The Great Sioux War of 1876
The war that broke across the northern plains in 1876 grew directly out of gold. Two years earlier the Custer expedition had confirmed gold in the Black Hills, and the rush that followed trampled the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty under the boots of thousands of prospectors. When the Lakota refused to sell the Hills, the government chose force, and the conflict that resulted was one of the largest of the western Indian wars.
The pretext came in late 1875. The federal government issued an order requiring all Lakota and Cheyenne to report to the agencies by the end of January 1876 or be treated as hostile. The order was unrealistic on its face. Many of the bands living in the unceded hunting grounds were far out on the winter plains, beyond reach of any messenger in that season, and they had no intention of abandoning the buffalo country for the cramped life of the agencies. When the deadline passed, the Army was free to act, which had plainly been the point.
A campaign of converging columns
The Army’s plan called for several columns to move toward the Powder River and Bighorn country from different directions, hoping to trap the nontreaty bands between them. The terrain was vast and the intelligence poor. One column under General George Crook moved north from the south. Another came east from Montana under Colonel John Gibbon. A third, including the Seventh Cavalry and led in the field by Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, marched west from the Missouri River as part of a force under General Alfred Terry.
What the Army badly underestimated was the size and resolve of the gathering it was chasing. Through the spring, bands drawn by leaders such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse coalesced into one of the largest concentrations of plains people anyone had seen, thousands of men, women, and children with their lodges and horse herds, moving together across the grass.
The first major clash came in June at the Rosebud, where Crook’s column met a large force led by Crazy Horse and was fought to a standstill. Crook withdrew to regroup, which took his column out of the campaign at a critical moment. The other commands had no way of knowing it.
The Little Bighorn
A week later, on a hot afternoon in late June, Custer’s part of the Terry-Gibbon force came upon the great village along the river the Lakota called the Greasy Grass and white maps called the Little Bighorn. Custer divided his regiment and attacked, badly misjudging both the size of the camp and the fighting capacity of its defenders. The result was a catastrophe for the Seventh Cavalry. Custer and the five companies under his immediate command were surrounded and killed to the last man. Other elements of the regiment, dug in on a bluff some distance away, survived a siege until the rest of the column arrived.
The Little Bighorn was the most complete Native victory of the plains wars, and it stunned a nation then celebrating its centennial. But the very scale of the triumph guaranteed a fierce response.
The slower defeat
The summer’s victory could not be sustained. The great village had gathered partly because the buffalo and the grass could feed it for a time, and such a concentration could not hold together indefinitely. The bands dispersed into smaller groups, and the Army, reinforced and embarrassed, pursued them relentlessly through the fall and the bitter winter that followed. Troops struck villages in the cold, destroyed lodges and food stores, and ran off horses, the kind of campaigning that wore people down without the need for a decisive battle.
By the spring of 1877 the resistance had largely collapsed. Crazy Horse brought his people in to surrender that May and was killed a few months later in a struggle at Fort Robinson. Sitting Bull led his followers across the border into Canada, where they held out in hardship for several years before returning. The free life on the buffalo plains was ending.
The political outcome was sealed even as the fighting wound down. With the Lakota broken in the field and the agencies used as leverage, Congress passed the act of 1877 seizing the Black Hills. The war that gold had started ended with the Hills lost. The mining camps and the supply town of Rapid City went on growing, while the people who had defended the country at the Little Bighorn were confined to a shrinking map.