Many of the citizens of that first town took their eviction with fair grace, turning to other means of employment than gold mining—and there were plenty—in Cheyenne, Denver, and the other near-by and rapidly growing settlements. One group, though, the Gordon Party, apparently enjoyed leadership of a tougher sort. They refused to be intimidated by the troops. Setting up camp on the very boundary line between the forbidden country and the permitted Platte Valley, they just waited. Actually, an increasingly large number of immigrants waited on the border only until nightfall, and then set out into the unknown. Some were apprehended by the cavalry and returned, some were killed by the sullen tribesmen, but hundreds of them managed to find their way to the vicinity of French Creek. More than that, they managed to stay.
It might be thought that gold mining, with all its necessary paraphernalia, supplies, and general confusion, could not very well be carried on in an atmosphere suggesting the more modern practice of moonshining; but the truth of the matter was that there were just too many settlers and too few soldiers. Time and again the troops would swoop down on some busy little gathering and hustle the miners out to the nearest courts, where they would hastily be acquitted and released to go back to their workings. Under the very fist of forbiddance a score of towns had sprung up, among them the reborn Custer City.
Finally the government gave up all hope of keeping the eager immigrants out of this last frontier. By the fall of 1875 the border towns of Sidney, Nebraska, Yankton, South Dakota, and Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming, were bursting at the seams with gold-hunters who demanded “their rights as citizens.” Bowing to the inevitable, the government sent a treaty commission to wait upon the Sioux. This body of earnest men offered the Indians six million dollars for the right of entry into the Hills. Although the treaty Sioux agreed to sell, the price they asked wavered between twenty and one hundred million. Crazy Horse, who did not attend the council, refused to sell at any price and solemnly warned the white man to stay out.
Frustrated, the treaty commissioners returned to Washington in despair, while the embittered Sioux disappeared into the west river country to nurse their grievances. Upon this turn of affairs, the government washed its hands of the matter and opened the lands to settlement.
That was in June of 1875. Within a matter of weeks after the bars had been let down, the Hills were populated by uncounted thousands of men, women, and children. Many simply came out of the woods to claim honestly the diggings they had been working dishonestly; but many, many more came from the East by every train, now that the country was legitimately open.
It was a motley assembly that took part in this Black Hills rush. In earlier bonanzas the type had been pretty well formalized, for the difficulty of the overland journey to California, for example, or across to the Pikes Peak region, had kept all but the roughest—and toughest—at home. But on this occasion the West was by no means as wild as it had been in those earlier days. Distances had been conquered; transportation methods, even beyond the railroads, were much safer and more adequate; and the Black Hills, although cold in the middle of winter, offered none of the climatic ferocities of the Rocky Mountains. Thus, to partake of this feast of yellow dust hopeful clerks brushed shoulders with desperadoes, professional men of every accomplishment traded rumors with crease-faced sourdoughs from the dead land south of the Mogollon, and oldsters who had thought they might never again hold a pan in their hands dug alongside mere boys from whom the apron strings had been relaxed.
In the meantime, even as the good citizens of Custer, Gayville, Central City, Golden Gate, Anchor City, and a host of other thriving towns, most of which have long been given over to the ghosts, were bustling about their exciting business, matters in the west were taking a slow but inexorable turn for the worse.
The army had let the situation ride for the summer and fall, keeping a careful watch over the enemy Sioux, but feeling fairly assured that they would attempt no large-scale raid of the Hills, populated now by at least fifty thousand people. Summer and fall were not normally times to worry over, in any case, for the buffalo were still on the range and forage was plentiful for the tribes. It was in the depths of winter that the tale would be told—either the Indians would come docilely to the reservations for their rations, or they would steer clear of the white man’s soldiers and supply their own necessities by raiding the isolated ranch and stage line outposts.
By mid-December the reservations were still empty, and General Terry sent out a call to Sitting Bull, ordering him to bring his people in to the military posts. January 1, 1876, was given as the deadline. The haughty Sioux chief paid scant attention to Terry’s order, replying simply that the general knew where to find him if he wanted to come for him. Sitting Bull knew that the army would attempt no large maneuvers with the weather as it was—one of the bitterest winters in recorded history.
Then he simply waited.