CHAPTER XXX

Inkpaduta and his hostile camp now1 felt perfectly secure and proceeded industriously in the hunt to make up for the supplies they had lost at Big Mound, and they met with very satisfactory success and were fast placing themselves in condition to pass a comfortable winter. They were in the country of the Yanktonais and expected to spend the winter at the old home of the Cut Heads on the Elm.

Sully had started up the river in ample time to join Sibley at Bismarck toward the end of July, but he had depended upon bringing his supplies up on steamboats and that season the river was extraordinarily low and he was subjected to many annoying delays, in consequence of which he was almost a month too late. He crossed Sibley's trail and went up almost to Fort Clark when from a captured fugitive Indian he learned of Sibley's exploits and that the hostiles had gone over into the James valley. He therefore turned his column toward the southwest and got onto the trail of the Indians. By September 3d he found by the remains of recently killed buffalo and other "signs" infallible to the frontier guide that the Indian camp was near at hand. The brigade remained in camp while Major A. E. House, in command of four companies of the 6th Iowa, was sent out upon a scout. The detail was under the guidance of Francois LaFrambois, a well known half Indian character of the Dakota country, a nephew of the older Joseph LaFrambois, the trader.

At noon Major House's party was resting and grazing their horses, when LaFrambois, who had been some miles in advance, came in and reported twenty lodges of Indians five miles to the southeast. Major House at once ordered his men forward and they proceeded upon a sharp gallop. The Indian camp was in the rough country twelve miles west of the present village of Ellendale, Dickey county, North Dakota. Under the direction of LaFrambois, House kept his men upon the low ground and behind the hills out of sight of the Indians, who were camped on a small lake among the rocky hills. Sully with the main force was twelve miles away. House proceeded down a draw toward the lake where the camp was, and turning about a bend in the ravine found himself directly upon the entire force of the enemy, which he thought contained about 5,000 Indians and 2,000 fighting men. This estimate, however, was excessive. As before stated the entire strength of the band was about 950 effective men, but the number of women and children was probably disproportionately large. There may have been 4,500 in all, but it is more probable that this figures is 1,000 too many. ' The battalion was fairly trapped. Though the Indians were as much surprised as if the military had dropped from the clouds, they immediately prepared for action, and before Major House could turn he discovered that both of his flanks were covered. His men sprang from their saddles to the earth and stood with guns in hand waiting for the order to fire. LaFrambois had been dispatched to summon Sully. The Indians were in position to destroy the battalion almost instantly and would have done so had it not been for the innate deviltry of Inkpaduta. Seeing that but few soldiers were in the detail he instantly resolved to make a great event of the killing. One that would forever resound to his great fame. One that would make his mighty achievement at Spirit Lake tame and colorless. "They are but few," he cried, "let us wait." With the soldiers hemmed in, captive as it appeared to them, and of which the Indians felt assured, the camp set about to prepare for a mighty carnival. The women began to cook and the warriors to paint themselves, meanwhile the untrained volunteers, standing at their guns but a few yards distant were subjected to all of the jeers and insults, in which the Dakota is so proficient. House, too, was maneuvering for time and his men stood unflinchingly in the presence of death. The warriors on the battle line, unable to obtain the ordinary paints, had daubed their faces and bodies with mud. It was drawing near evening and Inkpaduta was ready for the execution of his captives when Sully appeared upon a hill less than a mile away, approaching at the utmost speed of his cavalry. In the twinkling of an eye the aspect of the camp was changed. Tipis came down like magic and every thought of the Indians was turned toward escape. In an incredibly short time the camp was in full retreat. Sully struck them from the rear and House managed to cut in from the east; the Indians were caught in the ravine. Shouting the death song, the warriors sprang to the attack. It lasted but a moment but that moment was a bloody one. The warriors fell back into the ravine and pandemonium reigned. A nation was hemmed in that narrow space and the hour of extinction seemed at hand. "Get away; get away," came the cry and the warriors with buffalo robes over their heads again dashed out and the cavalry horses were stampeded and in the falling darkness many of the Indians escaped. The fight had lasted for an hour. Twenty-two soldiers were killed and fifty were wounded. Three hundred braves were left dead on the field and 250 women and children were taken prisoners. All of the camp equipage and supplies of the Indians were destroyed, and at the beginning of the winter the survivors of the hostile camp were left destitute.  Sully gathered up his captives and carried them down to Crow Creek, where the remnant of the Santees from the Minnesota had been brought during that summer by steamboat from St. Paul, by way of the Missouri, and established on the reservation there and Fort Thompson erected for its protection. The survivors of the hostile camp from White Stone Hill, as the battle of September 3d was called, crossed the Missouri and remained there with their Teton relatives until winter, when they came back to the east side, and with affected innocence approached the forts at Pierre and Crow Creek and eked out a precarious existence through the winter upon rations issued by the military and Indian agent.  In the fall Sully built old Fort Sully on the east side of the Missouri six miles below the present city of Pierre. White Lodge, with his band, returned to western Minnesota and succeeded in stealing enough provisions to keep them alive, meanwhile committing several murders. They continued along the frontier all of the next summer, going as far east as the Blue Earth, where they were driven away by the soldiers. After that they went to the British possessions by way of the Red River valley.

During the winter of 1863 the Black foot Tetons brought in and delivered up to the soldiers at Fort Sully Mrs. Frances Kelly, who had for several months been a captive among them. Mrs. Kelly, with her husband and little daughter, had the previous summer started from Kansas to emigrate to California, and they were attacked by Indians and Mr. Kelly was severely injured and the child killed. Mrs. Kelly was more kindly treated than was the usual lot of captives. Her husband recovered from his wounds and came to Fort Sully to meet his wife. She still resides at Washington, D. C, and has written a very interesting book detailing her experiences with the Dakotas.

Several outrages were committed upon the Dakota frontier during the spring and summer. In early May, Messrs. Thompson and Jacobson, two farmers of Clay county, encamped near the James River ferry cast of Yankton, were attacked at daybreak by Indians and Mr. Jacobson was killed and Mr. Thompson wounded. A few days later Sergeant Trask of the Fourteenth Iowa infantry was killed at Tackett's station at the crossing of Chouteau Creek. In July the family of Henson Wiseman, a soldier of the Second Nebraska, who was up the Missouri with his regiment, was massacred at their home near Helena, Nebraska, by a party of young savages of the bands of White Lodge and Inkpaduta, who spent the summer stealing horses and harassing the settlements all along the frontier.

Another campaign was planned for 1864 somewhat upon the lines of that of the previous year. Sully was to have command. He passed up the river with a strong battalion and at Swan Lake was joined by another expedition under Colonel Thomas, who came across the northern part of South Dakota from Fort Ridgely. The two battalions proceeded to the upper Missouri and a short distance above the mouth of the Cannonball built a post, which they called Fort Rice,

While proceeding on this trip, at the crossing of the Little Cheyenne in Potter county, South Dakota, a naturalist accompanying the expedition, named Fielner, was killed by two Indians who were-ambushed in a clump of bushes near the stream. They were at once pursued by a squad of the Dakota cavalry under Captain Miner, and after a run of fifteen miles were overtaken and killed. General Sully ordered that their heads be mounted upon high poles as a warning to all Indians of the fate that awaited them if they committed murders of white people. This was done by Sergeant English. This occurred on June 26th, and the junction with the second battalion was made on the 30th, and the site of Fort Rice was reached on July 8th.

Nothing that had yet occurred since the beginning of the outbreak had made so powerful an impression upon the Indian mind as this act of barbarity upon the part of General Sully. The Dakotas now came to the conclusion that they were doomed. That nothing short of the total extinction of the race would satisfy the vengeance of the white men, and that their only safety lay in flight to those places which were totally inaccessible to the soldiers. The story of the beheading of the warriors at the Little Cheyenne flew as upon the wings of the wind to every Dakota camp from the Oglalas on the Platte to those in farthest Canada. In hot haste the remnant of the Santees and the Yanktonais bands bundled off to the Bad Lands, where white men, it was said, could not come. They were speedily to learn that they had not yet measured the length of their father's arm when raised in anger. The approach of soldiers on the Missouri sent to them a large contingent of the Tetons of the Uncpapas, Sans Arcs, Blackfeet and Minneconjous. These latter tribes were closely followed in their flight by the military. In the aggregate there were 1,600 fighting men among these refugees. When the Santees and Yanktonais were joined by the Tetons they resolved to make a stand and fight the soldiers if they were attacked. Sully had in the field 2,200 men. True to their nature, members of the hostile band constantly prowled about the advancing column of troops, noting their every movement, and at every opportunity picking off stragglers. The progress of the troops was signaled from hilltop to hilltop by the flashing of mirrors in the daytime and by shooting fire arrows in the night. Four companies of the Thirtieth Wisconsin were left at the Missouri River to build Fort Rice, and on the 19th of July Sully started west in pursuit of the savages.  His course lay up the Cannonball, across to the Heart and thence to the headwaters of the Knife River, but the heavy baggage and provision train had been left under guard on the Heart River, and the last forty- seven miles was a forced march made in a single day on the 27th of July. Early next morning, just after breaking camp, Francois LaFrambois reported that he had located the hostile camp, but a few miles distant. The following is the official report of General Sully of what ensued after the location of the camp:

"I found the Indians strongly posted on the side of a mountain called Tahakouty Mountain, which is a small chain of very high hills, filled with ravines, thickly timbered and well watered, situated on a branch of the Little Missouri, latitude 47° 15', as laid down on the government maps. The prairie in front of the camp is very rolling, and on the left high hills On the top and sides of these hills, and on my right at the base of the mountains, also on the hillocks in front on the prairie, the Indians were posted. There were over 1,600 lodges, at least 5,000 or 6,000 warriors, composed of the Uncpapas, Sans Arcs, Blackfeet, Minneconjous, Santee and Yanktonais Sioux. My force consisted as follows: Eleven companies of the Sixth Iowa cavalry, Lieutenant Colonel Pollock commanding; two companies of Dakota cavalry, Captain Miner commanding; three companies of the Seventh Iowa cavalry. Lieutenant Colonel Pollock commanding; four companies of Brackett's Minnesota battalion. Major Brackett commanding; about seventy scouts and a prairie battery of two sections commanded by Captain N. Pope. This formed the first brigade. Ten companies of the Eighth Minnesota, under command of Lieutenant Colonel Rodgers; six companies of the Second Minnesota cavalry, under Colonel McLaren; and two sections of the Third Minnesota battery under Captain Jones formed the Second brigade, under command of Colonel Thomas. The whole of my force numbered on the field about 2,200 men. Finding that it would be impossible to charge owing to the country being filled with ravines filled with timber, I dismounted and deployed six companies of the Sixth Iowa on the right, with three companies on the Seventh Iowa, and on the left six companies of the Eighth Minnesota infantry; placed Pope's battery in the center, supported by two companies of cavalry; the Second cavalry on the left, drawn up by two squadrons, Brackett's Minnesota battalion on the right in the same order, Jones' battery and four companies of cavalry as a reserve. The few wagons I had I closed up and the rear guard, composed of three companies, followed. In this order we advanced, driving the Indians, until we reached the plain between the hills and the mountains. Here large bodies of Indians flanked me. The Second cavalry drove them from the left. A very large body of Indians gathered on my right for a charge. I directed Brackett to charge them. This he did gallantly, driving them in a circle of about three miles to the base of the mountains and beyond my line of skirmishers killing many of them. The Indians seeing his position collected in large numbers upon him but he repelled them, assisted by some well directed shots from Jones' battery. About this time a large body of Indians whom we learned afterwards had been out hunting for me came upon my rear,  I brought a piece of Jones' battery to the rear and with the rear guard dispersed them. The Indians seeing that the day would not be favorable to them began taking down their lodges and sending back their families. I swung the left of my line around to the right and closed on them, sending Pope with his guns and the Dakota cavalry, two companies forward. The artillery fire soon drove them out of their strong position in the ravines and Jones' battery with Brackett's battalion moving upon the right soon put them to flight, the whole of my line advancing at the same time. By sunset no Indians were upon the ground; a body, however, appeared upon the top of the mountain over which they had retreated. I sent Major Camp, Eighth Minnesota, forward with four companies; they ascended to the top of the hill, putting the Indians to flight and killing several. The total number killed was from 100 to 150. I saw them during the fight carry off a great many dead or wounded. The very strong position they held with the advantages they had to retreat over a broken country prevented me from killing any more. We slept on the battle ground that night."

General Sully's estimate of the strength of the Indians in this engagement is so exaggerated as to be ridiculous and only goes to prove that a band of hostile Indians looks exceedingly large, even to a very brave man, when he sees them in line of battle. Five thousand braves would be very near to the total fighting strength of the entire Sioux nation at any time during the past century. The Indians say there were about 1,600 men among them at the time and that they lost thirty-one in the engagement. They do not count wounded men who recover, so that it is quite likely that their estimate is correct. They were  miserably armed and with very little ammunition, which was nearly exhausted before the fight was over. They had lost their hunt the previous year, American trade was closed to them, or practically closed, and they had nothing to take to the British traders upon which to obtain credit. Consequently it was beyond their power to secure suitable arms to engage in a war with the troops. To fight, too, was the last thing they desired. It was their hope to get into a locality where the troops could not follow them. When they did come their best hope was to defend their homes from the aggressors. They say they could have done this in the splendid stronghold they had chosen but for the cannon, but that they could not stand against. In their flight they were compelled to leave a large portion of their equipment, which of course was promptly destroyed by the soldiers. All of the leading chiefs of the northern Tetons were there, but the general scheme of the defense was left to Inkpaduta, whom the Indians had come to believe possessed a charmed life.

The next night the Indians again attacked Sully's camp and killed two men. Thence Sully made the passage of the Bad Lands across the Little Missouri to the Yellowstone, being harassed most of the way by the Indians hanging on his flanks, but at no time risking an engagement of any moment, though there was a sharp skirmish at the Little Missouri. The supply boats for the expedition had been ordered to go to the Yellowstone and providentially reached there just as the troops emerged from the Bad Lands. After this the Tetons stole away down toward the Black Hills and the Santees and Yanktonais moved off toward the northeast and scattered along the Canadian line. Sully started to descend the Missouri, but when he reached Bismarck the scouts informed him that Inkpaduta was sixty or seventy miles north of that point at the Dog's Den. A strong party was sent against him but they did not catch him asleep this time and he escaped them, though they found his campfire still burning. A party of the Indians followed the troops upon the return to the river but did not succeed in reaching any of them, except to kill one or two men as they neared Fort Rice.

Colonel Thomas had escorted an emigrant train bound for Idaho, under a certain Captain Fisk, from Minnesota to Fort Rice and they had set out from there for the west at about the time that Sully started for the Bad Lands, going almost directly west. The train consisted of about eighty wagons and was escorted by fifty cavalry. About 200 miles from Fort Rice, Fisk was surrounded by a lot of the Tetons, who were returning from the Bad Lands fight to the Black Hills for the fall hunt. He parked his train and sent for assistance. Colonel Dill of the Thirtieth Wisconsin went to the relief of Fisk with 700 men and brought him back to the fort.

During that autumn Fort Wadsworth, afterwards Fort Sisseton, was built on the coteau in northeastern South Dakota, and the friendly Sissetons and Wahpetons who had remained at Camp Release and surrendered to Sibley in the fall of 1862 had been employed as scouts and for the protection of the frontier and were scattered in camps along the coteau from the Sheyenne down to the neighborhood of Lake Kampeska for the purpose of giving information of any hostile parties which might attempt to return to the settlements from the west.

The next year, 1865, another campaign was planned under Sully. This time the purpose was to go to Fort Pierre and thence sweep around by the Black Hills and clean up the Tetons, but getting information that the Santees were coming down out of Canada he went to the upper Missouri but accomplished nothing, and there was no noteworthy military event in his department that year.

In the spring of 1865 Jack Campbell, a notorious halfbreed, long a drunken renegade who had taken up quarters with White Lodge, with a party of young Santees managed to elude the frontier guards and got down to Mankato where they massacred the Jewett family. Jack was secured and hanged but the Indians accompanying him escaped and were making their way to the wilds of the west when they came upon a scouting camp presided over by Solomon Twostars, located on the western slope of the coteau where Bristol, South Dakota, now stands. There were eleven men among the scouts and sixteen of the hostiles. Solomon had been charged to take no prisoners. In the fight that ensued upon the meeting, fifteen of the hostiles were killed and the sixteenth chased to near Fort Wadsworth, where he was taken by the soldiers. Among the hostiles Solomon found the son of his own sister, but beliving that under his orders he had no discretion, he shot his nephew down with the others.

