The Black Hills War, also known as the Great Sioux War, was a major armed conflict of the Plains Indian Wars which was fought between the United States and the Native American Sioux tribes from 1876 to 1877. The Sioux and Cheyenne tribes refused to cede their lands in the Black Hills to the United States amid a gold rush which led to significant white encroachment into indigenous lands, leading to a war which climaxed at the famous Battle of the Little Bighorn and ended at the Battle of Wolf Mountain.
Background[]
The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie between the United States and the Sioux tribes set aside a portion of Lakota territory as the "Great Sioux Reservation", including the western half of South Dakota and the sacred Black Hills. The Lakota and Cheyenne were also granted their own "unceded lands" in Wyoming and Montana for use as hunting grounds; apart from US government officials, white men were forbidden to trespass on Native American land. However, white interest in the Black Hills grew because of its wealth in timber, and, in 1874, George Armstrong Custer's US Army expedition to the Black Hills discovered gold. Prospectors motivated by the Panic of 1873 began to trickle into the Black Hills, violating the 1868 treaty, and thousands of miners invaded the Black Hills from as far as New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia in the "Black Hills Gold Rush" of 1874-1877. The US Army's patrols evicted several of the white settlers, but President Ulysses S. Grant was eventually faced with mounting political pressure to secure the Black Hills from the Lakota. In May 1875, the Sioux leaders Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, and Lone Horn travelled to Washington DC to beseech Grant to honor the 1868 treaty. They were offered the Sioux tribes $25,000 to relocate to the Indian Territory, but Spotted Tail said that he wanted nothing to do with a country that was not his, and opined that, if the land in Oklahoma was such a good country, the white settlers should migrate there instead. The peace talks failed, and tensions escalated further when the government decided to build the Northern Pacific Railroad through the last of the great buffalo hunting grounds.
War[]
In November 1875, Lieutenant-General Philip Sheridan and Brigadier-General George Crook met with President Grant, and the three agreed to stop evicting trespassers from the Sioux reservation. Grant also decided to hold a council to discuss relocation with the Native tribes, and the generals decided to forcibly remove the tribes who rejected relocation. The United States government decreed that, if the Lakota and Sioux did not return to their reservation by 31 January 1876, they would potentially face military action. After the deadline passed, Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler informed the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Q. Smith, that the War Department would be given the liberty to deal with the Natives as it saw fit. On 8 February 1876, Sheridan ordered Generals George Crook and Alfred Terry to launch winter campaigns against the "hostiles".
On 17 March 1876, Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds launched an attack on a Cheyenne village of 65 lodges in the Battle of Powder River, burning the village before retreating under enemy fire. This early defeat ended the US government's first campaign; in the late spring of 1876, a second campaign was launched, with Terry leading 570 troops (including all twelve companies of George Armstrong Custer's US 7th Cavalry Regiment) to the Dakotas, Colonel John Gibbon leading a column to Montana, and General Crook leading a third column north to help pin the Natives down. On 17 June, Crook's advance was checked at the Battle of the Rosebud, and he remained in camp for several weeks to await reinforcements. Meanwhile, Custer and the 7th Cavalry were detached from the main column to scout out the Rosebud and Big Horn river valleys, and, on 25 June 1876, his command was surrounded and annihilated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Gibbon's command was unable to engage the Sioux and Cheyenne as they withdrew from the Little Bighorn, but, on 9 September 1876, Terry's command attacked and looted the Sioux village at Slim Buttes. The Army, learning from the disaster at Little Bighorn, sent more troops to the Indian agencies, and they seized horses and weapons belonging to friendly Native bands, lest they fall into enemy hands.
In October 1876, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie led a cavalry expedition to the Powder River, defeating the Cheyenne at the Dull Knife Fight on 25 November 1876. The Cheyenne tribe's lodges and supplies were destroyed, forcing them to surrender, and they were then compelled to relocate to the Indian Territory. Faced with starvation in Oklahoma, a portion of the Cheyenne embarked on an exodus to the north in 1877, resulting in the Fort Robinson massacre. Meanwhile, Colonel Nelson A. Miles was sent into the Lakota heartland, defeating the Sioux chief Crazy Horse at the Battle of Wolf Mountain in January 1877. His forces pursued the Cheyenne and Lakota until they either surrendered or escaped to Canada, and, on 28 February 1877, the Agreement of 1877 took away Sioux land and permanently established reservations. On 13 April, Crazy Horse himself surrendered, only to be bayonetted to death after being placed under surprise house arrest on 4 September 1877.