Great Sioux War

12 Key excerpts on "Great Sioux War"

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  Frontier Farewell

  The 1870s and the End of the Old West

  • Garrett Wilson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • U of R Press

    (Publisher)

  This clause was to form one of the central issues in litigation between the United States and the Sioux a century later. The Road to Little Big Horn 287 After the Powder River War, a concerned Congress appointed a mixed mil-itary and civilian commission to inquire into the causes of Indian complaint. The result was perhaps surprising: “After the most careful examination into the causes of this war, these gentlemen declare that we alone are responsible.” It was less surprising that the commission found “the Indians were not willing to make another treaty unless they could have the pledge that no white man should ever enter the territory guaranteed to them.”9 The Commission’s comment on the Powder River War itself was strongly critical: The results of the year’s campaign satisfied all reasonable men that the war was useless and expensive. To those who reflected on the sub-ject, knowing the facts, the war was something more than useless and expensive: it was dishonorable to the nation and disgraceful to those who originated it.10 These strong words did not bring about any discernible or profound change in the approach of the United States towards its Indian population. In spite of its commitment to prevent encroachment upon the Sioux lands, in 1874 the government itself sent a large expedition into the Black Hills to explore their value, with a particular interest in gold. The expedition, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, reported the discovery of gold and from then on even the United States Army could not protect the Hills from eager prospectors. In 1875 the United States attempted to negotiate the purchase of the Black Hills from the Sioux but was refused. Early the next year, 1876, the Army opened hostilities against the Sioux and in June met defeat at Little Big Horn. Then the government suspended rations called for by the 1868 Treaty until the Sioux should give up the Hills.

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  Teutoburg Forest, Little Bighorn, And Maiwand: Why Superior Military Forces Sometimes Fail

  • Major Michael T. Grissom(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Tannenberg Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3 — THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN

  It is a good day to die! – Lakota battle cry — Robinson, A Good Year to Die

  Much as Rome spread across Europe centuries earlier, in the nineteenth century the United States was spreading across North America. Manifest Destiny was the predominant idea, and fighting battles became necessary as some of the people already on those lands sought to resist. One of those battles was the Battle of the Little Bighorn, arguably one of the most analyzed battles in American history. The battle is also a tantalizing riddle, since some of the most important elements, such as Custer’s last stand, were not witnessed by any living white men, and the Sioux narratives are difficult to fully interpret. Nevertheless, the facts of the battle are plain enough; tribal warriors from a primitive society defeated a professional army from a technologically advanced society who were armed with superior weaponry. The intent of this chapter is to unravel how this may have transpired, and to later establish the relationship between this battle and others of its kind.

  Strategic Situation

  The U.S. Army

  During the latter half of the nineteenth century the United State was advancing westward across the continent at a rapid, if uneven pace. Naturally, this meant the dispossession of the Indian tribes who were already occupying those lands. Although the United States policy varied somewhat throughout this time period, the political resolution was that Indians were steadily pushed westward onto reservations set aside for them. The reality of this situation, however, was that the federal government did not have the means, military or political, to prevent white settlement of even these areas.{122} White settlers sometimes occupied these reservations, or portions of the reservations, especially if there were resources such as gold on them. A notable example of this occurred in 1874 when Custer led an Army expedition to scout for gold in the Black Hills.{123} The United States had previously ceded this territory to the Sioux Indians in the Fort Laramie Treaty signed by the chief Red Cloud.{124} Under President Ulysses Grant, the United States ceased enforcement of this treaty, and no longer attempted to prevent white incursions in the Black Hills, which was considered sacred hunting ground by the Sioux.{125}