 

 

CHAPTER XXXI

 

From the organization of the territory, Dakota had been a separate Indian superintendency over which the governor was ex officio superintendent. Newton Edmunds became governor and superintendent in 1863 and early in his examination of the situation he arrived at the conclusion that it was judicious superintendence and not soldiers, which were required to restore peace and effect the safety of the frontier, but the military arm of the government would not listen to his voice and arbitrarily forbade him to enter the Indian country, or to attempt any negotiations with the hostiles except through the army. For two years Governor Edmunds fretted and chafed under this restriction, thoroughly convinced that with a free hand he could end the hostility almost instantly, and finally, in the end of the winter of 1865, he carried his grievance to President Lincoln, in person. The president listened with patience and interest while the governor detailed his plan and then gave him a note to the chairman of the committee on Indian affairs requesting that he add to the pending appropriation bill for Indian affairs a clause, providing an appropriation of $30,000 to defray the expense of negotiating peace treaties with all of the Dakota tribes. The session was about to close, but the desired provision was made and a commission composed of Newton Edmunds, Edward P. Taylor, S. R. Curtis, Henry H. Sibley and Orrin Guernsey was appointed to negotiate the treaty. In high hopes Governor Edmunds returned to Dakota and proceeded to call his commissioners together for the purpose of taking up the work for which they were appointed when to his chagrin he was forbidden by the war department to attempt any negotiations with the Indians or to enter their country without the consent of the war department. Before anything could be done the death of the president occurred and it was fall before the matter could be straightened out. Finally in October, the matter .having been arranged, the commission met all of the representatives of the bands, except the Santees and Yanktons, at Pierre, that is at old Fort Sully, six miles below the present capital. Several thousand Indians were assembled there and all expressed a desire to enter into new treaties of peace with the government, but there was a difference of opinion about the terms of the treaty, which later led to the Red Cloud wars. This matter will be treated in its proper connection. Each band signed separate treaties, which were made by the Yanktonais, of the upper and lower bands; the Uncpapas, Blackfeet, Minneconjous, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, Lower Brules and Oglalas. The several treaties were essentially the same. They provided for a lasting peace between the signatories. That all trouble between themselves and other tribes should be submitted to the arbitrament of the president. That they would not only keep peace with the United States themselves, but that they would if necessary "use physical force to compel other tribes from making war," which in effect bound the Indians to keep the peace if they had to go to war to do it. The treaty provided further that the tribes should permit the establishment of roads across their lands in consideration of which the government agreed to pay small annuities. The Lower Brules agreed to accept a definite reservation to extend ten miles back from the Missouri and from Old Fort Lookout to White River, and the government promised to provide them with $25 per year per lodge in stock, implements and general improvement, about the same sum per lodge was pledged to each lodge of the other bands who would settle down to farming.

These treaties were generally signed by a goodly number of representative chiefs and headmen except the Oglalas, of whom but two could be induced to sign. Big Head and Drifting Goose were among the fifteen signers of the Upper Yanktonais convention. Bone Necklace and Fast Walker are recognized among the sixteen signers for the Lower Yanktonais; Bear's Rib and Running Antelope along with a dozen others, signed for the Uncpapas; Fireheart and thirteen stood for the Blackfeet. No well known man is recognized among the nine who signed for the Sans Arcs nor among the fourteen Minneconjous. Hump and Four Bears are well known Two Kettle signatories, of which there are twenty-two. Iron Medicine and Medicine Bull were of the fifteen Brules who signed. Long Bull and Charging Bear alone signed for the great Oglala band, which is indicative of the feeling in that section. Though the treaties were not ratified and proclaimed until the 17th of March, 1866, the war of the Outbreak was essentially over from the time of the signing in October, 1865.

That war which had so destructive an influence upon the people who precipitated it was brought about primarily by the ambition of one of the shrewdest and most unscrupulous Indians who has come in contact with the white men upon the western frontier, Little Crow, though his schemes were made possible by the failure of the government to carefully observe the spirit of its treaty obligations, and to the civil war which made the Dakotas think the government too weak to avenge their terrible conduct. The action of the government after the outbreak began was as prompt and vigorous as could have been expected in view of the great demands upon it at that awful juncture. General Sibley, upon whom that earliest campaign fell, conducted it with a success which under all of the disadvantages under which he acted is the highest eulogy which may be paid to any soldier. His long association with the Indians and knowledge of their character and methods served all interests splendidly. His whole conduct in the premises was exactly what might have been expected from a conservative business man and experienced frontiersman. His caution, which has been condemned, was one of his greatest virtues in that emergency and undoubtedly saved his forces from disaster and the lives of the helpless captives from sacrifice. The families of the captives and the people of the northwest may ever be thankful that in that emergency the situation of the general government was such that it was impossible to at once throw into that campaign a fully equipped and provisioned column of the regular army, under a trained military commander. The very difficulties of the situation, which left Sibley without cavalry or provisions, necessitating delay and slow movement, was the salvation of the captives and the success of the campaign. At the most critical juncture in the history of the northwest Henry Hastings Sibley was a special providence.

The continuation of the war after the rescue at Camp Release was due to no military necessity but simply to the terrible resentment against the Dakotas which had been engendered in the minds of the people of Minnesota in particular and of the northwest generally by the awful outrages perpetrated upon the Minnesota. But for this sentiment of hostility and revenge on the part of the whites the whole difficulty could have been readily and inexpensively settled at once and without an army.

As every crisis in the history of a people must do, so this event in the affairs of the Dakotas brought several men into the prominence of leadership and before proceeding with the story it is well to stop and measure up the men who were thus emphasized above their fellows. In the first instance it was emphatically Little Crow's war. He was the fourth Little Crow known to history in the direct line of succession, his great grandfather, from whom so far as known the name originated, was chief of the Kaposians and came into prominence through service in the Pontiac wars and the Revolution. He was succeeded by his son Chatanwakoowamani (Who Walks, Pursuing a Hawk). This is the Little Crow whom Pike met and made head chief of the Mississippi tribes and who afterwards was prominent as an English ally in the war of 1812. He was succeeded sometime before 1830 by his son Wamde-tanka (Big Eagle), who was the father of Tayoatidoota, the Little Crow 'of this sketch. From his boyhood Little Crow was an outlaw, disreputable in his habits, untruthful and deemed irresponsible and unsafe even by his own people. So bad, indeed, did he stand, that it was the intention of his father to disinherit him and confer the chieftainship upon a younger brother, but that brother was killed by the Chippewas in 1842 and in consequence when his father was called suddenly to die, from the effects of an accidental gunshot wound, he left the chieftainship to this son with great misgivings and reluctance, and with many admonitions for his reformation and advice for his future conduct of the office. He continued, as he came into power, adroit, treacherous, cruel, diplomatic, eloquent, disreputable. Untrusted by the white men who knew him intimately; feared and followed by the Indians who had no affection for him. He was regarded by all of the better Indians as an unsafe and ambitious counselor, even within his own band and the neighboring bands held him in real aversion. So bad did the Indians consider his counsel that they deposed him from the chieftainship, and it was to avenge this humiliation which his neighbors had put upon him that he railroaded them into a war, against the better judgment and earnest protest of almost all of the men who had arrived at years of discretion, but having with the political finesse of which he was master gotten the impetuous and reckless young men to his way of thinking the sane older men, not free from the traditions and customs which from time immemorial had held their people in thralldom, were unable to stand out against the demands of the warriors and so were carried into the war which from the beginning they felt must end in disaster to their people. It must be conceded that with Indians as with white men, fame and success are generally synonymous, and had success crowned Little Crow's outbreak there is no doubt that they would have looked upon him with far different eyes, but with his career ending as it did in his complete discomfiture, and resulting in great loss and hardship to his people, his memory is held in almost universal detestation among his own race.

In his early years Little Crow married two Wakpekute women of Shakopee's band, but after the first had borne him a son and the second a son and a daughter, he became enamoured of the daughters of Running Walker, the chief of a band of Wahpetons, and putting away the first two wives, successively and successfully married four of the Running Walker sisters, the first of whom bore him seven children, but one of whom, Wowinapa, lived, the second gave him four children, the third was the mother of five, and the last of three. Of this numerous family not more than seven children were living at the time of the outbreak. He took all of his four wives and children with him when he decamped from Camp Release and left them at St. Joseph's when he returned to Minnesota upon his fatal trip in 1863.

The Indian who more than any other developed great generalship in this war was Inkpaduta, the villainous Wakpekute renegade, of whom no single noble trait of character is recorded. This conscienceless Ishmael, whose hand was against every man, white and Indian alike, has been so constantly in evidence in these pages that most of his known life has been recorded, but it may be satisfactory to assemble here in a single paragraph the facts upon which his evil fame is founded.

Inkpaduta was the son of Wamdesapa, a Wakpekute chief of violent temper and bad character, who owing to differences with his tribe due to the Sac and Fox wars following the boundary treaty of 1825. seceded from the tribe in 1828 and took up his home on the Vermillion of South Dakota. In the troubles growing out of the tribal division Wamdesapa, in a fit of anger, killed Tasagi, the principal chief of the Wakpekutes, and after that the murderer was not longer esteemed a Wakpekute by the people of his own blood. He was married to a woman of the Lower Sissetons and Inkpaduta was born about 1815, while his family were camping upon the Watonwan River. He inherited his father's fiendish temper and cruel instincts, which were not at all modified by his training, and when he succeeded as chief of the outlaw band, upon the death of Wamdesapa about 1848, he was a post graduate in savage deviltry. His first official exploit as chief of his band which has been preserved to us was the massacre of Wamundeyakapi, the dashing and decent young chief of the Wakpekutes, together with seventeen of his warriors, as they slept in their hunting camp on the headwaters of the Des Moines, not far from Bear Lakes, in Murray county, Minnesota. Inkpaduta crept into the camp of Wamundeyakapi and stabbed the men to death without arousing them, until his work was almost completed, and then escaped without the loss of a man. This was in 1849, during the first year of his chieftainship. He was not summoned to the council of Traverse des Sioux in 1851, nor consulted in the matter of the disposal of the lands in Minnesota, his tribe considering that he had by his conduct forfeited all claim upon them. He looked upon the situation otherwise and when the time for the first payment came he was on hand to claim a share. The agent did not recognize him but Inkpaduta compelled the Indians to pay tribute to him in goods and money and he really got as much in value as the regular annuity Indians. He appeared at each  annual payment to 1856 and bulldozed the Indians into sharing with him. Before the next payment he indulged in the awful massacres at Spirit Lake and Springfield, which put an end to his open appearance at the agencies. In those massacres forty-two white persons first and last lost their lives. During all of this period his band was a refuge and a shelter for the renegade Indians of all the bands. When an Indian had rendered himself obnoxious to the whites or to his tribe so that life was unsafe on the frontier he knew that a welcome ever awaited him in the lodges of the desperado. For a long period his principal camp had been at the lakes near Madison, but after the Spirit Lake massacre he made his headquarters further back and was chiefly with the Yanktonais; indeed for the remainder of his long career he was intimately associated with the "Little Yanktons." He remained chiefly on the James until 1862, occasionally slipping down to communicate with the Santees until the outbreak. It is claimed, but not perfectly established, that Little Crow sent for him some weeks prior to the outbreak and that he remained near the settlements and in frequent communication with Little Crow until hostilities began. It is only certainly known that about the 1st of August Agent Galbraith obtained information that he was encamped on the Yellow Medicine some miles back of the agency and that he sent a detachment under Lieutenant Sheean after him. Sheean made a fruitless scout as far as Lake Benton, but it is pretty certain that the soldiers traveled further than Inkpaduta did, and that instead of fleeing before the military to the wilds of South Dakota, the wily red skulked about near to the Lower agency during the two weeks prior to the outbreak and that when it began his hands were among the bloodiest. From that time forward, during the war of the outbreak his ubiquity was amazing. He was everywhere from the Canadian line and the Bad Lands down to Nebraska and central Minnesota and wherever he appeared, murder and theft marked his trail, yet while carrying on this guerilla work he was the leader in every battle fought with the white troops after Wood Lake, and it is not at all certain that he was not active in that battle and the previous engagements along the Minnesota. He was at the affair at Fort Abercrombie in the very week of the battle of Wood Lake; he met Captain Miner at Sioux Falls in November; he stole horses and picked off an occasional man along the Minnesota frontier during the winter.

In May he murdered Mr. Henry Basche near New Ulm. though but two weeks earlier he had murdered Mr. Jacobson at the James River ferry near Yankton. In July he massacred the Wiseman family in Nebraska and had retired to the buffalo country to make his winter's meat just in time to be present and lead the hostiles in the battles at Big Mound, Dead Buffalo and Stony Lake the latter part of July. He was with the Yanktonais at the time and by common consent the leadership fell to him. This was probably the first time that the management of a large number of Indians in battle with the soldiers had been entrusted to him and the superb manner in which he covered that retreat, which was precipitated without a moment's notice, and without any opportunity to plan a line of action, yet which resulted in bringing off their women and children in safety and with the loss of but few men, marked him at once as a soldier of high executive ability, and won for him the admiration of the Indians who thereafter were glad to fight under his leadership. The affairs at Buffalo Lake and Stony Lake were no more than shows of forces, but his success in diverting Sibley from an attack while they were crossing the women and children over the Missouri still further advanced him in the admiration of the Indians as a war chief. At the battle of Whitestone Hill, a month later, he made the mistake of letting his vanity get the better of his soldierly instincts and put off the attack upon House, after he had him in his power, in order to make a carnival of the massacre, and so waited until Sully arrived with re-enforcements, but the manner in which he got more than 2,000 women and children out of the ravine in which they were entrapped, and spirited them away to safety, was a marvelous piece of management. In the early summer of 1864 he was down to the settlements on a horse-stealing expedition when the mounting of the heads of the men who massacred Fielner, at the little Cheyenne, set all of the tribes aflame, and the Yanktonais sent runners to summon him back. He arrived in the west in time to conduct the allied tribes back to the edge of the Bad Lands and establish them in the camp on the side of the mountain, where they were attacked and driven out by Sully in the battle of Killdeer Mountain on the 28th of July. He led in the running fights in the Bad Lands but as stated he was practically without arms. After that he went into Canada, but made frequent excursions along the frontier and wherever an outrage was committed the tracks of the bloody-handed chief might have been found nearby. After the close of the war of the outbreak, he remained along the Canadian border until the Red Cloud wars came on when he joined in them and after the treaty of 1868 joined the recalcitrants who with Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Black Moon roamed through the Montana country, and as we shall learn he took an active part in the war of 1876. After that he went into Canada, where he died about 1879.

It was only as a war chief that he won a place in the admiration of the Indians. In civil life they would have none of him. Except where bloodshedding was the business in hand, they knew by sore experience he was not to be trusted. During all of the time that he was in command of the Indian forces the white men did not realize that he was even present and in all of the writing, there is not a line that gives him credit for any part in those battles. Everything considered, he must be accorded a high place as a military leader. There is little of record and little which the living Indians know of him which indicates much of his mental endowments. He appears never to have resorted to diplomacy to carry a point but invariably depended upon brutal force. If there is one exception to this, it was in the negotiation for the release of Mrs. Marble. Greyfoot, the rescuer, relates that he craftily argued that the taking back of one captive would be sufficient to convince the white men that the annuity Indians had acted in good faith. It is scarcely probable from all of his conduct that he was other than he seemed, a terrible monster.

John Otherday, Paul Mazakutemane, Gabriel Renville, Struck by the Ree and other Indians who distinguished themselves in the war of the outbreak are treated at length in the first volume of the collections of this society.

Standing Buffalo, a chief of the Sissetons, has usually been credited with the leadership in the battle of Big Mound, but this is a mistake. As indicated in the text, Standing Buffalo did no more than was necessary to protect the women and children from the unexpected attack upon the camp, by the white men. No opportunity was given for explanations. When the fatal shot was fired by the young Inkpadutan, which killed Dr. Weiser, the attack began upon all Indians alike, without discriminating between the hostiles and friendlies; indeed it was presumed that all were hostile. The Indians, taken utterly by surprise, dashed away before the enraged soldiers. Their tipis were standing and the children were playing about. The warriors were compelled to find a means to hold the soldiers in check until the women could strike the tipis, gather up the utensils and clothing and get away. The Sissetons, under Standing Buffalo, did all that they could to assist in this and when the chase was over and the soldiers returned to camp, quietly withdrew and passed north toward Canada. There Standing Buffalo was killed by a party of Crows in 1866. It was after the Sissetons had begun to return to the states at the conclusion of the peace. In his testimony in support of the Sisseton claims. Little Fish, chief of the Devils Lake band of Sisseton tells the pathetic story: "The last time I had a talk with him he told me to try and see the white people and not be afraid to see them, and if I did see any white people to tell them that his wives and children, father and mother and most of his relatives had died of smallpox and that he was now living near to where they were buried; that he intended to come himself to the white people but he wanted to stay a little longer with his dead. Then I parted with him and the next news that I heard from him he was dead."

