Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee and the End of the Frontier

From Treaties to Small Reservations

By the late 1860s the United States had abandoned the older policy of a Permanent Indian Frontier and shifted to a system of small reservations. The 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty placed the southern Plains nations — Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne and Arapaho — on reservations in present-day Oklahoma. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty placed the northern Plains Lakota on the Great Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory, with the sacred Black Hills inside it. The treaties promised annuity goods (tools, food, blankets) and set the Black Hills aside for the Lakota’s ‘absolute and undisturbed use and occupation’.

Around the new reservations, federal policy attacked the buffalo herds on which Plains life depended. Railroad sport-hunters, hide hunters supplying Eastern leather factories, and the deliberate encouragement of military commanders like General Sheridan combined to reduce the buffalo from an estimated 30 million in 1860 to fewer than a thousand by 1885. Buffalo destruction was a Plains nations’ subsistence collapse and a federal weapon in the same act.

Black Hills Gold and the Great Sioux War

In 1874 a US Army expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel George Custer confirmed gold in the Black Hills. Within a year miners poured in, breaking the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. When the federal government failed to remove them and offered to buy the Black Hills, the Lakota leaders — Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse foremost among them — refused. The army responded by ordering all Lakota onto the reservation by January 1876 or be treated as hostile. Most refused. The result was the Great Sioux War of 1876-77.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 1876

On 25 June 1876, Lieutenant Colonel Custer’s Seventh Cavalry attacked a vast Lakota and Cheyenne encampment along the Little Bighorn River in Montana. Custer underestimated the camp’s size and split his command. Crazy Horse led the counter-charge; 268 men of the Seventh Cavalry were killed, Custer among them. The Battle of the Little Bighorn was the most spectacular Native victory of the Plains wars. It was also their last. The shock to American opinion drove Congress to pour troops into the region; within a year Crazy Horse had surrendered and was killed in custody, and Sitting Bull had taken his people into Canada (returning in 1881).

The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee

In 1889 a Paiute prophet, Wovoka, had a vision: if Indigenous peoples lived peacefully and performed a ritual Ghost Dance, the dead would return, the buffalo would come back and white settlers would vanish. The movement spread quickly to the Lakota in 1890. Reservation agents, alarmed, called for troops. Sitting Bull was killed by reservation police on 15 December 1890. Two weeks later, on 29 December 1890, the Seventh Cavalry intercepted a band of Miniconjou Lakota under Spotted Elk at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. As soldiers tried to disarm the band, a shot was fired; the cavalry opened up with rifles and Hotchkiss cannon. At least 250 Lakota men, women and children were killed. Twenty-five US soldiers died, many from their own crossfire.

The Frontier ‘Closes’

The 1890 US Census report contained a single sentence with vast cultural reach: it declared that there was no longer a continuous frontier line of unsettled territory. Three years later, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner read his Frontier Thesis at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Turner argued that the experience of conquering the frontier had created American democracy itself; with the frontier closed, a defining era of American history was over. Turner’s thesis dominated Western history for most of the 20th century.