The immediate result of this engagement was the signing of a halfhearted and inconclusive treaty at Fort Sully, near Pierre, in October of 1865. The treaty attempted to settle some old differences of a fundamental nature, but inasmuch as neither the Oglala nor the Brule were represented it failed of its mission.
A year later a further powwow was staged at Fort Laramie to pursue the matter of keeping the Bozeman Trail open through the forbidden Sioux country. Perhaps matters might have proceeded equably had not General Carrington arrived in the midst of the delicate negotiations to announce that he had enough soldiers to protect the trail, treaty or no treaty.
Carrington’s blustery announcement, backed up by a show of seven hundred courageous but misguided cavalrymen, brought the talks to an abrupt end and sent the two most important Sioux Chieftains, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, scurrying for the council fire and the war paths. In all the great plains there were not to be found braver or more single-minded Indian strategists than these two. For the better part of two years roving bands of tribesmen under Red Cloud and his stalwart colleague amply proved that Carrington could not have kept the trail safely open if he had had seventy times his seven hundred men. It was, as a matter of fact, the only time in our long history that Uncle Sam’s troops ever took a downright beating.
At last even Red Cloud could see that the white man, for all his braggadocio and poor planning, would eventually win the turn; and although his savage troops had tasted victory in almost every engagement, he consented in 1868 to negotiate once more. Presumably both sides were wiser by then, for a pact, sometimes called the Harney-Sanborne Treaty, was dutifully signed and accepted in April of that year. The United States agreed to close the Bozeman Trail and to abandon the forts. The Black Hills were utterly forbidden to the white man, and except for an agreement to let the Northern Pacific rails cross the upper prairies unmolested, the high plains from the Missouri to the Big Horn were returned by federal order to their historic isolation.
After that fiasco the situation remained comparatively quiet for a few years. Eastern Dakota was being settled bit by bit, and the rails were pushing forward, ever so slowly but ever so surely. The Missouri River was the frontier line, dividing the settled Dakotas from the Sioux lands; and Fort Lincoln, on the river (not far from the site of today’s Bismarck), was the outpost that overlooked the troubled territory.
From month to month trappers, gold-seekers, and would-be homesteaders slipped inside the Sioux curtain from the Cheyenne-Laramie country on the south, from the rich Niobrara country in northwest Nebraska, or from eastern Dakota itself. There was not much that the army could do about these treaty violators except worry, for the borders to be patrolled were vast and the forbidden lands inviting.
But the army did worry, endlessly. There were increasingly frequent rumors of the existence of gold in the Hills, and year after year General Sheridan, commanding the Departments of Dakota, the Platte, and the Missouri, urged stronger fortification of the Sioux boundaries to prevent trouble. Trouble was particularly to be expected because several bands of Sioux, specifically those under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, had not agreed to government supervision in 1868 and seemed thirsting for a fight.
Thus it was to make a military survey that Sheridan sent an expedition through the heart of the Hills in 1874. His force of more than a thousand soldiers moved under the command of George Armstrong Custer; and, strange impedimenta for an army, the luggage in the lorries included mining picks and pans, the belongings of H. N. Ross and William T. McKay, who were officially attached to the command. Presumably Custer was looking for something more than mere military sites.
The Indian fighters of an earlier day—Kit Carson, the Bents, or Sibley, for instance—would have stood gaping in the stockade as Custer’s force moved leisurely onto the empty Dakota prairies. This was no ragtag army in buckskin, but an orderly procession of one hundred and ten wagons, six ambulances, a dozen caissons, and two heavy field pieces. Each wagon and ambulance was drawn by a sprightly hand of six sleek mules.
In addition, three hundred head of beef cattle browsed slowly along the way in mooing testimony that this expedition would live off the very fattest of the land. The personnel included, in addition to Custer’s highly trained troops, a hundred Indian scouts, a platoon of expert white guides and trappers, and, mounted upon docile mares, a special contingent of botanists, geologists, geographers, and assorted expert college professors. Also, as has been reported, there were two miners.