Most, if not all of the Sissetons and Wahpetons who remained in Minnesota after the battle of Wood Lake volunteered under General Sibley as scouts during the ensuing war. Gabriel Renville and Sam J. Brown were chiefs of scouts and all of them did satisfactory work. Sam J. Brown, is a half Sisseton son of Major Joseph R. Brown the well known trader and Indian agent. He was born not far from the present village of Sisseton, March 7, 1844. His mother was of good Indian family, a descendant of Redwing's. When the massacre came the Browns lived on the east side of the Minnesota, about seven miles below the Upper agency, in a good stone house. Major Brown himself was absent in the east at the time but the entire family were taken prisoners by a party of Little Six's men and held captive until the delivery at Camp Release. In the spring of 1866, while acting as inspector of scouts, Young Brown was stationed at Fort Wadsworth, when he was informed that a party of hostiles was passing down from the west toward the settlements. It was his business to keep the scouting camps, strung along at frequent intervals from about the line of the Northern Pacific railway down to the central portion of South Dakota, on the qui vive, and when this information came to him, he wrote a note telling the fact to Lieutenant Cochrane, in command at Fort Abercrombie, which note was to be dispatched to Abercrombie the following morning. He then mounted his pony, and at sunset on the 19th of April, 1860, set out from Fort Wadsworth to ride to a scouting station on the Elm River, fifty-five miles distant. He reached the point on the Elm near midnight, to be informed that the peace treaty had been ratified and that the Indians which he had believed to be hostiles were runners which Major Brown had dispatched with news of the peace and to invite the Indians who were in hiding in Canada and elsewhere to come in to Fort Rice and meet Governor Edmunds' commission, which was expected to be up the river in May. Fearing that if the message to Lieutenant Cochrane was delivered it would cause great and unnecessary uneasiness along the frontier settlements, Young Brown determined to at once return to Wadsworth and secure the message before it was transmitted, and changing ponies he immediately set out upon the return trip. When well out upon the James River flats, a desperate spring blizzard set in, but pushing on he was driven from his course and at the first light of dawn he discovered he was down near the Waubay Lakes, and turning in the teeth of the storm forced his weary, but game little pony against it and at 8 o'clock in the morning landed at the fort, exhausted and paralyzed. He had rode 150 miles in little more than twelve hours. He has never recovered from the effects, being paralyzed in the legs. He still resides at Browns Valley, Minnesota.

 

CHAPTER XXXII

 

After the terrible punishment which Harney administered to Little Thunder and his band of Brules at the Blue Water in the autumn of 1855, and the terror which that campaign carried to all of the Teton bands, the rigor with which he handled them in the treaty making enterprises of 1856, and the establishment of Fort Randall that year, induced good behavior on the part of the Brules and the Oglalas until towards the time of the Minnesota outbreak, in 1862. This excited all of the Indians to a fresh uprising, but did not especially affect the western Tetons until the autumn of 1863. At that time they renewed their outrages upon the great overland routes between the Missouri River and the -Pacific coast. Frequent attacks were perpetrated upon immigrants, stage passengers and telegraph operators that fall, but the authorities did not appreciate the magnitude of the movement from the Indian point of view, believing them to be acts of irresponsible bands maddened by liquor, not infrequently sold to them by outside traders, and that the tribes would eventually punish these outlaws and maintain their former relations of amity and good will toward the government and the people, but this hope proved groundless.

Emboldened by exemption from the swift awl certain punishment which should always follow such acts of wanton cruelty and lawlessness, and believing, no doubt, that the general government, by reason of the continuance of a great and formidable rebellion and civil war, would he unable to chastise them for their crimes, these outrages rapidly multiplied, and finally culminated in open war. The atrocities perpetrated by the Brules and Oglalas upon the lives and property of unoffending and defenseless emigrants during the autumn of 1863 and in 1864 and 1865, will perhaps never be fully known or appreciated. They were numerous and shockingly revolting in their details, men, women and children falling alike victims to their cruelty. Wagon trains and ranches were burned, stage stations and telegraph offices robbed and destroyed, and private dwellings laid waste for hundreds of miles on all the various lines of travel from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains. The overland stage line and the Pacific telegraph enjoyed no exemption from their outrages, and during a large proportion of the time it was impossible either to run the one or to operate the other. Large bodies of troops were dispatched to the scene of disaster under the command of officers of acknowledged ability and experience, but the Indians successfully eluded their pursuers, concealing themselves in canyons by day, and perpetrating fresh atrocities by night.

These marauding parties were led chiefly by Spotted Tail, who was considered by the whites as responsible for the bail conditions at this period. The Oglalas, in the main, resided west of the Black Hills and did not participate in these troubles. Being little disturbed in their rich buffalo ranges, they had no such occasion to make trouble for the whites. The Oglalas at this period were subject to Mischief Maker as head chief, recognized by General Harney, and ten sub-chiefs, Harney-made, one of whom was Red Cloud, who by 1865 had come to be considered, by the Indians themselves, as leading chief of the nation.

The development of the gold mines in Idaho and Montana led to a demand for better roads from the states into these sections and by the 1st of March, 1865, congress passed a bill providing for a road connecting with the California trail near Fort Laramie and thence to proceed diagonally across the country west of the Black Hills, through the headwaters of the Tongue, Powder and Big Horn Rivers, skirting the Big Horn Mountains to Bozeman, in Montana. This line would provide a direct route from the central states, but the northern states of Wisconsin and Minnesota desiring to share in the business, it was proposed to build another road over practically the line of the present Dakota Central railroad, thence up the Cheyenne and westward until it intersected the Laramie and Bozeman trail. Each of these new roads, it will be observed, would run directly through the great buffalo ranges of the Tetons.

Early in the spring of 1865, Colonel Sawyer of Sioux City was designated to survey and open the Laramie-Bozeman trail, which soon came to be known as the Montana road. Lieutenant John R. Wood, with  a detachment of twenty-five men of B Company of Dakota cavalry, was detailed to protect him upon the expedition. He was also accompanied by some traders who were going into the mountain region, among whom was Nat Hedges of Sioux City. Sawyer, with commendable activity, proceeded to work, and soon was on the stretch northwest of Laramie. The general rendezvous of the Oglalas was at Fort Laramie, where their agent resided and where their annuities were paid. When Sawyer entered the buffalo country northwest of Laramie, Red Cloud at once perceived the danger of disturbance to the buffalo upon which the tribe depended for the greater part of its subsistence, and he started out to overtake Sawyer and protest against his entering the country. This he did, but, of course, effected nothing thereby. It was Sawyer's business to build a road and he had no discretion in the matter, and probably no comprehension of the argument advanced by the Indians.

Failing in argument to impress his point, Red Cloud resolved upon trying moral suasion. He gathered up a large body of Oglalas and Cheyennes, and again overtaking Sawyer's party at the Powder River, he surrounded it and held it in siege for fifteen days. No force was used; the intention being by a show of force to bluff the road makers out of their country. The Indians, after two weeks, raised the siege, but continued to make demonstrations to intimidate, but were careful to do no real damage. However, the feeling of hostility was growing and Red Cloud began to realize that it would be impossible to much longer restrain his young men. Young Hedges strolled too far away from the main force and was killed by an irresponsible young Cheyenne. After this Red Cloud withdrew his Indians and the expedition moved on to Tongue River, where he again centered his forces and held the company in siege for three days and then withdrew. He had failed in his purpose to stop the road building without resorting to bloodshed. He allowed Sawyer to go on and his escort was allowed to return through the Oglala country without molestation, but Red Cloud resolved that the road should be abandoned at every cost.

About that time all of the Indians were summoned to send their delegates to Fort Sully to meet the Edmunds' commission in October, 1865. Neither Red Cloud nor Spotted Tail could be induced to attend this council or permit their bands to be represented, but sent word that any attempt to build roads through their country, or locate forts therein, would be resisted with the whole strength of the tribe. Failing to bring the hostile Brules and Oglalas into council with the Edmunds' commission, the government resolved to make a new attempt in that direction and immediately sent out new runners, inviting them to a council to be held at Fort Laramie the next summer. These runners did not get into communication with the hostiles for some months, but finally located them and secured promises from them to come in. The council was called for the 30th of June.

Spotted Tail, who prior to 1863 had been on very friendly terms with the whites, familiarly intimate with the officers at Fort Laramie, in March sent in a runner asking permission to bring in the remains of his daughter and bury her at the fort according to the custom of the whites. This request was granted and as he approached the fort Colonel Maynadier, in command of Fort Laramie, went out with his staff to meet him, and brought him in, showing him every courtesy and honor, and the girl was given an impressive funeral and burial. In his funeral address Spotted Tail, though saying that his heart was bursting with grief and that he could not talk of business at that time, took occasion to say that it was his desire to live in peace with the whites, but, "We think we have been much wronged and are entitled to compensation for the damage and distress caused by making so many roads through our country, and driving off and destroying the buffalo and game." In his report of March 9, 1866, Colonel Maynadier says, "It satisfies me of the entire trustiness of Spotted Tail, who is always with Red Cloud, and they two rule the nation."

After the summons to this treaty council, all of the Dakotas ceased their hostilities and began to assemble about Fort Laramie. From January to July there was entire peace in the Dakota country. On the 1st of June, in pursuance of previous arrangement, the treaty commission assembled at Fort Laramie. It was constituted as follows: E. B. Taylor, superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern superintendency at Omaha, president; Colonel Henry E. Maynadier, Colonel R. N. McLaren, of Minnesota, and Thomas Wistar, of Philadelphia. Charles E. Bowles, of the Indian department was secretary and Frank Lehmer of Omaha assistant secretary.

Two thousand of the Brules and Oglalas were in attendance and the principal chiefs were delegated to represent the bands in the council. The main object sought to be accomplished by the commission was, of course, in addition to the general negotiation for peace, the opening of the new road from Fort Laramie to Montana by way of Bridger's ferry and the head waters of the Powder, Tongue and Big Horn Rivers. This region of country was the most highly prized by the Indians who occupied it, as it abounded in buffalo, antelope and deer. Those of them who did not reside in the region willingly signed the treaty granting a right of way, probably upon the theory that they were willing to sacrifice their relatives for the good of the country, but those who did reside in that region absolutely refused to allow a road to be made or a military pot to be established. While they were negotiating this treaty at Laramie, the commissioners and chiefs being assembled in council under a bower prepared for the purpose, Colonel Henry B. Harrington, of the Eighteenth United States infantry, arrived at Fort Laramie with a force of about 700 men, with instructions from military headquarters to establish and occupy military posts on the proposed route to Montana.

When Red Cloud, The Man Afraid of His Horses and other principal chiefs of the bands occupying the Powder River country, learned that it was the determination of the government to establish military posts in their country, whether the Indians consented or not, they at once withdrew from the council, and, with their followers, returned to their country and commenced a vigorous war upon all who came into it or traveled the proposed route to Montana. A small portion only of the Indians who were represented at the Laramie treaty remained true and peaceful. Some Oglalas under Big Mouth remained in the vicinity of Laramie and about 1.200 Brules and Oglalas under the chiefs Spotted Tail and Swift Bear went to the headwaters of the Republican River south of the Platte. This they did at the request of Colonel Maynadier, who represented to them that by so doing they could be held harmless from any suspicion of being connected with the hostiles. It is estimated that the Indians occupying the country north of Laramie from the 1st day of July, 1866, to the 21st of December, 1866, killed ninety-one enlisted men and five officers of the army, killed fifty-eight citizens and wounded twenty more, besides capturing and driving away large numbers of horses, mules and cattle.

 

CHAPTER XXXIII

 

In furtherance of the plan of the government to perfect and protect the Montana road, General Carrington was instructed to proceed from Fort Laramie northwest to Fort Reno on the Powder River, to dismantle that post and move it forty mites further west, re-erect and garrison it, and with the remainder of his force to go on to a point between Powder River and the Big Horn Mountains, and there establish a new post which would command the valley of the Powder River. He was also to erect two other posts, one on the Big Horn and one at the crossing of the Yellowstone. No one in either the civil or the military arm had any conception of the magnitude of the undertaking. To do this he was given about 700 men of the Twenty-seventh regular infantry, only 200 of whom were veteran soldiers, the remainder being raw recruits. General Carrington was officially designated as commander of the mountain district. He had four pieces of artillery, 226 wagons and a few ambulances. His men were armed with old fashioned Springfield muzzel-loading muskets, except a few who had the new Spencer breach-loading carbine. A portion of the command was mounted from discarded horses of the cavalry regiment, which was met at Fort Laramie. Pains had been taken in recruiting to obtain a complete outfit of artificers of every description, and they were equipped with tools and appliances needed for the construction of the forts, as well as all of the portable equipment therefor, such as stoves, windows, etc. They also had an outfit of haymaking tools and two steam sawmills. Many of the officers were accompanied by their wives and children, who at the outset seemed to regard it rather as a pleasure jaunt than otherwise. The expedition set out from Fort Laramie on the 14th of June, 1866. It was not planned or prepared for war, but was supposed to be a peaceable enterprise. It was about 160 miles up to Fort Reno and it was not until the 28th of June that the column reached that post. When they first started out from Laramie the Oglalas and Cheyennes protested against their entering their country, but no attention was paid to this. At Reno for the first time Carrington found his progress interrupted and his column menaced with hostilities. A courageous attempt was made by the Indians to stampede the live stock. Carrington was promptly made aware of the fact that it would be impracticable to abandon Fort Reno or try to remove it. It was a tumble down and temporary little place, but he put it in good repair, stockaded it and left 175 men for a garrison. With the balance of his force he left Fort Reno on the 9th of July and marched on, following the Montana trail to the junction of the Little and Big Piney Creeks, branches of the Powder, and selected, after a careful survey of all of that region, a location about twenty miles southeast of the present city of Sheridan. It was the 13th of July when he selected the site and began active operations in the construction of Fort Phil Kearney. The post was about four miles from the foot of the Big Horn Mountains and upon a little prairie knoll, sufficiently free from timber to render it easily defensible from skulking Indians. He began operations by building a strong stockade and then, more at leisure, undertook the erection of the fort proper. The most convenient timber was about seven miles distant, on an island, in the Big Piney Creek, directly west of the fort, and without any intervening hills, rendering the road for hauling timber and wood convenient and easy. He set up his sawmills at Piney Island. There were several foothills near to the fort site, one of which was named Suilivant bill, another Lodge Trail hill, upon the summits of which lookout sentinels were established. Sullivant was almost directly west of the fort and just to the right of the road to the wood island. Pilot hill was east of the fort and just across the Little Piney Creek. Lake DeSmet, about seven miles to the southeast. From the very first location at Fort Phil Kearney, Red Cloud and Man Afraid, at the head of the bands of the Oglalas, and Medicine Man, with a large party of Cheyennes, began to hang about the post to intimidate and tantalize the soldiers, attacking every train that appeared on the Montana road, and generally rendering life burdensome to all of the whites in that section. Within a few days they grew bolder and it was found unsafe for any white person to be outside of the stockade unless protected by a large detachment of military. A  team could not be sent to the wood yard, nor a load of hay brought in from the meadows without it was accompanied with a strong guard. The first hunters sent out came in themselves hunted and though there was an abundance of game in the vicinity no hunter was brave enough to stalk it. A reign of terror grew up among the civilians so that no one ventured alone outside of the stockade. An attack might be looked for at any moment and when conditions seemed most propitious and the danger the least to be expected it was usually the most imminent. Old Jim Bridger, the well known frontiersman, was in the fort and he described the situation when he said, "Where you don't see no Injuns there they're sartin to be the thickest." For a long period the Indians did not attempt anything like an open attack, but contented themselves with such predatory attacks as have been related. These of course rendered the construction of the buildings slow and unsatisfactory. The wood trains were subject to almost daily attack, and it was found necessary to erect a block house at the wood camp. Of course, these attacks were repelled with force, but it was almost useless to go out against them, for with the appearance of the soldiers the Indians dropped out of sight as if by magic, and day after day the detachments returned without having fired a gun. general Carrington himself pursued one band nearly to Tongue River in the hope of recovering some beef cattle they had succeeded in running off, but finding that the Indians were about to flank him he beat a hasty retreat, arriving at the fort in safety. "On the afternoon of December 6th the lookout on Sullivant hill signaled that the wood train had been attacked, and Captain Fetterman, the senior captain in the fort, was detailed with forty mounted men, including fifteen mounted cavalry under Lieutenants Bingham and Grummond, with Sergeant Bowers, a veteran of the civil war, to relieve the wood train and drive the Indians toward the Peno valley; while Carrington himself with about a score of mounted infantry would sweep around the north side of Lodge Trail hill and intercept them. The Indians gave way under Fetterman's advance, hoping to lure the troops into an ambush, but at a favorable spot they made a stand. The fighting there was so fierce that the cavalry, who by a singular circumstance were without their officers, gave way and retreated headlong along the valley toward the ridge. The mounted infantry stood its ground and under Fetterman's intrepid leadership was making a brave fight against overwhelming odds, the number of Indians present being estimated at more than 300. It would have gone hard with Fetterman, however, had not Carrington and the first six men of his detachment suddenly swept around a small hill and taken the Indians in reverse. The general had advanced under fire and meeting the fugitive cavalry had ordered them to fall in the rear of his detachment. The rear detachment and Fetterman soon joined Carrington, and through the combined parties the Indians were compelled to take to flight." This foray of the Indians was made by Yellow Eagle, a sub-chief under Red Cloud. It was a close call for all, but Lieutenants Grummond and Bingham were yet unaccounted for, as well as Sergeant Bowers; all of whom had been separated from their command while chasing some scattered Indians. Search was instituted for them, Lieutenant Bingham was found dead. Sergeant Bowers had been fearfully wounded, and scalped; he was still alive but died immediately. He had killed three Indians before he was overborne. Five others were wounded; Grummond was rescued alter a hand to hand fight with the enemy.  This will serve as an example of the character of the warfare which was carried on during this period. There had been, previous to this, affairs which reached the dignity of engagements on July 17th, July 20th, August 9th, September 10th and 16th, at Fort Phil Kearney and September 13th and 16th between Pino Creek and Fort Phil Kearney, September 21st at the Little  Horn, September 29th near the fort, October 6th and again following this on December 19th before the great culminating battle. During all of this period the public had no conception of the condition of affairs in the Big Horn country. The peace commission had reported that they had made satisfactory treaties and that there were only a few of the recalcitrants who had refused to sign and had made trouble. On the 8th of December, two days after the affair at Goose Creek, just described, the president in his annual message to congress felicitated the people that all was peace in the northwest. Previous to this about 150 men had been detached from Fort Kearney to build C. F. Smith, about ninety miles up the Montana trail, leaving a total available force of soldiers, teamsters, citizens and employes of 350 men at Fort Phil Kearney.  It will be difficult to approximate the number of Indians in the vicinity. Red Cloud had been joined in the autumn by recruits from all of the Teton bands and the Yanktonais, Inkpaduta, Black Moon, Gall, and Sitting Bull were already with him. In addition to the entire force of the Cheyennes under Roman Nose and Medicine Man, the northern Arapahoes having strength of about 125 lodges, under Little Chief and Sorrel Horse, had joined in the effort to keep the soldiers and travelers out of the buffalo country. It is probable that the entire Indian force approximated 3,000 warriors, who were daily growing more hostile and more and more reckless. The general direction of the entire campaign was in the hands of Red Cloud; Crazy Horse, though inferior in social standing to Man Afraid, was Red Cloud's principal lieutenant among the Oglalas and Roman Nose from among the Cheyennes. Black Moon was the recognized leader of the Missouri River Indians. It was no small task to provision Red Cloud's camp and supply them with ammunition, yet he managed his commissary so admirably that throughout the two years of the campaign there was no suffering among his people and no shortage of ammunition.  Hunting parties were sent into the buffalo ranges who brought in an abundance of meat and enough of his friends were "good Indians," staying about the agencies, to secure a supply of ammunition, which was secretly borne away to the hostile camp, to keep his arsenal well stocked. The good Indians, too, found a ready market for the robes and furs which the hostiles took, and the returns from these eked out his subsistence. In every respect Red Cloud subsisted and equipped his army better than did the United States government its forlorn hope under Carrington.

