33.8 America: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 26/31)

The Cheyenne and Sioux were more widely distributed, with the later especially spread from the Dakota territory through Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska. The U.S. had many forts in those areas, including Forts Buford, Abraham Lincoln, Yates, Meade and Randall in the Dakota Territory, Fort Kearney in Nebraska and Fort Ellis in Montana. Chief Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Sioux band warrior and Crazy Horse was an Oglala Sioux. In the 1 ,860s Washington gave the Hunkpapas a large reservation (along with some Cheyenne and Arapaho clans) encompassing the entire western 1/2 of South Dakota and the Powder River country to west of the Big Horn Mountains to be unceded Indian Territory, off limits to all white people. This was the Treaty of Laramie. But the Northern Pacific Railroad went through then and Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer was sent with reconnaissance guards. He reported that there was gold in the Black Hills, sacred to the Sioux. By 1875 there were over 1,000 prospectors there and Washington took away the unceded land. But Chief Sitting Bull ignored orders to go to a reservation. Consequently in 1876 three columns of army were sent out to "get" Sitting Bull. He did-a "scarlet blanket" ceremony to his god, which involved SO cuts of skin off each arm and then 24 hours of dancing. The now General Custer led one of the three forces of the U.S. and came across the trail of the Indians as they were moving. Recklessly and against orders, he attacked them. In the battle Custer was killed and the core of the 7th Cavalry was destroyed. Later the Sioux were defeated by Colonel Nelson Miles and Sitting Bull was taken prisoner. Still later, of course, he was famous with Bill Cody's Wild West Show, only to be killed in 1896 by Indian policemen, who had come to arrest him as a high priest of a ghost dance movement. After the capture of Sitting Bull, the Sioux Chief Big Foot, with 300 followers, escaped to the Badlands of South Dakota. They, too, were captured and taken to Wounded Knee Creek. When the soldiers were attempting to disarm the Indians gun fire broke out, the Indians were massacred and the bodies left on the ground to freeze. This is yet today a source of much Indian grievance and discontent. (Ref. 294 )

In the meantime, by 1870 a new tanning process developed in 1870, made buffalo hides commercially workable and therefore buffalo hunting a year around business. At the same time there appeared the high powered Sharps' rifle that could kill a full grown buffalo at 500 yards. A top marksman might kill 200 a day in the Texas panhandle. This marked the end of the buffalo and of the remaining Indians. Buffalo slaughter at more than a million a year meant that by 1886 only about 1,000 remained on the plains. (Ref. 294 )

Next we must turn our attention to the great southwest, where in the middle of the century some 7,000 Apaches lived in Arizona, New and Old Mexico. There were several bands - the White Mountain group, the Aravaipa Apache, the Mimbres and the Chiricahuas being the most numerous. The latter group was perhaps the most formidable and was led by Chief Cochise. In Mexico in 1837 and after, the states of Chihuahua and Sonora paid bounty of 100 pesos for a male Apache scalp, 50 for a woman's and 25 for a child. The Apache bows were lethal at 100 yards and they used slings which could hurl stones 150 yards, as well as war clubs and lances. Trained as long distance runners, they could cover 70 miles a day on foot in tough terrain. Chief Geronimo was made most vicious by a massacre of many of his people by the Mexican General Carrasco at Janos, Mexico. By the 1870s there were 10,000 white miners, ranchers and townsmen in Arizona and by 1880 the number had risen to 37,000, about 10 times the Indian population. In the 1880s 5,000 Apaches were forced on to the San Carlos reservation in southern Arizona where they were supposed to farm, but they didn't know how. Geronimo repeatedly escaped to Mexico and returned to raid. In 1886 General Nelson Miles took 5,000 troops to hunt him down and Geronimo finally gave himself up, after his family had been sent to Florida. In 1894 he and the remaining Chiricahuas were taken to Ft. Sill, where most of them soon died of disease. (Ref. 294 )