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  The Sioux

  The Dakota and Lakota Nations

  • Guy Gibbon(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Fighting for Survival, 1850–1889 117 nies he led at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The battle has been de-scribed in detail from many perspectives in many publications. 10 At its height, Sitting Bull’s encampment had nearly 1,000 lodges, at least 1,800 warriors, and thousands of horses. Never before had so many Indian fight-ing men joined forces on the Plains. The Battle of the Little Bighorn was the greatest of all Indian victories during the course of the Plains wars and the last great Indian military victory on the Plains. While the first three battles in the war for the Black Hills were great victories for the Sioux Alliance, the final five were victories for the US army and brought the resistance of the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho to a virtual close. The defeat at Little Bighorn infuri-ated federal authorities. In July, General Sherman persuaded Congress to place the northern reservations under the absolute control of the army. Indian agents in the troubled region were replaced with army officers, who tended to treat all Indians on reservations as potentially hostile. Weapons, ammunition, and horses were confiscated, and some men were held as prisoners of war. The final blows against Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and others came from the US army in a brutally effective winter campaign under the direction of colonels Randall Mackenzie and Nelson Miles. Indians recently recruited on Sioux reservations aided the army. During the 1877 campaign, Miles was responsible for forcing most of the remaining hostiles onto reserva-tions or into Canada. On May 6, 1887, Crazy Horse acknowledged de-feat and surrendered at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. He was killed by a soldier while submitting to arrest later that year. 11 Although the power of the Sioux Alliance was broken, sporadic raiding by the Sioux continued on through the 1880s.

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  "Farewell, My Nation"

  American Indians and the United States in the Nineteenth Century

  • Philip Weeks(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Army patrols had been ineffective in keeping Americans out of the Great Sioux Reservation. On the other hand, the Sioux were becoming progressively bitter at the gold hunters and at the repeated treaty violations. Secretary of War William W. Belknap assessed the emergency: recent reports “fore‐shadow trouble between the miners and the Indians of the country known as the Black Hills, unless something be done to obtain possession of that section; for the white miners have been strongly attracted there by the reports of rich deposits of the precious metal.” The United States government concluded that it could not successfully defend the territorial and treaty rights of the Sioux. It appeared just a matter of time before the Sioux would take matters into their own hands and eradicate any prospectors whom they found on their land. Indian Bureau, military, and congressional officials all now agreed that the way to end the predicament was to purchase the Black Hills from the Sioux. In September 1875, a delegation of key congressional and military officials journeyed to the Red Cloud agency near the reservation. They planned to discuss the hoped‐for purchase of the Black Hills with leaders like Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. The delegation also dispatched messengers ahead of themselves requesting the attendance of the off‐reservation leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The latter replied that they would not come to the meeting nor would they authorize the sale of one foot of their land to the United States. “I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell any land to the government,” The Plains Wars, Phase II: Enforcing Concentration 245 Sitting Bull told the hapless messenger. “Not even this much,” he added defiantly, waving a pinch of earth in the man’s face. In spite of his characteristic obstinacy, the commissioners confidently believed they could persuade Red Cloud to sell the Black Hills.

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  Radical Hope

  Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation

  • Jonathan Lear(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  The threats were real and imminent. The historian Richard White, building on the research of other historians and anthropologists, has argued convincingly that it is a mistake to think that the master historical narrative of this period is of a stable, traditional society being overwhelmed by the ad-vance of western civilization. Such a narrative overlooks the sig-nificance of intertribal warfare: “wars were not interminable con-tests with traditional enemies, but real struggles in which defeat was often catastrophic”: The history of the northern and central American Great Plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is far After This, Nothing Happened 21 more complicated than the tragic retreat of the Indians in the face of an inexorable white advance. From the perspective of most northern and central plains tribes the crucial invasion of the plains during this period was not necessarily that of the whites at all. These tribes had few illusions about American whites and the danger they presented, but the Sioux remained their most feared en-emy. 24 This is not the place to tell the history of the terrible military pres-sure that the westward migration of the Sioux placed on the Crow, but, as White describes, the hunting grounds around the Yellowstone, Rosebud, and Big Horn Rivers, which had been dominated by the Crow in the first half of the nineteenth century, were “reduced to a neutral ground in the 1840s and 1850s.” 25 And it was certainly part of living memory for the rest of the century that, in the early 1820s, a thousand Sioux warriors had launched a surprise attack on a Crow village near the Yellowstone River and destroyed several hundred lodges. According to oral tradition, half of the population was killed. 26 In principle, every bearer of a coup-stick was willing to give his life so that something like that should never happen again. The Crow had been fighting the Sioux for decades, but, as White points out, By the 1840s .

