By
STEVE YOUNG
Argus Leader (6/24/01)
Tensions of the past linger today
LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD -- It began benignly enough with children
playing in the river, their mothers smiling as they dug for wild
turnips nearby and their fathers still asleep.
In a few hours, the sun would boil overhead -- the temperature
steaming into the mid-90s and the haze over the Little Bighorn River
valley mingling with the dust of 30,000 ponies.
And when it did, the ancestral rhythms of Lakota life would explode
in a cataclysm of gunfire that would echo across Indian-white
relations on the Northern Plains for generations to come.
The date was June 25, 1876 -- 125 years ago Monday; the place --
near the Bighorn Mountains in southeastern Montana. And the moment
-- the unfolding drama of one of the last great conflicts between
the U.S. military and the warrior societies of the Lakota and
Northern Cheyenne tribes.
The battle is known in the annals of history as Custer's Last Stand.
"We won the fight," says Johnson Holy Rock of Pine Ridge,
whose father, Jonas, was a 10-year-old boy at the Battle of the
Little Bighorn. "And, unfortunately, lost a way of life."
In many ways, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's assault on the
massive tipi village at Little Bighorn is linked inexorably to
another anniversary in 2001 --the federal government's unlawful
seizure of the Black Hills in western South Dakota, 125 years ago
this fall.
To most historians, one never would have taken place without the
other. For it was Custer's foray into the Black Hills in 1874,
ostensibly to seek out sites for an Army post, that led to the
discovery of gold and a subsequent rush of miners.
In turn, the mad dash of white America for the mineral-rich fields
of Dakota and Montana brought thousands of trespassers onto lands
promised to the Lakota under the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie
treaties.
Angrily, the Sioux and Cheyenne retaliated by attacking intruders
who ignored the treaties and entered their territories. Frustrated
U.S. Army officials struggled with the dual missions of trying to
protect white people from Indian attacks and the Indian people from
white intrusions onto their land.
Ultimately, President Ulysses S. Grant decided he didn't have the
means or manpower to do both. Since Indians didn't vote, he opted to
quit policing the miners, a decision made early in November 1875.
Soon after, the Army ordered all Indians outside of the Great Sioux
Reservation created in western South Dakota by the 1868 Fort Laramie
to return to the reservation by Jan. 31, 1876, or be considered
hostile and thus subject to Army force.
In southeastern Montana, chiefs like Sitting Bull, Gall and Crazy
Horse weren't about to abandon their hunting grounds. And so the
stage was set for the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
"I think it's pretty obvious that if it wasn't for the Black
Hills and the squabble with all of those illegal prospectors, there
couldn't have been a Little Bighorn," says historian Bob Lee of
Sturgis, who has written extensively on the history of the Black
Hills.
Today, the arrogance, greed and ignorance that typified the cultural
conflict of 125 years ago reverberate in symbolism throughout the
Little Bighorn River valley, 45 miles southeast of Billings.
In the 1870s, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud and the others were bent on
keeping the Northern Pacific rail lines from pushing west to
Yellowstone. The iron horse scared the buffalo and other game. It
used up scarce firewood supplies along the way.
Today, ironically, Interstate 90 cuts through the heart of the
Little Bighorn valley, in the exact spot where the tipis of Sitting
Bull's people sat at the time of the battle. And coal trains pulled
by Burlington Northern Santa Fe engines rumble through it as well on
their way from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to the Pacific
Northwest.
Skirmishes fought by Red Cloud and others to keep those trains out
of their homelands continue yet today, says Oliver Red Cloud of Pine
Ridge, great-grandson of the chief. Now, the battle is with the
Dakota Minnesota & Eastern Railroad, which wants to use new and
existing lines through the Black Hills to haul coal from Wyoming
through South Dakota to the Mississippi River in Minnesota.
"They had a meeting in Rapid City about it," says Oliver
Red Cloud, 82, chairman of the Black Hills Sioux Nation Council, an
intertribal organization that advises Sioux tribes on their treaty
claims. "We told them no. We're still trying to settle things
from the treaties of 1851 and 1868.
"There are a lot of old graves out there that would be
disturbed. There's land that was taken from us that we want back. We
don't want no trains running through there. We told them no; that
should be it."
