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August 9 - August 24, 2025
But even with the right instruments, dry farming on the prairies was a losing battle. Most eastern settlers who tried to put down roots in the Dakotas found the environment drove them quickly into despair.
Indeed, it turned out that the Indians’ economy beat the American economy hands down on the dry prairies. Generations of Indian hunters had made the prairies perfect for grazing animals.
Eventually, settlers also came to rely on animal herds, realizing that the only way to make the prairies profitable in the days before irrigation was by ranging cattle on them. Herding animals, though, requires far more land than farming does.
By cutting Indian land into small parcels, government policies destroyed Indians’ ability to practice the only economy that worked in...
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Seeing a chance to open more land to settlement, western developers and their supporters in Congress revived the plan to divide the Great Sioux Reservation. They wanted to take the “extra” land from the Sioux in a corridor through the reservation and sell it to railroad men and homesteaders for fifty cents an acre.
Congress approved the plan, but before it could be enacted, there was an obstacle to overcome. Under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, three-quarters of the adult males in the tribe had to agree to the cession of land.
As the hated head of the school that tore Indian children away from parents in order to crush the Sioux culture, Pratt had little chance of success. To make matters worse, he chose to start negotiations at Standing Rock, the home of Sitting Bull and the least likely of the Indians to approve of the cession.
The four new states would be admitted into the Union in nine months. This plan cut Democratic New Mexico out of statehood, and split Republican Dakota Territory into two new Republican states. Rather than the two new Republican and two new Democratic states that Congress had considered the previous year, the omnibus bill created three new Republican states and one new Democratic state that Republicans thought they could capture.
Harrison’s men were eager to bring new western states into the Union. They expected that the 1890 census would reveal such growth in the western population that the region would become a driving force in American politics. Admitting new states full of western Republican voters would dramatically increase the strength of the Republican Party in Congress. It would also change the number of electors in the Electoral College, altering the number of votes necessary to win the presidency.
South Dakota, though, could not be turned into a viable state unless the Sioux sold much of their land, and Congress set out to make that happen. On March 2, 1889, just a week after President Cleveland had split South Dakota off from North Dakota and authorized them each to organize a state government, the lame-duck Congress authorized the division of the Great Sioux Reservation into six smaller reservations. Desperate to get Sioux land for the nascent state of South Dakota, the incoming Republican administration was willing to offer higher land prices than the Democrats had.
The strength of the commission was in the third member of the party, General George Crook, commander of the Division of the Missouri.
Indians and officers both believed him to be strictly honest, and felt they could rely on his word. The Sioux knew Crook and respected him from the days of the 1876 campaign.19
The Crook Commission’s task would not be easy because most Indians opposed the treaty. They had seen too many treaties broken, annuities and provisions delayed or denied, and lands guaranteed to them “forever” slip from their control.
Rosebud, it produced feasts and exuded goodwill, but could get no signers until Crook made a number of personal promises that redressed old grievances.
They made Crook put in writing that this land cession would not have any affect on rations.
Between the promises and threats, the commission got three-quarters of the Brulé to sign, despite the adamant opposition of traditional leader Two Strike.21
From there the commission went to Lower Brulé and Crow Creek, where the Sioux were willing to negotiate. The Indians there, in the middle of the stretch of land the settlers wanted, were worried that they were going to lose their land no matter what they did. They wanted simply to forge the best deal they could out of the situation.
Up the Missouri at Cheyenne River, the commissioners also got the required signatures, but how they did so is shrouded in mystery.
They were so resistant to signing that Crook finally left in fury. He told the agent and an army officer who remained at Cheyenne River to do as they wished to get the signatures. In two weeks, they signed up everyone—even Hump—but left no record of how they did so.24
The commission used similarly heavy-handed tactics at Standing Rock, where the Hunkpapas opposed the treaty as fervently as the Minneconjous had.
The commission worked around his opposition by telling him that it already had enough signatures to take the land. This was not true, but Agent James McLaughlin echoed it in a secret meeting with Grass. If his people did not sign, McLaughlin warned, they would lose their land and get nothing for it. The agent also promised that Crook would get Congress to pay for ponies the army had taken from Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Indians in 1876.
Crook begged and bullied to get the signatures he needed. He insisted that the land agreement would not affect rations. He promised not to force Indians onto allotments until a majority wanted the land divided; he said he would try to get Indians rather than whites hired for agency jobs. He assured the Indians that he would see that the construction and funding of schools and gristmills, and the provision of farm animals, long ignored by government agents, would finally be accomplished. Crook used a number of tactics to divide the Indians, making presents to individuals, taking men aside for
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Later, Crook would insist that he had never promised the Indians anything, that he had only assured the Sioux that he would press for their concerns to be considered in Washington.
Crook was adamant that the Indians needed to sign, in part, perhaps, because he suspected that they would lose their land one way or another. While the Treaty of Fort Laramie had established that three-quarters of the Sioux men would have to approve changes to the Indian reservation, that requirement had been thrown out the window before.