By this time all of the warehouses at the new fort were finished and it was estimated that one large wood train would furnish enough logs to finish the hospital, which alone needed attention. Impressed by Powell's report, after an affair on the afternoon of the 19th of December, Carrington himself accompanied the lumber train of December 20th, built a bridge across to Piney Island to facilitate quick hauling and returned to the fort to prepare for one more, the last, trip. No Indians appeared on that date. A large amount of fire wood, including all of the slabs from the sawmills, had been accumulated. Carrington was a man of great prudence, so prudent indeed as to create great dissatisfaction among his subordinates. Some of them, including Fetterman and Brown, offered with eighty men to ride through the entire Sioux nation. Carrington was wise enough to see that such folly would lead to utter destruction. "Ammunition was running low, there was at one time only forty rounds a man available. Repeated requests and appeals both by letter and telegram for reinforcements and supplies, and especially for modern and serviceable weapons, had met with but little or no consideration. The officials in the east hugged their treaty and refused to believe that a state of war existed; they appeared to believe that if it did exist that it was the fault of the commanding officer for provoking it. In several instances presents given in the treaty at Laramie were found on the persons of visiting Indians and one captured Indian's pony was heavily loaded with original packages of those presents." Carrington had done nothing to provoke war, he had simply carried out General Sherman's written instructions, sent him as late as August. To avoid a general war until the army could be reorganized and increased, while he defended himself and his command stoutly when attacked. But some of his officers, covertly sneering at the caution of the commander, were burning for an opportunity to distinguish themselves, and had practically determined to make or take one at the first chance. Fetterman and Brown, unfortunately, were chief among these malcontents.

Manifestly no one had yet come to comprehend the stern determination which actuated Red Cloud and his allies in this stand which they were making for the protection and preservation of everything that men hold dear and sacred. From their point of view the very existence of the Indians depended upon the success of their campaign. To permit the road to be traveled and a military post to be maintained meant the total destruction of the buffalo herds, and with the buffalo would go the last hope of the Indians for subsistence. It does not appear that cither the Indians or whites had yet arrived at the conception of a time when the government should actually supply rations for their subsistence. Up to this time the Oglalas' highest idea of government assistance was a few blankets and trinkets of an approximate value of $10,000 or $15,000 annually for a tribe of 5,000 or 6,000 people, a quantity that in no wise supplied or much affected the supply of their real necessities. Each individual secured through his annuities less than he could secure from the trader for a single buffalo robe. To the Indian the situation was a desperate one, demanding the exercise of all the genius and power of the allied tribes to resist. No candid person can investigate existing conditions and inform himself of the motives and the actions of the Indians without reaching the conviction that they were moved in their hostility to the whites by impulses of the highest patriotism. Their methods were those to which they were prompted by tradition and familiar usage, and were not more inhuman than those to which they had themselves been subjected by Harney, Sheridan and Sully. During the summer season the camp of the hostiles was kept at various points far down on the Powder, and the depredations about Fort Kearney were made by picked bands of warriors, but when winter came on the camps were moved to the base of the Big Horn range on the head waters of the Tongue River, but a short distance from the Montana trail, and not more than fifty miles from the fort.

In the story which follows, of the affair of December 21st in which Fetterman and his command were totally annihilated, we have in the main followed the graphic stories told by Dr. Brady and General R. I. Dodge, both of whose accounts are strictly based upon the official reports. "On the 21st of December, the ground being free from snow, the air clear and cold, the lookout on Sullivant hill signaled about 11 o'clock in the morning that the wood train had been corraled and was attacked in force about a mile and a half from the fort. A relief party of forty-nine troopers from the Eighteenth infantry with twenty-seven troopers from the Twenty-seventh cavalry—a detachment of which nearly all were recruits and armed chiefly with muskets, had joined the post some months before—was at once ordered out. The command was first given to Captain Powell with Lieutenant Grummond in charge of the cavalry. Grummond had a wife in delicate health at the post and he was cautioned by the officers not to be led into a trap, although it would seem that his experience on December 6th, when he had so narrowly escaped death, was the best warning he could have had. This body of men were the best armed at the post, a few of the cavalry carrying the Spencer repeating carbine. Each company had been directed to keep forty rounds a man on hand for immediate use in any emergency, besides extra boxes always kept in company quarters. The men had been exercised in firing recently and some of the ammunition had been expended, although they had a supply abundant for the purpose of the expedition. Carrington personally inspected the men before they left and rejected those who were not amply provided. The situation of the wood train was critical and the party was assembled with the greatest dispatch. Just as they were about to start. Captain Fetterman, who had had less experience in the country, and in Indian fighting than the other officers, for he had joined the regiment some time after the fort had been built and expected assignment to command Fort Phil Kearney, begged for the command of the expedition, pleading his senior captaincy as justification for his request. Carrington reluctantly acceded to his plea, which indeed he could scarcely have refused, and placed him in charge, giving him strict and positive instructions to, relieve the wood train, drive back the Indians, but on no account to pursue the Indians beyond Lodge Trail ridge and to return immediately to the fort when he had performed this duty.

"Captain Fetterman, as has been said, had frequently expressed his contempt for the Indians although his fight on December 6th had slightly modified his opinions. Carrington, knowing his view, was particular and emphatic in his orders. So necessary did he think the caution that he repeated it to Lieutenant Grummond, who, with the cavalry, followed the infantry out of the gate. The infantry, having fewer preparations to make, getting away first. These orders were delivered in a loud voice and were audible to many persons, women, officers and men in the fort. The general went so far as to hasten to the gate after the cavalry had left the fort and from the sentry platform, or banquette, overlooking it, called out after them again, emphatically directing them 'on no account to pursue the Indians across Lodge Trail  ridge.'

"The duty devolved upon Captain Fetterman was exactly the same as that which Captain Powell had performed so satisfactorially a few days before. With Captain Fetterman went Captain Brown, just promoted, with two citizens, frontiersmen and hunters, as volunteers. These two civilians, Wheatley and Fisher, were both armed with the new breach loading rapid fire Henry rifle, with which they were anxious to experiment on the hostiles. Wheatley left his wife and children in the fort.

"Captain Frederick Brown, a veteran of the civil war, had been promoted, had received orders, and was simply waiting a favorable opportunity to leave. He was a man of the most undaunted courage. His position as quartermaster had kept him on the watch for Indians all the time and he announced on the day before the battle that he, 'Must have one more chance at the Indians before he left.' It is believed, however, that his impetuous council and his good luck in many a brush with assailing parties, which he had several times pursued almost alone, largely precipitated the final disaster.

"The total force, therefore, including officers and citizens, under Fetterman's command, was eighty-one. Just the number with which he had agreed to ride through the whole Sioux nation. No one in the command seemed to have the least idea that any force of Indians, however great, could overcome them. Captain Fetterman, instead of leading his men directly to the wood train on the south side of Sullivant hill, doubled quicked toward the Peno valley, on the north side. Perhaps he hoped that he could take the Indians in reverse, when he rounded the western end of the hills, and exterminate them between his own troops and the guard of the wood train, which all told comprised some ninety men. This movement was noticed from the fort, but as it involved no disobedience of orders and as it might be considered a good tactical maneuver no apprehension was felt because of it.

"The Indians surrounding the wood train were well served by their scouts, and when they found that Fetterman's force was advancing on the other side of the hill, they immediately withdrew from the wood train, which presently broke corral and made its way to the Piney. some seven miles to the west of the fort, unmolested. As Fetterman's troops disappeared down the valley a number of Indians were observed along the Piney in front of the fort. A spherical case shot from the howitzer in the fort exploded in their midst and they vanished. The Indians were much afraid of the 'gun that shoots twice' as they call it. At that time it was discovered that no doctor had gone with the relieving party, so Surgeon Hines, with an escort of four men, was sent out with orders to join Fetterman. The doctor hastened away but returned soon after with the' information that the wood train had gone on and that when he had attempted to cross the valley of the Pino to join Fetterman's men. He found it full of Indians, who were  swarming about Lodge Trail ridge, and that no sign of Fetterman was observed. Despite Fetterman's orders he must have gone over the ridge.

'The alarm caused in the fort by this news was deepened by the sound of firing at 12 o'clock. Six shots in rapid succession were counted and immediately after heavy firing was heard from over the Lodge Trail ridge, five miles away, which continued with such fierceness as to indicate a pitched battle. Carrington instantly dispatched Captain Ten Eyck with the rest of the infantry, in all about seventy-six men, directing him to join Fetterman's command, then return with them to the fort. The men went forward on the run.

"Counting out Fetterman's detachment, the guard of the wood train and Ten Eyck's detachment, the garrison was now reduced to a very small number. The post might be attacked at any moment. Carrington at once released all the prisoners from the guard house, armed the quartermaster's employes and citizens, but could muster altogether only 119 men. Although every preparation for a desperate defense was made there was not enough soldiers to man the walls. The general, with his remaining officers, repaired to the observatory tower, field glasses in hand and watched the ridge in apprehension of a catastrophe so fearful that they scarcely allowed themselves to imagine it. The women and children, especially those who had husbands fend fathers with the first detachment, were almost crazed with terror.

"Presently Sample, the general's own orderly, who had been sent with Ten Eyck, was seen galloping furiously down the opposite hill. He had the best horse in the command, one of the general's, and he covered the distance between Lodge Trail ridge and the fort with amazing swiftness. He dashed up to headquarters with a message .from Ten Eyck, 'The valley on the other side of the ridge said the orderly, is filled with Indians, who are threatening him, the firing has stopped, he sees no sign of Captain Fetterman's command. He wants a howitzer sent to him.' General Carrington replied in writing: 'Forty well armed men with 3,000 rounds, ambulances, stores, etc., left before your courier came in. You must unite with Fetterman, fire slowly and keep men in hand. You would have saved two miles toward the scene of action if you had taken Lodge Trail ridge. I order the wood train in, which will give fifty men to spare.' No gun could be sent him, since all the horses were already in the field, it would have required men to haul it. No more men could be spared and not a man with Ten Eyck knew how to cut a fuse or handle the piece. The guns were especially needed at the fort to protect the women and children.

"Late in the afternoon Ten Eyck's party returned to the fort with tidings of appalling disaster. In the wagons with his command were the bodies of forty-nine of Fetterman's men. The remaining thirty-two were not at that time accounted for. Ten Eyck very properly had stood on the defensive upon the ridge and refused to go into the valley in spite of the insults and sneers of the Indians, who numbered upwards of 2,000 warriors, and they finally withdrew.

"'After waiting a sufficient time he marched carefully and cautiously toward the Pino valley and to the bare lower ridge over which the road ran. Here he came across evidences of a fierce battle. On the end of the ridge farther from the fort in a space about six feet square, enclosed by some huge rocks, making a sort of rude shelter, he found the bodies of the forty-nine men, which he had brought back. After their ammunition was spent they had been killed, stripped, shot full of arrows, hacked to pieces, scalped and mutilated in a horrible manner. There were no evidences at that place of a very severe struggle. But few cartridge shells lay on the ground. Of these men, only four, besides the two officers, had been killed by bullets. The rest had been slain by arrows, hatchets or spears. They had evidently been tortured. Brown and Fetterman were found laying side by side, each with a bullet wound in the right temple. Their heads were scorched and filled with gun powder around the wound. Evidently seeing that alt was lost they had stood face to face and bad shot each other dead with their revolvers. They had both sworn to die rather than to be taken alive by the Indians, and in the last extremity they had carried out their vows. Lieutenant Grummond, who had so narrowly escaped on the 6th of December, was not yet accounted for, but there was little hope that he had escaped again.

"The night was one of wild anxiety; nearly one-fourth of the entire force of the fort had been wiped out. Mirror signals flashed from the hills during the day and fires here and there during the night indicated that the savages had not left the vicinity of the fort. Guards were doubled and every man slept with his clothing on, his weapons close at hand. In even barrack a non-commissioned officer and two men kept watch throughout the night. Carrington and the remaining officers did not sleep at all. They fully expected the fort to be attacked. The next day was bitterly cold, the sky was overcast and lowering, with indications of a tremendous storm. The Indians did not usually conduct active operations under such conditions, and there were no signs of them about. Carrington determined to go out to ascertain the fate of the missing men. He rightly judged that the moral effect of the battle would be greatly enhanced in the eyes of the Indians, if the bodies were not recovered. Besides to set at rest all doubts it was necessary to determine the fate of the balance of his command. In the afternoon, with a heavily armed force of eighty men, Carrington went to the scene of the battle. The following order was left with the officer of the day: "Fire the usual sunset gun, running a white light to masthead. If the Indians appear, fire three guns from the twelve-pounder at minute intervals, and later substitute a red lantern for the white." Pickets were left on two commanding ridges as signal observers as the command moved forward. The women and children were placed in the magazine, a building well adapted for defense, which had been stocked with water, crackers and various supplies for an emergency, with an officer pledged not to allow the women to be taken alive, if the general did not return and the Indians should overcome the stockade.

"Passing the place where the greatest slaughter had occurred, the men marched cautiously along the trail. Bodies were strung all along the road to the western end farthest from the fort. Here they found Lieutenant Grummond. There were evidences of a desperate struggle about his body. Behind a little pile of rock making a natural fortification, were the two civilians who had been armed with the modern Henry rifles. By the side of one fifty empty shells were counted and nearly as many by the side of the other brave frontiersman. Behind such cover as they could obtain nearby lay the bodies of the oldest and most experienced soldiers in Fetterman's command. In front of them they found no fewer than sixty great gouts of blood on the ground and grass, showing where the bullets of the defenders had reached their marks, and in every direction was signs of the fiercest kind of hand to hand fighting. Ghastly and mutilated remains, stripped naked, shot full of arrows— Wheatley with no less than 105 in him—scalped, lay before them.

