Background: Between 1851 and 1890, the United States government waged a relentless assault on native peoples west of the Mississippi. As a booming national population pushed American settlement further and further west, Andrew Jackson s talk of Indians living beyond the reach of injury or oppression became yet another empty white promise. In 1851, the Treaty of Fort Laramie created artificial boundaries, which laid the foundations for future reservations, to restrict northern Great Plains tribes to limited territories. In 1867, the Treaty of Medicine Lodge carved up the ancestral homelands of southern Plains tribes to create small reservations to separate, supervise, and civilize Indians, and the U. S. Army launched a series of campaigns to round up tribes who refused to move to the reservations. Meanwhile, American settlers, encouraged by the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, filled in the spaces of native land that the U. S. government deemed the Indians no longer needed. As American settlement spread, white trophy hunters (who were encouraged by the U. S. Army and Bureau of Indian Affairs) decimated the staple diet of Plains tribes: American bison, whose numbers would plummet from 15 million in 1865 to less than a thousand by 1895. Without a food supply, Indians faced an ugly ultimatum: freedom and starvation, while being hunted by the army on the Plains, or confinement and the evils of the American dole, while being monitored on a reservation. By 1871, the U. S. Congress declared that Indians should be treated as wards of the state not independent nations and declared an end to treaty-making. As Sioux Chief Red Cloud had groaned a year earlier, Indians were, indeed, melting like snow on the hillside, while Americans were grown like spring grass. By 1879, schools to reform Indian children into productive American citizens, such as Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, attempted to engineer assimilable native children by forcing them away at gunpoint from their Indian family and friends, who were seen as contaminating influences. At two dozen off-reservation boarding schools (as well as at many on-reservation academies, all paid for by the U. S. government at the cost of $3 million by 1900), white reformers tried to kill the Indian and save the man and harshly penalized native parents, even withholding food rations and annuities, if they objected. In 1887, in a reversal of almost fifty years of Indian policy, the U. S. Congress attempted to promote increased assimilation by passing the Dawes Severalty Act, which tried to force most western Indians to become private land owners and farmers in the white man s image by abolishing reservations, allotting parcels of land to individual Indians as private property, and offering whites surplus land from former reservation territories. If Indians abandoned their native ways and became civilized, they would be rewarded with U. S. citizenship. The law remained in force until 1934, by which time the act had resulted in the loss of millions of acres of once-promised reservation lands. In 1889, the U. S. government opened unassigned lands in Indian Territory to white settlers, and, one year later, Oklahoma Territory was organized out of the western half of Indian Territory, which further diminished once-pledged tribal holdings. Americans had made white settlement of the West a zero-sum game: an increase for one side could come only at a decrease for the other. Coexistence was not an option, and the dominant civilization set the terms, which accounted for the all-time low in American Indian population less than 250,000 by 1890.
