In the winter of 1889-1890, a Lakota elder stood on the frozen ground of the former Great Sioux Reservation and watched government surveyors drive iron stakes into the earth. The stakes were dividing what remained — 9 million acres, excised from 22 million the Treaty of Fort Laramie had guaranteed in 1868, opened to white homesteaders under the Sioux Act. Red Cloud, by then an old man, said flatly: "I was not consulted." The surveyors worked methodically across the plains. The lines went into the ground.
This is the history of how those lines got drawn. Historian William Hartshorne Stone traces the full arc from the Dakota War of 1862 — when 38 men were hanged simultaneously at Mankato, the largest mass execution in American history — through the Apache Wars and the Great Sioux War, to Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, where four Hotchkiss guns fired 500 shells in under an hour into a crowd that included women and children. General Miles called it "a cruel and unnecessary massacre." The government awarded twenty Medals of Honor to the soldiers who participated.
Inside this Indian Wars history:
- The Dakota War and the Mankato hangings — Andrew Myrick tells the starving Dakota they can eat grass; his body is found with his mouth stuffed with it; 38 men hanged December 26, 1862 — the largest mass execution in American history (Chapter 1)
- Sand Creek and the logic of atrocity — Black Kettle surrenders under an American flag; Colonel Chivington's Colorado militia kills 200, mostly women and children; the men are never prosecuted (Chapter 2)
- Little Bighorn, June 25, 1876 — how the Black Hills gold rush broke the Fort Laramie Treaty and drove the Lakota to their greatest military victory, and their final catastrophe (Chapters 9-11)
- Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo — the last free men: their strategies, their surrenders, and what the government did with them after they stopped fighting (Chapters 12, 14)
- The boarding schools — Captain Pratt's formula at Carlisle: "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man"; 186 children in Carlisle's cemetery; Jim Thorpe wins two Olympic gold medals and dies in a California trailer (Chapter 19)
- The Dawes Act and ninety million acres lost — how Senator Dawes's sincere belief in private property transferred 65 percent of the 1887 Native land base to non-Native hands in forty-seven years (Chapter 18)
- Wounded Knee and its aftermath — Lost Bird, two months old, found alive under her mother's body; the Medals of Honor awarded and never rescinded; L. Frank Baum's editorial calling for "total annihilation" five days later (Chapter 16)
The Indian Wars are not ancient history. The 22 million acres of the Great Sioux Reservation, the 90 million acres lost to allotment, the Carlisle children buried under names not their own — these are the foundations on which the contemporary West was built. Understanding them is not optional for anyone who wants to understand America.
For readers of Dee Brown's BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE and David Grann's KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.