"Brown rode a little Indian, calico, pony which had been given to General Carrington's sons when they started from Fort Leavenworth in November, 1865, and the body of the horse was found in the low ground at the west end of the ridge, showing that the fight began there before the party could reach high ground. At 10 o'clock at night on the return the white lamp at mast head told the welcome story of the garrison still intact. Such was the melancholy fate of Fetterman and his men. The post was isolated, the weather frightful. A courier was at once dispatched to Fort Laramie, but such means of communication was necessarily slow and it was not until Christmas morning that the world was apprised of the fatal story. Perhaps it ill becomes us to censure the dead, but the whole unfortunate affair arose from the direct disobediance of orders, on the part of Fetterman and his men.

 

CHAPTER XXXIV

 

After the annihilation of Fetterman's forces Red Cloud, who was in personal direction of the affair, though all of his sub-chiefs and the chiefs of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes were present, having come down from the camp with the intention of ambushing the wood guard, conceived that their success had been so stupenduous that the soldiers would at once set out to make a desperate retaliation. They, therefore, hastened back to their camp on the head waters of the Tongue and though it was mid-winter, and frightfully cold, they resolved to break up the camp at once and scatter in small bands. The Arapahoes went to the Yellowstone, the Cheyennes trailed through to the west of the Big Horn Mountains and the Dakotas scattered down the valley of the Powder and Tongue Rivers. No further attacks on the military were attempted in the neighborhood of Fort Phil Kearney until the succeeding summer, but a small band under Small Hawk and Crazy Horse proceeded to the neighborhood of Fort Reno and from the end of February harassed and annoyed the soldiers at that post, holding it in about the same state of siege that the Phil Kearneyans had been during the preceding autumn.. Though not attacking the fort at the Piney in force Red Cloud kept it under constant surveillance, and almost daily his scouts were seen in the vicinity and the nervous apprehension of attack under which soldiers and civilians alike lived, wrought upon their fears and made the situation almost unendurable. There were sharp scraps near Fort Reno on February 27th, April 26th and 27th, May 23d and May 30th. On June 12th Yellow Hand, having been sent into the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearney with a considerable force of warriors, a little fight occurred near that post, the first of any importance since the Fetterman massacre of the previous December. A similar engagement occurred on the 18th of June. On the very date of Yellow Hand's attack on Fort Phil Kearney, Man Afraid and a band of the head men of the Oglalas and Brules appeared at Fort Laramie and engaged in a long council with General Sanborn and General Beaubois. They claimed to represent 200 lodges of the hostiles, which they undoubtedly did. They told the commissioners that Red Cloud had abandoned the war and was now ready to come in and join the friendlies under Spotted Tail. They, however, expressed great anxiety to get powder from the commissioners, and the optimistic men of peace were forced to the conclusion that the only significance of this pilgrimage of Man Afraid's was "to obtain more powder and lead with which to wage a more vigorous war.""

All of this time Spotted Tail, Swift Bear, Standing Elk, Big Mouth and Blue Horse with in the neighborhood of 1,200 warriors, were quietly hunting buffalo on the Republican and doing their best to keep out of mischief.

On the 20th of June an unidentified band of Oglalas made an attack upon a company of Pawnee scouts from Fort Laramie, on the line of the Union Pacific railroad south of the Black Hills. They were probably Man Afraid's peaceful embassy, just then starting off-to enter into negotiations with Spotted Tail in the hope of drawing him into the war. After twelve days of quiet Yellow Hand made another demonstration near Fort Phil Kearney, which brought out Company C of the Eighteenth infantry, and a few shots were exchanged. All of the efforts of the Indians during June had been to draw the soldiers out of the fort and into ambush. During this period the soldiers were all engaged within the stockade, barely going outside except to make a little sortie toward the Indians, but careful to keep under the protection of the big guns. There had been no occasion to cut wood and the horses had not been put out to pasture, except immediately under the walls of the fort, being subsisted upon grain and the hay made the previous season. The time, however, was fast approaching when it would be necessary to lay in the supply of firewood for the succeeding winter. Failing in every effort to draw the soldiers out and into ambush Red Cloud and his allies had determined to concentrate all of their forces about Fort Kearney and utterly destroy it, and then proceed to the other posts. Reno and Smith, which would be easily overcome. All of that summer the entire Wyoming country was kept in a state of terror, travel on the Montana trail was utterly abandoned except by the military expeditions carrying the re-inforcements and supplies to the forts. Just at the time when Red Cloud had mobilized his army on the slopes of the Big Horn about Phil Kearney the wood cutting at Piney Island was resumed.

"The wood was to be cut and delivered at the fort by a civilian outfit which had entered into a contract with the government for the purpose. One of the stipulations of the contract was that the woodmen were to be guarded and protected by the soldiers. Wood cutting began on the 31st of July, 1867, and Captain and Brevet Major James W. Powell, commanding Company C of the Twenty-seventh infantry, a part of the command which had built the fort and to which Fetterman and his men belonged, was detailed with his company to guard the contractor's party. Arriving at Piney Island, some seven miles from the post, Powell found that the contractor had divided his men into two parties; one had its headquarters on a bare, treeless and comparatively level plain, perhaps 1,000 yards across, which was surrounded by low hills, backed by mountains farther away. This was an admirable place to graze the herds of mules required to haul the wagons. As will be seen it could be also turned into a strong defensive position. The other camp was in the thick of the pine woods about a mile away, across the creek at the foot of the mountain. This division of labor necessitated a division of force, which was a misfortune, but this could not he avoided. Powell sent twelve men under a non-commissioned officer to guard the camp in the woods and detailed thirteen men with another non-commissioned officer to escort the wood train to and from the fort. With the remaining twenty-six men and his lieutenant, John C. Jenness, he established headquarters on the plain in the open. The wagons used by the wood cutters were furnished by the quartermaster's department. In transporting the cord wood the woodmen made use of the running gears only, the wagon bodies having been deposited in Powell's camp in the clearings. It has been stated that these wagon bodies were lined with boiler iron, but that is not true, they were just the ordinary wooden wagon beds. There were fourteen of these wagon bodies. Powell arranged them in the form of a wide oval at the highest point of the plain, which happened to be in the vicinity when this corral was made. The wagon beds were deep and afforded ample concealment for anyone lying in them. There were plenty of tools, including augers, in the camp, and with these Powell's men made a number of loop holes about a foot from the ground in the outsides of the wagons. The openings to the corral were at either end, where the configuration of the ground made it most vulnerable to attack, especially by mounted men; therefore, at each end a complete wagon, running gears, body and all, heavily loaded, was placed before the entrances a short distance from the corral to break the force of a charge and that the defenders might fire at the charging party underneath the body and through the wheels. The wagon bodies forming the sides of the corral were re-inforced with logs and sacks of grain, or anything that was available that would turn a bullet. All of the supplies for the soldiers and the wood cutters were contained within this corral. Powell's party were provided with the new Allen modification of the Springfield breach-loading rifle. He had rifles enough for all of his men and for all of the civilian employees, and plenty of ammunition. The new rifle had never been used by the troops in a combat with the Indians and the red men were entirely ignorant of its tremenduous range and power and of the wonderful rapidity of fire which it permitted.

"Having matured a plan, Red Cloud determined to make his attack on Fort Phil Kearney by annihiliating the little detachment guarding the train. Parties of Indians had been observed in the neighborhood for several days but no attack had been made until on the 2d of August, at about 9 o'clock in the morning, a party of about 200 Indians attempted to stampede the mule herd. The herders, who were all armed, stood their ground and succeeded for the time being in beating back the attack. But while they were hotly engaged with this dismounted force, sixty mounted Indians succeeded in getting into the herd and running it off. At the same time 500 Indians attacked the wood train at the other camp. The affair was not quite a surprise, for the approach of the Indians had been detected and signaled from the corral on the island a few moments before. In the face of so overwhelming a force the soldiers at the wood train immediately retreated, abandoning the train and the camp. The retreat, however, was an orderly one and they kept back the Indians by a well directed fire. Meanwhile the herders, seeing the stampede of the mules, made an attempt to join the party retreating from the wood train. The Indians endeavored to intercept them and cut them off. Powell, however, with a portion of his force, leaving the post on the island in the command of Lieutenant Jenness, dashed across the prairie and attacked the savages in the rear. They turned at once, abandoning the pursuit of the herders and fell upon Powell, who in his turn retreated without loss to the corral. His prompt and bold sortie had saved the herders, for they were enabled to effect a junction with the retreating wood train men and their guard, and the soldiers and civilians, and eventually gained the fort, although not without hard fighting and severe loss.. One thing that helped them to get away from the Indians was that the savages stopped to pillage the camp and burn it and the train; another thing was the presence of Powell's command, which the Indians could not leave in their rear. After driving away the soldiers and completing the destruction of the camp, the Sioux turned their attention to Powell's corral. Powell's men lay down in the wagon beds before the loop holes. Blankets were thrown over the tops of the beds to screen the defenders from observation and in the hope, perhaps, of saving them from the ill effects of the plunging arrow fire, and all was made ready. Everybody bad plenty of ammunition. Some of the men who were not good shots were told off to load rifles, of which there were so many that each man had two or three beside him; one man making use of no fewer than eight. Four civilians succeeded in joining the party in the corral, a welcome addition, indeed, bringing the total number up to thirty-two officers and men. Among this quartet of civilians was an old frontiersman, who had spent most of his life in the Indian country and who had been in innumerable fights. He was  a renowned deadshot. To him the eight guns were allotted. Powell, rifle in hand, stationed himself at one end of the corral, Jenness, similarly armed, was posted at the other; each officer watching one of the openings covered by the complete wagons. While all these preparations were being rapidly made without confusion or alarm, the surrounding country was filling with a countless multitude of Indians. It was impossible at the time to estimate the number of them, although it was ascertained later that more than 3,000 warriors were present and engaged. Red Cloud himself was in command, and with him were the great chiefs of the great tribes of the Sioux, who were all represented; Uncpapas, Minneconjous, Oglalas, Brules and Sans Arcs, besides hundreds of Cheyennes. So confident of success were they that contrary to their ordinary practice they had brought with them their women and children to assist in carrying back the plunder. These, massed out of range on the farthest hills, constituted an audience for the terrible drama about to be played in the amphitheatre beneath them.  There were no heroics, no speeches made, Powell quietly remarked that they had to fight for their lives now, which was patent to all, and he directed that no man should for any reason whatever open fire until he gave the order. Some little time was spent by the Indians in making preparation, and then a force of about 500 Indians, magnificently mounted on the best war ponies, and armed with rifles, carbines or muskets, detached itself from the main body and started toward the little corral lying like a black dot on the open plain. They intended to ride over the soldiers and end the battle with one swift blow. Slowly at first, but gradually increasing their pace until their ponies were on a dead run, they dashed gallantly toward the corral, while the main body of the savages, some distance in the rear, prepared to take advantage of any opening that might be made in the defenses. It was a brilliant charge, splendidly delivered.

"Such was the discipline of Powell's men that not a shot was fired as the Indians, yelling and whooping madly came rushing on. There was something terribly ominous about the absolute silence of that little fortification. The galloping men were within 100 yards now, now fifty. At that instant Powell spoke to his men. The enclosure was sheeted with flame. Out of the smoke and fire a rain of bullets was poured upon the astonished savages. The fire was not as usual, one volley, then another, and then silence; but it was a steady, persistent, continuous stream which mowed them down in scores. The advance was thrown into confusion, checked, but not halted, its impetus being too great, and then the force divided and swept around the corral looking for a weak spot for a possible entrance. At the same moment a furious fire was poured into it by the warriors, whose position on their horses' backs gave them sufficient elevation to deliver a plunging fire upon the garrison. Then they circled about the corral in a mad gallop, seeking some undefended point upon which to concentrate and break through, but in vain. The little enclosure was literally ringed with fire. Nothing could stand against it. So close were they that one bullet sometimes pierced two or three Indians. Having lost terribly and having failed to make any impression whatever, the Indians broke and gave way. They rushed pellmell from the spot in frantic confusion till they got out of range of the deadly storm that swept the plain. All around the corral lay dead and dying Indians, stoically enduring all of their sufferings and making no outcry, but mingling with them were killed and wounded horses, the latter kicking and screaming with pain. In front of the corral, where the first force of the charge had been spent, a mass of horses and men were stretched out as if they had been cut down by a gigantic mowing machine. The defenders of the corral had suffered in their turn. Lieutenant Jenness, brave and earnest in defense, had exposed himself to give a necessary command and had received a bullet in his brain. One of the private soldiers had been killed and two severely wounded. The thirty-two had been reduced to twenty-eight. At that rate, since there were so few to suffer, the end appeared inevitable. The spirit of the little band, however, remained undaunted. Fortunately for them the Indians had met with such a terrible repulse that all they thought of for the time being was to get out of range. The vicinity of the corral was thus at once abandoned.

"Red Cloud determined, after consultation with the other chiefs, upon another plan, which gave greater promise of success. Seven hundred Indians armed with rifles and muskets, and followed by a number carrying bows and arrows, were told off to prepare themselves as a skirmishing party. Their preparation was simple, and consisted in denuding themselves of vestige of clothing, including their war shirts and war bonnets These men were directed to creep forward, taking advantage of every depression, ravine or other cover, until they were within range of the corral, which they were to overwhelm by gun and rifle fire. Supporting them, and intended to constitute the main attack, was the whole remaining body of Indians, numbering upwards of 2,000 warriors. With the wonderful skill of which they were possessed, the skirmishing party approached near to the corral and began to fire upon it. Here and there when a savage incautiously exposed himself he was shot by one of the defenders, but in the main the people of the corral kept silent under this terrible fusillade of bullets and arrows. The tops of the wagon sides were literally torn to pieces, the heavy blankets were filled with arrows, which, shot from a distance, did no damage. The fire of the Indians was rapid and continuous. The bullets crashed into the wood just over the heads of the prostrate men, sounding like crackling thunder, yet not one man in the wagon beds was hurt. Arguing perhaps, from the silence in the corral, that the defenders had been overwhelmed and that the time for the grand attack had arrived, the signal was given for the main body of the Indians to charge. They were led by the nephew of Red Cloud, a superb young chieftain, who was ambitious of succeeding in due course to the leadership now held by his uncle. Chanting their fierce war songs, they came on arranged in a great semi-circle, splendid, stalwart braves, the flower of the nation. Most of them carried on their left arm painted targets or shields of buffalo hide, stout enough to turn a rifle bullet unless hit fairly. Under a fire of redoubled intensity from their skirmishers they broke into a charge. Again they advanced into the face of a terrible silence. Again at the appointed moment the order rang out. Again the fearful discharge swept them away in scores. Powell's own rifle brought down the dauntless young chief in.the lead. Others sprang to the fore when he fell and gallantly led on their men. Undaunted they came on and on, in spite of the slaughter such as no Indian living had experienced or heard of. The Indians could account for the contintious fire only by supposing that the corral contained a greater number of defenders than its area would indicate it capable of receiving. So in the hope that the infernal fire would slack, they pressed home the attack until they were almost at the wagon beds. Back on the hills Red Cloud and the veteran chiefs, with the women and children, watched the progress of the battle with eager intensity and marked with painful apprehension the slaughter of their bold warriors. The situation was terribly critical. If they came on a few feet further the rifles would be useless and the little party would have to fight hand to hand without reloading. In that event the end would be certain, but just before the Indians reached the corral they broke and gave way. So close had they come that some of the troopers in their excitement actually rose to their knees and threw the augers with which the loop- holes had been made and other missiles in the faces of the Indians.

"What relief filled the minds of the defenders when they saw the great force which had come on so gallantly reeling back over the plain in a frantic desire to get to cover, can easily be imagined. Yet such was the courage, the desperation of these Indians, that in spite of repulse after repulse, and slaughter awful to contemplate, they made no less than six several and distinct charges in three hours upon that little band. After the first attack made by the men on horseback, not a single casualty occurred among the defenders of the corral. It was after noon before the Indians got enough. They could not account for this sustained and frightful fire which came from the little fort except by attributing it to magic. 'The white man must have made bad medicine,' they said afterwards, before they learned the secret of the long range breech-loading firearms, 'to make the guns fire themselves without loading.' Indeed, such had been the rapidity of the fire that many of the gun barrels became so hot that they were rendered useless. To this day the Indians refer to that battle as the bad medicine fight of the white men.