Between 1851 and 1890, however, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, native peoples did not go gently into that awful night, and, through a series of wars fought against the U. S. Army, they raged and raged against the dying of the light. Following the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851), native raiding parties attacked wagon trains and stagecoaches and targeted isolated ranches and farms in a desperate attempt to defend their homelands and families against American expansion and its attendant concentrated confinement on the reservations of the northern Plains. In return, American military forces exacted blind and savage retribution, such as when Colonel J. M. Chivington s troops violated the territorial governor s promise of protection and massacred a peaceful camp of 270 Arapaho and Cheyenne, mostly women and children, at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory, in 1864. Two years earlier, after the U. S. government had failed to deliver promised annuities to the Sioux in Minnesota and had told them to just eat grass, Chief Little Crow had led an uprising that had killed more than one thousand settlers. The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862, as the event was called, resulted in the largest public hanging in American history. Four years later, when the U. S. Army attempted to build a road (the Bozeman Trail) through Sioux lands between Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and the gold fields of Montana, Chief Red Cloud s warriors fought the army to a standstill and annihilated Captain William Fetterman s entire command in December 1866: a victory that caused the U. S. government to abandon the trail and General William Tecumseh Sherman to exclaim, We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children. White settlers responded to Sherman s challenge by waging their own vigilante warfare a practice they called Indian hunting against neighboring tribes. In 1874 in violation of a second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which had guaranteed the sacred Black Hills to the Sioux as part of their Great Sioux Reservation Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills region of South Dakota and verified reports of gold. By 1876, white prospectors flooded the region, the Sioux refused to sell their land, and the U. S. Army began a three-pronged invasion to pacify the incensed warriors and take it anyway. Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull led the Sioux resistance forces, which won victories in Montana at the Battle of the Rosebud (against General George Crook) and the Battle of the Little Big Horn (against Custer s Seventh Cavalry) in June before surrendering to superior troops and watching helplessly as Congress took the Black Hills and extinguished all Sioux rights outside the newly defined reservation territories, where both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull would meet death at the hands of reservation police. In 1877, Chief Joseph s Nez Percé of Oregon made a desperate 1,500-mile dash for freedom in Canada before being hunted down by the U. S. Army and stopped at the Battle of Bear Paw Mountain, just shy of the border. In the terms of surrender, General Nelson Miles promised the Nez Percé that they could return to a reservation in Idaho that was similar to their homeland, but the government refused to honor the terms, and many of the Nez Percé died of disease or malnutrition as they were shipped to Indian Territory in the alien Midwest. Many tribes, like the Cheyenne of Wyoming,
met a similar fate. Meanwhile, in a tooth-and-nail struggle in the Southwest, Chief Geronimo s Apaches led the last organized resistance to the U. S. Army in its quest to bring in all of the western tribes to reservations. By 1886, after more than a decade of raiding settlements and eluding American troops in Arizona and New Mexico, Geronimo s band of followers, which had dwindled to 18 warriors, plus a few women and children, surrendered to General Miles and his force of five thousand: an event that marked the end of formal U. S.-Indian warfare in the West. Four years later, after the Paiute prophet Wovoka called for Indians on reservations to perform mass Ghost Dances to make whites disappear and bring back the bison herds, the Seventh Cavalry tried to disarm some of Chief Big Foot s Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Believing their Ghost Shirts would protect them from American bullets, a few of Big Foot s warriors opened fire. The cavalrymen responded by unleashing their repeating rifles and four Hotchkiss cannon on the encircled masses of Indians, not stopping until over two hundred men, women, and children lay dead on the frozen ground. As Black Elk, a young man at the time of the massacre, would later record, this last major armed encounter between Indians and whites in North America not only killed people: I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people s dream died there. Questions to Consider as You Read: What reasons does Crazy Horse give for fighting against whites? In Sitting Bull s speech as a prisoner of war, what does he say about the differences between Sioux life and white life and what his people want? In Sitting Bull s undated remarks, what does he say about treaties? How does he contrast the actions of whites with his own actions? Research: Speeches by Sioux Chiefs Crazy Horse (1877) and Sitting Bull (c. 1882 and Undated) As you read, don t forget to mark and annotate main ideas, key terms, confusing concepts, unknown vocabulary, cause/effect relationships, examples, etc. Crazy Horse on His Deathbed, 5 September 1877: I was not hostile to the white man. Sometimes my young men would attack the Indians who were their enemies and took their ponies. They did it in return. We had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing and our tepees. