Figure 1. The iconic figure who led the battle at Little Bighorn River, Sitting Bull led Indians in what was their largest victory against American settlers. While the battle was a rout by the Sioux over Custer’s troops, the ultimate outcome for his tribe and the men who had joined him was one of constant harassment, arrest, and death at the hands of federal troops.

Rising Tensions

Many of the Sioux and Cheyenne were irate at the presence of so many Americans encroaching in the Black Hills to look for gold—in direct violation of the Fort Laramie treaties. Sitting Bull was an elite Lakota Sioux war leader in his mid-40s and a respected holy man who had visions and dreams. Another important leader was the Oglala Lakota supreme war chief Crazy Horse, a leader (known as a “shirt-wearer”) with a reputation as a fierce warrior. Both resisted the reservations and American encroachment on their lands. They wanted Indian autonomy and were willing to unite and fight for it.

In early November 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant met with General Philip Sheridan and other advisors on Indian policy at the White House. They issued an ultimatum for all Sioux outside the reservation to go there by January 31, 1876, or be considered hostile. The Sioux ignored the edict from Washington, D.C. Sitting Bull said, “I will not go to the reservation. I have no land to sell. There is plenty of game for us. We have enough ammunition. We don’t want any white men here.”

In March, General George Crook attacked the Cheyenne on the Powder River, prompting them to go to the nearby Oglala camp and then the massive Sioux village. The different Indian tribes decided to unite through the summer and fight the encroaching Americans. In the spring, Sitting Bull called for warriors at the reservations to assemble at his village for war. Nearly 2,000 warriors answered the call, creating an extensive village estimated at more than 10,000 people by June. Many were armed with the latest repeating Springfield rifles.

After discovering the approximate location of Sitting Bull’s village, U.S. General Alfred Terry met with Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and Colonel John Gibbon on the Yellowstone River to formulate a plan. They agreed on a classic hammer-and-anvil attack in which Custer would proceed down the Rosebud River and attack the village while Terry and Gibbon went down the Yellowstone and Little Bighorn Rivers by June 26 to block any escape

Figure 2. The Battle of Little Bighorn was fought in what was then the Montana Territory.

The Battle of Little Bighorn

The Battle of Little Bighorn (also called the Battle of the Greasy Grass by the Indians) is perhaps the most famous battle of the American West. At the Little Bighorn River, the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry, led by Lt. Colonel George Custer, sought a showdown. Driven by his own personal ambition, on June 25, 1876, Custer foolishly attacked what he thought was a minor Indian encampment. Instead, it turned out to be the main Sioux force. The Sioux warriors—nearly three thousand in strength—surrounded and killed Custer and 262 of his men and support units, in the single greatest loss of U.S. troops to an Indian attack in the era of westward expansion. Eyewitness reports of the attack indicated that the victorious Sioux bathed and wrapped Custer’s body in the tradition of a chieftain burial; however, they dismembered many other soldiers’ corpses in order for a few distant observers from Major Marcus Reno’s wounded troops and Captain Frederick Benteen’s company to report back to government officials about the ferocity of the Sioux enemy.

Custer’s fall shocked the nation. Cries for a swift American response filled the public sphere, and military expeditions were sent out to crush Native resistance. The Sioux splintered off into the wilderness and began a campaign of intermittent resistance but, outnumbered and suffering after a long, hungry winter, Crazy Horse led a band of Oglala Sioux to surrender in May 1877. Other bands gradually followed until finally, in July 1881, Sitting Bull and his followers at last laid down their weapons and came to the reservation. Indigenous powers had been defeated. The Plains, it seemed, had been pacified.

Forced Submission

Despite their success at Little Bighorn, neither the Sioux nor any other Plains tribe followed this battle with any other armed encounter. Rather, they either returned to tribal life or fled out of fear of the remaining troops, until the U.S. Army arrived in greater numbers and began to exterminate Indian encampments and force others to accept payment for forcible removal from their lands. In Montana, the Blackfoot and Crow were forced to leave their tribal lands and in Colorado, the Utes gave up their lands after a brief period of resistance. In Idaho, most of the Nez Perce gave up their lands peacefully, although, in an incredible episode, a band of some eight hundred Indians sought to evade U.S. troops and escape into Canada.