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  "Farewell, My Nation"

  American Indians and the United States in the Nineteenth Century

  • Philip Weeks(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  When no word from Custer arrived by June 26, Terry and Gibbon continued the march toward Sitting Bull’s camp, reaching their destination the following morning, Tuesday, June 27. They rescued Reno, Benteen, and the survivors of their companies. They also discovered the remains of soldiers strewn throughout the general area of the battle, and the location—soon to be called “Last Stand Hill”—where Custer and all of his command perished. General Terry recorded that day: “It is marked by the remains of his officers and men and the bodies of his horses, some of them strewed along the path, others heaped where halts appear to have been made.” The sight appalled both the troops and their two commanders: “A scene of sickening, ghastly horror,” one soldier recalled after viewing the corpses littering the battlefield, many of whom were stripped and mutilated. Within several days, the entire nation shared their feelings.

  The Great Sioux War Concludes

  A terse telegraph message conveyed the news eastward: “Bismarck, D.T. [Dakota Territory], July 5, 1876:—General Custer attacked the Indians June 25, and he, with every officer and man in five companies, were killed.” Reports of the Battle of the Little Bighorn shocked an incredulous American public on July 6th, in the midst of the republic’s jubilant celebration of its centennial. Philip Sheridan and many of the military’s senior officers learned of the battle while in Philadelphia, the city where the Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence a hundred years earlier in July, 1776. The officers were attending the centennial exposition celebrating the theme “A Century of Progress” when the news arrived. At first Sheridan refused to believe the initial Associated Press wire story. The arrival of General Alfred Terry’s confidential report left no doubt about the annihilation of Custer and the five companies of the Seventh Cavalry. As newspapers across the country printed the report about the battle, the nation clamored for revenge against the Indians.

  Not everyone pardoned George Custer. A commentator editorialized in The Nation magazine: “We admire the gallantry of General Custer and his men, but who shall blame the Sioux for defending themselves?” President Grant assessed: “I regard Custer's Massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary—wholly unnecessary.” General Terry’s report clearly attributed the Little Bighorn disaster to the commander of the Seventh Cavalry’s egregious conduct. “Custer’s action is inexplicable in the case,” Terry evaluated.

  That the analysis of Custer’s commanding officer was accurate was the least of the American public’s concerns. The legend of the man and the event soon christened “Custer’s Last Stand” was born almost immediately after the battle, and it continued to grow in the years following his death. The legend is replete with irony. George Armstrong Custer finally attained heroic immortality and achieved the lasting fame that he tirelessly sought on numerous battlefields during the Civil War and the Plains Indian wars—not by means of a breathtaking victory, but through complete and utter defeat.

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  Custerology

  The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer

  • Michael A. Elliott(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  For the Lakotas, the agreement approved by Congress in 1877 was nothing more than an illegal seizure of the Black Hills. During World War I and its immediate aftermath, a time when American Indians were asked to con-tribute to the U.S. war effort, the grievances of the Lakotas began to win sympathy within the federal Indian Bureau, and in 1920 Congress passed a jurisdictional act that allowed the Sioux tribes to sue the United States c h a p t e r f o u r ~ 180 in federal court. Over the next half-century, the tribes and their lawyers waged a long legal battle punctuated by minor victories as well as sev-eral setbacks that nearly ended the lawsuit altogether. At last, in 1979, the U.S. Court of Claims decided that the transfer of the Black Hills to the United States constituted an illegal taking and awarded the Sioux tribes a judgment of $105 million. A year later, by an 8-1 margin, the U.S. Su-preme Court affirmed the decision. Writing for the majority, Justice Harry Blackmun quoted with approval the words of the Court of Claims: “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all prob-ability, be found in our history.” 58 (The lone dissenter, then Justice Wil-liam Rehnquist, said that it was “unfair to judge by the light of ‘revisionist’ historians or the mores of another era actions that were taken under pres-sure of time more than a century ago.”) 59 The litigation over the Black Hills then took one more dramatic turn: The Lakotas, through their tribal councils and other groups concerned about the Black Hills, refused the monetary settlement. They insisted that they wanted to recover the land itself, not a cash payment for it.

