Plains Indian Wars

Plains Indians wars (1860s-80s) (see also American Indian wars). These were uprisings by the ‘hostile’ tribes of the Great Plains horse and buffalo cultural area, excluding the Apache of the south-west and the Utes and others of far west and mountain zones. They were subdued by a strategy of exterminating the buffalo and winter campaigning devised by Sherman. The main hostiles with their approximate ranges stated in terms of modern US states were

• Northern Cheyenne/Arapaho: Algonquian-speaking tribes in Wyoming and Montana
• Southern Cheyenne/Arapaho: in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas
• Comanche: Uto-Aztecan speaking people, from Kansas to Mexico inclusive
• Kiowa: Kiowa-Tanoan speakers in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas
• Kiowa-Apache: Athapascan speakers in Texas and New Mexico
• Santee Sioux (Mdewkanton, Sisseton, et al.): Siouan speakers in Minnesota and Wisconsin
• Teton Sioux (Brulé, Hunkpapa, Mineconjou, Oglala, Sans Arc): spread over the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana

The Canada border-area hostile Algonquian-speaking Blackfoot tribe is included among the Teton Sioux. Because of tribal enmity or prudent calculation, many of the Caddoan Arikara and Pawnee, the Siouan Crow and Osage, and the Uto-Aztecan Shoshoni allied with the whites against the hostiles—when, that is, they were not raiding on their own account amid the swirling confusion of a frontier war where the autumn hostiles could be the winter reservation Indians and back out on the warpath in the spring.

Like the Yankton/Yanktonai Sioux, the Santee grudgingly accepted ‘concentration’ in 1858. In August 1862, a corrupt Indian agent of the government denied them treaty supplies and one of his soon-to-die confederates suggested they eat grass. Led by the previously accommodationist Mdewkanton Little Crow, the Santee went on an orgy of raiding that spread into Wisconsin until defeated at Wood Lake on 23 September. Two thousand surrendered and 303 were condemned to death by courts martial, but Lincoln personally reviewed the sentences and reduced the number to 38. The Sisseton and some Teton Sioux were chased into Dakota, where the last battle took place at Killdeer Mountain in July 1863.

For the southern hostiles, the moment when resisting the whites finally took absolute precedence over fighting each other came with the massacre of Black Kettle's trusting Cheyenne at Sand Creek. The ‘Cheyenne-Arapaho war’ of 1864-5, ‘Hancock's Campaign’ of 1867, and ‘Sheridan's Campaign’ of 1868-9 were basically one long spasm of related uprisings. In the first, raids by the Cheyenne and Arapaho joined by some Teton Sioux ravaged Colorado until battles at the North Platte and Powder rivers in late 1865 bought a year's relative tranquillity. When raiding revived in 1867, Hancock drove them out of Colorado, to spread terror through western Kansas.

Although he signed the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867 and withdrew to a reservation in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), the hapless Black Kettle could not control the élite Dog Soldiers of his own tribe, who joined a Kiowa and Comanche uprising the next year, once again provoked by withheld supplies. In September, 50 troopers held off 600 Oglala and Dog Soldiers at Beecher's Island in Kansas, killing their leader Roman Nose. On 27 November, Black Kettle and 102 others, mostly old men, women, and children, were killed in Sheridan's Campaign when Custer attacked their camp at Washita River. On Christmas Day, Dog Soldiers and Kiowa were defeated at nearby Soldier Spring. After a further defeat in July 1869 when fighting alongside the Northern Cheyenne at Summit Springs in north-east Colorado, surviving Dog Soldiers surrendered.

The Kiowa rebelled again in May 1871. Satanta and other leaders were captured and condemned to death, but their sentences were commuted—unwisely, because they led the Kiowa war faction to join the Comanche again in the ‘Red River war’ of 1874, which tore up the Texas panhandle. After defeats at Adobe Walls and Palo Duro Canyon, Satanta surrendered to Miles in October. Sporadic raiding continued, but the southern Plains Indians wars are considered to have ended when the feared half-breed Comanche Quanah Parker surrendered in June 1875.

