Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre

by Heather Cox Richardson

He also insisted that the army remove settlers’ land claims from the Sioux hunting lands in the Black Hills and Big Horn Mountains.

“All the promises made in treaties had never been fulfilled,” Red Cloud said. “The object of the whites was to crush the Indians down to nothing. The Great Spirit would judge these things hereafter.” Red Cloud and his men left Washington in bitterness.

As the soldiers and settlers hemmed in the Indians, Red Cloud’s influence with other Sioux began to fade. Red Cloud had embarked on the delicate work of trying to balance his people’s needs and expectations with government demands, and it was thankless work.

Red Cloud’s trip to Washington bore fruit, for example, when the government finally compromised and established agencies for his Oglalas and Spotted Tail’s Brulés in northwestern Nebraska, locating Fort Robinson nearby. But by the time that happened, Red Cloud’s support in the tribe had slipped as his followers had come to perceive him as weak.

Red Cloud lost control primarily over those warriors who resented the loss of their traditional life. Some of the more traditionalist Sioux had opposed signing the Treaty of Fort Laramie back in 1868, and moved northwest to join Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas, who lived in the Powder River country and had little contact with whites apart from an occasional trader.

As Red Cloud prepared to sign the 1868 treaty, Sitting Bull emerged as the leader of the traditionalist Sioux.

The warrior societies of the Hunkpapa Sioux had proposed to bands of Cheyennes and Arapahos, northern Sioux Minneconjous, Sans Arcs, and Crazy Horse’s Oglalas, and a few Yanktonais and Two Kettles, that they elect a single leader to marshal them against the whites. The group fell in behind Sitting Bull, now a warrior in his early thirties who had gained a reputation as a deadly fighter and a holy man.

Sitting Bull was determined to prove to the younger men in his band that they should never challenge his authority. As the battle raged around him, he strolled into the area between the two armies. He lit a pipe and sat calmly smoking it, then invited the younger warriors to join him. They did, but smoked as fast as they possibly could, then darted back to cover. Sitting Bull’s sheer nerve cemented his leadership in the war with the interlopers.83

Military retribution was swift. In September 1872, Congress sent a thousand guns to settlers in eastern Montana to protect themselves, and two months later, the army established Fort Abraham Lincoln on the west side of the Missouri River near what is now Bismarck, North Dakota.

There was another way that Indians could try to negotiate the tension between their traditional culture and the new economy pushing in on them from the East. Some Sioux, who recognized that the pressure of Republican economic policy on Indian life was inexorable, were willing to try to live like white men.

Men like the Shermans believed that their new free labor economy was the best in the world and that it would attract any man who was not utterly blind to its obvious benefits. As evidence, they could offer the 4 million African American freedpeople who had fought to be included in the new economy, the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who arrived each year to participate in it, and even some Sioux, who recognized that the pressure of Republican economic policy on Indian life could not be ignored and who were willing to try to live like white men.

was precisely the right assignment for John Sherman. He knew more about the brand-new economic system of the Union than almost anyone else, and he was an expert on the government’s fledgling monetary system.

His exalted position, though, did not mean he had a nuanced understanding of economics, which was a subject only in its infancy in the mid-nineteenth century. Like other Americans, Sherman filtered his understanding of economic affairs through his own morals, prejudices, and impressions of the changing world around him.

The East Coast, in particular, benefited from the postwar economy. The development of wheat farming in California meant surpluses of wheat with a kernel hard enough to withstand months at sea, and this new crop, combined with increasing trade of eastern manufactured goods, brought real wealth to the East. Up and down the New England coast, shipyards turned out the trim and ship-shape “Down-Easters” that carried American goods to harbors all over the world.

The nation’s new businessmen had a steady income that permitted them to enjoy the novel products pouring out of the factories.

Men and women both experimented with the new bicycles that became a fad in the 1890s and that dramatically increased the range a man could travel, requiring civic-minded governments to pave city streets with asphalt because cobblestones were so dangerous to the narrow-wheeled machines.3

For those thriving in the industrial world, the new economy created by the Republicans seemed to have brought to life all that their wartime free labor dream had promised. Eastern Americans had money, novel ways to spend it, and leisure time to enjoy their new purchases.

The extension of the new industrial economy to the West had begun during the Civil War, when Congress had pushed farmers to produce more and more wheat and corn for the troops and for export. It had passed homestead legislation to get farmers onto land, relaxed immigration laws to draw more workers into the country, and chartered railroads to make it easier to go west.

After 1874, two developments made even more farmers decide to try their luck on the Plains. First, barbed wire became widely available. Until then, farmers had found it next to impossible to fence their fields on the treeless plains.

Barbed wire went west by the trainload as farmers snapped it up.

The second development was the start of a wet weather cycle that brought unusual amounts of rain to the dry prairies.

With the spurs of barbed wire and rain, farmers moved onto the Plains in large numbers, cutting prairies into cultivated fields.

Railroad companies encouraged Americans’ vision of the West as an agricultural paradise. In order to fund the building of the transcontinental railroad, Congress had given western land to the railroad companies, which they then sold to settlers to pay the expenses of the railroad’s construction.

Railroads enticed settlers west with promises of easy farming and mild climates, promises that seemed realistic in the atypical wet decade that began in the mid-1870s.

