The Plains Indian Wars, also known as the Sioux Wars, was a series of wars fought between the United States government and the Native American peoples of the Great Plains from the Dakota War of 1862 to the Ghost Dance War of 1890. Expansion west across the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast brought American settlers into conflict with Native American tribes who lived on the Great Plains; settler encroachment into their hunting grounds led to massacres and wars that would last until the end of the 19th century.
Background[]
The expansion of the United States westwards from its original Thirteen Colonies on the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River brought settlers into conflict with Native Americans. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 allowed for the forced expulsion of native tribes to the unsettled Indian Territory west ot the Mississippi River. Resistance from the Sauk and Fox tribes of Illinois and Wisconsin led to the Black Hawk War of 1832, and the Creeks of Georgia and Alabama were crushed in 1836. The Seminole of Florida were defeated in 1837, and the Cherokees were evicted during the winter of 1838-1839; on their "Trail of Tears" to the Indian Territory more than 4,000 lost their lives. By the 1860s, the land west of the Mississippi was itself being encroached on by the settlers.
History[]
The Great Plains west of the Mississippi River were peopled mainly by Sioux, Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho tribes, whose age-old way of life was disturbed when the settlers appeared in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But the settlers had legal backing; the US Congress had passed a series of bills that offered supposedly free or unowned land on the plains in return for minimal investment.
The first wars[]
Conflicts between tribes and settlers were inevitable, but war broke out in 1862 when bands of eastern Sioux, or Dakota, took up arms against settlers living along the Minnesota River. Sparked by the US government's failure to ratify its own treaty agreements (by which land was ceded by the Sioux in return for money and goods), the war lasted three months and led to the hanging of 38 Dakota on 26 December 1862 - the largest number of hangings in a single day in US history. The rest of the Dakota were expelled from Minnesota and sent to Nebraska and South Dakota, and their reservations were abolished by Congress.
The next major outbreak took place less than two years later, as the American Civil War was ending. Some 600 Cheyenne and Arapaho were camped on a bend of Sand Creek in Colorado, flying the American flag and a white flag of truce. Their chief, Black Kettle, had come to seek peace with the Americans after hostilities had flared between militant Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and white immigrants who had entered their lands in search of gold. He met with the Americans at Fort Lyon to ensure peace, but was later attacked in his camp by 700 Colorado militia led by Colonel John Chivington. Though Kettle himself survived, 150 Indians, many of them women and children, were killed in the attack.
The atrocity led to over a year of war in Colorado, the two sides using tactics that were replicated across the plains for nearly 40 years. Very often they fought on even terms; both sides largely fought on horseback, and the musket-rifles and pistols of the US troops regularly found their way into native hands. The Native Americans were skilled at guerrilla warfare and knew the land intimately, but Indians from hostile tribes often provided scouts and information to US troops. Tragically, each side also inflicted massacres and atrocities on the other.
The Bozeman Trail[]
At the same time as the Colorado War, a similar war was being fought in Montana, where the Bozeman Trail was established on Sioux lands in the early 1860s following the discovery of gold in the region. After numerous Sioux attacks on the trail, the US Army built three forts along its route. The Lakota Sioux leader, Red Cloud, attacked the forts, at one point holding a wagon train hostage on the trail. On 21 December 1866, Captain William Fetterman and 80 US cavalry rode to rescue the hostages but were lured off the trail and massacred. Two years later, Red Cloud became the first (and remained the only) Indian leader to sign a peace treaty with the US government as a victory. By the Treaty of Fort Laramie the white settlers were banned from using the Bozeman Trail and the US Army forts were abandoned. The Great Sioux Reservation was also established, encompassing all of modern "West River" South Dakota, including the Black Hills and parts of Nebraska.
Broken promises[]
The US government honored the treaty for just six years, until gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874. As gold miners and traders poured in, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors fought back under the leadership of chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The US government sent three armies to force the tribes back to their homes in the spring of 1876, one of which was defeated by the Lakota at the Battle of the Rosebud. On 25 June came the Sioux's finest hour; Lieutenant-Colonel George Armstrong Custer and 225 US cavalry attacked a Sioux camp by the Little Bighorn River, only to be surrounded by Crazy Horse's warriors and massacred. The Sioux victory was decisive, but short-lived; the arrival of increasing numbers of US troops forced them to surrender in 1881.
The end of the conflict[]
By the late 1880s, most tribes were settled on reservations and officially the war was over, but their suffering continued. Not only had they lost their traditional lands, but their means of subsistence had been destroyed by the slaughter of the buffalo, driven almost to extinction by the settlers' indiscriminate hunting. Furthermore, the Sioux reservation was now so small that it could no longer support the population. The half-starved Sioux turned to the mysticism and rites of the "Ghost Dance", a religious ceremony associated with the ending of white rule and the rebirth of the former world of the Sioux. Though the ceremony was banned, the Lakota of Pine Ridge and Rosebud performed it in October 1890, provoking the US government to send troops to arrest the leaders. While under arrest, Chief Sitting Bull was killed, provoking some 200 Sioux to leave their reservation. On the night of 28 December 1890, they surrendered quietly to the US 7th Cavalry Regiment at Wounded Knee Creek. The following morning, however, a scuffle broke out as the Sioux were being disarmed and a trooper was shot. The soldiers moved in with machine guns and massacred the largely unarmed Sioux. The war with the Sioux was finally over, leaving the white man master of the plains.
Aftermath[]
The removal of the Plains Indians to reservations from the 1860s onward precipitated a similar fate for Native Americans across the continent.
Gold was the cause of a war waged in 1877 between US troops and the Nez Perce peoples of Idaho. In 1863, their reservation was reduced to a quarter of its size to allow for mining, but after raids by both sides, their chief, Chief Joseph, decided in 1877 that their future lay in Canada. They trekked north for five months, but were encircled at Bear Paw Mountain, just 40 miles from the border. The two sides fought for five days, but the Nez Perce gave u p when they realized US reinforcements were on their way. They were banished to the Indian Territory.
Conflict also raged in the American Southwest. The Apache were gradually confined to reservations after 1870, but pressure from white settlers led the government to consolidate them in the arid San Carlos Reservation. One Apache chief, Geronimo, repeatedly borke out of the reservation, fleeing to Mexico and raiding settlements on both sides of the border, until he surrendered in 1886. Imprisoned in Florida and Alabama, he died in Fort Sill in the Indian Territory in 1909.
The Indian Territory changed soon after it was set up in the 1830s. It shrank in size in 1854 and again in 1890, and was finally abolished in 1907, when, as Oklahoma, it became the 46th state to join the Union. By then, almost all native tribes had signed treaties with the US government and moved into reservations. Some tribes received US citizenship from 1855, a right that was extended to all in the Indian Territory in 1901. Full US citizenship was granted in 1924 to all Native Americans born in the country.