The conferences held by Howard with the leaders, in May, made it clear to them that their alternatives were to emigrate to Lapwai or to fight. At first Howard thought they would yield. Looking Glass and White Bird picked out a site on the Clearwater to which the tribe agreed to remove at once; but just before the day fixed for the removal, the murder of one of the Indians near Mt. Idaho led to revenge directed against the whites and the massacre of several. War immediately followed, for the next two months covering the borderland of Idaho and Montana with confusion. A whole volume by General Howard has been devoted to its details. Chief Joseph himself discussed it in the North American Review in 1879. Dunn has treated it critically in his Massacres of the Mountains, and the Montana Historical Society has published many articles concerning it. Considerably less is known of the more important wars which preceded it than of this struggle of the Nez Percés. In August the fighting turned to flight, Chief Joseph abandoning the Salmon River country and crossing into the Yellowstone Valley. In seventy-five days Howard chased him 1321 miles, across the Yellowstone Park toward the Big Horn country and the Sioux reserve. Along the swift flight there were running battles from time to time, while the fugitives replenished their stores and stock from the country through which they passed. Behind them Howard pressed; in their front Colonel Nelson A. Miles was ordered to head them off. Miles caught their trail in the end of September after they had crossed the Missouri River and had headed for the refuge in Canada which Sitting Bull had found. On October 3, 1877, he surprised the Nez Percé camp on Snake Creek, capturing six hundred head of stock and inflicting upon Joseph's band the heaviest blow of the war. Two days later the stubborn chief surrendered to Colonel Miles.
"What shall be done with them?" Commissioner Hayt asked at the end of 1877. For once an Indian band had conducted a war on white principles, obeying the rules of war and refraining from mutilation and torture. Joseph had by his sheer military skill won the admiration and respect of his military opponents. But the murders which had inaugurated the war prevented a return of the tribe to Idaho. To exile they were sent, and Joseph's uprising ended as all such resistances must. The forcible invasion of the territory by the whites was maintained; the tribe was sent in punishment to malarial lands in Indian Territory, where they rapidly dwindled in number. There has been no adequate defence of the policy of the United States from first to last.
The Modoc of northern California, and the Apache of Arizona and New Mexico fought against the inevitable, as did the Sioux and the Nez Percés. The former broke out in resistance in the winter of 1872–1873, after they had long been proscribed by California opinion. In March of 1873 they made their fate sure by the treacherous murder of General E. R. S. Canby and other peace commissioners sent to confer with them. In the war which resulted the Modoc, under Modoc Jack and Scar-Faced Charley, were pursued from cave to ravine among the lava beds of the Modoc country until regular soldiers finally corralled them all. Jack was hanged for murder at Fort Klamath in October, but Charley lived to settle down and reform with a portion of the tribe in Indian Territory.
The Apache had always been a thorn in the flesh of the trifling population of Arizona and New Mexico, and a nuisance to both army and Indian Office. The Navaho, their neighbors, after a hard decade with Carleton and the Bosque Redondo, had quieted down during the seventies and advanced towards economic independence. But the Apache were long in learning the virtues of non-resistance. Bell had found in Arizona a young girl whose adventures as a fifteen-year-old child served to explain the attitude of the whites. She had been carried off by Indians who, when pressed by pursuers, had stripped her naked, knocked her senseless with a tomahawk, pierced her arms with three arrows and a leg with one, and then rolled her down a ravine, there to abandon her. The child had come to, and without food, clothes, or water, had found her way home over thirty miles of mountain paths. Such episodes necessarily inspired the white population with fear and hatred, while the continued residence of the sufferers in the Indians' vicinity illustrates the persistence of the pressure which was sure to overwhelm the tribes in the end. Tucson had retaliated against such excesses of the red men by equal excesses of the whites. Without any immediate provocation, fourscore Arivapa Apache, who had been concentrated under military supervision at Camp Grant, were massacred in cold blood.
General George Crook alone was able to bring order into the Arizona frontier. From 1871 to 1875 he was there in command,—"the beau-ideal Indian fighter," Dunn calls him. For two years he engaged in constant campaigns against the "incorrigibly hostile," but before 1873 was over he had most of his Apache pacified, checked off, and under police supervision. He enrolled them and gave to each a brass identification check, so that it might be easier for his police to watch them. The tribes were passed back to the Indian Office in 1874, and Crook was transferred to another command in 1875. Immediately the Indian Commissioner commenced to concentrate the scattered tribes, but was hindered by hostilities among the Indians themselves quite as bitter as their hatred for the whites. First Victorio, and then Geronimo was the centre of the resistance to the concentration which placed hereditary enemies side by side. They protested against the sites assigned them, and successfully defied the Commissioner to carry out his orders. Crook was brought back to the department in 1882, and after another long war gradually established peace.
Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada in 1876, returned to Dakota in the early eighties in time to witness the rapid settlement of the northern plains and the growth of the territories towards statehood. After his revolt the Black Hills had been taken away from the tribe, as had been the vague hunting rights over northern Wyoming. Now as statehood advanced in the later eighties, and as population piled up around the edges of the reserve, the time was ripe for the medicine-men to preach the coming of a Messiah, and for Sitting Bull to increase his personal following. Bad crops which in these years produced populism in Kansas and Nebraska, had even greater menace for the half-civilized Indians. Agents and army officers became aware of the undercurrent of danger some months before trouble broke out.
The state of South Dakota was admitted in November, 1889. Just a year later the Bureau turned the Sioux country over to the army, and General Nelson A. Miles proceeded to restore peace, especially in the vicinity of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies. The arrest of Sitting Bull, who claimed miraculous powers for himself, and whose "ghost shirts" were supposed to give invulnerability to his followers, was attempted in December. The troops sent out were resisted, however, and in the mêlée the prophet was killed. The war which followed was much noticed, but of little consequence. General Miles had plenty of troops and Hotchkiss guns. Heliograph stations conveyed news easily and safely. But when orders were issued two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull to disarm the camp at Wounded Knee, the savages resisted. The troops within reach, far outnumbered, blazed away with their rapid-fire guns, regardless of age or sex, with such effect that more than two hundred Indian bodies, mostly women and children, were found dead upon the field.
With the death of Sitting Bull, turbulence among the Indians, important enough to be called resistance, came to an end. There had been many other isolated cases of outbreak since the adoption of the peace policy in 1869. There were petty riots and individual murders long after 1890. But there were, and could be, no more Indian wars. Many of the tribes had been educated to half-civilization, while lands in severalty had changed the point of view of many tribesmen. The relative strength of the two races was overwhelmingly in favor of the whites.