The Dakota War

Figure 1. Inyan Kara, a mountain sacred to the Lakota people, is part of the Black Hills area of modern-day South Dakota

In 1862, while the Civil War still consumed the United States, tensions erupted between Dakota Nation and White settlers in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory. The 1850 U.S. census recorded a White population of about 6,000 in Minnesota; eight years later, when it became a state, the White population was more than 150,000.^[1] The illegal influx of American farmers pushed the Dakota to the breaking point. Hunting became unsustainable and those Dakota who had taken up farming found only poverty. The federal Indian agent refused to disburse promised food. Many starved. Andrew Myrick, a trader at the agency, refused to sell food on credit. “If they are hungry,” he is alleged to have said, “let them eat grass or their own dung.”

Then, on August 17, 1862, four young men of the Santees, a Dakota band, killed five White settlers near the Redwood Agency, an American administrative office. In the face of an inevitable American retaliation, and over the protests of many members, the tribe chose war. On the following day, Dakota warriors attacked settlements near the Agency. They killed thirty-one men, women, and children (including Myrick, whose mouth was found filled with grass). They then ambushed a U.S. military detachment at Redwood Ferry, killing twenty-three. The governor of Minnesota called up militia and several thousand Americans waged war against the Sioux insurgents. Fighting broke out at New Ulm, Fort Ridgely, and Birch Coulee, but the Americans broke the Indian resistance at the Battle of Wood Lake on September 23, ending the so-called Dakota War.^[2]

More than two thousand Dakota had been taken prisoner during the fighting. Many were tried at federal forts for murder, rape, and other atrocities, in a kind of legalistic choreography that conveyed American ideas of Native guilt and White innocence. Military tribunals convicted 303 Dakota and sentenced them to hang. At the last minute, President Lincoln commuted all but thirty-eight of the sentences. Minnesota settlers and government officials insisted not only that the Dakota lose much of their reservation lands and be removed farther west, but that those who had fled be hunted down and placed on reservations as well. The American military gave chase and, on September 3, 1863, after a year of attrition, American military units surrounded a large encampment of Dakota. American troops killed an estimated three hundred men, women, and children. Dozens more were taken prisoner. Troops spent the next two days burning winter food and supply stores to starve out the Dakota resistance, which continued to insist on Dakota sovereignty and treaty rights.

Figure 2. This map shows the major battles between the U.S. government and Native Americans in the late nineteenth century. Look for the Battles of Birch Coulee, New Ulm, and Fort Ridgely, in Minnesota from the Dakota War. Americans broke the Indian resistance at the Battle of Wood Lake.

Figure 3. The Second Treaty of Fort Laramie ended what was known as Red Cloud’s War and divided the area around the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming into distinct zones for the major tribes: Lakota (Sioux), Arapaho & Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine, and Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan. During Red Cloud’s War, the Sioux defeated the U.S. Army on the same plains on which the Sioux had previously defeated the Crow. In 1868, the U.S. and the Sioux entered into negotiations regarding the western Powder River area, although neither held the treaty rights to the land. Animosities over the agreement arose quickly, with neither side fully honoring the terms. Open war again broke out in 1876, and the U.S. government unilaterally annexed Native land protected under the treaty in 1877.

The Second Treaty of Fort Laramie and the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek

Hoping to forestall similar uprisings and all-out Indian wars, the U.S. Congress commissioned a committee to investigate the causes of incidents such as the Sand Creek Massacre. The subsequent report of their findings led to the passage of two additional treaties: the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) and the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek (1867), both designed to move the remaining tribes to even more remote reservations. The Second Treaty of Fort Laramie moved the remaining Sioux to the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory and the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek moved the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche to “Indian Territory,” later to become the State of Oklahoma.

The agreements were short-lived, however. With the subsequent discovery of gold in the Black Hills, settlers seeking their fortune began to move upon the newly granted Sioux lands with support from U.S. cavalry troops. By the middle of 1875, thousands of White prospectors were illegally digging and panning in the area. The Sioux protested the invasion of their territory and the violation of sacred ground. The government offered to lease the Black Hills or pay $6 million if the Indians were willing to sell the land. When the tribes refused, the government imposed what it considered a fair price for the land, ordered the Indians to move, and in the spring of 1876, made ready to force them onto the reservation.

The treaty formed the basis of the 1980 Supreme Court case, United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, in which the court ruled that tribal lands covered under the treaty had been taken illegally by the U.S. government, and the tribe was owed compensation plus interest. As of 2018, this amounted to more than $1 billion. The Sioux have refused the payment, demanding instead the return of their land.

Conflict with George Custer

Meanwhile, tensions were high in other parts of the West. In Kansas, the Cheyenne had killed more than 100 settlers in 1867, and Lieutenant Colonel George Custer was dispatched to the Oklahoma Territory to carry out retribution against the Cheyenne. Custer was the flamboyant but brave hero of Gettysburg and other Civil War campaigns who, after the war, had alternatively fought Indians in the West and performed Reconstruction occupation duty in the South.

In late November 1868, Custer led the Seventh Cavalry through deep snow to attack a large Cheyenne village of 6,000 people on the Washita River, in southwestern Oklahoma. The Battle of Washita River was regarded as the first substantial U.S. victory in the Southern Plains War, and it helped force a large portion of the Southern Cheyenne onto a U.S.-assigned reservation.

In 1873, Custer was sent to the Dakota Territory to protect a railroad survey party against the Lakota. On August 4, 1873, near the Tongue River, Custer and the 7th Cavalry Regiment clashed for the first time with the Lakota. One man on each side was killed. In 1874 Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills and announced the discovery of gold on French Creek near present-day Custer, South Dakota. Custer’s announcement triggered the Black Hills Gold Rush.