"Black Hills and Bloodshed: The U.S. Army and the Invasion of Lakota Land" (original) (raw)
1998
For more than twenty years, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument has generated more controversy than any other unit administered by the National Park Service. Amateur historians belonging to the Little Big Horn Associates-angry because their overpriced, vanity press books were not sold in the park bookstore-had the staff investigated for alleged anti-Custer bias. At the same time, increasingly belligerent Native American activists protested that the site of their ancestors\u27 greatest victory was being run as a shrine to the frontier military. In 1988, Russell Means and other militants from the American Indian Movement stormed onto the battlefield and desecrated the granite monument marking the mass grave of the troopers who fell with George Armstrong Custer on 25 June 1876. Fearful of provoking violence, park officials failed either to stop or prosecute Means. Indeed, the National Park Service eventually moved to mollify its Indian critics by instituting interpretive p...
1998
Few western figures have received the attention George Armstrong Custer has. Since his death in 1876, his name and fame have alternately been attacked and defended by writers. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, Louis Kraft\u27s recent monograph falls into the latter camp. As Volume Five of the Custer Trail Series, Custer and the Cheyennes incorporates alternating points-of-view of both whites and natives, using extensive quotes to let the actors speak for themselves. In this manner, Kraft presents a chronological narrative of Custer\u27s frontier beginnings on the Southern Plains of Kansas, Texas, and Indian Territory (Oklahoma) against the Tsistsistas (Southern Cheyennes). In addition to containing informative footnotes and bibliography, the book is handsomely designed with photos, art work, and maps. The price, however, may deter all but the most ardent Custerophiles. Kraft centers his discussion on General Philip Sheridan\u27s use of total warfare against Indian na...
The Great Plains Tribes Section C -Displacement (Continued)
There were two theaters to the war against the Plains Indians. One was along the Platte River in Kansas and the Red River on the border between Oklahoma and Texas. In both theaters there was a division between the Pawnees, Crows, Shoshonis, and Arikaras, who served as scouts for the U.S. Army, and their traditional enemies the Lakotas, Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches who fought against the Army. The senior leadership of the army, including William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan, George Armstrong Custer, and Nelson A. Miles, were all veterans of the Civil War. However, the Army after 1870 consisted mainly of German and Irish immigrants. In December 1868, General Sheridan ordered all Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches to come to Fort Cobb, Oklahoma. The Comanche leader Tosawi, the Cheyenne leader Black Kettle, and the Arapaho leader Yellow Bear all complied with the order, but the Kiowas did not. Sheridan sent Lieutenant Colonel Custer after them. He confronted them at their winter camp on Rainy Mountain Creek. The Kiowa chief Satanta and Lone Wolf with an escort of warriors came out to talk with Custer. Instead of negotiating, Custer arrested Satanta, Lone Wolf, and the escort party. In the spring of 1869, the Comanches and Kiowas were sent to Fort Sill, and the Cheyennes and Arapahos were sent to a reservation around Camp Supply. The Indian agent at Fort Sill, Lawrie Tatum, forced them to become farmers. 2,000 Kiowas and 2,500 Comanches were settled on the reservation. During the autumn Black Kettle moved his people to the Washita River. When in November he heard rumors that soldiers were coming his way, Black Kettle, Little Robe, and two Arapaho leaders traveled to Fort Cobb, which was the headquarters for their near agency south of the Arkansas River. When in November the soldiers approached his village, Black Kettle went out to meet them at the Washita Ford. However, the soldiers including Custer’s 7th Cavalry launched an attack. Black Kettle and his wife were killed in the attack. In May 1870, Eli S. Parker, a Seneca Indian whom President Ulysses S. Grant appointed as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, invited Red Cloud and 15 Oglalas to come to Washington, DC. The chiefs met with President Grant, and Red Cloud told the President that the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty gave them the right to trade at Fort Laramie and have an agency on the Platte River. The next morning Secretary of Interior read to them the terms of the treaty that made no mention of Fort Laramie or the Platte River and instead stated that the Sioux agency would be established “at some place on the Missouri.” Red Cloud claimed that this was the first time he had heard about this condition and that he had been lied to. The war against the Comanches and Kiowas continued into the autumn as Miles and Ranald Mackenzie accompanied advanced onto the Llano Estacado, a high plateau in the Texas Panhandle. In September 1874, five columns of American soldiers converged on Palo Duro Canyon. As winter came, the Comanches and Kiowas surrendered, except for one band of Quahadhi Comanches under Quannah Parker, who held out until the spring of 1875. Eventually Parker surrendered and led the Kwahadi to the reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Later in life he became a wealthy cattle rancher, and he was appointed by the federal government as the principal chief of the entire Comanche nation. