter, a chemical-warfare team and a special team of snipers - in addition to four more SWAT teams from outside the state.  Within a few days, the FBI operation included two armored personnel carriers, a stock of high explosives, and at least two hundred agents clad in battle dress and armed with automatic weapons.  (Matthiessen, ibid, pp. 192-193.)

On the morning of June 26, Little Joe Stuntz, a tall, shy, quiet Coeur d'Alene Indian normally assigned as a bodyguard for Dennis Banks, decided to take the day off.  Grandpa and Grandma Jumping Bull had left at daybreak for a steer auction over in Nebraska.  The Long Visitor family was using the white house in their absence.  Angie Long Visitor heard "firecrackers or something" while washing dishes.  Because her small children were playing outside, she walked out onto the bluff to have a look.  Two strange cars were parked in the pasture meadow west of the compound and below, down toward the horse corral, at the edge of the creek woods.  One of two white men - she assumed they were lawmen because of the radio aerials and the good condition of the cars - was removing a gun case from the trunk of his car; the other was kneeling and shooting in her general direction with a handgun.  Frightened, she grabbed up her kids - four, two, and nine months - and ran into the house.  "We didn't know what to do at first," she says.  "We just closed the door and stayed in there for a while."  Then she and her young husband, Ivis, decided they'd better run:  "We was so scared!  We just grabbed our kids, and we started runnin' real fast!"  They fled south along the edge of the plowed field, then cut across toward Highway 18.  (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 155.)  On the way, they met a few of the AIM Indians from the camp down in the woods, who were running uphill towards the houses.  When what sounded like an exchange of shots came from the direction of the compound a quarter of a mile away, Norman Brown and Joe Killsright (in the camp) had jumped up to investigate.  From the wood edge below the bluff, they could see nothing, but it was plain that the shooting came from the area of the Jumping Bull houses.  They ran back downhill to to arm themselves and warn the camp.  Norman grabbed his single-shot .22, and Joe a .30-30 deer rifle.  Then they took off again, up through the bushes.  Bullets whistled overhead as soon as they appeared, Brown says; even so, he and Joe continued uphill into the compound to join Mike Anderson and Norman Charles.

From the green house in the compound, looking downhill to the west, Norman Brown saw two cars and two white men well over one hundred yards away; a gold-white car was parked behind a green one, both aimed in the general direction of the camp.  The trunk of the gold-white car was open, and its driver was behind it, a rifle or a shotgun at his shoulder.  The other man, using a handgun, was crouching and shooting next to the green car.  Brown recalls seeing Leonard Peltier lying down by a row of junked cars near the woods, rising up to fire, lying prone again.  Almost immediately someone yelled that two more cars were coming in from Highway 18, one of them a green-and-white BIA patrol car, and Brown ran across to the log cabin to try to divert the attention of these cars with his .22.  Apparently, Anderson and Norman Charles were also firing at those cars.  At a distance of nearly two hundred yards, the young Indians succeeded in shooting out one tire on each of them, and the cars backed up in a wild zigzagging retreat along the rain-puddled dirt road toward Highway 18, before one of them got stuck in a muddy ditch.  After a long-range exchange of shots with a big white man who jumped out of his car and began shooting, Brown returned to the edge of the edge of the bluff overlooking the meadow, in time to see the man with the shoulder gun behaving strangely.  "He crawled through the front of the car and he crawled out.  He was there for a while, and then he crawled back out and got in the same place he was at."  The man with the handgun, however was still "shooting away there."  By this time, additional cars traveling at high speeds were arriving from both directions on Highway 18.  The Indians were astonished to see so many men arrive so quickly.  At this point or so, Brown said later, his friend Joe came up "told me that they were going to kill me.  This is the time to be a man; today you can be a warrior.  Remember our sisters and the children at the camp."  In Brown's account, Joe Killsright said that more lawmen were coming in from the southeast, and he sent Brown and Anderson away from the compound, down along the plateau, to cover the approaches to the camp from the open fields.

"I was in the tipi with my wife," Dino Butler recalls.  "We were just getting up and I heard the firing up there.  Norman Brown came down and said 'There is shooting up there, there's women and children up there, and we got to get up there.'  So I grabbed my gun and told my wife to take Jean and the other girl out of here.  I went running up there with my brothers.  It took me five minutes or so to get up there, and yet we were already surrounded by the time I got there.  I seen Ivis and Angie and their three children run out of their house, running toward our camp, in the direction of our camp."  By that time, Butler says, at least twenty shots had been fired.  His wife said "Dino and I got up late that day, and we were coming out of the tipi and the younger girls were cooking breakfast, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of shooting just started.  All the guys took off and went up the hill to find out what was going on, because there were about four different families living up there, and all of them had young children.  There were about, I'd estimate, eight kids up there and three pregnant women, and there were also Grandma and Grandpa Jumping Bull lived up there, and they had just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary that year.  So they were older people, and everybody was was really concerned about someone getting hurt. . . . I took the younger girls and a young boy, and we stayed down there to see what was going to happen.  We didn't know what to do."I was in the tipi with my wife," Dino Butler recalls.  "We were just getting up and I heard the firing up there.  Norman Brown came down and said 'There is shooting up there, there's women and children up there, and we got to get up there.'  So I grabbed my gun and told my wife to take Jean and the other girl out of here.  I went running up there with my brothers.  It took me five minutes or so to get up there, and yet we were already surrounded by the time I got there.  I seen Ivis and Angie and their three children run out of their house, running toward our camp, in the direction of our camp."  By that time, Butler says, at least twenty shots had been fired.

His wife said "Dino and I got up late that day, and we were coming out of the tipi and the younger girls were cooking breakfast, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of shooting just started. All the guys took off and went up the hill to find out what was going on, because there were about four different families living up there, and all of them had young children. There were about, I'd estimate, eight kids up there and three pregnant women, and there were also Grandma and Grandpa Jumping Bull lived up there, and they had just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary that year. So they were older people, and everybody was was really concerned about someone getting hurt. . . . I took the younger girls and a young boy, and we stayed down there to see what was going to happen.  We were trying to go over this one hill and see what was going on, but we didn't want to get in the way.  And a couple of people were walking out with their kids, and we said 'Well, what's going on?'  They said, Oh they're having a firefight over there.  And they said that it might be police officials, and they said they were taking off.  All this happened really fast: it probably takes a longer time to tell about it than it actually happened.  So then we took off; we were running to this one area where we knew there was a bridge to get onto the main road and try to get the kids out of there, and by the time we hot the main road, there was a roadblock on it, and a lot of people there.  And I was so surprised because it seemed like the shooting had just barely started and already they had roadblocks up. . . . We thought about just saying we were taking a walk, but then we thought, Well, maybe not, because they looked like they were kind of eager to get it in with anybody, and I didn't want to put the kids in jeopardy.  So we started walking back to camp, and at that time we saw helicopters, and I remember thinking, What the hell is this?!"