The Ghost Dance

Figure 3. The Oglala Lakota performing a Ghost Dance, circa 1890.

The stresses of conquest unsettled generations of Native Americans. Many took comfort from the words of prophets and holy men. In Nevada, on January 1, 1889, Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka experienced a great revelation. He had traveled, he said, from his earthly home in western Nevada to heaven and returned during a solar eclipse to prophesy to his people. “You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always,” he allegedly exhorted. And they must, he said, participate in a religious ceremony that came to be known as the Ghost Dance. If the people lived justly and danced the Ghost Dance, Wovoka said, droughts would dissipate, the Whites in the West would vanish, and the buffalo would once again roam the Plains.^[1]

Native American prophets had often confronted American imperial power. Some prophets, including Wovoka, incorporated Christian elements like heaven and a Messiah figure into Indigenous spiritual traditions. And so, though it was far from unique, Wovoka’s prophecy nevertheless caught on quickly and spread beyond the Paiutes. From across the West, members of the Arapaho, Bannock, Cheyenne, and Shoshone nations, among others, adopted the Ghost Dance religion. They believed that proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on their behalf, end American expansion onto their lands, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples throughout the West.

Perhaps the most avid Ghost Dancers—and certainly the most famous—were the Lakota Sioux. The Lakota were in dire straits. South Dakota, formed out of land that belonged by treaty to the Lakota, became a state in 1889. White homesteaders had poured in, reservations were carved up and diminished, starvation set in, corrupt federal agents cut food rations, and drought hit the Plains. Many Lakota feared a future as the landless subjects of a growing American empire when a delegation of eleven men, led by Kicking Bear, joined Ghost Dance pilgrims on the rails westward to Nevada and returned to spread the revival in the Dakotas.

Wounded Knee Massacre

The energy and message of the revivals frightened settlers and Indian agents. Newly arrived Pine Ridge agent Daniel Royer sent fearful dispatches to Washington and the press urging a military crackdown. Newspapers, meanwhile, sensationalized the Ghost Dance.^[2] Agents began arresting Lakota leaders. Chief Sitting Bull and several others were killed in December 1890 during a botched arrest, convincing many bands to flee the reservations to join fugitive bands farther west, where Lakota adherents of the Ghost Dance preached that the Ghost Dancers would be immune to bullets.

Figure 4. Burial of the dead after the massacre of Wounded Knee. U.S. Soldiers put Native Americans in a common grave. South Dakota. 1891. Library of Congress.

Two weeks later, an American cavalry unit intercepted a band of 350 Lakotas, including over 100 women and children, under Chief Spotted Elk (later known as Bigfoot) seeking refuge at the Pine Ridge Agency. They were escorted to Wounded Knee Creek, where they camped for the night. The following morning, December 29, the American cavalrymen entered the camp to disarm Spotted Elk’s band. Tensions flared, a shot was fired, and a skirmish became a massacre.

Although the accounts are unclear, an apparent accidental rifle discharge by a young male Indian preparing to lay down his weapon led the U.S. soldiers to begin firing indiscriminately upon the Indians. The Americans fired their heavy weaponry indiscriminately into the camp. Two dozen cavalrymen had been killed by the Lakotas’ concealed weapons or by friendly fire, but when the guns went silent, between 150 and 300 Native men, women, and children were dead.^[3]

Captain Edward Godfrey of the Seventh Cavalry later commented, “I know the men did not aim deliberately and they were greatly excited. I don’t believe they saw their sights. They fired rapidly but it seemed to me only a few seconds till there was not a living thing before us; warriors, squaws, children, ponies, and dogs . . . went down before that unaimed fire.”

Wounded Knee marked the end of sustained, armed Native American resistance on the Plains. Individuals continued to resist the pressures of assimilation and preserve traditional cultural practices, but sustained military defeats, the loss of sovereignty over land and resources, and the onset of crippling poverty on the reservations marked the final decades of the nineteenth century as a particularly dark era for America’s western tribes.