Tension exists today
At Little Bighorn, the animosities that drove two cultures to fight
in 1876 exist in various shades today as well.
It can be as subtle as the emotions spawned by the battle
re-enactments that take place there every year. The chamber of
commerce in Hardin, Mont., 15 miles up the road from the
battlefield, stages one such depiction. Ken Real Bird, a Crow Indian
with land within the battlefield boundaries, puts on another.
Real Bird believes his event more accurately depicts the Indian
account of Little Bighorn. But the Hardin chamber insists that its
performance is based on Crow tribal elder Joseph Medicine Crow's
translation of oral and written Indian narratives.
"There's some tension there that has to do with who is more
fair to the Indian point of view," says Marvin Dawes, an
instructor at nearby Little Big Horn College at Crow Agency who
teaches tribal people how to be tour guides at the battlefield.
Being fair to Indians is a rather new concept, Dawes says and then
laughs. It certainly wasn't a great concern among the U.S. Army in
1876.
Even today, he runs into the kind of arrogance that drove Custer and
white America to believe they could simply take what they wanted
from the native people.
During a recent tour of the battlefield, Dawes stopped to watch
three adults and several children pile out of a minivan with Florida
license plates.
The adults emerged from the van with beer bottles in hand, then
ignored private property signs to scramble up a hillside for a
better view. When Dawes advised them that they couldn't trespass,
they told him they had permission to access the property, then
quickly backtracked and mumbled something about trying to find out
how to solicit that permission.
"You see," Dawes said afterward, shaking his head as the
group drove away, "not much has changed in 125 years, has
it?"
In some ways, it seems, he could be right. Certainly 19th century
America had its biases against the country's aboriginal people,
stereotypes that were similar to some of the racist views that exist
today.
But in 1876, the reservation system that emerged from treaty
promises and made the Lakota reliant on the government for their
subsistence hadn't really evolved yet. It hadn't developed into a
welfare society dependent on the Great White Father for its
education, health care and housing. Back then, the Lakota were very
much entrenched in a nomadic lifestyle, a horse-and-buffalo
existence that took them seasonally across the Plains.
Sizing up Indians
Custer's relatives, like Ken Custer of Murrieta, Calif., don't
believe the officer harbored any innate hatred for the Lakota.
"I don't view him as someone who hated Indians," says Ken
Custer, 47, whose great-grandfather was a first cousin to George
Custer. "I view him as an ambitious soldier who did what he had
to do based upon his ambition to climb in rank."
Yet interviews George Custer gave in the months before the battle at
Little Bighorn suggested that he had no great respect for native
people.
In a story in the Toledo, Ohio, Sunday Journal published in March
1876, Custer speculated about a potential presidential run by Gen.
William Sherman and how Sherman might conduct Indian policy if
elected.
"There would be one grand Indian war, and then there would be
no more Indians," Custer was quoted in the story reprinted in
the March 9, 1876, Sioux Falls Independent. "It would settle
the Indian question beyond the tomfoolery of Quakers and
sentimentalists who don't seem to know that every Indian everywhere
is simply a brute. You can't civilize an Indian any more than you
can teach a rooster to lay goose eggs."
In other words, they were savages, Custer insinuated, people with no
written language and no apparent religion who were best dealt with
through force.
But as he himself would soon find out, such a characterization
wasn't that simple.
Of course, fighting Indians in the late 1860s and 1870s was no easy
proposition. America in Custer's day was just emerging from the
Civil War. Much of its military strength was directed to
reconstruction in the South. Its economy along the East Coast
struggled amidst a depression.
Job options for a steady flow of immigrants pouring into New York
were limited. With few choices, newcomers to the country often
enlisted in the military --a fact illustrated in the makeup of
Custer's 7th Cavalry troops that fought at Little Bighorn.
Half of his 586 soldiers were born outside of the U.S., including
128 in Ireland, 125 in Germany, 53 in England and others from places
such as Russia, Greece, Italy and Scandinavia.
The gold fields of California also beckoned. Oregon had been opened,
and with the Mormon migration to Utah, thousands trekked west along
the Platte River Road through Nebraska and southern Wyoming.
