After the Horse Creek Treaty of 1851, Native Nations suffered numerous violent acts from individual settlers as well as the United States military, including attacks that became known as the Harney Massacre and the Sand Creek Massacre. Gold discovery in Montana intensified these violent confrontations, particularly following the opening of the Bozeman Trail, which represented an incursion into Native lands in the northern Great Plains. Native Nations resisted this growing invasion. Still reeling from the drain on military resources caused by the Civil War, the United States was unable to mount an effective offensive against this fierce Native resistance and was pressed to engage in treaty negotiations.
February 1851: Congress authorizes $100,000 to hold a great council with Plains Nations.
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De Smet, Pierre. Map of the Upper Great Plains and Rocky Mountain Region. Map. 1851. From Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.
A Mormon emigrant’s cow wanders into a Lakota camp and is killed for food. The military, led by Second Lieutenant John Lawrence Grattan, demands the person who killed it be turned over. Tribal leaders offer reparation, but they are refused. Lakota (Sioux) successfully defend themselves, killing twenty-nine U.S. soldiers.
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Brigadier General William S. Harney leads a massacre against non-combatant Brule Lakota (Sioux) as revenge for the “Mormon Cow Incident.”
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After a false accusation of horse stealing is made against a party of Cheyennes, one Cheyenne is shot and killed, another captured, and a third wounded. The horses in question actually belong to Two Tails, who was later to become the famed Chief Little Wolf.
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Gathering of Oceti Sakowin (Sioux) Nations over invasion into their territory. The Seven Council Fires outline policy against U.S. encroachment into the Black Hills.
“Near here in 1857 a great council of the Indians determined to hold the Black Hills inviolate from the white man and for two decades this policy dictated their defensive actions.”
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Bear Butte (Mato Paha) Indian Camp, photograph by J. Stephen Conn, September 26, 2009
The United States government is preoccupied with the war and ignores its treaty agreements with Native Nations.
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Interior View of Fort Sumter, April 14, 1861. NAID 532292. Photographs of Federal and Other Buildings in the United States, 1857–1942, Record Group 121, Records of the Public Building Service, 1801–2000, National Archives at College Park – Still Pictures (RDSS), College Park, MD.
Dakota Territory is created by President James Buchanan. This act opens the way for the U.S. government to build forts in Indian territory.
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Dakota Territory, Department of the Interior, U.S. General Land Office, Oct. 2, 1866. Courtesy of David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Dakota (Sioux) in Minnesota face confinement and starvation that ultimately leads to resistance and conflict, imprisonment in two concentration camps at Fort Snelling and Mankato, and the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men on the day after Christmas.
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Major gold discovery in what would become Montana Territory.
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Sutro Tunnel Entrance, Comstock Mines vicinity, 1933. Photograph by W. Bailey, Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.
Pacific Railway Act passed to secure railroad passage through Indian lands.
Colonel Chivington and seven hundred Colorado Volunteers attack a camp of Southern Cheyennes and a small number of Arapahos; two-thirds of the camp were women and children. One hundred thirty-seven people, mostly Southern Cheyennes, were brutally massacred.
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The Powder River Expedition, a military operation of the United States government, was intended to crush the “hostile” Northern Plains tribes—in particular, the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho Nations.
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Military turns its attention and resources to the West.
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Grant, Lt. Gen. Ulysses, S.; three-quarter-length standing. NAID 558720. Photograph by Mathew Brady. Personalities from the Civil War Era, 1860–1869, National Archives at College Park- Still Pictures (RDSS), College Park, MD. Lee, Gen. Robert E.; full-length, standing, April 1865. NAID 525769. Photograph by Mathew Brady. Record Group 111, National Archives at College Park-Still Pictures (RDSS), College Park, MD.
Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho engage in conflict with U.S. military over invasion and expansion into Native territories.
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President Grant orders the forts on the Bozeman trail to be closed and abandoned in response to pressure from the Sioux Nation and other Northern Plains tribes.
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Robertson, Brown, Campsey, McMee, compilers, Atlas of the Sioux Wars, Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
In the spring of 1868 a conference is held at Fort Laramie, in present day Wyoming, which results in a treaty with the Sioux. This treaty is intended to bring peace between the whites and the Sioux who agree to settle within the Black Hills reservation in the Dakota Territory.
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Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders meeting with members of the U.S. Indian Peace Commission, 1868. Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory. Photograph by Alexander Gardner. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution NAA INV 00514500
Articles of a treaty made and concluded by and between Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, General William S. Harney, General Alfred H. Terry, General O.O. Augur, J.B. Henderson, Nathaniel G. Taylor, John G. Sanborn, and Samuel F. Tappan, duly appointed commissioners on the part of the United States, and the different bands of the Sioux Nation of Indians, by their chiefs and headmen, whose names are hereto subscribed, they being duly authorized to act in the premises.
These are the agreements made in a treaty between the United States and the Sioux Nation of Indians. It was made by commissioners who are the officially appointed representatives of the United States—Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, General William S. Harney, General Alfred H. Terry, General O.O. Augur, J.B. Henderson, Nathaniel G. Taylor, John G. Sanborn, and Samuel F. Tappan—and the chiefs and headmen of the different bands of the Sioux Nation of Indians who signed their names to it as the Sioux’s authorized representatives for this purpose.
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Custer’s Black Hills Expedition in Castle Creek Valley, 1874. Photograph by William H. Illingworth, courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives
In early July 1874, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, led a thousand-man expedition into the Black Hills. He was under U.S. government orders to find a good location for a military post. Miners accompanied Custer’s military forces. By mid-July Custer reported the presence of gold and within a year, more than a thousand miners had streamed into the Black Hills—territory that belonged to the Lakota (Sioux).
“The discussions at Washington, D.C., in May and June had been unsuccessful, but officials still hoped to effect an arrangement whereby, in return for cash payment and other considerations, the Sioux would cede the Black Hills or at least consent to the presence of American citizens on their land.”
Wayne R. Kline, ed., The Black Hills Journals of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 10
Colonel Richard Irving Dodge was one of several officers sent to the Black Hills post to expel unauthorized people in the area.
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Red Cloud, 1880, photograph by Charles Milton Bell, taken while Red Cloud was on a delegation, courtesy of South Dakota State Historical Society
“Grant gave negotiation one more try. He appointed a commission to hold a grand council on the Great Sioux Reservation and buy mining rights to the Black Hills . . . The grand council convened that September but quickly foundered. Crazy Horse refused to come. So did Sitting Bull; when the commission sent a messenger to talk to him, he [Sitting Bull] picked up a pinch of dirt and said,
“I do not want to sell or lease any land to the government—not even as much as this.”
Peter Cozzens, “President Grant’s Uncivil War,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2016
Peter Cozzens’s article traces President Grant’s efforts to take the Black Hills from the Sioux Nation.
