Unit 5
End of the Indians in the Great Plains
1868-1900

Background
 Jeffersonian
▪ Indians should be removed to distance them from worst
of American fur traders
▪ Cheated them or traded them whiskey
 Jacksonian
▪ Indians were inferior and should be removed to make
way for American expansion
▪ Condescending perspective, much like that of slave owners
toward their slaves

Early Years Europeans had to recognize Indian
sovereignty because they could overwhelm
colonials
 Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia
▪ Domestic, dependent nations
▪ By 1871 congressional legislation sought to eliminate all Indian
sovereignty

Transfer issues
 political battle over whether Indian policy should be
held by the Department of War or Department of
Interior

Some Easterners who saw what was happening
on the plains as genocide
 Wanted Indian policy in the Bureau of Indian Affairs
(BIA)

Senator James Doolittle
 Wisconsin Senator Chair of the Indians Affairs
Committee
▪ Pushed a bill through Congress to setup an ad hoc committee
of 3 senators and 4 house members
▪ Convinced President Johnson to give committee a
commission to negotiate treaties
▪ A few Indian nations signed, but most were too angry and not yet
pacified

For over a decade policy vacillated between
peace and force
 Peace advocates tried to implement
Concentration
▪ Negotiated by Doolittle’s committee
▪ Whenever Indians left reservations force policy kicked
into action

June 1866 a peace commission under
Doolittle met with Dakota and allied leaders
 The Bozeman road had been laid out to connect
the mine fields of Montana with the Oregon Trail
▪ Cut through some of the best remaining hunting
grounds for Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho
▪ While negotiating, Indians see Colonel Henry Carrington
come through with construction equipment and men
setup three forts to protect travelers

Indians stormed out and lay siege to the forts
 Brought construction to a near halt

Fetterman’s Massacre (Battle of a hundred Slain)
 Indians win
▪ In late 1868, Army vacated the forts, and the Indians burned
them to the ground
 The military blamed it on the BIA’s failure to stop the
arms trade
▪ BIA blamed it on military blunders

Indians then come back to negotiate

Doolittle lost his Senate seat in the 1866 term
elections
 Replaced by Senator John Henderson of Missouri as
Chair of the Indian Affairs Committee
▪ Tried to appease all by selecting equal number of “force” and
“peace advocates

“Peace”
 Henderson, Nathaniel Taylor, Samuel Tappan

“Force”
 General William S. Harney, Alfred Terry, William T.
Sherman

Peace Commission renegotiates treaties
 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek (1867)
 Second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868)

Similarities in treaties
 Reservations with outlets
 No unwelcome whites on reservations
 Thirty years of annuities
 Some in the South on “Reconstruction Treaties” lands
 Promises of “assimilation” tools

September 1867, the plains were divided into
a northern division and southern division
 General Philip Sheridan appointed to lead the
Northern
▪ Known as the division of the Missouri
 His aggressive, Civil War, tactics played a big role
in turning the tide

Black Kettle and his band were one of the few
that moved to the place mandated
 He couldn’t control the Dog Soldiers that moved
into and out of his encampment
▪ General Sherman called it all out war
 November 27, 1868 George Armstrong Custer and
his 7th U.S. Calvary attacked Black Kettle’s
Southern Cheyenne camp on the Washita’s River

Hazen tried to contact Sherman at nearby
Fort Cobb to tell him that Black Kettle’s band
had surrenered
 But it was too late

Custer led one column in another “zeroing
operation”
 He attacked first, killing 875 horses, and then 102
men
▪ A few women and children

Angry over Sand Creek Massacre and opposed to
Treaty of Medicine Lodge
 Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho hit farms and travel
routes killing 79

September 16, 1868 Major George A. Forsyth led
50 frontiersmen out of Fort Hays
 Camped on Arikaree Fork in Colorado Territory
 Dog Soldiers under Roman Nose pinned them down
on an island in the middle of the river
▪ Armed with Spencer repeating rifles, frontiersmen withstood
many assaults

Not conclusive who won

Kiowa (Mother was Southern Arapaho)
 Only reluctantly agreed to the treaty of Medicine
Lodge Creek
 Moved onto a reservation and ventured into the
west to hunt buffalo
▪ Their numbers were dwindling
 When reservation agents punished withholding
annuity food
▪ They started raiding Wichita and Caddo villages

Satanta and his friend and fellow headman, Big
Tree, led their men in raids into Texas
 Especially supply wagon trains, seeing it as not part of
the U.S. and thus outside the Treaty of Medicine
Lodge Creek

He and his men also considered their raiding as
pay-back for annuities not delivered
 Taken prisoner in 1871, with promises of his release
only when his people obeyed the government’s
mandate
▪ To return to their reservation
▪ The Indians complied
Big Tree

Isa-Tai, a Comanche shaman, united Indians
the souther plains
 Called for the first Comanche Sun Dance
▪ Took little persuasion by Isa-Tai to convince Indian
leaders they had to strike back
 Southern Cheyenne, Southern Arapahos, Kiowas,
Kiowa-Apache, and Comanche attacked the new
settlement of buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls
▪ An old Spanish mission

In the early-morning hours of June 27, 1874, 300
Indians moved in hoping to surprise the buffalo
hunters and overpower them
 led by Isa-Tai and famed Comanche headman Quanah
Parker

Although the 28 hunters were vastly
outnumbered, they were well armed with long
range “buffalo rifles” and held off the Indians
 70 Indians killed without 3 buffalo hunter casualties

Most Lakota and their allies, Northern
Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho moved
onto the reserve after the Second Treaty of
Fort Laramie
 Gold discovered in the Black Hills in 1873
 The government first tried to keep whites out of
the Black Hills but gave up and tried to keep
Indians out
▪ Then the usual thirty days warning for all Indians to
come into the agencies