Their northern brethren, particularly the Teton Sioux, gave the overstretched US army even more trouble. Always ready to join the uprisings of others to the east and to the south, under remarkable leaders such as Spotted Tail of the Brulé, his nephew Crazy Horse and Red Cloud of the Oglala, and Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa, the defeats they inflicted on the regular army were unique in the Plains wars saga. In 1854 after the Brulé wiped out a 30-man punitive column under Grattan near Fort Laramie, the ensuing punishment persuaded Spotted Tail to become an advocate of negotiation. The same pattern of winning prestige in battle first and then accepting the inevitable was followed by Red Cloud after his successful 1866-8 war against the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming. Sent to build three forts through the heart of the Teton's range in 1866, the army encountered fierce resistance. On 21 December a party of Oglala led by Crazy Horse lured to destruction an 80-man column out of Fort Kearny under Fetterman, who had boasted he could ride through the whole Sioux nation with precisely that number. In the face of constant harassment, the Trail was abandoned by the Fort Laramie Treaty of April 1867.

The northern Plains Indians' last stand was provoked by a treaty-violating ultimatum to surrender their sacred Black Hills (Paha Sapa), where an expedition under Custer discovered gold in 1874. In June 1876, driven by converging army columns, a unique concentration of Sioux and Cheyenne/Arapaho in southern Montana first repulsed a 1, 000-man column under Crook at the Rosebud and then destroyed Custer's command at Little Bighorn. The concentration dispersed and the ensuing winter campaign broke the back of the resistance, with battles at Slim Buttes and Wolf Mountain. One by one the war bands surrendered or followed Sitting Bull to refuge in Canada. The last battle was Miles's destruction of the Mineconjou at Muddy Creek in May 1877 after their chief Lame Deer had died trying to kill him in a personal gunfight.

The Plains Indians wars effectively ended within a year of the Indians' greatest victory at Little Bighorn, which finally goaded Washington into providing the resources necessary to crush them. There were two subsequent clashes. In 1878 the Northern Cheyenne, desperate to return, were almost exterminated, an act which aroused pity and an unusual concession to their wishes. The pathetic Ghost Dance revival was drowned in blood at Wounded Knee in December 1890.

Bibliography

• Utley, Robert, The Indian Frontier of the American West (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1984).
• Waldman, Carl, Atlas of the North American Indian (New York, 1985)

— Hugh Bicheno

The wars between the Indian tribes of the Great Plains and the U.S. Army grew out of the westward movement of Americans. The territorial accessions of the Mexican War of 1846–48, followed by the discovery of gold in California, set off a migration across the plains that ended only in the final decades of the nineteenth century as farmers and stockmen began to occupy the plains themselves. Plains warfare, however, centered mainly on securing the transcontinental travel routes and protecting travelers rather than actual residents from Indian aggressions. Indian hostility arose from resentment over the inroads of travelers on such Indian resources as game, timber, and grass. Typically, the major wars with the Plains tribes followed treaties negotiated by government commissioners that bound the Indians to settle on a designated reservation. The military was then called in to make them go, or to make them return once they had moved, discovered the misery of reservation life, and bolted.

The Plains tribes that fought the United States most intensively were the Sioux (Lakota), Cheyenne, and Arapaho on the northern plains and the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche on the southern plains. All these tribes had traditions of constant warfare with other tribes—the Sioux and Cheyennes against the Crows and Shoshones, for example. Thus, military operations occurred against a backdrop of constant intertribal fighting, with Indians often serving as scouts or auxiliaries for the federal troops.

Army and Indian warred in different styles. The army maintained a system of forts at strategic locations and fielded heavy offensive columns burdened by slow‐moving supply trains. The Indians fought with hit‐and‐run tactics that exploited environmental factors and avoided open engagement unless the risk was small. The individual warrior excelled over the typical regular in virtually every test of combat proficiency, but in open battle this was offset by military organization, discipline, command, and firepower. In general, the army prevailed when the Indians abandoned their orthodoxy and fought by white rules, or when commanders abandoned their orthodoxy and fought by Indian rules.