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservations, where we were driven against our will. At times we did not get enough to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt. We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government then. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages. [He referred to the winter before when his village was destroyed by Colonel Reynolds, Third Cavalry.] Then Long Hair [Custer] came
in the same way. They say we massacred him, but he would have done the same to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape with our squaws and papooses, but we were so hemmed in that we had to fight. After that I went up on Tongue River with a few of my people and lived in peace. But the government would not let me alone. Finally, I came back to Red Cloud agency. Yet I was not allowed to remain quiet. I was tired of fighting. I went to Spotted Tail agency and asked that chief and his agent to let me live there in peace. I came here with the agent [Lee] to talk with big white chief, but was not given a chance. They tried to confine me, I tried to escape, and a soldier ran his bayonet into me. I have spoken. Sitting Bull as a Prisoner of War, c. 1882: I have lived a long time, and I have seen a great deal, and I have always had a reason for everything I have done. Every act in my life has had an object in view, and no man can say that I have neglected facts or failed to think. I am one of the last chiefs of the independent Sioux nation, and the place I hold among my people was held by my ancestors before me. If I had no place in the world, I would not be here, and the fact of my existence entitles me to exercise any influence I possess. I am satisfied that I was brought into this life for a purpose; otherwise, why am I here? This land belongs to us, for the Great Spirit gave it to us when he put us here. We were free to come and go, and to live in our own way. But white men, who belong to another land, have come upon us, and are forcing us to live according to their ideas. That is an injustice; we have never dreamed of making white men live as we live. White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo as their fathers did. White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their tepees here and there to the different hunting grounds. The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our own fashion. Why has our blood been shed by your soldiers? [Sitting Bull drew a square on the ground with his thumb nail. The Indians craned their necks to see what he was doing.] There! Your soldiers made a mark like that in our country, and said that we must live there. They fed us well, and sent their doctors to heal our sick. They said that we should live without having to work. But they told us that we must go only so far in this direction, and only so far in that directions. They gave us meat, but they took away our liberty. The white men had many things that we wanted, but we could see that they did not have the one thing we liked best, freedom. I would rather live in a tepee and go without meat when game is scarce than give up
my privileges as a free Indian, even though I could have all that white men have. We marched across the lines of our reservation, and the soldiers followed us. They attacked our village, and we killed them all. What would you do if your home was attacked? You would stand up like a brave man and defend it. That is our story. I have spoken. Sitting Bull on Treaties, Undated: What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the whites ever made with us red men have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set in their lands. They sent ten thousand horsemen to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? What white man can say I ever stole his lands or a penny of his money? Yet they say I am a thief. What white woman, however lonely, was ever when a captive insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian. What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and gone unfed? Who has ever seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked in me because my skin is red; because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my fathers lived; because I would die for my people and my country? 1 Notebook Questions: Reason and Record What reasons does Crazy Horse give for fighting against whites? In Sitting Bull s speech as a prisoner of war, what does he say about the differences between Sioux life and white life and what his people want? In Sitting Bull s undated remarks, what does he say about treaties? How does he contrast the actions of whites with his own actions? Notebook Questions: Relate and Record 1 SOURCE: Wheeler, Homer W. Buffalo Days. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1905; Creelman, James. On the Great Highway: The Wanderings and Adventures of a Special Correspondent. Boston: Lothrop Publishing Co., 1901; and Johnson, W. Fletcher. Life of Sitting Bull and History of the Indian War of 1890-91. Philadelphia: Edgewood Publishing Co., 1891, respectively.
