Flash-Pack » Sioux

The Hoop is Broken

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:01:19 +0000

The 1876 battle of the Little Bighorn marked the peak of the Sioux resistance; by 1877, the Army had forced the hostiles into exile or surrender. Sitting Bull and Gall fled to Canada with their band, staying several years. Crazy Horse, after brief confinement on a reservation, was killed while under military arrest. The Great Sioux Reservation was reduced; the different sub tribes assigned to different agencies on it. But deprived of freedom and purpose, the Indians adjusted badly to reservation life. In 1883, Sitting Bull returned to the reservation and remained there, except for one year with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, as the preeminent leader of his people. In 1890, a new messianic religion spread among the Sioux. Promising that whites would disappear and that buffalo and all the dead Indians would return to the Plains, it called upon Indians to perform the Ghost Dance. The reservation agent, alarmed by the Ghost Dancing, ordered Sitting Bull arrested, but the great Chief was killed in the process. This precipitated a crisis, culminating two weeks later in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. There, while disarming a Sioux band, the Army opened fire on several hundred men, women and children. On recalling that day, Sioux holy man Black Elk would later say, “the nation’s hoop is broken.”

The Battle of Little Big Horn

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:37:46 +0000

On June 25, 1876, Colonel George Armstrong Custer led his troops to annihilation in the famous battle of the Little Big Horn. Undistinguished at West Point, Custer won recognition as a bold cavalryman during the Civil War, then went on to head the Seventh Cavalry in campaigns against the Plains Indians. Court-martialed in 1867, his command was suspended for nearly a year. In 1874, Custer led the expedition that confirmed the presence of gold in the sacred Black Hills territory of the Sioux, touching off a white invasion. When the Sioux refused to sell the Black Hills to the U.S. government, they were ordered off their unceded lands and onto reservations. Those who resisted were branded “hostiles,” the Army sent to retrieve them. It was such a mission that brought Custer and his 225 men to the valley of the Little Big Horn, or, as the Indians called it, Greasy Grass, River in southern Montana, supposedly to reconnoiter the area. There, unbeknownst to Custer, was the largest Indian army ever assembled, about 3,000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by such chiefs as Crazy Horse, Gall and the revered Sitting Bull. Though his men and horses were exhausted and he had been ordered to await reinforcements, Custer nonetheless ordered the attack that resulted in his own death and that of his men. Critics censured his recklessness, but news of “Custer’s last stand” incited the nation’s wrath against the Sioux.

The Indian Wars of 1865 – 1899

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:36:06 +0000

The years and decades after the Civil War witnessed tremendous westward expansion — expansion that was fundamentally incompatible with the traditional lifestyle of the Indians. A final showdown was inevitable and it came in a series of Indian Wars between the so-called “hostiles” — tribes or tribal factions who resisted expropriation of their lands and refused to live on reservations — and the U.S. Army. Between 1865 and 1890, the Army battled many tribes in many places. It fought Apaches in the Southwest, Bannocks, Modocs, Utes and Nez Perce in the Northwest; and on the Plains, Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and largest and most powerful of the Indian tribes, Sioux. With their superior horsemanship and knowledge of terrain, the Indians were not without victories. In 1868, Chief Red Cloud won his two-year campaign to oust the Army from forts along the Bozeman Trail, a route which passed through Sioux hunting grounds in the Powder River country of Wyoming. And, in 1876, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors defeated U.S. troops in battles at the Rosebud and the famous Little Big Horn. But in the end, the Army — superior in numbers and technology — prevailed, aided in part by the destruction of the buffalo, the Plains Indians’ primary source of food.

African-Americans on the Western Frontier

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:34:29 +0000

African-Americans were active participants on the western frontier, particularly in the years after the Civil War. Many cowboys were black, skilled as cowhands, horsebreakers and riders on the long drive. Although the top jobs of trail boss and ranch foreman were closed to them, blacks often filled the next most authoritative position — the chuckwagon or ranch cook. Blacks also homesteaded. In the late 1870s, tens of thousands of black “Exodusters” fled the poverty and discrimination of the post-Reconstruction South to found farming communities in Kansas, such as Nicodemus. And blacks served with distinction in the Indian Wars of 1865-1890. Two cavalry regiments (the Ninth and Tenth) and two infantry regiments (the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth) of the U.S. Army were composed of blacks, under white officers. These “buffalo soldiers” — as the Indians called them because of the texture of their hair — fought in numerous engagements against Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, Ute and Sioux warriors, several times coming to the aid of beleaguered white troops. they also took part in patrolling the disquiet Texas-Mexican border and staffed the garrisons of many frontier posts. Between 1870 and 1890, 14 black soldiers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery as were four black Army scouts.