Great Sioux War of 1876: Black Hills Gold, Sell or Starve and Dull Knife

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The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty created the Great Sioux Reservation, covering the western half of modern South Dakota including the Black Hills, and recognized unceded hunting territory across Wyoming and Montana where white settlement was forbidden. The Lakota and Cheyenne had themselves pushed west in earlier decades, displacing the Kiowa and the Crow. In 1874 George Armstrong Custer's expedition found gold in the Black Hills just after the Panic of 1873, and thousands of miners poured across the treaty line. The Army removed some miners, but the political backlash convinced the Grant administration to stop. In 1875 it offered Spotted Tail and Red Cloud $25,000 to relocate to Indian Territory, and Spotted Tail asked why the miners were not sent there instead. The government then ordered all Lakota and Northern Cheyenne to report to the agencies by January 31, 1876, a deadline Philip Sheridan privately considered a joke.

Colonel Joseph Reynolds attacked a village in March but lost its pony herd the next day. A three-column campaign under Alfred Terry, John Gibbon and George Crook stalled when Crook was checked at the Rosebud, and on June 25 Custer split his command at the Little Bighorn, where nearly 270 soldiers died. Washington shifted to a war of attrition: Congress cut agency rations under the sell or starve rider, and winter campaigns destroyed food and shelter. Crazy Horse surrendered in May 1877 and was bayoneted in custody that September, while Sitting Bull went into exile in Canada until 1881.

• Army troops carried the single-shot Springfield Model 1873, while many Native fighters used Winchester repeaters and bows that were deadly at close range.
• Arikara and Crow scouts served with the Army against the Lakota who had displaced them.
• Crook's troops ate their own horses on the Horsemeat March before attacking a village at Slim Buttes.
• In November 1876 Colonel Ranald Mackenzie burned Dull Knife's Northern Cheyenne village, its lodges, blankets and pemmican, and took its pony herd.
• Spotted Tail and Red Cloud rode out to persuade starving holdouts to surrender, and the 1877 agreement annexed the Black Hills.