Treaties for trails
When California became a state in 1850, securing a route west across
the Great Plains became an important federal policy. So the
government called for a council with the Plains Indians at Fort
Laramie in Wyoming in September 1851 to negotiate the sale of what
became known as the Oregon-California Trail.
In exchange for agreeing to allow settlers to pass unharmed, and for
allowing the government to establish roads and military posts along
the way, the Indians were promised unconditional use of the land
extending north and south of the trail. They also bargained for
$50,000 in goods yearly for 50 years as payment for injuries to
their hunting and wintering grounds.
Yet, soon after the 1851 treaty was signed, the U.S. Senate reneged,
modifying the treaty, reducing the annuity to 10 years.
That didn't sit well with the Lakota, who began exacting their
grievances against settlers on the trail. By 1855 and 1856, the Army
was engaging bands of Teton Sioux in Dakota Territory, providing a
preview of hostilities that would begin in earnest the next decade.
Unfortunately, the necessary Civil War reconstruction in the South
left the U.S. military with few options to address the Indian
problems. When gold was discovered in southwestern Montana in 1862,
the flood of fortune seekers only exacerbated the situation with the
Indians.
The opening of Colorado gold fields, along with the Montana gold
rush, led to demands for separate routes to connect those areas to
the east.
After researching several trails, those headed for Montana settled
on the Bozeman route, cutting through eastern Wyoming, north and
then west through Montana. To pacify the region and insure the
safety of the Bozeman Trail, the government sent out a call in the
fall of 1866 to leaders of the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho for a
conference the following spring.
The Indians wanted no part of that. Sioux leaders protested that
opening the Bozeman Trail would destroy their last decent hunting
ground. Soldiers placed on the trail while negotiations were still
ongoing proved to be the last straw for Indian leaders like Oglala
Chief Red Cloud.
"The Great Father sends us presents and wants us to sell him
the road," Red Cloud said. "But the White Chief goes with
soldiers to steal the road before the Indians say yes or no."
The chiefs of the Powder River country angrily left the council.
Meanwhile, the military established posts at Fort Reno east of
present Kaycee, Wyo.; Fort Phil Kearny north of present Buffalo,
Wyo.; and Fort C.F. Smith west of what is now Lodge Grass, Mont.
Through 1866 and 1867, the forts were under a virtual state of siege
by the Indians. On Dec. 21, 1866, Capt. William Fetterman and 80 of
his men were killed as they tried to protect a wood-gathering detail
near Fort Kearny.
The Indian wars went little better in 1867. The Army could hold its
forts, but the Indians owned the trails.
With too few soldiers to commit to battle, Congress decided to
pursue a policy of peace. It called for another council with the
Indians, again at Fort Laramie. A treaty would be signed in 1868,
though Sioux leaders such as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull didn't
sign it.
In essence, that agreement created a Great Sioux Reservation in
western South Dakota for the undisturbed use of the Lakota. In
exchange, the warring was supposed to end.
Of course, it didn't.
Earlier, in 1866, the U.S. Army had established a new cavalry unit
at Fort Riley, Kan., to help with the Indian wars. That same year, a
young Civil War hero named George Custer was named a lieutenant
colonel in the new unit. Custer had gained fame fighting the
Confederacy, including routing Gen. Jeb Stuart and his troops at
Gettysburg.
But Custer also ran into some trouble after the war and was
court-martialed during his first year at Fort Riley for an
unauthorized visit to his wife, misuse of government materials,
abandoning wounded men and ordering deserters shot without trial.
Suspended from his rank and pay for a year, Custer vowed to
resurrect his career in the Indian wars. And, for a time he did
throughout the American Midwest and Northern Plains.
Black Hills treasure
Then, in the spring of 1873, he was assigned to Fort Abraham Lincoln
near Bismarck, N.D. The Lakota, disenchanted with the government's
reneging on treaty promises, continued to attack settlers along the
Bozeman Trail. So in the summer of 1874, Custer and an expedition
were sent to the Black Hills to find a suitable site for a military
post from which to try to rein in the Lakota.
On July 30, 1874, two miners in Custer's party claimed they found
gold in the Black Hills. That opened a floodgate to fortune seekers.