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  Native America

  A History

  • Michael Leroy Oberg(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The trail crossed through land that the United States had guar- anteed to the Crows at Fort Laramie in 1851. Despite receiving invitations to fight, the Crows stayed out of the conflict. They had no interest in aiding the Lakota who had expanded into the Yellowstone and Bighorn Valleys. Red Cloud’s warriors managed to cut off much of the traffic along the Bozeman Trail. When the United States decided to use force to open the road late in 1866, its campaigns went badly. Captain William Fetterman rode out of Fort Phil Kearny in pursuit of a group of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. A short distance from the fort, Crazy Horse’s warriors wiped out Fetterman and his men. The decisive Lakota victory provoked some American policymakers, like General William Tecumseh Sherman, to call for a war of extermination against the Plains tribes to enforce the policy of concentration. Others were not so sure. Some thought that order might be achieved on the Plains if Congress transferred oversight of the BIA from the Interior Department (created in 1849) to the War Department (which had been in charge of Indian policy prior to that date). Most thought that the warfare on the 234 THE INVASION OF THE GREAT WEST Plains, occurring as the United States tried to demobilize from the Civil War and restore order to a country that had lost over 600,000 men in five years of bloody fighting, demonstrated the limitations of any purely military solution to the nation’s Indian problems. Many Americans in the east hoped to avoid more Sand Creeks.

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  American Puppet Modernism

  Essays on the Material World in Performance

  • John Bell(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  It seemed too sudden to make such a change. If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indians. . . . Then many of the white men often abused the Indians and treated them unkindly. Perhaps they had excuse, but the Indians did not think so. Many of the whites always seemed to say by their manner when they saw an Indian, “I am much better than you,” and the Indians did not like this. 26 In the summer of 1862, following a harsh winter, crops failed and the Sioux began to starve; the annuities due them were never paid. When a delegation of Sioux led by the sixty-year-old Mdewkanton chief Ta-oya-te-duta (Little Crow) met with a group of traders on August 4 to demand food from their well- stocked storehouses, one of the traders replied, “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.” 27 Two days later, four young Santee Sioux men hoping both to steal eggs and to prove their bravery killed three men and two women at a settlement near Lake Shetek. For the white set- tlers, those killings marked the beginning of the “Sioux War.” The conflict drew into it reluctant older warriors such as Little Crow, who recognized the futility of fighting the settlers and the federal army, but felt he had no choice. After a series of skirmishes, battles, and attacks on civilians by both sides, the Sixth Minnesota Regiment, led by Colonel Henry H. Sibley (owner of the American Fur Company) defeated the Sioux by the end of September. Following military trials in which legal rights and legal counsel were denied the defendants, 303 Santee Sioux were sentenced to death. President Lincoln reduced the number of condemned to thirty-eight, who were all executed on a specially constructed scaffold in a public spectacle in the middle of Mankato on December 26; a spectator proudly called it “America’s greatest mass execution.” 28 22 American Puppet Modernism

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  The Native American Experience

  Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Fetterman Massacre, and Creek Mary's Blood

  • Dee Brown(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  34

  Regardless of who had killed him, the Long Hair who made the Thieves’ Road into the Black Hills was dead with all his men. Reno’s soldiers, however, reinforced by those of Major Frederick Benteen, were dug in on a hill farther down the river. The Indians surrounded the hill completely and watched the soldiers through the night, and next morning started fighting them again. During the day, scouts sent out by the chiefs came back with warnings of many more soldiers marching in the direction of the Little Bighorn.

  After a council it was decided to break camp. The warriors had expended most of their ammunition, and they knew it would be foolish to try to fight so many soldiers with bows and arrows. The women were told to begin packing, and before sunset they started up the valley toward the Bighorn Mountains, the tribes separating along the way and taking different directions.

  When the white men in the East heard of the Long Hair’s defeat, they called it a massacre and went crazy with anger. They wanted to punish all the Indians in the West. Because they could not punish Sitting Bull and the war chiefs, the Great Council in Washington decided to punish the Indians they could find—those who remained on the reservations and had taken no part in the fighting.

