These words, when repeated to my chief, disturbed him deeply. “We must watch these men. They are spies of those who wish to steal the Black Hills as the plowmen have already taken the land east of the Missouri. We can not afford to move again. It is necessary to make a stand.”
Then General Custer—“Long Hair”—was sent on an expedition into the hills and the whole tribe became very anxious; even those who had accepted the agent’s goods and lived slothfully at the Standing Rock began to take alarm. They plainly felt at last the white man pushing, pushing from the east.
Those who went away to see came back reporting that the settlers were thick beyond numbering on the prairies and that all the forests were being destroyed by them. They were plowing above the graves of our sires, whose bones were being flung to the wolves. Steamboats hooted along the rivers and iron horses ran athwart the most immemorial trails. Immigrants were already lining the great muddy river with forts and villages, and some were looking greedily at the Black Hills, in which the soldiers had reported gold.
My people considered Custer’s expedition an unlawful incursion on their lands, just as, far to the south, so our friends the Ogallallahs reported, other white men without treaty were moving westward, building railways and driving the buffalo before them. It was most alarming.
The Sitting Bull listened to these tales uneasily, hoping his messengers were misled. He feared and hated the more fiercely all messengers who came thereafter, bringing gifts, and the commission which entered his camp in 1875 found him very dark of face and very curt of speech. Never was he less free of tongue.
They said, “We come to buy the hills.”
He replied, “I do not care to sell.”
“We will pay well for the loan of the peaks—the high places where the gold is.”
“I cannot lend; the hills belong to my people,” he said.
“We are your friends. You had better sell, for if you don’t the white men will take the hills without pay. They are coming in a flood. Nothing can stop them; their eyes are fixed. You are fighting a losing battle.”