grand irony of the Great Plains is that none of the tribes with which the army would clash were native to the lands they claimed. All had been caught up in a vast migration, precipitated by the white settlement of the East. This Indian exodus had begun in the late seventeenth century and was far from over when the Oregon Trail opened in 1843. As the dislocated Indians spilled onto the plains, they jockeyed with native tribes for the choicest hunting lands. In a very real sense, then—and this cannot be overemphasized—the wars that were to come between the Indians and the government for the
...more