How do the documents relate to FACE Principle #3: America's Heritage of Christian Character: The image of Christ engraved upon the individual within, bringing dominion and change to his external environment. The model of American Christian character is the Pilgrim character with these qualities: faith and steadfastness, brotherly love, Christian care, diligence and industry, and liberty of conscience? How do the documents relate to Doctrine and Covenants 109:65, Doctrine and Covenants 87:5, and 2 Nephi 26:15? Record Activity: Multiple Choice Comprehension Check 1. Background: Which one of the following is not true about actions of the U. S. government between 1851 and 1890? a. In 1851, the Treaty of Fort Laramie created artificial boundaries, which laid the foundations for future reservations, to restrict northern Great Plains tribes to limited territories. b. In 1867, the Treaty of Medicine Lodge carved up the ancestral homelands of southern Plains tribes to create small reservations to separate, supervise, and civilize Indians, and the U. S. Army launched a series of campaigns to round up tribes who refused to move to the reservations. c. The U. S. Army and Bureau of Indian Affairs encouraged white trophy hunters to decimate the staple diet of Plains tribes: American bison. d. By 1871, the U. S. Congress declared that Indians should be treated as wards of the state not independent nations and declared an end to treaty-making. e. By 1879, schools to reform Indian children into productive American citizens, such as Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, attempted to engineer assimilable native children by forcing them away at gunpoint from their Indian family and friends, who were seen as contaminating influences. f. In 1887, in a reversal of almost fifty years of Indian policy, the U. S. Congress attempted to promote increased assimilation by passing the Dawes Severalty Act, which tried to force most western Indians to become private land owners and
farmers in the white man s image by abolishing reservations, allotting parcels of land to individual Indians as private property, and offering whites surplus land from former reservation territories. g. In an effort to extend the vision of the Declaration of Independence and the protections of the U. S. Constitution to native peoples, the government granted citizenship to all Indians in 1887. h. In 1889, the U. S. government opened unassigned lands in Indian Territory to white settlers, and, one year later, Oklahoma Territory was organized out of the western half of Indian Territory, which further diminished once-pledged tribal holdings. 2. Background: Which one of the following is not true about the period of Indian wars between 1851 and 1890? a. Following the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851), native raiding parties attacked wagon trains and stagecoaches and targeted isolated ranches and farms in a desperate attempt to defend their homelands and families against American expansion and its attendant concentrated confinement. b. Colonel J. M. Chivington s troops violated the territorial governor s promise of protection and massacred a peaceful camp of 270 Arapaho and Cheyenne, mostly women and children, at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory, in 1864. c. In 1862, after the U. S. government failed to deliver promised annuities to the Sioux in Minnesota and told them to just eat grass, Chief Little Crow led an uprising that killed more than one thousand settlers. d. In 1866, when the U. S. Army attempted to build a road (the Bozeman Trail) through Sioux lands between Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and the gold fields of Montana, Chief Red Cloud s warriors fought the army to a standstill and annihilated Captain William Fetterman s entire command. e. White settlers waged their own vigilante warfare a practice they called Indian hunting against neighboring tribes. f. In 1876, Sioux Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull won victories in Montana at the Battle of the Rosebud (against General George Crook) and the Battle of the Little Big Horn (against Custer s Seventh Cavalry) before surrendering to superior troops and watching helplessly as Congress took the Black Hills. g. In 1877, Chief Joseph s Nez Percé of Oregon made a desperate 1,500-mile dash for freedom in Canada before being hunted down by the U. S. Army and stopped at the Battle of Bear Paw Mountain. h. By 1886, after more than a decade of raiding settlements and eluding American troops in Arizona and New Mexico, Geronimo s band of Apache, which had dwindled to 18 warriors, plus a few women and children, surrendered to General
Miles and his force of five thousand: an event that marked the end of formal U. S.-Indian warfare in the West. i. The massacre at Wounded Knee in 1895 was the last major armed encounter between Indians and whites in North America. 3. Sources: Which one of the following did Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull not give as a reason for their resistance? a. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservations, where we were driven against our will. b. At times we did not get enough to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt. c. We preferred our own way of living. d. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. e. We defended ourselves and fought to the last. f. We were so hemmed in that we had to fight. g. They tried to confine me, I tried to escape. h. This land belongs to us. i. We were free to come and go, and to live in our own way. But white men, who belong to another land, have come upon us, and are forcing us to live according to their ideas. That is an injustice; we have never dreamed of making white men live as we live. j. The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. k. I have seen nothing that a white man has that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our own fashion. l. They gave us meat, but they took away our liberty. The white men had many things that we wanted, but we could see that they did not have the one thing we liked best, freedom. I would rather live in a tepee and go without meat when game is scarce than give up my privileges as a free Indian, even though I could have all that white men have. m. What would you do if your home was attacked? You would stand up like a brave man and defend it. That is our story. n. What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. o. We merely want to expand and force our way of life on others. Is it wrong to increase at another s expense? We preach kindness unless being kind gets in the way of getting rich. p. Is it wicked in me because my skin is red; because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my fathers lived; because I would die for my people and my country?