When railroads were built in the West, travel became faster and easier for the settlers. But for the American Indians, especially the tribes living in the Great Plains, the railroads spelled the end to a vital part of their existence.
The Great Plains, the area between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, was home to many American Indian tribes including the Blackfoot, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. The survival of many of the tribes depended on one thing—the buffalo.
At one time as many as 30 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains. By the end of the 1800s the number was less than 1,000. For the Plains Indians, the buffalo was their primary source of food and clothing. They used every part of a buffalo, leaving nothing to waste. They ate the buffalo meat and used buffalo hides to make teepees and for trade. Female buffalo hides were especially popular, and Indians traded them with white men for guns and knives.
In addition to American Indian hunters, professional hunters came through the plains, killing as many as 1 million buffalo each year. During the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, hunters killed thousands of buffalo while clearing the land, often leaving behind the bodies of the buffalo to rot in the sun. After the railroad was completed in 1869, it became easier for the hunters to send hides back East, and the number of buffalo killed increased.
THE DAKOTA CONFLICT
In summer 1862 many Dakota Sioux Indians living on a small reservation in southern Minnesota were starving. Their crops the previous year had failed, and land payments owed them by the government had been delayed. The settlers in the area were unwilling to help them. Trader Andrew Myrick, when asked by Dakota Chief Little Crow for help, replied, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.”3
The Dakota people’s problems continued after the execution. The government took their reservation land and forced them to leave Minnesota.
American Indians who lived on the Great Plains adapted to the largely treeless area by living in tepees. The cone-shaped tepees were made of buffalo skins stretched over a pole framework. Tepees were approximately 15 feet (4.6 meters) in diameter. Since tepees could be easily moved from one spot to another, the Indians were able to follow the herds of buffalo and other game such as deer, elk, and antelope on the Great Plains.
GOLD IN THE BLACK HILLS
The Black Hills of present-day South Dakota were considered sacred to the Lakota Sioux who lived there. A government treaty set aside the land for the Lakota, but when gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1875, the government wanted to break the treaty. The government planned to force the Lakota to leave the Black Hills and move to a reservation. The Lakota refused to go.
On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, Army General George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry attacked Lakota Chief Sitting Bull’s camp near the Little Bighorn River in Montana. The Lakota warriors learned of Custer’s plan and launched a counterattack. The Lakota warriors numbered at least 1,500, compared to about 200 soldiers under Custer’s command. Within an hour Custer was dead, along with all of his men. Although the Indians won the Battle of the Little Bighorn, it wasn’t a lasting victory. After the battle they were forced to leave the Black Hills and move to reservations—the very fate they had fought to avoid.
THE GHOST DANCE
One nonviolent way the American Indians fought back was to dance the Ghost Dance. Part of a religious movement that swept the West, the Ghost Dance promised American Indians that the land would return to the way it used to be. It promised that great herds of buffalo would return to the land and that the American Indians would be able to return to their old ways.
People who participated in the Ghost Dance danced in circles while chanting and praying, all in a trancelike state. The Ghost Dance frightened people who didn’t understand it. The dance led to one of the bloodiest battles between the American Indians and the U.S. government.
In December 1890 the government banned the Ghost Dance on Indian reservations, but it continued at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. The Lakota ghost dancers sent word to Chief Sitting Bull at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota to join them. On December 15 reservation police attempted to arrest Sitting Bull. He was killed during the fighting that followed, along with seven of his supporters and six police officers.
Once the Lakota at Pine Ridge learned of Sitting Bull’s death, many of them fled the reservation. Members of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry found the Indians and ordered them to move their camp to Wounded Knee Creek. On December 29 soldiers demanded that the Indians in the camp turn over their guns. A deaf Indian man resisted, and in a violent battle, at least 150 Lakota, many of them women and children, and 25 U.S. soldiers were killed. The Indians called the incident the Massacre at Wounded Knee. It was to be the last major confrontation between Indians and whites.