  On July 22 the Great Warrior Sherman received authority to assume military control of all reservations in the Sioux country and to treat the Indians there as prisoners of war. On August 15 the Great Council made a new law requiring the Indians to give up all rights to the Powder River country and the Black Hills. They did this without regard to the treaty of 1868, maintaining that the Indians had violated the treaty by going to war with the United States. This was difficult for the reservation Indians to understand, because they had not attacked United States soldiers, nor had Sitting Bull’s followers attacked them until Custer sent Reno charging through the Sioux villages.

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  For Those Who Come After

  A Study of Native American Autobiography

  • Arnold Krupat(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  3/ History, Science, and Geronimo's Story T H e first Indian war to be fought after passage of the Indian Removal Act, the Black Hawk War was also the last to be fought east of the Mississippi. 1 Any hope that Indians might live unmolested in the Great American Desert across the river, or even within an Indian state, proved illusory as land-hungry settlers crossed the Mississippi into an area increasingly represented, in William Nash Smith's account, not as a desert but as the "Garden of the World." 2 On the Plains, in the Great Basin and Plateau, in the southwest and the Pacific northwest, the familiar pattern of contact, S. M. Barrett, Geronimo, and Asa Daklugie at work on Geronimo's autobiography. Photo titled, "How the Book was Made." From the original edition of Geronimo's Story of his Life, 1906. Geronimo's Story conflict, and conquest reasserted itself. Indian war, in Wil- liam Hagan's bitter phrase, "that great American institu- tion," persisted as the leading edge of history, whose inexorable law decreed that Indians must vanish in the name of civilization. 3 And "progress" created "State-prisoners" and "fertilizer" in abundance. Through the expansionist 1840s and into the 1850s, the Indian continued to be represented in art and imitated in life. In the East, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Harvard professor and the first to teach Faust at an American college, saw Black Hawk in 1837 in Boston, read Henry Schoolcraft's AIgic Researches (1839), and transformed Schoolcraft's Manabozho into his own Hiawatha. Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha (1855) sold out its first printing of 4,000 copies on the day of its publication and completed its first year in print with sales of 38,000. Hiawatha elegiacally counsels his people to abandon the old ways and adapt themselves to the coming of "civilization," but he does so in a verse form which only "civilization" can provide; Longfellow de- rived Hiawatha's trochaic meter from the Finnish epic, Kalevala.

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  Shaped by the West, Volume 2

  A History of North America from 1850

  • William F. Deverell, Anne F. Hyde(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Gold there is, everywhere in the granitic areas; gold enough to make many fortunes, and tempt to the loss of many more. The very uncertainty has a fasci-nation for many men. It is a grand lottery! Only a few draw prizes, but each may be the favorite of the “fickle goddess.” This hope, this barest chance, will draw thousands of men from comfortable homes and sorrowing friends. In a few weeks or months the eager thirst for “pot-holes” 6 will have deserted the better class, and they will settle down into valuable citizens of a country destined in a few years to be an important and wealthy portion of the great American Republic. 6 . “pot-holes”: mining strikes. A Cheyenne View of Battle 27 11. A CHEYENNE VIEW OF BATTLE In 1874, troops under the command of George Armstrong Custer found gold in the Black Hills. Miners soon began to stream into the area, in stark violation of the Laramie Treaty of 1868. Sioux Indians and their allies retaliated, and Custer and other military offi cers and units were sent out to push the Indians onto reservations. But things did not work out as the US Army planned. On June 25, 1876, Custer, along with several hundred of his men, died in a brief but fierce battle near the banks of the Little Big Horn River in Montana. The humiliating defeat galvanized the army, which quickly conquered the Native Americans of 28 Chapter Two: Western Conquest the northern Plains. Nearly sixty years after the battle, the Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg recalled the event and his role in it. In this excerpt from the tran-scription of his reminiscences, the aged Cheyenne remembers the tumult and excitement of that fateful day when Custer and his few hundred men blundered into a gathering of four thousand Indians, the largest congregation of Native American warriors ever assembled in North America. As you read Wooden Leg’s account, think of the sights and sounds of the battle he is describing.

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