Thursday, October 9, 2025

Join our email blast

Morain

10/09/25

10/9/2025

Kathy and I returned last Friday from three days in the Black Hills, communing with two of my graduate school former housemates and their spouses. It’s a reunion that takes place somewhere in the U.S. on an irregular basis, always enjoyable and nostalgic. Both housemates are professors emeriti, one from the West Coast and the other from the East Coast, and neither had ever been to the Black Hills, so Kathy and I served as tour directors. Memorable occasion.

The Black Hills throb with Native American ambience. It was impossible for us American historians not to discuss the late 19th Century tension, warfare, and eventual subjugation of the Plains indigenous tribes during our all-too-brief reunion. The Black Hills are the very heart of the Lakota people’s homeland, and even though a rapid influx of U.S. settlers and miners imposed white culture on top of the native tribes starting in the 1870s, evidence of Lakota history remains ever-present throughout the area.

(Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota are the names used by the three subdivisions of what white America calls the Sioux Nation. The Dakota group comprises the eastern division, and the Lakota the western division. The Nakota split off from the main Sioux body about four centuries ago and moved further west and north into what are now Montana and southern Canada, becoming known as the Assiniboine people.)

(Side note: it’s intriguing how many American place names commemorate or are drawn from languages of peoples subjugated by American western expansion. Many states, especially west of the Appalachian mountains, fit that category, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah.)

The Lakota experience typifies the fate of hundreds of tribes across what became the continental United States. The Lakota had moved westward onto the Great Plains many years before their contact with whites, adapted to a horse culture, and together with the Cheyenne grew to dominate a large portion of the northern Great Plains. They fought tribes that lived there prior to the Lakota, like the Crow, for the region’s rich hunting grounds.

CNA - Stop HIV (October 2025)CNA - Alcohol/Cancer (October 2025)

Whites encroached onto Lakota land during and after the Civil War, prompting skirmishes and more deadly fighting between whites and Lakotas. Continuing battles resulted in the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, under which the tribes gave up claims to many thousands of acres they were promised in earlier treaties and agreed to relocate to the Black Hills. They retained hunting and fishing rights in their older territory east of the Missouri River.

In return, the U.S. government created the Great Sioux Reservation, comprising much of the western half of what is now South Dakota, including the Black Hills, sacred to the Lakota. The tribes agreed not to attack railroads or settlers.

But in 1874, an exploratory expedition into the Black Hills, led by General George Custer, discovered gold. Word spread rapidly, and soon miners were moving onto the hunting grounds in violation of the 1868 treaty, demanding Army protection. 

The Lakota and Cheyenne resisted the white encroachment, and clashes broke out once again. In 1875 the U.S. government ordered all Lakota and Cheyenne to move onto reservations by January 1876. The tribes didn’t do so, and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs turned enforcement over to the military. 

In June 1876 a Seventh Cavalry detachment numbering a few hundred men, led by Custer, encountered a large Sioux and Cheyenne camp at the Little Bighorn River. Some 1,200 to 1,500 warriors annihilated the detachment, including General Custer.

Outraged Americans demanded retaliation. Consequently the U.S. government declared the Treaty of Fort Laramie null and void. Overwhelming Army forces moved in, and within a year most of the tribal members were on reservations. And the United States of America took possession of the Black Hills.

In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the U.S. had wronged the Lakota by seizing the Black Hills, and the government set aside $103 million in trust for compensation. But the Lakota to this day refuse to take the payment, which has grown to well over $1 billion today.

They don’t want the money. They want the Black Hills.

A sad, final episode of violence against the Lakota took place in late December 1890 at a tribal camp near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, southeast of the Black Hills. A religious movement called the Ghost Dance had spread among many Western tribes, and settlers feared the movement would morph into tribal violence against whites.

A military detachment set out to bring in several hundred Lakotas to a reservation headquarters. When the soldiers tried to disarm the group, violence broke out, and the upshot was the massacre of 200 to 300 Lakota men, women, and children. Troopers pursued fleeing women and children for miles to kill them. Dozens of the traumatized survivors, many of them wounded, froze to death in a brutal blizzard that lasted for three days immediately after the massacre. 

The U.S. government awarded 20 of the troopers the Medal of Honor following the event. Subsequent attempts to revoke the awards have never succeeded. Just two weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared that the awards would not be revoked, calling the recipients “brave soldiers” and declaring, “We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals” and “their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”

The most appropriate valedictory statement to America’s “Indian Wars” came from Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe, who tried to preserve his people’s independence by leading 750 men, women, and children, including fewer than 200 fighters, on a four-month, 1,400-mile flight from 2,000 pursuing Army troops across Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana in 1877.

Joseph and his group’s skill and courage deeply impressed the Army leaders. One of them called the tribal group “the finest light cavalry in the world.” 

Joseph tried to reach Canada, but just 40 miles from the border, starving and encircled, he surrendered his people. His statement to General Nelson Miles (repeated here in part) echoes down the years:

“The old men are all dead. He who led the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

Post a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

House - Rack Locations