"The ground around the corral was ringed with Indian slain. Red Cloud, recognizing the complete frustration at that time of his hopes of overwhelming Fort Phil Kearney and sweeping the invaders out of the land, now wished only to get his dead away and retreat. In order to do this he threw his skirmishers forward again, who once more poured a heavy fire upon the corral. This seemed to Powell and his exhausted men the precursor of the final attack, which they feared would be their end. Indeed, Powell says in his report that another attack must have been successful. From the heat and the frightful strain of the long period of steady fighting the men were in a critical condition, and the ammunition, inexhaustible as it had seemed, was running low. Many of the rifles were useless They still preserved, however, a calm, unbroken front to the foe. Red Cloud,  however, had no thought of again attacking. He wanted only to get away. Under cover of his skirmishers he succeeded in carrying off most of the dead, the wounded who were able to crawl getting away themselves. A warrior, protecting himself as well as he could with the stout buffalo shield which he carried, would creep forward, attach the end of a long lariat to the foot of a dead man, and then rapidly retreating, would pull the dead body away. All the while the hills and mountains resounded with the death chants of the old men and  women.

"In the midst of these operations a shell burst in the midst of the Indian skirmishers, and through the trees off to the left the weary defenders saw the blue uniforms of approaching soldiers, who a moment later debouched in the open."

The herders, woodsmen and guard that escaped from the camp in the morning had hurried off to the fort and apprised the officers there of Powell's danger. Major Smith, with 100 men, had been sent to his relief, and conducted Powell and his gallant men back to the fort. Powell estimated that he had killed sixty-seven and wounded 120 Indians, but the men under him estimated the Indian loss at anywhere from 300 to 500. An Indian afterwards told Colonel Richard I. Dodge that they lost in that engagement 1,137 warriors, but this is manifestly an absurd and untruthful statement. Colonel Dodge manifestly did not place much reliance on the Indian's tale, but Dr. Brady accepts it as a fact.

Though defeated, Red Cloud did not give up nor recede from his determination to drive the white invaders from his hunting preserves. Leaving a strong scouting party in the neighborhood of Fort Phil Kearney, he again scattered his warriors in widely settled camps from the Yellowstone to the Black Hills. On August 14th he led in person an attack on Fort Reno, and renewed it on the 16th. But little fighting was done, however. But he rendered the Montana trail utterly impracticable to travel, and in that way rendered the forts entirely useless for the purposes for which they were established. During September nothing occurred in the nature of an attack which might be called an engagement, but on the 20th of October active campaigning was again begun. On that day there was a sortie on Crazy Woman's Fork of the Powder; on November 4th another at Goose Creek, just northwest of Fort Phil Kearney; on the 13th another at Crazy Woman's Fork, nearby; another on December 2d at Crazy Woman, and on December 14th one under the very walls of Phil Kearney itself."

 

CHAPTER XXXV

Under an act of congress approved July 20, 1867, to establish peace with certain hostile Indian tribes, a commission was appointed, consisting of N. G. Taylor, J. B. Henderson, General Sherman, General Harney, General Sanborn, General Terry, General Augur and S. F. Tappan. This was known as the peace commission, and was authorized to call together the chiefs and headmen of such bands of Indians as were then waging war. for the purpose of ascertaining their reasons for hostility, and. if thought advisable, to make a treaty of peace with them. The commissioners met at St. Louis on the 6th day of August and organized by selecting N. G. Taylor president and A. S. H. White secretary. His first difficulty which presented itself was to secure interviews with the chiefs and leading men of these tribes, but after some negotiations they got word to Red Cloud and his people that they would be met at Fort Laramie on the 13th day of September. While they were waiting for the Indians to come in they took a trip up the Missouri to a point thirteen miles north of the mouth of :he 15ig Cheyenne River. On the trip up the river they were accompanied by Hon. Andrew J. Faulk, governor of Dakota.

Swift Bear, a friendly Brule, had been employed to carry he summons to the hostiles. and finding that the proposition was not received with favor, he took it upon himself to promise that if they would come in the commission would furnish them with ammunition to kill game for the winter.

When the commissioners arrived at Fort Laramie to keep their appointment for the 13th of September, Swift Bear met them and told them of the promises that he had made, and that the hostiles had agreed to come down and meet them, but that they could not do so early in the season, but that they would be there about the 1st of November.

When November arrived, to the great disappointment of the commission, Red Cloud did not appear. He sent word, however, by Man Afraid, that his war against the whites was to save the valley of the Powder River, the only hunting ground left to his nation, from our intrusion. He assured the commissioners that whenever the military garrisons at Fort Phil Kearney, Fort C. F. Smith and Fort Reno were withdrawn the war on his part would cease. The commissioners sent word back to him asking him for a truce until a council could be held. Red Cloud sent word to them that he would meet them the next spring or summer.

Early in the spring of 1868 the commissioners returned to Fort Laramie, and by the 29th of April had negotiated a treaty which they believed would be acceptable to all of the hostiles. This is known as the treaty of Laramie, the full text of which appears as appendix "D," page 454 of Volume I of the South Dakota collections. In brief, it provides in the first article for a permanent peace between the United States and all of the signatory tribes. It provides for the punishment in regular manner of all whites who shall commit wrongs or depredations upon the Indians, and the Indians on their part agreed to deliver up to the United States any offenders among them for trial. It sets apart the great Sioux reservation from the north line of the state of Nebraska to the 46th parallel, bounded on the east by the Missouri River, to the 104th degree of longitude on the west; that is, in effect, the entire portion of South Dakota west of the Missouri River, and the article creating this reservation contains this clause: "And the same is set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named." The United States agrees to construct at its own expense at sonic place on the Missouri River near the center of said reservation, where timber and water may be convenient, a complete outfit of agency buildings, to include warehouses, store rooms, residences for the agent, physician, carpenter, farmer, blacksmith, miller and engineer, and school house and mission building; a good steam circular sawmill, a grist mill and shingle mill; and to provide agent, officers and employes as shall be necessary. Any Indian who desires to settle down to farming is permitted to select 320 acres of land if he be the head of a family, and if not the head of a family he may select eighty acres of land, which shall be patented to him after three years' residence, and after receiving said patent the said Indian shall be a full citizen of the United States. Compulsory education of children between six and sixteen is agreed upon. Whoever settles down to farm in good faith is entitled to receive seeds and agricultural implements and to have the assistance of the agency farmer to instruct him in his work. All previous provisions for annuities are abrogated and a new agreement entered into, by the terms of which for the term of thirty years every male over 14 years of age shall receive annually a suit of good, substantial woolen clothing, each female over 12 the goods necessary to make a pair of woolen hose, twelve yards of calico, a flannel skirt and twelve yards of cotton domestics. The boys and girls under the ages named, are each to receive such cotton and flannel goods as will be used to make each a suit. In addition to the clothing each Indian shall receive annually for a period of thirty years $10 if he continues to roam and hunt, and if he settles down to farming he shall receive $20, to be paid in merchandise. And each family which settles down to farming is to receive a good American cow and a pair of good American broken oxen. In addition to that, a prize or reward of $500 per year was put up to be expended in presents to the ten persons in the tribe who, in the judgment of the agents, may grow the most valuable crops for the respective years. The United States expressly agreed and stipulated that the country north of the North Platte River and east of the summits of the Big Horn Mountains shall be held and considered to be unceded Indian territory, and also stipulates and agrees that no white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion of the same, or without the consent of the Indians first having been obtained, to pass through the same; and the United States further agreed that within ninety days after the conclusion of peace with all of the bands of the Sioux nation, the military posts now established in the territory should be abandoned and that the road leading to them and by them to the settlements in the territory of Montana shall be closed. The Indians withdrew all opposition to the construction of railroads and wagon roads south of the North Platte. It was expressly agreed in this treaty that no part of the reservation therein described should be ceded unless three-fourths of all of the adult male Indians agreed to and signed the treaty.

The treaty was duly signed by Spotted Tail and the Brules, twenty-four of the chiefs joining, on the 29th day of April, 1868. Man Afraid and thirty-nine of the Oglalas signed on the 25th of May. Old One Horn, he who was painted by Catlin thirty-five years before, and sixteen Minneconjous signed on May 26th. Twenty-three Yanktonais, headed by Two Bears, and among whom was the still well known Black Tomahawk, signed on the same day for the Yanktonais, and at the same time Little Chief, Sorrel Horse and twenty-five Arapahoes put their names to the treaty. Red Cloud sent down word that he guessed he would wait until the forts were abandoned and the roads closed up before he would sign, and so the matter hung along month after month. Finally, at the end of August, upon the advice of the peace commissioners, the government determined to take the old chief at his word, and on the 27th of that month all of the troops were withdrawn from Forts Phil Kearney, C. F. Smith and Reno. Red Cloud at the time was watching operations from the buffalo camp on the Powder, and he said he guessed he would make his meat before he came in to meet the commissioners. His action caused a good deal of uneasiness both in military quarters and in the Indian department, where it was felt that it was possible that he did not intend to keep faith. However, when the old man "had got his fall's work done up" he appeared at Fort Laramie, and on November 6th signed the treaty. He brought in at the same time many of the leading men of the Uncpapas, Blackfeet, Cutheads, Two Kettles, Sans Arcs and Santees, who had been with him in the hostile camps of the Big Horn country. Among the Uncpapas the only familiar of the signers is that of young Bear's Rib, who had succeeded to his father, the Harney chief of 1856. John Grass is one of the signers on the part of the Blackfeet, and the Fireheart signs as the head chief. Big Head is one of the signers for the Cutheads, and the Long Mandan for the Two Kettles. No familiar name appears among the signers for the Sans Arcs. Wapasha the third and Big Eagle signed for the Santees, along with five others. It may be noted that the names of Rev. Samuel D. Hinman, the Episcopal missionary, and Father DeSmet appear as the witnesses to all of these Indians. The treaty was duly ratified by the senate on February 16, 1869, and was proclaimed by President Andrew Johnson on February 24th. And with it the great Red Cloud war came to an end.

It will be observed that everything Red Cloud was fighting for was conceded by this treaty. It was a complete victory for the Dakotas and a square backdown for the government. It is the only instance in the history of the United States where the government has gone to war and afterwards negotiated a peace conceding everything demanded by the enemy and exacting nothing in return.

 

CHAPTER XXXVI

 

Before proceeding with the main thread of this discourse it will be necessary to go back and pick up a few loose ends which have been left while keeping the story of the Red Cloud war coherent. It will be remembered that in 1863 Fort Thompson was established at the mouth of Crow Creek on the Missouri River in Dakota, and to it were brought the captured remnant of the hostile bands from Minnesota and the Winnebagoes, and established there in an independent agency. For several reasons the location was found to be impracticable. Several successive years of intense drought rendered farming profitless, and the vast hordes of Tetons from the adjacent prairies found it convenient to come in each winter and hang about the agency and eat the resident Indians out of house and home. The Winnebagoes were especially dissatisfied with the new location, and for them the government purchased a small reservation of the Omahas, nearly opposite Sioux City, on the Nebraska side of the Missouri. Of the Santees at Crow Creek there were very few men, most of them being held as prisoners in the government prison at Davenport. It was, however, determined to release something more than 240 of these men from  prison and bring them out to their people and establish them upon a new reservation, consisting of about four townships of land, adjoining the Poncas in northern Nebraska. They numbered about 1,350 souls at that time. These people were thoroughly subdued and at once set about to engage in farming, and they still reside on the reservation set apart for them at that time, living at all times in perfect amity with the whites. This removal was made in the summer of 1866.

We left the Sissetons and Wahpetons, under Standing Buffalo, Wanatan and Scarlet Plume, hovering about the Canadian border after the battle of Big Mound in 1863, and anxious to return to their lands. It was a long time before an understanding of the real situation relating to these people could be brought to the consciousness of our people. The general impression was, both, in civil and military quarters, that they had flown from their lands about Big Stone Lake in the autumn of 1862 because they were hostile; that they had engaged in the hostilities at Big Mound, Dead Buffalo Lake, Stony Lake and White Stone Hill in the Autumn of 1863 and at Kill Deer Mountain and in the Bad Lands in the summer of 1864, and in consequence intense prejudice existed against them. Gradually, through the mediation of the friendly Sissetons and Wahpetons, who had remained with General Sibley and enlisted in the government service, the true situation began to dawn upon the authorities, and by 1867 negotiations were opened with them looking to the establishment of them upon reservations in Dakota territory. These negotiations resulted in the signing of the treaty on the 22d day of April, 1867, made by Lewis V. Bogy and William H. Watson, commissioners on the part of the United States, and Gabriel Renville, John Otherday and twenty-one other Sissetons and Wahpetons, by which the Flatiron reservation, between Lake Kampeska, Lake Traverse and the head of the coteau, was set apart for the friendlies and for those who had heretofore surrendered to the authorities of the government and were not sent to the Crow Creek reservation. And for the Cuthead band of Yanktonais and for all other members of the Sissetons and Wahpetons not before provided for, the reservation lying on the south side of Devils Lake, now known as the Fort Totten reservation. That the Indians should be induced to engage in agricultural pursuits, each man was allowed to take a farm of 160 acres, and the government agreed to expend $350,000 m the year 1867, $250,000 for the year 1868, $100,000 for 1869, and $50,000 for 1870, and $30,000 annually thereafter. At the Lake Traverse and at the Devils Lake reservation $100,000 was to be expended the first year, $200,000 the second year, $100,000 the third year, $50,000 the fourth year, and $30,000 annually thereafter. All traders in furs were excluded from these reservations as an incident, to encourage the Indians in farming. But all of these goods and money were to be paid out, not as annuities, but in payment of labors actually performed or for produce delivered. Gabriel Renville was recognized as head chief of the Sissetons and Wahpetons at Lake Traverse, and Little Fish as chief of the Indians at Devils Lake. Most of the Sissetons and Wahpetons and Cutheads at once returned to and settled upon these reservations.

A few of the recalcitrants and hostiles of 1862, still fearing the vengeance of the whites, remained in Canada, and they and their descendants are in the British dominion to this day. Inkpaduta, as has been seen, took the most Vicious of the Sissetons and Yanktonais into the Powder River country, where they remained until after the war of 1876, with the few exceptions who came in and signed the treaty of Laramie. Of those who did sign the treaty of Laramie, Wapasha went to the Santee agency in Nebraska, and Big Eagle and his party returned to the Yellow Medicine near the Upper agency and settled down to farming, and have become industrious and self-respecting citizens.

In the spring of 1870 a considerable party of the Presbyterian Santees, who prior to the outbreak were directly under the influence of the missionaries of the Upper and Lower agencies, living in comfortable homes with well cultivated farms, determined to withdraw from the Santees of Nebraska and establish themselves as citizens of the United States upon the Sioux River. They selected locations in the neighborhood of Flandreau, where the conditions were quite similar to those to which they had been accustomed on the Minnesota River, and under regulations prescribed by the Indian department, on oath renounced all claim on the United States for annuities, selected homesteads and settled down as self-respecting citizens, and have from that time to the present maintained themselves and have engaged in all the activities of the excellent community in which they reside. This enterprise on the part of the Indians was a noteworthy experiment and was watched with a great deal of interest by the Indian officials and the public generally, being the first instance in which Indians of their own volition and outside of reservation and agency influences, established themselves as citizens on an equality with white men. Everything considered, the experiment must be deemed a success of the first order. This settlement had been in contemplation for some time and in furtherance of it the president, on March 7, 1867, had withdrawn from settlement and set aside a reservation which was intended to be devoted to all of the Santees, Sissetons, Wahpetons, M'dewakantons and Wakpekutes. This reservation was bounded on the east by the Sioux River and on the west by the James River, and included all of the land between those streams in a belt extending from Flandreau to Lake Kampeska. The people of Minnesota, however, were so violently opposed to having the Indians domiciled so near to them, and the selection by the friendly Sissetons and Wahpetons of the Flatiron reservation north of Lake Kampeska induced the abandonment of the scheme, and on the 13th of July, 1868, the president rescinded his previous action and restored this vast body of land in the interior of South Dakota to the public domain.

By this time probably one-half, or nearly one-half of the entire Dakota nation, Santee, Yankton and Teton, were gathered upon reservations. Through all of the disturbances from 1859 forward the Yanktons lived quietly and peaceably on their reservation in Charles Mix county, South Dakota, and made satisfactory progress in agriculture, civilization, education and Christianity. The Two Kettles and a portion of the Minneconjous and Sans Arcs were gathered about Cheyenne River agency, located at the mouth of the Cheyenne River, while at the mouth of the Grand River were gathered the better disposed portions of the Uncpapas, Yanktonais, Cutheads and Blackfeet. And under all of the conditions their conduct was as good as could be hoped for. A small band of the Brules were gathered at the Lower Brule agency opposite Chamberlain. At this time General D. S. Stanley, in command of the middle district, with headquarters at Fort Sully, made the following report upon the general condition of the Dakota Indians:

Uncpapas, 2,000 in all, tributary to Fort Rice and Grand River; 1,500 hostile, 500 peaceful.

