The Yellowstone River and its tributaries, Sunday Creek and the Tongue River, were the lifeblood of this raw, expansive landscape of rolling short prairie grass, dramatic clay badlands, and sagebrush plains. Sitting Bull’s oral family history states he was born along the Yellowstone River just south of present-day Miles City.

Antony Ellis, writer and Producer of The Frontier Gentleman, used the violent, unforgiving backdrop of the Montana Territory to make the stories more grounded, morally complex, and dangerous. South Sunday was probably based on the future Miles City, named for Colonel Nelson A. Miles.

Herds of buffalo still roamed the land, though their numbers were dropping fast. Large tipi villages belonging to the thousands of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho families snaked along the banks.

The most famous and common steamboat on that specific stretch of the river was the Josephine, captained by Grant Marsh. It generally carried supplies to military outposts and settlers. The Coulson Packet Company fleet, specifically designed to navigate the sandbars of the Yellowstone, ran until 1882 when the steamboat era gave way to the Northern Pacific railroad. 

The Far West, commanded by Grant Marsh, was extensively used by the U.S. Army during the 1876 Indian Wars to move troops and supplies past the confluence of Sunday Creek. The Far West was allowed to carry 30 passengers in regular cabin quarters.

In reality, the Sunday Creek basin was one of the most heavily armed, volatile militarized zones in North America from 1876 -1877. October 1876, Sitting  Bull and his tribe tracked and engaged the US Army supply and wagon trains along the Tongue River near Miles City.

Sunday Creek served as a primary scouting and transit corridor for Colonel Nelson A Miles’s Fifth Infantry during the Great Sioux War of 1876. Cutting northwest from the Yellowstone River, military scouts would track Sitting Bull’s movements along the creek to parleys and subsequently the Battle of Cedar Creek just to the north. 

In 1873, Lieutenant Colonel  George Armstrong Custer and his brigade camped directly at the mouth of Sunday Creek, and Sitting Bull and his tribe camped in the Sunday Creek area. On August 4, 1873, Custer’s troops moved up the south fork of Sunday Creek, where two Lakota warriors were said to have killed two civilians associated with the expedition. The warriors are believed to be part of Chief Rain-In-The-Face’s band.

In November 1876, Colonel Nelson A. Miles and his troops marched directly up through the Sunday Creek basin, through blinding snowstorms along the creek to track Sitting Bull’s movements.

The landscape was dense and rugged, with breaks where Sitting Bull’s scouts and small camps frequently moved through the Sunday Creek Valley to monitor the army supply trains. In reality, the 2,000-mile steamboat trek from Saint Louis, Missouri, would have brought them to Miles City. In 1887, Miles City had a strict ordinance to enforce “good order and morals”, making it illegal to discharge or carry firearms within city limits. 

South Sunday is modeled after the future Miles City, Montana. The lawlessness of the area is quite accurate. Sunday Creek was the northern terminus of the Outlaw Trail, with the rugged coulees, badlands, and dense brush in the basin providing ideal cover to hide stolen livestock. The SundaCreek corridor was ideal for moving stolen cattle north to Canada and south to Wyoming. It was plagued with highly organized, multi-brother, and heavily armed syndicates, just such a place where the Shelton Brothers would feel safe from being shot in the back, but could still keep an eye on the business at hand.

AI-generated map of the Outlaw Trail from Miles City, Montana, to Landusky, Montana. The sweeping, lonely expanse of the Montana badlands, rolling prairies, and hidden coulees once gave refuge to the likes of Kid Curry, the Wild Bunch, and the Sundance Kid.

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