Try as it might to honor the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the military
didn't have the manpower to keep the intruders out of the Lakota's
sacred Black Hills. Nor was it succeeding in keeping Indians from
assaulting the trespassers.
So, in 1875, Congress tried to negotiate with the Lakota through the
Allison Commission to lease or buy the land the Indians called the
Paha Sapa, or Black Hills. The Sioux roundly refused.
President Grant saw no possible resolution. So, in November 1875, he
decided to ignore the 1868 treaty and allow miners into the Black
Hills without fear of arrest by the military.
By then, many of the Indians who had agreed to give up their nomadic
ways for reservation life were growing more disenchanted. Sedentary
life didn't sit well with them. Indian agents on the reservations
treated them with little regard for their native traditions. And the
goods promised them in the treaties were either inferior or never
showed up at all.
Hundreds of reservation Indians poured out into eastern Wyoming and
southeastern Montana to join brethren who had refused to live on
reservations in the first place. Committed to controlling them, the
government turned control of the Indians over to the War Department.
In 1876, the Lakota and Cheyenne were ordered back to the Great
Sioux Reservation in western Dakota Territory.
Under the spiritual and political guidance of Hunkpapa leader
Sitting Bull, the Sioux and Cheyenne showed no interest in bowing to
threats. They stayed put in the Powder River country of Wyoming and
Montana and waited.
On May 17, 1876, Gen. Alfred Terry and Custer led a column of 1,000
soldiers out of Fort Abraham Lincoln to escort the Indians from
camps in the Powder River basin to the reservation.
At the same time, more than 1,000 troops under Gen. George Crook
were moving up from Fort Fetterman in Wyoming to assist Terry, as
were 500 soldiers under Col. John Gibbon of Fort Ellis in Bozeman,
Mont.
It was a long, hard march for the 7th Cavalry soldiers. They earned
a paltry $13 a month. In addition, they had to subsist on meager
rations -- coffee beans they ground themselves, a pouch of sugar,
hardened peas and beans that were Civil War surplus, at least 11
years old.
The Army issued them a deck of cards, a tin cup and a mess kit that
included a fry pan and plate, both good for digging trenches.
In exchange, they had to march 10 to 15 miles a day. They hunted
antelope and deer along the way to supplement their diet. And when
they camped at night, details would be sent around to pierce the
dirt with bayonets to ensure that no rattlesnakes would crawl into
their blankets.
What awaited them in the valley of the Little Bighorn River was a
village of 1,000 tipis stretching a mile and a half, up to 10,000
tribal people --including 1,500 to 2,000 warriors --and as many as
30,000 horses.
What no one understood at the time was that the Sioux and Cheyenne
were formidable adversaries of the white man's own making. Prior to
1750, the tribes had no horses, and thus no great mobility on the
Plains. Those animals only arrived in North America with Columbus
and the white people that followed. The white traders also brought
other instruments that the Indians eventually used against them --
metal blades for tomahawks, metal tips for arrows. And guns.
All of which made them potent adversaries on the morning of June 25,
1876, a day that unfolded innocently enough with Sioux children
splashing in the Little Bighorn River, with their mothers foraging
for food and their fathers sleeping off a night of dancing and
socializing.
Fifteen miles to the east, a young lieutenant colonel, George
Custer, peered through his binoculars at the clouds of dust and
smoke rising from the valley and made ready for battle.
He had no idea that on a day when the sun would boil, the blood of
some 260 of his soldiers, scouts and civilians would spill on the
sagebrush-covered ridges in the distance.
No one could know then that it would be the last great victory the
Sioux and Cheyenne would ever know on the battlefield. By 1890,
Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall and Red Cloud were either dead or
living on reservations. And their horse-and-buffalo culture lay
decimated in the bloody snows of Wounded Knee in southwestern South
Dakota, destroyed by a vengeful 7th Cavalry.
What remained afterward in the echoes of all that gunfire were two
mass graves --one for the 198 dead soldiers buried on Last Stand
Hill at the Little Bighorn, and one for the 300 Lakota slaughtered
at Wounded Knee.
That and the reverberations of mistrust that have hounded
Indian-white relations on the Northern Plains ever since.