Blackfeet, on Grand River, 900: 200 hostile, 700 peaceful.

Two Kettles, about Forts Sully and Thompson: 500 hostile, 1,000 peaceful.

Sans Arcs, 1,500, Fort Sully; 1,000 hostile, 500 peaceful.

Minneconjous, 2,000. Fort Sully and Grand River; 1,600 hostile, 400 peaceable.

Upper Brules, 1,500, Fort Sully and White River; 800 hostile, 700 peaceful.

Lower Yanktonais, 1,000. Fort Thompson; peaceable.

Brules of the Platte. 1,500, Whetstone agency; supposed to be peaceable.

Oglalas, 2,000, Whetstone agency; 1,500 hostile, 500 peaceable.

The Upper Yanktonais, ruled by the chiefs Two Bears and Black Eyes, are perhaps the best behaved Indians on the river. The Uncpapas are turbulent and mischievous. Those who pretend to be friendly live at Grand River reservation, but give so much trouble that it is doubtful whether the agency can be kept on that side. Their chief is Bear's Rib.

The Blackfeet Sioux arc quiet and well-behaved; their principal chief is John Grass. The Two Kettles, Minneconjous and Sans Arcs draw rations at Cheyenne. The first two tribes are quiet, the Minneconjous are turbulent and very insolent. The chief of the Two Kettles is the Tall Mandan; of the Sans Arcs,  Burnt Face; of the Minneconjous, the Iron Horn and Little White Swan. The Lower Brules have a reservation and cultivate at White River and draw rations at Fort Thompson. They acknowledge no chief; are perfect Ishmaelites, wandering in small bands thousands of miles over the prairies; are treacherous beyond all other Sioux and commit most of the rascalities which occur in this district. The Lower Yanktonais are peaceable and are trying to farm at Fort Thompson. The Brules of the Platte generally stay from twenty to a hundred miles out from Whetstone, coming into that place for their provisions. Their disposition is very suspicious and like their brethren, the upper Brules are not to be trusted. The Oglalas at Whetstone are well behaved. At the agencies established for the Sioux (Dakotas) there is one class of Indians which has been friendly for four or five years and are nearly permanent residents, only leaving from time to time to hunt and pick wild fruits. With this class there is no trouble. There is another class passing half of their time at these agencies and the other half at the hostile camps. They abuse the agents, threaten their lives, kill their cattle at night, and do anything they can to oppose the civilizing movement, but eat all the provisions they can get and thus far have taken no lives. If the agencies were removed east of the Missouri we could suppress and punish these violent and troublesome fellows. The hostiles have representatives from every band, but the leading band in hostility is the Uncpapas. During the winter for the past two years almost the entire hostile Sioux have camped together in one big camp on Rosebud, near the Yellowstone. In the summer time they break up and spread over the prairie, either to hunt, plunder, or come into the posts to beg.

This report, dated at Fort Sully, Dakota Territory; August 20. 1869, is a most comprehensive and correct statement of the condition of the Dakota Indians at the close of the Red Cloud war.

 

 

CHAPTER XXXVII

 

As soon as Spotted Tail and the Brules signed the Laramie treaty in the spring of 1868 they started to establish themselves near the Missouri River. Pursuant to the contract of the treaty. General Harney went to the Missouri River and began the construction of their agency at the mouth of Whetstone Creek, eighteen miles above Fort Randall.  About 1,000 mixed bloods, and of the most friendly of the Brules, settled down in the immediate vicinity of the agency, but Spotted Tail, fearful of the river influences, and particularly of access to liquor, upon his young men, kept them back from twenty-five to 100 miles away from the Missouri. They did a little planting, but were mainly subsisted by the government, and thereafter gave very little concern to the authorities.

As has been stated, after the terms of the treaty were made known to the hostiles there was, during the season of 1868, scarcely any trouble north of the North Platte and the Big Horn Mountains. During the war Roman Nose and Medicine Man, with their bands of Northern Cheyennes, had been the faithful and effective allies of Red Cloud, but now the Cheyennes had important business in their own country. The Kansas Pacific was shoving on to Denver, directly through the heart of the Cheyenne range, and Roman Nose obstinately contested its passage. The time had come for reciprocity on the part of the Dakotas, and while Red Cloud and Man Afraid and the other chiefs of renown personally kept out of it, they connived in sending large bodies of the hostile Teton warriors to fight under the standard of the giant Cheyenne. The Tetons were with Roman Nose in force at the several fights in eastern Colorado in the autumn of that year, and particularly in the attack on Forsyth's scouts on the 17th of September.

Red Cloud signed the treaty on the 6th of November, drew his presents from the commissioners, and at once returned to the Powder River country, where he ranged unmolested for the next two or three years. Eighteen hundred and sixty-nine and 1870 were years of entire peace in the Dakota country, except a little attempt at stock stealing by some lawless Indians at Fort Rice. Not a single circumstance occurred to disturb the general quiet, though, of course, as General Stanley reported, the wild Indians were not agreeable in their relations with the officials at the agencies, and at any time would have enjoyed a little fight. Nevertheless under the advice and earnest desire of the responsible chiefs, the conditions of the treaty of Fort Laramie were faithfully observed. In 1870 Governor Burbank reported that there were 4,500 Indians drawing subsistence at the Whetstone agency, consisting of Brules, Oglalas and seceders from the other bands. "They are making some progress toward civilization and are attempting in a small way to till the soil but with imperfect success. They have settled down at no particular place, but spend most of their time at from within twenty-five to fifty miles of the agency. Red Cloud showed no disposition to settle down and it was deemed wise by the department to get him away from the wild and hostile influences and have him visit the east and learn something of the power and progress of the whites, and of the profits-and advantages of civilization. Accordingly, in the summer of 1870 the old chief, together with seventeen of his head men and three of his squaws, and Spotted Tail and four other chiefs of the Brules, were invited to go to Washington to visit the president and to become the guests of the government. They arrived at Washington about the 1st of June. It was at once discovered that there was a bit of jealousy between the two great generals, due to the great prominence given to Red Cloud and his warriors, but Spotted Tail, in the interest of peace, wisely suppressed his ambitions and let Red Cloud take precedence of him. They were shown the navy yard and the arsenal, taken to all the places of public interest, and Red Cloud declined to have his picture taken by Brady, on the ground that he was not a white man and was not dressed to fit the occasion. For their benefit a big fifteen inch Rodman gun at the arsenal was fired, and their surprise was great as they saw the huge shell ricochetting down the river. Red Cloud carefully took the measure of the diameter of the gun with his fan and when shown the size of the grains of powder used, his admiration was unbounded. The main point which the government desired to secure by this visit was to induce Red Cloud to bring in his people and settle down at an agency on a reservation, a position on the Missouri River being preferable. The secretary of the interior made a somewhat extended talk on this line, indicating its advantages, and in general going over the whole situation growing out of the late period of hostility. To this talk Red Cloud replied:

The Great Spirit has seen me naked and my Great Father I have fought against him. I offered my prayers to the Great Spirit so I might come here safe. Look at me, I was raised on this land where the sun rises and now I come from where the sun sets. Whose voice was first sounded on this land? The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows. The Great Father says he is good and kind to us. I don't think so. I am good to his white people. From the word sent me I have come all the way to his home. My face is red. Yours is white The Great Spirit has made you to read and write, but not me. I have not learned. I come here to tell the Great Father what I do not like in my country. You are all close to my Great Father and are a great many chiefs. The men the Great Father sends to us have no sense. What he has done in my country I did not want: I did not ask for it: white people going through my country. Father, have you or any of your friends here got children? Do you want to raise them? Look at me; I come here with all these young men. All of them have children and want to raise them. The white children have surrounded me and have left me nothing but an island. When we first had this land we were strong, now are melting like snow on a hill side, while you are grown like spring grass. Now I have come a long distance to my Great Father's house. See if 1 have left any blood in his land when I go. When  the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him. Tell the Great Father move Fort Fetterman away and we will have no more trouble. I have two mountains in that country, the Black Hills and the Big Horn Mountains. I want the Father to make no roads through them. 1 have told these things three times and now I have come here to tell them the fourth time. I do not want my reservation  on the Missouri. This is the fourth time I have said so. Here are some people from there now. Our children are dying off. The country does not suit them. I was born at the forks of the Platte and I was told that the land belonged to me from north, south, east and west. The red man has come to the Great Father's house. The Oglalas are the last who have come here, but I come to hear and listen to the words of the Great Father. They have promised me traders, but we have none. At the mouth of horse Creek they made a treaty in 1852 and the man who made the treaty is the only man who has told me the truth. When you send goods to me they are stolen all along the road, so when they reach me there is only a handful. They held out a paper for me to sign and that is all I got for my land. I know the people you send out there are liars. Look at me, I am poor and naked, I do not want war with my government; the railroad is passing through my country now; I have received no pay for the land, not even a brass ring. You might grant my people the powder we ask. We are but a handful and you a great and powerful nation. You make all the ammunition; all I ask is enough for my people to kill game. The Great Spirit has made all things that 1 have in my country wild, I have to hunt them up. Its not like you who go out and find what you want. I have no more to say.

The secretary then took up the treaty of 1868 and carefully explained its provisions to Red Cloud. He declared he had been entirely deceived as to what the treaty provided and that that was the first time that it had ever been explained to him. He was greatly dejected to learn that he was not to be provided with ammunition and with horses, particularly so, as Spotted Tail and his people, who had settled down near the agency, were to have horses. All of the band were discouraged and despondent, and when the next day he went to the president and demanded that Fort Fetterman should be removed, and the president informed him that it could not be done, some of the members of the party were determined to commit suicide, declaring that they might as well die there as to go home to starve among their people. Secretary Cox, therefore, rounded them up on the succeeding day and told them that he would not require them to go to the Missouri River but would establish for them a business agency somewhere on the head waters of the Cheyenne near the Black Hills, and that the government would give them cattle, food and clothing so as to make them happy in their new home. To this Red Cloud replied:

I have only a few words to add this morning. I have become tired of speaking. When I saw the treaty and all the false things in it I was mad, and I suppose it made you the same. The secretary has explained this morning and now I am pleased. As to the goods you talked about I want what is due and belongs to me. The red people were raised with the bow and the arrow and are all of one nation, but the whites who are civilized and educated swindle me, and I am not hard to swindle because I do not know how to read and write. You whites have a chief to go by, but all the chief I go by is God Almighty. What he tells me, that is for the best. I always go by his guidance. The whites think the Great Spirit has nothing to do with us, but He has. After fooling with us and taking away our property they will have to suffer for it hereafter. The Great Spirit is now looking at us and we offer to him our prayers. The Great Spirit makes us suffer for our wrong doing. You promise us many things but you never perform them. You take away everything, and yet if you live forty or fifty years in this world and then die, you cannot take your goods with you. The Great Spirit will not make me suffer because I am ignorant. He will put me in a place where I will be better off than in this world.  Look at me, my hair is straight. I was free born in this land. An interpreter who signed the treaty has curly hair. He is no man. I'll see him hereafter. I know I have been wronged. The words of my Great Father never reach me and mine never reach him. There are too many streams between us. The Great Spirit has raised me on wild game.  I do not ask my Great Father to give me anything. I came naked and I will go away naked.

The secretary then explained to the Indians that they wanted to take them to New York and let them see some of the great cities of the east, and have a pleasant time and receive presents. To this Red Cloud  replied:

I do not want to go that way. I want a straight line. I've seen enough of towns. There are plenty of stores between here and my home. There is no occasion to go out of the way to buy goods. I have no business in New York. I want to go back the way I came. The whites are the same everywhere. J see them every day. As to the improvement of the red men I want to send them here to be delegates to  congress.

Notwithstanding the protest of Red Cloud, it was decided to take them to New York, and Peter Cooper tendered to the commissioners the large reception hall at Cooper Institute for a public reception to Red Cloud. Though but a few hours' notice could be given of this reception the great hall was so crowded that many left unable to obtain admission. "Never before," said the New York Herald, "was the great hall of the Cooper Institute filled with a larger or more respectable crowd of people than assembled to listen to Red Cloud yesterday. The effect of this splendid reception of the great chief was to completely win his heart, and as the crowd surged forward over the platform at the close of the evening, to tender its congratulations to Red Cloud, and many costly and appropriate presents were given to him, he was thoroughly satisfied that he had hosts of true friends among the pale faces, and he left New York the following day in the best of humor." They returned to their tribes and arrangements were at once perfected to set up an agency for Red Cloud's people not far from Fort Laramie, and Spotted Tail's request to permit the removal of his agency back from the evil influence of the Missouri was granted and the Whetstone was moved far back on the upper waters of the White River. In July of 1871 Red Cloud, with his people, were finally established at the new agency, which was located on the Platte and  but a short distance from Laramie.

 

 

CHAPTER XXXVIII

 

During all of this period less than half of the warriors of the Teton tribes had submitted to the agency regulations, and still roamed through the Powder River country, living comfortably upon the buffalo and other game. The Uncpapas were the leaders among these wild Indians and only a very few, indeed, of them had ever submitted to the authorities. Black Moon was the acknowledged chief of the great heathen element of the Uncpapas and Sitting Bull was fast coming into prominence and influence as their chief medicine man. As early as 1871 the whites had begun to regard Sitting Bull as the leader of this recalcitrant element of the Tetons, but he never at any time acquired that notoriety among the Indians themselves. While these Indians lived and roamed in peace, they were at heart as hostile as ever to the whites and only awaited opportunity to manifest their sentiments. The Tetons claimed the Yellowstone River as the northern boundary of their lands. The wild people among them having no regard to any treaty regulations, but based their claims to it upon their right of conquest, having in 1822 wrested the land from the Crows and from that time recorded it as their territory. The Dakotas considered the Heart River as the northern limit of their domain on the Missouri and this line projected west to the Yellowstone, thence up the Yellowstone to the Big Horn and down the Big Horn range to the Platte as their western limits. This claim, not coming in conflict with any white interest, was not disputed until 1871, when the surveyors for the Northern Pacific railroad, after several reconnoisances of this region, determined that the practicable route for their road lay up the south bank of the Yellowstone, through the country claimed by the wild Tetons. Immediately the Uncpapas made a vigorous protest and active hostilities were resumed. In this contention the wild Indians had the active sympathy of Red Cloud and all the Tetons who had joined in the treaty of Laramie, which claimed that the building of the railroad south of the Yellowstone was in direct violation of the treaty which stipulates, that the country north of the North Platte River and east of the summits of the Big Horn Mountains shall be held and considered to be uncedcd Indian territory, and also stipulates and agrees that no white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion of the same, or, without the consent of the Indians first  having been obtained, to pass through the same. It will be observed that the provisions of the treaty does not define the northern limit of the country so reserved, which the Indians earnestly maintained extended to the Yellowstone River, and which contention on their part could not be successfully refuted. Nevertheless, without obtaining the consent of the Indians or in any manner treating for it, the government permitted the railway to be perfected south of the Yellowstone and provided strong military escorts to protect the surveyors, and forts were established; at the crossing of the Missouri, Port McLean, afterwards Fort Abraham Lincoln, Fort Keogh on the Yellowstone, and Fort Ellis near Bozeman, to protect the line. Eighteen hundred and seventy-one, however, passed without an open rupture. By the middle of the summer of 1872 the situation was becoming tense, and on August 14th, near Pryor's Fork in southern Montana, a column consisting of four troops of the Second cavalry and four troops of the Seventh cavalry, commanded by Major K. M. Baker, of the Second cavalry, were attacked by several hundred Sioux and Cheyennes. They were under the direction of Black Moon. One soldier was killed and one citizen and three soldiers were wounded. Two Indians were killed and ten wounded, most of them mortally. Again on the 26th of that month a war party of about 125 of the Dakotas attacked a detachment of one sergeant and six privates of the Sixth infantry and two Ree scouts, twelve miles from Bismarck, and the two Rees were killed. On the 2d of October, 300 Uncpapas attacked Fort Abraham Lincoln opposite Bismarck, and wounded one and killed three Ree scouts, but withdrew without damaging the post. At this time the Indian commissioner was of the opinion that there were 1,000 hostile Sioux warriors under Black Moon and Sitting Bull, but this is one of the few occasions in which the force of the enemy was underrated by the authorities. It is certain that there were three or four times as many of the hostiles as the Indian department supposed.