Sioux and Cheyenne defiantly left their
reservations and gathered with Sitting Bull
Army sent three columns against them including
Lt. Colonel George Custer
 Those under Sioux leader Crazy Horse enveloped
Custer’s men and killed them
▪ Indians mutilated the bodies in order to force them to suffer
in the afterlife

Battle was the pinnacle of Indians power
 Created resentment toward Indians with American
officials leading to the push to get retribution

Conditions
 Reservations reduced in size
 Most located in land not suitable for agriculture
▪ Goal of BIA was to turn Indians into self-sustaining farmers
▪ Few jobs or ways of making a living
▪ Poverty and starvation rampant
▪ Bad housing/many live in tipis with no buffalo skins to cover
them
▪ High death rate
▪ Had to live under the dictates of a reservation’s Indian agent
▪ Enforced White man’s laws

Selected from ranks of Indian men, usually
soldier sodalities
 Enforced White law among Indians
▪ No practice of traditional religion
▪ No plural marriages
▪ No practice of traditional political structure/agents
chose leadership
Ute
Policeman

Lt. Richard Pratt
 Worked with imprisoned Indian Soldiers in the
1870’s
 Convinced the army to let him use old army
barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to setup a school
▪ Sought to assimilate and teach young Indians
▪ Major goal of the peace policy advocates
 So successful initially that the government took
over the school in 1882 and established many
more off-reservation boarding schools thereafter

Controversies
 students were forced to attend and many of their
parents tried to hide them
 Students had to work half a day to support the
school
▪ In the “outing system” students were placed in the
homes of nearby white residents
▪ Virtually slaves
▪ Many returned to their reservations
▪ Former students didn’t fit in and had a hard time adjusting
Carlisle
Arapaho After

Pushed through Congress by Henry Dawes in
1887
 Goal was to turn Indians away from communal
land tenure to private land ownership
 Divided reservations into individual plots
▪ usually 160 acres for men and 80 acres for women and
children
 Promised farm equipment and training
▪ No taxation on Indian lands

After allotting reservation and assigning plots
the remaining lands (Surplus lands) were
opened to Whites to claim under
homesteading laws
 Bill was supported by Whites because they could
buy “surplus lands”
 Reformers thought assimilation was best for
Indians and by the military
▪ Money made through land sales was earmarked for the
army

Problems
 Promoters soon realized that without knowledge
of individual land ownership Indians would get
cheated by Whites in land sales
 So included in the bill a 25 year trust restriction on
the land
▪ Could not sell the land until the trust ended
 Little farming equipment or training in farming
▪ No help in private land ownership was forthcoming

Most allotment accomplished by 1900
 Indians lost over 87 million acres of “surplus lands”

1894 bill authorized the Secretary of Interior
to grant easements across allotted lands for
telephone and telegraphy lines
 By 1902 the “Dead Indian Act” allowed adult heirs
to sell their deceased relatives land

Started with Piute Indian Tavibo
 In 1870 he had a vision telling him that deliverance was
near
 Whites would be destroyed in an earthquake
▪ Indians would be spared and the world would be restored to the old
order

Few initially believed so he had a second revelation
 Same as first however Indians would be resurrected on the
third day

Still few follow so he had a third vision
 Only the Indians that believed in the Ghost Dance would
be resurrected

Took over his father’s work on the Ghost
Dance
 Saw himself as the next Christ after the first one
had been killed
 His version included frequent bathing, rejecting
alcohol and no violence
▪ Dancing for five consecutive days demonstrated ones’
worthiness
▪ Gave Indians vision of a restored world once Whites were
eliminated in cataclysm

Lakota had become divided
 Some had assimilated
▪ Role of Shaman had faded
▪ Political leadership was changing
 Continuing loss of land
▪ Allotment Act - 2nd Treaty of Fort Laramie required 3/4
vote for the government to take anymore land
▪ Government won the vote using scare tactics and bribery

Lakota believed that the “Ghost Shirts” would
protect them from bluecoats’ bullets
 During the fall of 1890 the Ghost Dance spread
through the Sioux villages of the Dakota Reservations
▪ Revitalized the Indians and brought fear to the Whites
 A desperate Indian Agent at Pine Ridge wired a
message to Washington
▪ “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy... We
need protection and we need it now.”
 Order went out to arrest Sitting Bull at the Standing
Rock Reservation
▪ Sitting Bull was killed in the attempt on December 15 by
Indian Police

On December 15 Sitting Bull had been killed
 The reason given for the shooting claimed that he had
resisted arrest

Many fled to Spotted Elk’s band due to his reputation
as a peaceful leader
 Yet, after slaying of Sitting Bull Spotted Elk was put on the
list of “fomenters of disturbances” and arrested

Lakota had sent representatives to learn Wovoka’s
new religion
 7th Calvary commanded by Major Samuel Whiteside
intercepted Spotted Elk’s band of Lakota and took them
westward to Wounded Knee Creek to camp

The rest of 7th Cavalry arrived and surrounded
Spotted Elk’s encampment with four Hotchkiss guns
 Morning of December 29 the troops went into the camp to
disarm the Sioux
 During the process a deaf tribesman named Black Coyote
would not give up his gun
▪ A scuffle ensued where a shot was fired
▪ Led to the Cavalry opening fire with the their guns and killing all in
their path
▪ Women, children and fellow troopers

All in all, at least 150 men, women and children of
Lakota had been killed
 Only 25 American troops died, most to friendly fire

End of Indian dominance in the Great Plains
Spotted Elk