Boys' Book of Indian Warriors and Heroic Indian Women

by Edwin L. Sabin

AN UNCONQUERED LEADER

The treaty that Chief Red Cloud at last signed in the fall of 1868 was half white and half red. The white part made the Sioux agree to a reservation which covered all of present South Dakota west of the Missouri River. Here they were to live and be fed. The red part, put in by Red Cloud, said that the whole country west of the reservation to the Big Horn Mountains of northern Wyoming, and north of the North Platte River, should be Indian country. Here the Sioux and their Indian friends were to hunt as they pleased.

This closed the road, and gave the Powder River region to the Sioux. They might chase the buffalo, from central Wyoming up across Montana clear to Canada, and no white man could interfere. It was their own game reserve—and the best game reserve in the United States.

The Sioux numbered thirty thousand. Many of them preferred living in their hunting grounds instead of upon the reservation. That was their natural life—to hunt and to war. Besides, they found out that the United States was not doing as had been promised. There were to be cows, seeds, farm tools, teachers, and so forth, for the reservation Indians—and scarcely a third of these things was supplied.

The Indians upon the reservation did not live nearly so comfortably as those who did as they pleased, in the hunting grounds.

So the treaty did not work out well. The hunting-ground Indians were perfectly free. They had guests from other tribes; and in the passing back and forth, white men were attacked. The Crows of western Montana complained that the Sioux invaded them, and that they might as well go to war, themselves, as try to stay at home.

The Government had intended that the Sioux should settle upon the big reservation, and from there take their hunting trips. Speedily, or in 1869, General Sherman, head of the army, declared that the Indians found outside of the reservation might be treated as hostiles, and brought back.

Nevertheless, by the terms of the Red Cloud treaty, the Sioux had a right to be in this country, which was all theirs, if they behaved themselves.

Among the leaders of the hunting-ground Sioux, Sitting Bull ranked with the foremost. He was a Hunkpapa Sioux, of the Teton division—in which Spotted Tail was leader of the Brulés and Red Cloud of the Oglalas.

But Sitting Bull was no chief. By his own count he laid claim to being a great warrior; by the Sioux count he had powerful medicine—he could tell of events to come. And this was his strong hold upon the Sioux. They feared him.