The affairs of 1872 concluded with a fight on October 3d and 4th near White River in which a number of Indians attacked detachments of the Twenty-second and Twenty-seventh infantry under Lieutenants Crosby and Adair, and one civilian, a hunter accompanying the party, was killed. Again on October 14th a large body of Uncpapas attacked Fort A. Lincoln. One company of the Sixteenth infantry and eighteen scouts went out from the garrison to drive off the attacking party, and lost two enlisted men killed, but in return got three of the Indians. The difficulties already encountered along the line of the Northern Pacific induced Indian Commissioner Smith in March, 1873, to appoint a commission consisting of Rev. John P. Williamson and Dr. J. W. Daniels to go out to the hostile camps and investigate the condition of the Indians along the line of the Northern Pacific railroad with reference to their probable opposition to its construction. They learned at once that owing to the scarcity of food in the Yellowstone country the northern Indians mostly had come down into the neighborhood of Fort Laramie and the Black Hills, and that they were not far from the new Red Cloud agency, where one of the commissioners, Dr. Daniels, then resided. They sent out word to all of the hostile camps, inviting them to send in representatives to a general council, and on May 9th met delegates representing from 400 to 500 of the hostile lodges. The commissioners informed them of the wishes of the government in relation to the Northern Pacific, in reply to which the Indians said they were very glad to hear from the Great Father, and they wished to have him informed that they did not want the Northern Pacific railroad built and that they did not want any white men in their country. The trader was the only white man they wanted to see. They wanted the Great Father to let them sell guns and ammunition. The principal men in the council were Red Thunder, Thin Soup, Ashes, Little Chief, and Hump Rib, head soldiers of the Uncpapas, Minneconjous and Sans Arcs. The commissioners report that with apparent good feeling on the part of all the council then closed. The commissioners conclude their report with these remarks: "They feel no hesitancy in assuring the department that there will be no combined resistance to the construction of the Northern Pacific railroad. The Indians have neither ammunition nor subsistence to undertake a general war."

While the commissioners were correct in their conclusion that the Indians could not make a great and united campaign because of the lack of subsistence, they, nevertheless, were able to give the military an active summer. Red Cloud was thoroughly impressed at this time with the belief that the government did not intend to show good faith, and keep the stipulations of the treaty of Laramie relating to the sanctity of the Indian lands, and Crazy Horse, Black Moon and Sitting Bull at least received his approbation, if not his active assistance, in their attempts to harass and drive out the Northern Pacific surveyers from the Yellowstone country. On the 7th of May, at the very time when the commissioners were at the Red Cloud agency and two days before the great council there, another vigorous attack was made upon Fort Abraham Lincoln, which was repelled by Lieutenant Colonel Carlen, of the Seventeenth infantry. The Indians were driven off with a loss of one killed and three wounded. On June 15th and 17th two separate at tacks were made upon Fort Abraham Lincoln which Colonel Carlen repulsed, losing one of his Ree scouts in doing so Three Tetons were killed and eight wounded. So bold and frequent had been the Indian attacks on the military posts and escorts to working parties on the Northern Pacific that Colonel George A. Custer with the Seventh cavalry was transferred from the south to Fort Abraham Lincoln for the purpose of following and punishing these Indians, if they continued their attacks. An expedition was organized under Colonel D. S. Stanley and a supply depot established near Glendive Creek where it empties into the Yellowstone, the point at which it was then expected the surveying parties of the Northern Pacific would run across the river. The troops comprising the "Yellowstone expedition" left Forts Rice and A. Lincoln about the middle of June, returning to their stations in September, after accomplishing the purposes intended, having had several engagements with the hostiles during this period. August 4th troops A and B of the Seventh cavalry, commanded by Captain M. Moylan, had a fight with the Indians near Tongue River, Dakota, one soldier being killed. Later in the same day the main column of the Seventh, commanded by General Custer were attacked by several hundred Sioux on the Yellowstone River. Four enlisted men were killed and Lieutenant Brader and three enlisted men were wounded.

Earlier this same day young Rain in the Face had caught Dr. Flonzinger, the veterinarian of the expedition, and Baliran, the sutler, and cruelly killed them. General Stanley, with the main force, coming upon the bodies of these men, was apprised of the proximity of the enemy and hurried reinforcements forward, which probably prevented more serious results, for Black .Moon's force was vastly superior to Custer's. During the succeeding winter Rain in the Face appeared at Standing Rock and boasted of the killing of these men, and word being carried to Fort Lincoln Captain Tom Custer was sent down to the agency and effected the arrest of the miscreant. He was confined at Fort A. Lincoln for some months, but finally escaped and participated in the great battles of 1876. He still (1904) resides at Eagle postoffice, on the Grand River, South Dakota. August 11th ten troops of the Seventh, under General Custer, were again attacked on the Yellowstone; four Indians were reported killed and twelve wounded. On September 18th two troops of the Seventh cavalry, under Captain Egan, attacked a war party of the Sioux Indians, on the North Laramie, capturing eighteen horses and mules. On the 1st of August Red Cloud and his people reluctantly gave up the temporary agency on the Platte and located on White River, about eighty miles northeast of Fort Laramie, and two or three miles from the present location of Fort Robinson. It was a very good location, in a pretty valley, with good water, farming land and building material near by. Dr. Daniels, the agent, reports: "They show more feeling of independence and more anxiety to be at peace. When they first came into the agency they sent their soldiers to get rations that they might taste the white man's food without his knowing it, but after a few issues they came to acknowledge their dependence." Dr. Daniels says that the Indians who committed the depredations during the year were composed of Bad Faced Sioux, of the Oglala band, numbering about forty lodges, under Crazy Horse. Red Cloud is called the chief of all the Bad Faces by the Indians, and most of his relatives belong to the outlaws. His son-in-law was one of the principals in killing two women on Sweetwater in July. It is manifest that Dr. Daniels did not at that time have definite knowledge about the extent of the hostile party. He evidently did not comprehend that Crazy Horse was in company with most of the Uncpapas and many of the Sans Arcs and Minneconjous, as well as the stragglers and hostile element of all of the hostile bands, which it is now known were with him. So far as the agency Indians are concerned, it may be said that while they were indignant at. the trespass of the Northern Pacific under the protection of the military upon their lands, they were not sufficiently interested in the matter to be thoroughly aroused over it, and it is most likely that they would soon have come to acquiesce in it had not other and more palpable violations of their treaty rights followed.

 

CHAPTER XXXIX

Notwithstanding the troubles incident to the survey and construction of the Northern Pacific railroad, 1874 opened up very quietly in the Indian country. Christian C. Cox, a special commissioner sent out by the Indian department to investigate conditions among the Dakota Indians, visited all of the agencies and reports: "I was received with marked cordiality and while smoking with the chiefs the pipe of peace, conversed freely with them on subjects of interest to themselves and of their relations to the general government. There was no reserve and much that they said added to the favorable impressions I had formed. While visiting the encampments I could be but strongly impressed with the indolent, luxurious pictures presented by their mode of life. Every tipi had its curtains of jerked beef suspended near it. The ponies grazed on the rich prairie grass on the verge of the camp, while the young bucks were basking in the sun at the doors of their lodges, dallying with their papooses. In fact, a more perfect representation of Arcadia could hardly be conceived. It was the calm before the storm.

The raids along the Northern Pacific survey during the previous two or three years had led Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan, in command of the department of the Missouri, to believe that he could exercise better control over the Dakotas by establishing a military post in the Black Hills. His first thought was that with Fort Laramie as a base he would start his reconnoisance of the Hills, which were not more than a hundred miles distant, but visiting that post in the fall of 1873, found the Indians in no temper to permit such an enterprise. He therefore turned his attention to Fort Abraham Lincoln as the base of operation, and visiting that post in the spring of 1874, directed General Terry to organize the expedition, to make a reconnoisance in the Black Hills country, and to put General George A. Custer in command.  Such an enterprise was, of course, in direct violation of the provisions of the treaty of Laramie, which stipulated that white men should not enter upon the Indian lands without first obtaining the consent of the Dakotas. The faith of the government was pledged to protect the Indians against all intrusions upon this land. Pursuant to the arrangement made by General Sheridan, Colonel Custer left Fort Abraham Lincoln with 1,200 men on the 1st day of July, 1874, and proceeding in a southwesterly direction without interference or interruption reached the Belle Fourche on the 18th of July. On the 20th they crossed the Belle Fourche and began as it were, skirmishing with the Black Hills. General Custer was delighted with the country and in the most glowing terms pictures the wealth of timber and prairie and the beauty of the flora. They passed to the north of the Hills, proper, reaching Inyan Kara on the 22d, thence passing down on the western side of the Hills, crossed over into Custer Park.

It would be difficult to frame language better calculated to inflame the public mind and excite men to enter this country or die in the attempt, than is the language of General Custer's official report upon the Black Hills and the section immediately surrounding them. We copy literally from the report from the time the valley of the Belle Fourche was reached: "We continued from the time we ascended from the valley of the Belle Fourche to move through a very superior country, covered with the best of grazing and an abundance of timber, principally pine, poplar and several varieties of oak. This valley in one respect presented the most wonderful as well as beautiful aspect. Its equal I have never seen and such, too, was the testimony of all who beheld it. In no private or public park have I ever seen such a profuse display of flowers. Every step of our march that day was amid flowers of the most exquisite color and perfume. So luxuriant in growth were they that men plucked them without dismounting from the saddle. Some belonged to new or unclassified species. It was a strange sight to glance back at the advancing columns of cavalry and. behold the men with beautiful boquets in their hands, while the headgear of the horses were decorated with wreaths of flowers fit to crown a queen of May. Deeming it a most fitting appellation, I named this Floral Valley. General Forsythe at one of our halting places plucked seventeen beautiful flowers belonging to different varieties, and within a space twenty feet square. The same evening, while seated at the mess table, one of the officers called attention to the carpet of flowers strewed under our feet and it was suggested that it be determined how many different flowers could be plucked without leaving our seat at dinner table. Seven beautiful varieties were thus gathered. Professor Donaldson, the botanist of the expedition, estimated the number of flowers in bloom in Floral Valley at fifty, while an equal number had bloomed or were yet to bloom. The number of trees, shrubs and grasses was estimated at twenty-five, making the total flora of the valley embrace one hundred and twenty-five species. Through this beautiful valley meanders a stream of crystal water so cold as to render ice undesirable even at noonday. The temperature of two of the streams found flowing into it was taken and ascertained to be 44° and 44 1/2° respectively. The next morning, although loath to leave so enchanting a locality, we continued to ascend this valley until gradually, almost imperceptibly, we discovered that we were on the western crest of the ridge of the Black Hills, and instead of being among barren peaks, as might be supposed, we found ourselves wending our way through a little park, whose natural beauty may well bear comparison with the fairest portions of Central Park. Favored as we had been to have a floral valley as our roadway to the crest of the hills, we were scarcely less fortunate in the valley, which seemed to rise to meet us in the interior slope. The rippling stream of clear, cold water, the counterpart of that we had ascended the day before, flowed at our feet and pointed out the way before us, while along its banks grew beautiful flowers, surpassed but little in beauty and profusion by their sisters which had greeted us in Floral Valley. After advancing down this valley about fourteen miles, our course being almost southeast, we encamped in the midst of grazing whose only fault, if any, was the great luxuriance. It is needless to suggest that in view of this report it was scarcely necessary for General Custer to add that he had discovered gold, to induce white men to determine that the Black Hills was too good a country for the Indians to possess.

Up to this time Custer had seen no signs of Indians, but on the 24th he came upon an Indian campfire still burning, and which with other indications, showed that a small party of Indians had encamped there the previous night and had evidently left that morning in ignorance of his proximity. He therefore sent his head scout, Bloody Knife, a Ree Indian, with a few braves to reconnoiter in the valley. In a few minutes two of the braves returned, reporting that they had found five lodges of the Sioux, when Custer with a company of cavalry hastened forward and very soon found himself in close proximity to the lodges, about which a considerable number of ponies were grazing. He reached a point very close to the lodges without being discovered and even was able to completely surround the camp with his cavalry before the Indians became aware of his presence. He dispatched the guard and interpreter with a flag of truce to acquaint the occupants of the camp that they were friendly and desired to communicate with  them. Custer himself entered the village and shook hands with the occupants, and promised them presents of flour, sugar and coffee. The Indians agreed to accept the invitation the next morning. With this understanding Custer left them. The entire party numbered twenty-seven. "Later in the afternoon four of the men, including chief One Stab, visited our camp and desired the promised rations, saying their entire party would move up and join us the following morning, as agreed upon. I ordered presents of sugar, coffee and bacon given them, and to relieve them of their pretended anxiety for the safety of their village during the night, I ordered a party of fifteen of my command to return with them and protect them, but from their great disinclination to wait a few minutes till the party could saddle up, and from the fact that two of the four had already slipped away, I was of the opinion that they were not acting in good faith. In this I was confirmed when the two remaining ones set off at a gallop in the direction of their village. I sent a party of our scouts to overtake them and request them to return. Not complying with this request 1 sent a second party with orders to repeat the request, and if not complied with to take hold of the  bridles of their ponies and lead them back, but to offer no violence. When overtaken by our scouts one of the two Indians seized the musket of one of the scouts and endeavored to wrest it from him. Failing in this, he released his hold after the scout became dismounted in the struggle and set off as fast as his pony could carry him, but not before the musket of the scout was discharged. From blood discovered afterward it was very evident that either the Indian or his pony was wounded. I hope that neither was seriously hurt, although the Indians have their own bad faith as the sole ground for the collision.

General Custer quite overlooks the fact that he was himself a trespasser upon the Indian preserves and that the latter had good cause to be alarmed at discovering an army in the middle of a reservation which the government had pledged its faith to hold inviolate.

"One Stab, the chief, was brought back to camp. The scouts galloped down the valley to the site of the village, when it was discovered that the entire party had packed up their lodges and fled, and the visit of the four Indians to our camp was not only to obtain their rations promised them in return for future services, but to cover the flight of the lodges. One Stab claims to belong to both Red Cloud's and Spotted Tail's agency, but has been to neither for a long time."

Proceeding in a southeasterly direction, on the 30th Custer reached and ascended Harney's Peak, and at the top drank the health of the veteran for whom it was named, and for the next two or three days   divided up into small parties for the exploration of the country in the vicinity of Harney's Peak and Custer's Park. In describing it General Custer again breaks into a rhapsody:  "The country which we have passed since leaving the Belle Fourche River has been generally open and extremely fertile. The main portion of that passed over since entering the unexplored portions of the Black Hills consists of beautiful parks and valleys, through which flow streams of clear, cold water, perfectly free from alkali, while bounding these parks, or valleys, is invariably found unlimited supplies of timber, much of it being capable of being made into good lumber. In no portion of the United States, not excepting the famous blue grass region of Kentucky, have I ever seen grazing superior to that found growing wild in this hitherto unknown region. I know of no portion of our country where nature has done so much to prepare homes for husbandmen and left so little for the latter to do as here. The open and timber spaces are so divided that a partly prepared farm of almost any dimensions can be found here. Not only is the land cleared, and timber, both for fuel and building, conveniently located, with streams of pure water flowing through it, length and breadth, but nature oftimes seems to have gone farther and placed beautiful shrubbery and evergreens in the most desirable locations for building sites. Everything indicates an abundance of moisture within the space enclosed by the Black Hills. The soil is that of a rich garden and composed of a dark mold of exceedingly fine grain. We have found the country in many places covered with wild raspberries, both the black and red varieties. Yesterday and today I have feasted on the latter. It is no unusual sight to see hundreds of soldiers gathering wild berries. Nowhere in the states have I tasted cultivated berries of equal flavor to those found growing wild here, nor have I ever seen them as large or in as great profusion, as I have seen hundreds of acres of them here. Wild strawberries, wild currants, gooseberries, two varieties of blueberries and wild cherries are also found in great profusion, and of exceedingly pure quality.  Cattle could winter in these valleys without other food or shelter than that to be obtained from running at large. I have quoted very largely from General Custer's report because it has been frequently alleged by writers upon this topic that he said nothing which justified the wild rush to the Black Hills which immediately ensued after the publication of his report. I leave it to the reader to determine from the foregoing whether or not he made representations which would induce land-hungry men to make great sacrifices to reach so favored a spot. But, continuing, Custer had other things to say:

"Gold has been found at several places and it is the belief of those who are giving their attention to this subject that it will be found in paying quantities. I have upon my table forty or fifty particles of pure gold in size averaging that of a small pin head, and most of it obtained today from one pan full of earth. As we have never remained at one camp longer than one day it will be readily understood that there is no opportunity to make a satisfactory examination in regard to deposits of valuable minerals. Veins of lead and strong indications of silver have been found. Veins of what the geologists term goldbearing quartz crop out on almost every hillside, but in one place, and the only one within my knowledge, where so great a depth was reached, a hole was dug eight feet in depth, the miners report that they found gold among the roots of the grass, and from that point to the lowest point reached, gold was found in paying quantities. On some of the water courses almost every pan full of earth produced gold in small yet paying quantities It has not required an expert to find gold in the Black Hills, as men without former experience in mining have discovered it at an expense of but little time or labor. And in conclusion,  as. if he had not already said enough to turn the heads of all the world, General Custer says, "I have never seen as many deer as in the Black Hills. Elk and bear have also been killed." General Custer returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln August 22d, having had no collision with hostile Indians.