5th of May, 1877 - Nearly a year after he won the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull led his people into The Grandmother's Country (Canada, so-named out of respect for Queen Victoria - Grandmothers were much-revered) to try to find some relief from the U.S. Army.
Here he and his people lived in peace for four years. His younger warriors started making trouble with the neighboring tribes, however, and the Canadian government asked Sitting Bull to return to the U.S.
Sitting Bull engineered the victory at 'Custer's Last Stand'. Sitting Bull was a brilliant tactician, a Lakota Visionary, able to spur his warriors to victory even after defeat. It was for this talent that the U.S. Army feared him most.
He saw the victory at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, so his warriors knew they were going to be victorious. Unfortunately they did not heed the second part of his prophecy, to not take any of the white man's property as spoils of war.
Sitting Bull never signed a "peace treaty." A meadowlark told him of his death by Lakota People.
This is a comprehensive look at the life of the Great Lakotoa Chief, one of the last Great Leaders of the Indian Resistance Movement - a look at the life of a great man who still inspires The People today.
Twenty seasons in, "Secrets d'histoire" can still surprise its audience. The Season 20 finale aired on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 9:10 p.m. on France 3, and Stéphane Bern closed the season with one of the most notorious women of antiquity: Messalina, the third wife of Emperor Claudius. If you watched it, you already know it was more than a parade of Roman scandal. It was a careful re-examination of a woman whose name has been shorthand for depravity for almost two thousand years. If you haven't caught up yet, this debrief shows why the episode, and the whole season, deserves a place in your watchlist.
A finale that puts history's verdict on trial
The question at the centre of the finale was simple: does Messalina deserve the brutal nickname history gave her? Roman writers handed down a woman driven by insatiable desire and a hunger for power. Bern's team took that portrait apart piece by piece. They asked who wrote the story, why they wrote it, and what they gained from it. This is the series at its best. It doesn't simply retell a legend. It looks into how the legend was made. Messalina's world gave the episode plenty of drama: Caligula, Nero, Agrippina and the freedman Narcissus all appear, each with their own agenda in the deadly politics of the Julio-Claudian court. Without spoiling anything for latecomers, the finale's real emotional pull comes from the gap between the caricature and the young woman caught up in a machine much bigger than she was.