The Battle of Little Bighorn

In 1868, at Fort Laramie, U.S. commissioners signed a treaty promising the Lakota Sioux the Black Hills in perpetuity, along with hunting rights on unceded land north of the North Platte River. Six years later, in July 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led roughly 1,000 soldiers into those same hills and confirmed what prospectors had whispered about for years: gold. By 1875 an estimated 800 to 1,500 miners had poured into the Black Hills, which the Lakota called Paha Sapa, sacred ground under a signature the government itself had made. Chief Red Cloud watched the treaty unravel from the reservation. In May 1875 he traveled to Washington with Spotted Tail and Lone Horn to protest, carrying the treaty's own words back to the men who had written them. The answer came that September, when the Allison Commission offered $6 million to buy the Black Hills outright, or $400,000 a year to lease the mining rights. Lakota delegates refused both. The land was not for sale, and no rent was worth what it meant. The Army had promised to keep miners out. It had not tried very hard. Red Cloud returned home with nothing but a treaty already being ignored, and a hillside full of white men digging where his people were told no one ever would.