The Great Sioux War of 1876, also known as the Black Hills War, was a series of battles and negotiations that occurred in 1876 and 1877 in an alliance of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne against the United States. The cause of the war was the desire of the US government to obtain ownership of the Black Hills. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, settlers began to encroach onto Native American lands, and the Sioux and the Cheyenne refused to cede ownership. Traditionally, American military and historians place the Lakota at the center of the story, especially because of their numbers, but some Native Americans believe the Cheyenne were the primary target of the American campaign.
Among the many battles and skirmishes of the war was the Battle of the Little Bighorn – often known as Custer's Last Stand and the most storied of the many encounters between the US Army and mounted Plains Indians. Despite the Indian victory, the Americans leveraged national resources to force the Indians to surrender, primarily by attacking and destroying their encampments and property. The Great Sioux War took place under US Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes. The Agreement of 1877 (19 Stat. 254, enacted February 28, 1877) officially annexed Sioux land and permanently established Indian reservations.
Background
The Cheyenne had migrated west to the Black Hills and Powder River Country before the Lakota and introduced them to horse culture about 1730. By the late 18th century, the growing Lakota tribe had begun expanding its territory west of the Missouri River. They pushed out the Kiowa and formed alliances with the Cheyenne and Arapaho to gain control of the rich buffalo hunting grounds of the northern Great Plains. The Black Hills, located in present-day western South Dakota, became an important source to the Lakota for lodge poles, plant resources and small game.
By the early 19th century, the Northern Cheyenne became the first to wage tribal-level warfare. Because European Americans used many different names for the Cheyenne, the military may not have realized their unity. The US Army destroyed seven Cheyenne camps before 1876 and three more that year, more than any other tribes suffered in this period. From 1860 on, the Cheyenne were a major force in warfare on the Plains. "No other group on the plains achieved such centralized tribal organization and authority." The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, signed with the US by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne leaders following Red Cloud's War, set aside a portion of the Lakota territory as the Great Sioux Reservation. This comprised the western one-half of South Dakota, including the Black Hills region for their exclusive use. It also provided for a large "unceded territory" in Wyoming and Montana, the Powder River Country, as Cheyenne and Lakota hunting grounds. On both the reservation and the unceded territory, white men were forbidden to trespass, except for officials of the U.S. government.
The growing number of miners and settlers encroaching in the Dakota Territory, however, rapidly nullified the protections. The US government could not keep settlers out. By 1872, territorial officials were considering harvesting the rich timber resources of the Black Hills, to be floated down the Cheyenne River to the Missouri, where new plains settlements needed lumber. The geographic uplift area suggested the potential for mineral resources. When a commission approached the Red Cloud Agency about the possibility of the Lakota's signing away the Black Hills, Colonel John E. Smith noted that this was "the only portion [of their reservation] worth anything to them". He concluded that "nothing short of their annihilation will get it from them".
As a result, Cheyenne and Lakota began moving west into land belonging to smaller tribes. Most battles in the coming war would be fought "on lands those Indians had taken from other tribes since 1851". The resulting effect was resistance to the Lakotas from the local Crow tribe, which had treaty on the area. Already in 1873, Crow chief Blackfoot had called for U.S. military actions against the Indian intruders. The steady Lakota invasion into treaty areas belonging to the smaller tribes guaranteed that the United States would find allies in the Arikaras and the Crows who saw the Cheyenne and Lakotas as trespassers.]
In 1874, the government dispatched the Custer Expedition to examine the Black Hills. The Lakota were alarmed at his expedition. Before Custer's column had returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln, news of their discovery of gold was telegraphed nationally. The presence of valuable mineral resources was confirmed the following year by the Newton–Jenney Geological Expedition. Prospectors, motivated by the economic panic of 1873, began to trickle into the Black Hills in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty. This trickle turned into a flood as thousands of miners invaded the Hills before the gold rush was over. Organized groups came from states as far away as New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Initially, the United States Army struggled to keep miners out of the region. In December 1874, for example, a group of miners led by John Gordon from Sioux City, Iowa, managed to evade Army patrols and reached the Black Hills, where they spent three months before the Army ejected them. Such evictions, however, increased political pressure on the Grant Administration to secure the Black Hills from the Lakota.
In May 1875, Sioux delegations headed by Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, and Lone Horn traveled to Washington, D.C. in an eleventh-hour attempt to persuade President Ulysses S. Grant to honor existing treaties and stem the flow of miners into their territories. They met with Grant, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward Smith. The US leaders said that the Congress wanted to pay the tribes $25,000 for the land and have them relocate to Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma). The delegates refused to sign a new treaty with these stipulations. Spotted Tail said, "You speak of another country, but it is not my country; it does not concern me, and I want nothing to do with it. I was not born there ... If it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there and let us alone." Although the chiefs were unsuccessful in finding a peaceful solution, they did not join Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull in the warfare that followed.
