The Plains Indian Wars

The Plains Indian Wars. The Plains Indian Wars (1854-1890) were the long struggle of the Native peoples of the Great Plains against the expansion of the United States. The horse and the buffalo had made the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa some of the finest light cavalry in the world, and for two centuries they ruled the plains. But after the Civil War, American settlers, miners, and railroads poured west, treaties were made and broken, and the buffalo herds were systematically destroyed, dooming the way of life they supported.

The wars flared for a generation. On the northern plains, Red Cloud's warriors forced the United States in 1868 to abandon the Bozeman Trail, the only war in which the government accepted an Indian nation's terms. In 1876, when the army moved against the Lakota and Cheyenne over the Black Hills, the allied warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse annihilated George Custer's command at the Little Bighorn. But the victory could not be sustained: the army pursued the bands without rest, Crazy Horse was killed in 1877, and Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881. In the south, the Comanche and their allies fought until the Red River War of 1874-75 drove them onto the reservations.

The end came at Wounded Knee. In 1890, as the Lakota turned in despair to the Ghost Dance religion, the army moved to disarm them, and at Wounded Knee Creek soldiers killed some two hundred and fifty Lakota, many of them women and children. It was the last armed confrontation of the Plains wars.

The wars decided the fate of a continent. The Plains nations were confined to reservations on poor land, their children sent to boarding schools meant to erase their cultures, their treaty lands whittled away. Yet the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Comanche nations survive, and the memory of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse remains a touchstone of resistance and identity for Native America.

To read more about this topic:

Encyclopedia of the Great Plains: Sioux Wars Smithsonian American History Museum: Western Indian Wars Wikipedia: Plains Indian Warfare Wiley Encyclopedia: Sioux Wars, 1854-1891