After years of broken promises, conflicts and massacres, came the Treaty of Fort Laramie, said to be the most important document in the history of Indian-white relations on the Great Plains (Marrin 94). The treaty basically set aside a Great Sioux Reservation on all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River up to and including the Black Hills, and barred all whites except government officials from the reservation and from a vast "unceded" territory lying between the Black Hills and Bighorn Mountains (Marrin 94). Under the treaty, these lands belonged to the Lakota "forever" unless three-quarters of the tribes' men agreed to part with them, and those who settled there would receive food and clothing while learning to support themselves by farming (Marrin 95). Moreover, those who did not wish to settle down could hunt in the unceded territory while the buffalo lasted, and the government agreed to close and abandon the forts (Marrin 95). What the white interpreters did not explain was that the treaty did not close the gold mines, thus prospectors would keep coming, and whites planned to exterminate the herds of bison (Marrin 95). By 1869, most Lakota bands, some 17,000 people, had moved onto the Great Sioux Reservation, and in 1870, Red Cloud visited Washington, D.C., and returned a changed man (Marrin 95). After seeing the throngs of people in this one city, he realized that nothing could stop the whites from advancing into Indian lands (Merrin 96). Once a strong and mighty people, the Native tribes were now melting like snow on a hillside, white the whites were growing like spring grass (Merrin 96).
Sitting Bull did not sign the treaty, and Crazy Horse did not follow Red Cloud onto the reservation (Merrin 96). When the crews began working to link the Central Pacific Railroad from the West and the Union Pacific Railroad from the East, more conflicts between the tribes and the whites ensued (Merrin 102). The Fort Laramie Treaty had promised to end all war between the Indians and whites, however over the next twenty years, the contents of some sixteen articles of that treaty were ratified by Congress to such an extent from the original that it was like two horses whose colors did not match (Brown 146). The Treaty of 1868 had promised that not only would whites be forbidden to settle or occupy any portion of the territory, they could not even pass through the lands with the consent of the Indians (Brown 273). Red Cloud had signed under the condition that Fort Laramie be the Teton Sioux trading post, however the fort was placed on the Missouri side, thus Red Cloud and his people were forbidden to enter (Brown 177).
By 1890, the white population of the United States had reached 62,622,250 and Idaho and Wyoming had become the forty-third and forty-fourth states of the Union (Brown 415). Sitting Bull spent some four years in exile in Canada, and unable to convince the Canadians to give his people a reservation, and following a brutal winter, he and his followers made their was south, arriving into Fort Buford in 1881 (Brown 420). By 1889, the United State government had managed to break up the Great Sioux Reservation and obtain even more land by rather devious maneuvers (Brown 428).
About a year after the breaking up of the Great Sioux Reservation, in October 1890, Kicking Bear, a Minneconjou from the Cheyenne River agency, came to visit Sitting Bull, bringing with him new of the Paiute Messiah, Wovoka, who had founded the religious of the Ghost Dance (Brown 431). Kicking Bear told how a voice had told him to go forth and meet the ghosts of Indians who were to return and inhabit the earth, and so he traveled to the camp of the Paiutes (Brown 432). Kicking Bear told how there he had met the Messiah, the Christ, who had appeared as an Indian and showed them how to dance the Dance of the Ghosts, and promised to return again and return the earth as it was before the white man came (Brown 432). The Indians who dance the Ghost Dance would be taken up in the air and suspended there while a wave of new earth was passing, and then they would be set down among the ghosts of their ancestors on the new earth, where only Indians would live (Brown 434). Sitting Bull had no objections to his people dancing the...
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