The Great Plains Tribes Section B -Displacement (original) (raw)

The introduction of the horse by the Spaniards and of guns by the French in the fur trade created a rivalry between Great Plains tribes over hunting territories resulting in the displacement of some tribes by other tribes. These rivalries continued with the displacement caused by the American expansion onto the Great Plains in which some tribes, such as the Shoshone, Pawnees, and Crows, sided with the Americans against their historical tribal enemies. In 1851 the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Sioux, Crows, and other Great Plains tribes came to Fort Laramie on the North Platte River in Wyoming today and agreed to allow Americans to build roads and military posts in their territory. Red Cloud of the Ogallala Dakota signed a treaty of Fort Laramie allowing for White people to travel across Dakota territory on their way to California, where gold had been discovered. The Dakota were promised that they would receive in return presents for the next 55 years. But White settlers infringed upon the Dakota reservation lands, annuity payments were late or never received, and the Indian agents and traders were often corrupt. When in 1858 gold was discovered at Pike’s Peak, thousands of White miners began to come into this region. In 1859 they built a village named Denver City on the Plains at the base of the Rocky Mountains in present-day Colorado. Lands on the Platte River Valley that had been assigned to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapahos by the Fort Laramie Treaty began to fill up with settlers. In February 1861 U.S. officials invited the chiefs of the Cheyennes and Arapahos to Fort Wise on the Arkansas River to discuss a new treaty. The Cheyennes and Arapahos understood that under the treaty they would retain their land rights and freedom of movement to hunt buffalo, but they would live within a triangular territory bounded by the Sand Creek and the Arkansas River. The Santee Sioux were originally woodlands Indians, who were confined to a narrow strip along the Minnesota River as the result of two treaties under which the surrendered nine-tenths of their original homeland. In May 1863, 770 Santees were put on a steamboat to be relocated to a reservation at Crow Creek on the Missouri River in the Dakota Territory. Governor Evans of the Colorado Territory created the 3rd Colorado Cavalry Regiment under Colonel John Chivington to protect Denver and the Platte River Road. Chivington was a Methodist pastor, but despite his religious background, Chivington was anti-Indian. Colorado Volunteers based in Denver attacked some Cheyennes on the South Platte River even though they had no authority to operate in Kansas. In November 1864, Chivington’s Colorado regiments attacked the Cheyenne and Arapaho camps on the bend of Sand Creek. Gold was discovered in Montana during the Civil War. After the war, the Oregon and California Trail crossed the hunting grounds of the western Lakotas. In August 1866, Colonel Henry B. Carrington sent his men to build a fort on the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud moved to the headwaters of the Tongue River in easy striking distance of Fort Phil Kearny. In late December Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos warriors camped north of Fort Phil Kearny, and they and sent several young warriors, including Crazy Horse, as decoys. The decoys attacked a party of woodcutters, and Captain William J. Fetterman led a party of cavalry and infantry to rescue them. The decoys led them into the trap set by the Indians. In the spring of 1866 several Southern Cheyennes went south for the summer to hunt buffalo along the Smoky Hill. A peace commission convened a council in early October at Medicine Lodge Creek. There were more than 4,000 Indians, mostly Kiowa, Comanches, and Arapaho with few Cheyennes. The Medicine Lodge Treaty stated that the Indians had the right to hunt on any lands south of the Arkansas River “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers to justify the chase.” Over the winter of 1867-68 the Cheyennes and Arapahos received no arms or annuities while Congress debated the treaty in Washington. A second Fort Laramie treaty in May 1868, was signed only by the Mountain Crow chiefs. Under it they relinquished all their lands and accepted a permanent reservation from the 107th meridian west to about the Yellowstone Park and north and west to the Yellowstone River and the Wyoming line to the south. The posts on the Bozeman Road were abandoned in the summer of 1868, and as soon as the troops left that Lakotas burned them down. Red Cloud came to Fort Laramie in 1868 with a hundred other chiefs, some of whom signed the treaty. Red Cloud initially refused to sign the treaty. He finally agreed, but he cautioned that it might be difficult to control all the young warriors. When Ulysses S. Grant became president in 1869, his Commissioner of Indian Affairs, a Seneca Indian named Ely S. Parker, invited Red Cloud and other chiefs to Washington, where the learned that the 1868 treaty stated a an agency for the Teton Sioux would be established at a place on the Missouri River, not at Fort Laramie.