After the Mexican War, Indian wars erupted along the Oregon‐California Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the various trails across Texas. Sioux and Cheyennes slipped into hostilities in 1854–55. Near Fort Laramie, the Grattan Massacre of 19 August 1854, caused by the imprudent actions of a young officer, led to Brig. Gen. William S. Harney's campaign of 1855. At the Battle of Bluewater, 3 September 1855, Harney destroyed a Sioux village and killed Chief Little Thunder. To the south, Kiowas, Comanches, and Cheyennes threatened the commerce with Santa Fe and raided deep into Texas.

The Civil War years intensified fighting, with federalized volunteer units replacing the regulars. The Minnesota uprising of 1862 spread west into Dakota Territory, where Sioux resented gold seekers crossing their homeland to newly opened mines in western Montana. In the summers of 1863, 1864, and 1865, Brig. Gen. Henry H. Sibley and Brig. Gen. Alfred Sully fought successful engagements with the Sioux. Most notable was Sully's victory over Sitting Bull and Inkpaduta at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, 28 July 1864.

On the central plains during the summer of 1864, Indian unrest threatened the trails from the east to Denver, Colorado, and led to the tragic and treacherous attack by Col. John M. Chivington on Black Kettle's Cheyenne village at Sand Creek, 29 November 1864. Sand Creek set off a general war that spread over the plains country in 1865. A three‐pronged offensive on the northern plains directed by Brig. Gen. Patrick E. Connor failed when columns encountered bad weather and ran out of supplies.

With the end of the Civil War, regulars returned to the plains. Red Cloud's Sioux closed the Bozeman Trail to the Montana mines and besieged the three forts erected to protect travelers. On 21 December 1866, warriors wiped out an eighty‐man force under Capt. William J. Fetterman near Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming. The following summer, however, in the Wagon Box and Hayfield fights, new breech‐loading rifles helped beat back massed Indian assaults. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 ended the Red Cloud War and provided for abandoning the three forts along the Bozeman Trail.

On the southern plains, a war in 1868–69 forced Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches to new reservations. The highlight of this conflict was the Battle of the Washita, 27 November 1868, in which Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer fell on the Cheyenne village of Black Kettle, who had survived Sand Creek but now died. In 1874, these tribes, discontented with reservation life, fled to the west. The Red River War of 1874–75, featuring operations by Col. Nelson A. Miles and Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie, ended warfare on the southern plains and along the Texas frontier.

On the northern plains, new tensions arose as railroads aimed for the Sioux country and gold was discovered in the Black Hills, part of the Sioux reservation. The Great Sioux War of 1876 resulted, as the army sought to force Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other chiefs to go to the reservation. Three columns converged on the Sioux hunting grounds under Brig. Gen. George Crook, Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry, and Col. John Gibbon. Riding with Terry was Custer and his Seventh Cavalry Regiment. On 25 June 1876, Custer attacked a great village of Sioux and Cheyennes on Montana's Little Bighorn River. He and the force under his immediate command, 212 men, were wiped out. The Custer disaster so stunned Americans that large armies took the field, and by the spring of 1877, most of the Sioux and Cheyennes had surrendered. Sitting Bull sought refuge in Canada, but gave up in 1881.

The Red River War and the Great Sioux War ended major warfare on the Great Plains, although fighting went on elsewhere in the West until the final surrender of the Apache Geronimo in 1886. One final bloodletting occurred at the Battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on 29 December 1890. This was hardly war, however, but rather a spiritual revival that blew up in unintended and unexpected violence. Wounded Knee was the last important encounter between U.S. soldiers and American Indians and coincided with the passing of the western frontier.

[See also Native American Wars.]

Bibliography

• Robert M. Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865, 1967.
• Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890, 1974

The wars between the Great Plains Indian tribes and the U.S. Army (1854-90), which grew out of the westward movement of Americans. Typically, the major wars with the Plains tribes followed treaties negotiated by government commissioners that bound the Indians to settle on a designated reservation. The Plains tribes that fought the U.S. most intensively were the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho on the northern plains and the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche on the southern plains. The U.S. Army maintained a system of forts and fielded heavy offensive columns; the Indians fought with hit-and-run tactics that exploited environmental factors and avoided open engagement. Though most fighting on the Great Plains ended by the 1880s, the end of the Plains Indians War was not finally signaled until the Battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.