The Act of 1877: How the United States Took the Black Hills
The taking of the Black Hills did not happen in a single dramatic stroke. It came through a law, drafted in committee rooms and passed by a Congress that had already decided the outcome. The act that the United States approved early in 1877 stripped the Lakota of land that a treaty had promised them less than a decade before, and it did so under terms that few Lakota would have called a choice.
To understand the act, it helps to recall what came before it. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, which included the whole of the Black Hills, as land reserved for the Lakota and their relatives. The treaty’s language was unusually explicit. No cession of any part of the reservation would be valid unless approved by three-fourths of the adult male members of the bands concerned. That clause was meant to protect the Lakota from exactly the kind of pressure that was soon brought to bear.
Gold changes the calculation
When the Custer expedition of 1874 confirmed gold in the Hills, the treaty became, in practical terms, an obstacle to be removed. Prospectors poured in regardless of the law, and the government’s effort to keep them out was halfhearted at best. In 1875 a federal commission traveled west to buy or lease the Black Hills outright. The Lakota leaders who came to the council were divided and wary, and the prices discussed struck many of them as insulting given what the land was worth and what it meant. No agreement was reached. The three-fourths threshold was nowhere close to being met.
What followed was the Great Sioux War of 1876, including the destruction of Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn that June. The Lakota and Cheyenne victory in that fight hardened opinion in Washington rather than softening it. The Army pressed the campaign through the winter, and the agencies where many Lakota depended on government rations became instruments of coercion.
A signature under pressure
In the late summer of 1876 another commission, led by George Manypenny, arrived at the agencies with an ultimatum dressed as a negotiation. The terms were plain. Sign over the Black Hills and the unceded hunting grounds, or the government would cut off the rations on which the people now depended. Congress had already attached such a condition to the appropriations that kept the agencies fed. The commissioners gathered signatures from agency leaders, but they fell far short of the three-fourths of adult men the 1868 treaty required.
It did not matter to the outcome. Congress took the signatures it had and enacted the agreement as law in February 1877. The act severed the Black Hills from the reservation, opened them to mining and settlement, and rewrote the boundaries of Lakota country. The legal fiction was that the Lakota had agreed to sell. The reality was closer to confiscation under threat of starvation.
What the act set in motion
For the goldfields and the towns rising at the edge of the Hills, the 1877 act removed the last cloud over their legal standing. Settlement that had been technically unlawful was now sanctioned. The supply town that became Rapid City and the mining camps to its west could grow without the question of trespass hanging over them. Land offices opened, claims were recorded, and the machinery of American property law spread across ground that had been guaranteed to others.
For the Lakota, the act was a wound that did not close. They had not surrendered the Hills, and many refused to accept that they ever had. The grievance was specific and legal as much as it was moral, fixed on a treaty clause that the government had simply ignored. That grievance moved slowly through courts and commissions over the following century, surfacing again in the 1980 Supreme Court case United States v. Sioux Nation, where the act of 1877 was finally examined for what it was. The Hills themselves had long since filled with mines, roads, monuments, and tourists. The question of how they were taken never went away.