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had refused to sign the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, which established a Lakota reservation. The arrival of gold hunters provoked them into open warfare. In the summer of 1875 Sitting Bull joined the Cheyenne in a Sun Dance, which resulted in an alliance of the two tribes. When the government ordered all Lakotas to go to the reservation established for them, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse ignored the order. Shortly after Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and their Teton people settled on their reservation in northwestern Nebraska, rumors began to spread about the discovery of Gold in the Black Hills. In 1874 George Armstrong Custer, who had participated in the slaughter of Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyennes on the Washita in 1868, was sent into the Black Hills to report on the situation. In December 1875, Commissioner of Indian Affairs ordered all off reservation Indians Sioux and Cheyenne to report to their agencies. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse replied that they wouldn’t come until the spring. A mixed band of Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Sioux left the Red Cloud agency to go to the Powder River country. On February 7, 1876, the War Department authorized General Sheridan to commence operations against “hostile” Sioux. In May George Crook and a force of more than a thousand left Fort Fetterman for Fort Reno, where he was to rendezvous with at least 200 Crow and Shoshone allies. In July Custer departed Fort Abraham Lincoln with a party of mostly Arikara scouts. The chiefs decided to move to the valley of the Little Big Horn River to the west. On June 15 Custer’s forces on the Rosebud crossed the ridge between the Rosebud and the Little Big Horn. Custer divided his forces and sent Major Marcus Reno to the south to attack the Hunkpapa camp. The Indians were able to turn back Reno’s attack. This enabled the Indians to make a frontal attack on Custer’s column in which Custer and his entire force were wiped out. By the spring of 1877 most of the Lakotas, including Crazy Horse, had surrendered. But Sitting Bull led a small band into Canada. The Canadian government did not consider his people to be Canadian Indians. Finally, in 1881, Sitting Bull crossed the border and was arrested as a military prisoner. By 1883 he was released from prison and transferred to the Hunkpapa Agency at Standing Rock. When he learned that the Lakota might be sent to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma, Crazy Horse left the reservation. He was captured and placed in the guard house at Fort Robinson, where in a struggle with one of the guards, he was killed in September 1877. Crazy Horse spend nine years after his surrender on the Lakota reservation. In 1890 a millenarian cult known as the Ghost Dance spread from a Paiute messiah. Informants said that Crazy Horse was preparing to leave the reservation, and Nelson Miles, sent an order to arrest him. Crazy Horse surrendered to the Indian police without a fight, but as they exited the tent, a fight erupted and Crazy Horse was killed. In December hundreds of Lakota Sioux left the Standing Rock reservation for a Ghost Dance. They were intercepted by troops of the 7th Cavalry under Major Samuel Whiteside, who took them at a cavalry camp on the Wounded Knee Creek. In an effort to disarm them, a fight broke out in which nearly 300 Lakota men, women, and killed were killed in what became known as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Today, the Lakota Sioux live in five reservations in western South Dakota: the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala, the Rosebud and Lower Brulé reservations of the Brulé, the Cheyenne River Reservation of several other Lakota bands, and the Standing Rock Reservation of the Hunkpapa and other bands. Under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 tribe is entitled to elect their own leaders, but many traditionalist Oglalas did not support the new form of government. The issue came to a head in the early 1970s, when younger members joined the American Indian Movement (AIM). This led to an armed stand-off between the FBI, federal marshals, and AIM in the hamlet of Wounded Knee in which one marshal was wounded and two Indians were killed.