But Ezra Kind was killed and his secret slept, and thus we are as we are today. Actually it was the Indians who kept the Hills so long forbidden—Indians of the Teton Sioux, the same tribe who put Ezra’s party to the tomahawk.
Before the California gold rush life on the Great Plains had proceeded pretty much on an even keel. The mighty Teton Sioux, all seven tribes of them—the Oglalas, the Unkpapas, the San Arcs, the Brules, the Minniconjous, the Blackfeet, and the Two Kettle—roamed the prairies at will, from the Missouri Valley to the Rocky Mountains. Of course they had their misadventures with the fur companies, but just as often their dealings with the Mountain Men were profitable, for the Indians, when in the mood, scouted, trapped, and hunted, all for the white man’s pay.
With the great exodus to California, though, the situation took on a different hue. Immigrants by the hundreds and the thousands poured up the rolling valley of the Platte, and it was not many months before the haphazard Indian attacks took on a new strength and design. Long burned the council fires in the dark nights, and all up and down the great plains the war raged. To protect the wagon trains the government sent its shrewdest and most experienced Indian agent, Thomas Fitzpatrick, a veteran fur trader since 1823, the famed “Broken Hand” of western legend. Summoning the tribes to Fort Laramie in 1851, Fitzpatrick managed to subdue them, but only by promising that he would confine the settlers to specific ranges and would keep them steadfastly out of the Dakotas and the Black Hills.
In the meanwhile the eastern tribes, the Santee Sioux, were beginning to feel the pressure of settlement in the rich Minnesota valleys. In 1862 they revolted, and the terrible battle of Wood Lake was fought, with the score of massacred settlers reaching into the high hundreds. The leaders of this outrage were, of course, apprehended and punished, but whole tribes fled into the western plains, into the land of the Black Hills, where they eventually joined forces with their Teton cousins.
The Four Great Faces: Mount Rushmore Memorial
Sylvan Lake mirrors great granite shields at an altitude of 6,250 feet
By 1865 matters had come to a head again, because although the great Sioux, numbering between thirty and forty thousand, had kept to themselves, the white man had broken his side of the bargain and was cutting a new route into the forbidden country. This passage was the famed Bozeman Trail, which drove north from Fort Laramie, on the Oregon Trail, directly through the Sioux country to serve the new gold fields of Montana.
To protect the wagon trains on the Bozeman the army called upon General Grenville Dodge, who was later to build the Union Pacific. Dodge, Commandant of the Department of the Missouri, was an old hand at Indian warfare. He rushed into Wyoming a full force, four columns of men, who swiftly brought the angered tribes to heel.