Railroad promoters’ claims about the charms of western farming were especially exaggerated in regard to the Dakotas. In the railroad boom of the late 1870s, as new western railroads cut into the Dakota Territory formed from Sioux land, Dakota railroads had to work to entice settlers away from other rail lines. Railroads offered financial aid for settlers’ travel west, built “reception houses” in big towns to shelter arriving emigrants, sold land at two to ten dollars an acre, and gave rebates to those breaking land.

Eastern migrants, black as well as white, bought into the vision of a free labor West, a place where anyone who worked hard could rise. Settlers poured into the plains, envisioning their futures as solid citizens of prosperous towns.

African Americans in the West were at least as enthusiastic about the region as white settlers.

Western boosters saw themselves as agents of progress united against a common enemy: the western Indians who insisted on keeping their lands undeveloped to protect the game on which their economy depended. The mission to contain and domesticate the Indians overrode eastern racial distinctions.

The “whites” who were moving west were eastern Americans of all ancestries, united in a cause against the Indians whose way of life stood in the way of economic “progress.”10

The army was charged with keeping the settlers out of Sioux lands, but they found their work harder every day. The Sioux insisted that the intrusions into their territory must be stopped.

Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, and their men harassed the surveyors and prospectors, while demanding that the army keep intruders out of Sioux land.

While Sheridan wanted a military report, Custer and his men were much more interested in the economic value of the area.

His dispatches back East confirmed that there was, indeed, gold in the Black Hills. It was easy to find, he claimed, and there was enough of it to make mining a paying proposition.

Custer’s report created a stampede into the Great Sioux Reservation. By 1875, men were pouring into the Black Hills to find their fortunes, and prostitutes and gamblers followed them to find theirs.

Emigrants to the Sioux land could not understand why the Indians were so determined to hold on to the Black Hills, which it seemed they only used occasionally for hunting and the cutting of lodge poles. Settlers thought it was only a question of finding the right price—a low one—to get them to give up their claim.

The commission had no luck. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, along with their men, were willing to confer, but not to sell the land. They wanted the army to do its job, keeping miners out of the Black Hills.

The commission reported back to Washington that the Indians were asking for more than the government would ever be willing to pay. It concluded that it was useless to try to negotiate with the Indians in council.16

“We want no white men here,” Sitting Bull said. “The Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them, I will fight.” To traditionalist Sioux, the Black Hills were sacred. Their red rock was the blood of Sioux forefathers; their heights, the place from which humans had come to earth. The Black Hills could never be sold. Like Red Cloud, the traditionalists demanded that whites respect the Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Government officials chose to interpret Sioux refusal to sell their land as hostility to Americans. After months of ongoing clashes between Indians and intruders in the Black Hills, officials simply stopped trying to honor the 1868 treaty.

The Indians’ noncompliance with the order to report to their agencies confirmed for government officials that they must be brought to heel.

On the morning of March 17, the soldiers stumbled onto a large camp of Cheyenne and Oglala Sioux on the Powder River and, believing the people there to be Crazy Horse’s band, attacked the village. They drove off the Indians, who scrambled out of their sleeping robes and cut their way out of the tepees that had been fastened tightly against the cold.

While the soldiers had taken the camp, the raid was a strategic loss. Crook had planned to capture the supplies in the camp and, when they were burned, he couldn’t continue his campaign.

The attack also hurt the army by cementing Sioux determination to fight. Cold and hungry Cheyenne refugees from the attack fled down the river to Sitting Bull’s camp.

“We are an island of Indians in a lake of whites. We must stand together, or they will rub us out separately. These soldiers have come shooting; they want war. All right, we’ll give it to them!”23

Sitting Bull began to prepare for a full-blown war. He sent runners to the agencies and the traditionalist Indian bands, calling people to his camp at the Big Bend of the Rosebud River to make a stand against the soldiers.

Thousands of men rallied to Sitting Bull. In the spring of 1876, Indians from almost every Sioux band, including the Santees and the Yanktonais, gathered with Sitting Bull in the Rosebud River valley and named him the leader of their campaign. It was the largest camp of Indians the Sioux had ever known; participants estimated that there were 1,400 lodges, plus individual men sleeping on their own or as guests in the tepees.

Sitting Bull’s vision was right. Army leaders believed that there were only about three thousand “hostile” Indians, of whom only about five hundred to eight hundred were warriors. They expected this small fighting band to fall quickly under a display of force. In fact, Sitting Bull’s camp boasted almost a thousand warriors at the time of his Sun Dance, and the number was growing every day.

Crook reported to his superiors that the Indians had retreated in great confusion and tried to claim that he had prevailed. In fact, the victory had gone to the Sioux and the Cheyenne. Crook’s advance stopped dead after the Battle of Rosebud as he fell back to the south to his base camp and waited for reinforcements.

Effectively, his men were out of the campaign for the next six weeks, six weeks that would prove crucial.

On June 21, unaware that Crook had been stopped by the Battle of the Rosebud, the other two commanders, Gibbon and Terry, met up on a steamer at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Rosebud rivers. They agreed to trap the Indians between the two commands by moving the main body of their forces up the Yellowstone, then up what they called the Bighorn River, and then up the Little Bighorn River—the Indians’ Greasy Grass.