Throughout the nineteenth century the linguistically and culturally related Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota, or Sioux, Indians spread throughout the northern Plains. Consolidating control of prime buffalo-grazing grasslands, the Lakota-speaking Teton Sioux controlled the region for more than a century. When the U.S. government claimed possession of Lakota territory in the mid-1800s, conflicts ensued. Initially, the Lakota and allied Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Shoshone groups entered into peace treaties with the government. At Fort Laramie in the Wyoming Territory, the government in 1851 negotiated the first Fort Laramie Treaty, which established mechanisms for annual payments to Indian groups for the safe passage of white settlers through Indian lands. Although white settlers heading to the Oregon Territory and later the Washington Territory passed through Lakota lands, in the early 1850s neither the U.S. government nor its citizens wanted to colonize those lands. Fearing that agreeing to any government treaties would result in permanent land losses, the Lakota refused to sign.
By the mid-1850s, Lakota groups increasingly came into conflict with growing numbers of white emigrants who disrupted buffalo migrations and damaged fragile river ecologies. In 1854, Lakota warriors fought and killed Lieutenant John L. Grattan and eighteen of his men at Fort Laramie. In revenge, General William S. Harney attacked a Brulé Lakota encampment near Ash Hollow, Nebraska, the following year, killing more than one hundred Lakota, including women and children.
At the beginning of the Civil War, regular U.S. Army troops were removed from western forts and replaced by territorial and state militia, many of whom held deep suspicions and hatred of Indians. In Minnesota, for example, after the defeat of the Dakota in September 1862 during the Sioux Uprising, Minnesota military leaders rounded up surrendered Dakota warriors and sentenced nearly 303 to death—a sizable percentage of the remaining Dakota male population. Eventually, only 38 were executed, but deep animosities endured as many remaining Dakota families migrated onto the Plains to join their Lakota kinsmen.
During the Civil War, Lakota dominance of the northern Plains continued. As more and more white emigrants poured into Montana following the discovery of gold, Lakota groups attacked them as well as forts along the Bozeman Trail, routinely defeating army units. Under the political and military leadership of Red Cloud, Lakota groups in 1865 beat federal troops at Platte Bridge, cutting off an important portion of the Bozeman.
With several thousand warriors under their command, Lakota leaders throughout the 1860s remained confident of their ability to control their homelands. In 1866, when army troops attempted to erect forts along the Bozeman, the Lakota again resisted, initiating a series of conflicts known as Red Cloud's War. The Lakota effectively halted efforts to fortify the Bozeman, destroying army outposts, including Captain William Fetterman's unit of nearly one hundred soldiers at Fort Phil Kearny in the Wyoming Territory in December 1866. Brilliantly orchestrated by the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse, Fetterman's unit was lured out of the fort and then destroyed along a narrow passage. After several army reprisals, Red Cloud and other Lakota leaders negotiated peace with the federal government, and in 1868, in the second Fort Laramie Treaty, the U.S. government agreed to abandon its forts along the Bozeman Trail and to establish protected Indian reservations within which no whites would be allowed to settle. The Lakota had fought the government to a standstill and extracted the provisions they demanded. Red Cloud vowed to honor the treaty and moved to the new Great Sioux Reservation that included all the lands west of the Missouri River in the Dakota Territory, including the sacred Black Hills.
In the 1870s, Crazy Horse and other Lakota leaders, including Sitting Bull, grew increasingly suspicious of the government's intentions, especially after federal troops in 1874 under Colonel George Armstrong Custer accompanied white prospectors into the Black Hills, in direct violation of the second Fort Laramie Treaty. After gold was discovered, whites rushed into the Lakota territories and a series of new conflicts erupted. In early 1876, government troops inconclusively fought Lakota and allied Cheyenne groups, and on 25 June 1876, a combined Lakota-Cheyenne force entirely destroyed Custer's twelve
companies of the Seventh Cavalry along the Little Big-horn River in Montana. As news spread of Custer's defeat, the government resolved to pursue and punish remaining Lakota groups, and in January 1877, Crazy Horse and his Oglala Lakota surrendered to General Nelson Miles in Canada, where they had sought refuge.
The last military conflict of the Sioux Wars came more than a decade later. In 1890, after years of reservation confinement, members of Big Foot's Hunkpapa band attempted to flee the reservation after learning of Sitting Bull's assassination. Pursued to the creek of Wounded Knee, Big Foot and his band were massacred in December 1890. The Wounded Knee massacre marked the end of Lakota efforts to live entirely independent of the federal government. The Lakota wars, however, continue politically and culturally as Lakota communities demand redress for the unconstitutional violations of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.
Bibliography
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1971.
Hedren, Paul L., ed. The Great Sioux War, 1867–77. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1991.
Utley, Robert M. Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846– 1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.