Later that year, a US commission was sent to each of the Indian agencies to hold councils with the Lakota. They hoped to gain the people's approval and thereby bring pressure on the Lakota leaders to sign a new treaty. The government's attempt to secure the Black Hills failed. While the Black Hills were at the center of the growing crisis, Lakota resentment was growing over expanding US interests in other portions of Lakota territory. For instance, the government proposed that the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad would cross through the last of the great buffalo hunting grounds. In addition, the US Army had carried out several devastating attacks on Cheyenne camps before 1876.
Combatants
The number of Indian combatants in the war is disputed with estimates ranging from 900 up to 4,000 warriors. The seven bands of the Lakota Sioux in the 1870s numbered perhaps 15,000 men, women, and children, but most of them were living on the Great Sioux Reservation and were noncombatants. An Indian agent in November 1875 said the Indians living in the unceded areas numbered "a few hundred warriors." General Crook estimated that he might face up to 2,000 warriors. Most of the Sioux who remained in the unceded territory where the war would take place were Oglala and Hunkpapa, numbering about 5,500 in total. Added to this were about 1,500 Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho for a total hostile Indian population of about 7,000, which might include as many as 2,000 warriors. The number of warriors participating in the Battle of the Little Bighorn is estimated at between 900 and 2,000.
The Indians had advantages in mobility and knowledge of the country, but all Indians were part-time warriors. In spring, they were partially immobilized by the weakness of their horses which had survived the long winter on limited forage. Much of summer and fall they spent hunting buffalo to feed their families. About one half of the Indian warriors were armed with guns, ranging from repeating rifles to antiquated muskets, and one half with bows and arrows. The short, stout Indian bow was designed to be used from horseback and was deadly at short range, but nearly worthless against a distant or well-fortified enemy. Ammunition was in short supply. Indian warriors had traditionally fought for individual prestige, rather than strategic objectives, although Crazy Horse seems to have instilled in the Sioux some sense of collective endeavor. The Cheyenne were the most centralized and best organized of the Plains Indians. The Sioux and Cheyenne were also at war with their long-time enemies, the Crow and Shoshone, which drained off many of their resources.
To combat the Sioux, the U.S. army established a string of forts ringing the Great Sioux Reservation and unceded territory. The largest force arrayed against the Indians at one time was in summer 1876 and consisted of 2,500 soldiers deployed in the unceded territory and accompanied by hundreds of Indian scouts and civilians. Many of the soldiers were recent immigrants and inexperienced on the frontier and in Indian warfare. Cavalry soldiers were armed with .45 caliber, single-action revolvers and the Springfield model 1873, a single-shot, breech-loading rifle which gave the soldiers a large advantage in range over most Indian firearms.
Launching the war
Grant and his administration began to consider alternatives to the failed diplomatic venture. In early November 1875, Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Division of the Missouri, and Brigadier General George Crook, commander of the Department of the Platte, were called to Washington, D.C. to meet with Grant and several members of his cabinet to discuss the Black Hills issue. They agreed that the Army should stop evicting trespassers from the reservation, thus opening the way for the Black Hills Gold Rush. In addition, they discussed initiating military action against the bands of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne who had refused to come to the Indian agencies for council. Indian Inspector Erwin C. Watkins supported this option. "The true policy in my judgement," he wrote, "is to send troops against them in the winter, the sooner the better, and whip them into subjection."
Concerned about launching a war against the Lakota without provocation, the government instructed Indian agents in the region to notify all Lakota and Sioux to return to the reservation by January 31, 1876, or face potential military action. The US agent at Standing Rock Agency expressed concern that this was insufficient time for the Lakota to respond, as deep winter restricted travel. His request to extend the deadline was denied. General Sheridan considered the notification exercise a waste of time. "The matter of notifying the Indians to come in is perhaps well to put on paper," he commented, "but it will in all probability be regarded as a good joke by the Indians."
Meanwhile, in the council lodges of the non-treaty bands, Lakota leaders seriously discussed the notification for return. Short Bull, a member of the Soreback Band of the Oglala, later recalled that many of the bands had gathered on the Tongue River. "About one hundred men went out from the agency to coax the hostiles to come in under pretense that the trouble about the Black Hills was to be settled," he said. "...All the hostiles agreed that since it was late [in the season] and they had to shoot for tipis [i.e., hunt buffalo] they would come in to the agency the following spring."
As the deadline of January 31 passed, the new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Q. Smith, wrote that "without the receipt of any news of Sitting Bull's submission, I see no reason why, in the discretion of the Hon. the Secretary of War, military operations against him should not commence at once." His superior, Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler agreed, adding that "the said Indians are hereby turned over to the War Department for such action on the part of the Army as you may deem proper under the circumstances." On February 8, 1876, General Sheridan telegraphed Generals Crook and Terry, ordering them to commence their winter campaigns against the "hostiles", thus starting The Great Sioux War of 1876–77.