Crook had reason to suspect that the government might do something similar in 1889, as pressure built to turn Dakota Territory into two new states. Only by signing could the Indians hope to receive anything for the loss of their land. Time was short. A constitutional convention had been called for July 4, 1889, in Sioux Falls to adopt a state constitution and prepare for the Territory to enter the Union.28
By August 6, Crook and his men had the requisite number of signatures. Traditional leaders disliked the deal the American government had handed them, but the majority of Indians had eventually agreed to sign.
Not everyone was willing to take this desperate gamble, though. Indians like Sitting Bull, and those younger men who didn’t trust Americans or didn’t want to give up their culture, clung to the world they had known as youngsters, when they supplied their own needs from the buffalo hunt, protected their own kin, rode over their wide territory, and lived as free men.
Sitting Bull did all he could to defeat the treaty, and the signing disgusted him. In the end, even his old ally Gall had defected. When a reporter asked Sitting Bull what the opening of the reservation would mean for the Indians, the old leader replied bitterly: “Don’t talk to me about Indians; there are no Indians left except those in my band. They are all dead, and those still wearing the clothes of warriors are only squaws. I am sorry for my followers, who have been defeated and their land taken from them.”30
The 1889 land agreement brought disastrous changes to the Sioux. According to Congress, they had agreed to part with fully half their land. From now on, the different bands of the Sioux would be divided onto six different reservations, although about 2,000 of the 10,500 Brulé were entered against their will onto the rolls at Pine Ridge, where the Oglalas lived.
While different groups would live on their own within the reservation boundaries, usually in log cabins along rivers or streams, they would have to come in to the agency for rations and supplies.31
Each agency was a little cluster of buildings, almost a town. At each, the government constructed a house for the agent and his family, a school, an office and living quarters for the agency doctor, a warehouse for the distribution of clothing and supplies, and perhaps a few houses for important Indian chiefs and others who were tied to the government.
A life that revolved around the agencies was a traumatic wrench for the Sioux, but eastern Republicans saw the cession of the Sioux lands as the rightful extension of the American economy westward.
For two months, prospective settlers had been camped on the eastern bank of the Missouri River waiting for the Sioux lands to become American lands.
They hastened to assure voters that the taking of the Sioux land had been accomplished under “the terms of the treaty made when the Indians were given the reservation,” with no self-consciousness about using the word “given” in this context.
The Republicans also spun the organization of the Dakotas into states as the triumph of civilization over savagery.
While Republicans trumpeted their promotion of development and civilization, they were nonetheless forthright about the other agenda underlying their push to fill South Dakota with settlers. They made no secret of the fact they expected western Territories to support the Republican Party.
Harrison’s men were willing to manipulate elections and attack opponents to make sure this ascendancy would endure. When the Montana legislature threatened to go Democratic in 1889, Republicans simply threw out the Democratic votes, charging fraud.
Just as they had planned in February, the Republicans had added three Republican states to the Union, and had come close to grabbing a fourth. The West was the key to maintaining national political power, and it looked as though Harrison’s men had managed to claim the region for themselves.
On the reservations, it appeared that the dire predictions of the traditionalists who had opposed the land agreement were coming true. Opponents of the treaty had warned the signers that the whites were not to be trusted. Once they had taken the land, they would try to starve the Sioux to death.
Crook was not lying to the Sioux—rations and the land treaty really did not have anything to do with each other on the government’s account books. Nonetheless, just as soon as the treaty went back to Washington, food rations decreased.
According to the Treaty of Fort Laramie, the quantity of rations the Sioux received was determined by their population. But the reality was that the system of providing Indian rations was a macabre game in which both sides fudged numbers to try to get the best deal they could. Agents
By the early 1880s, the Sioux were receiving only about two-thirds of their legal allotments of beef.
Contributing to the swindling of the Sioux was the fact that the treaty did not stipulate when the beef would be weighed. As a result it became standard practice for the cattle traders to sell beef to the agents in the fall, when the animals were at their maximum heft.
Beef was not the only problem. Across the board, provisions were rarely adequate. Flour was often spoiled, clothing late or poorly made, and so on, down the whole list of provisions allotted to the Sioux by treaty.43
The Indians, in turn, had their own ways of fighting back against the inadequate supplies.
This unsavory equilibrium suddenly tipped immediately after the Sioux accepted the 1889 land cession. Just weeks after the Sioux commission left South Dakota, government officials cut Sioux rations.
Reformers wanted to drag Indians out of their culture to save their souls and their lives; politicians wanted to get traditionalist Indians out of the way so Americans could have their lands for economic development. Because their goals were similar, they were able to agree on General T. J. Morgan as Commissioner of Indian Affairs when President Harrison took office.
He also urged the teachers to use discretion. When they were dealing with students, they “should carefully avoid any unnecessary reference to the fact that they are Indians.”46
In August, Lea sent his numbers to Morgan, claiming that there were almost 2,500 fewer Indians on Rosebud than had been drawing rations; he reported similar inflations at the other agencies. It is unlikely that his count was accurate.
Morgan promptly scaled back the beef allotment to reflect the new count. He cut 2 million pounds of beef from Rosebud, a million pounds from the Pine Ridge allotment, and similar amounts from the other agencies.
