The Last Stand

When the cowboys and homesteaders arrived on the Great Plains, Amerindian peoples like the Sioux had been roaming across them for hundreds of years. The Sioux lived by hunting the buffalo. In the early part of the nineteenth century an estimated twelve million of these gentle, heavy animals wandered the Great Plains. They moved about in herds. Sometimes these herds were so big that they stretched as far as the eye could see. The buffalo provided the Sioux with everything that they needed-food, clothing, tools, homes.  In the 1840s wagon trains heading for Oregon and California began to cross the Great Plains. The Amerindians usually let them pass without trouble. Then railroads began to push across the grasslands. The railroads carried white people who stayed on the prairies and began to plough them. At first the Amerindians tried to drive the newcomers away from their hunting grounds.  But soon they saw that this was impossible. So they made treaties with the government in Washington, giving up large pieces of their land for white farmers to settle upon. In 1851 the Pawnee people signed away an area that today forms most of the state of Nebraska. In 1858 the Sioux gave up an area almost as big in South Dakota. In the 1860s the Comanche and the Kiowa gave up lands in Kansas, Colorado and Texas. In return for such agreements the government promised to leave the Amerindians in peace on the lands that remained theirs. The Fort Laramie treaty of 1868 was typical of these agreements. So was what happened to it. In this treaty the government declared that large areas between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains belonged to the Sioux. It gave a solemn promise that the lands would remain Sioux properly "as long as [he grass should grow and the water flow."

Fine and moving words. Six years later, however. American soldiers found gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Black Hills were sacred to the Sioux and when the government tried to buy them, the Sioux refused to sell. "One docs not sell the Earth upon which the people walk," said a chief named Crazy Horse. But the Ameri can government ignored the Sioux's refusal. It broke the Fort Laramie treaty and allowed prospectors and miners to enter the Black Hills. In the winter of 1875 thousands of white men poured into the area. By this time the Amerindian peoples of the Great Plains were faring another serious problem. The buffalo was beginning to disappear. More and more of the land that the big animals needed to graze upon was being taken by ranchers and farmers. Worse still, white hunters were shooting down the buffalo in thousands. They killed them for their hides or for sport and left their flesh to rot. In  just two years between 1872 and 1874 the hunters almost completely destroyed the  great herds. A visitor to the Plains in 1873 described what he saw there. "Where there were myriads [vast numbers] of buffalo the year before. Then' were now myriads of corpses.

The Amerindians could not understand this behavior, "Has the white man become a child that he should recklessly kill and not car?" asked a Kiowa chief. But the American army encouraged the slaughter. General Sheridan, the officer who commanded the army in the West, saw the extermination of the buffalo as a way to end Amerindian resistance to the occupation of their land. "These men [the buffalo hunters] have done more in the last two years to settle the Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years, " he wrote. " Send them powder and lead and for the sake of lasting peace let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated." As more settlers claimed homesteads in the West the American government needed more land for them. To obtain this it decided to force the Amerindians to give up their wandering way of life. The Amerindians fought back. One of their best known leaders was Sitting Bull of the Sioux. "We lived in om country in the way our fathers and our fathers' fathers lived before us and we sought trouble with no men," he said later. " But the soldiers came into our country and fired upon us and we fought back. Is it so bad to fight in defense of one's country and loved ones?" The Amerindians were outnumbered and outgunned. Bur they inflicted some surprising defeats on the American soldiers. They won their best known victory at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876, all a hill beside the Little Big Horn River 3,000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Crazy Horse surrounded and killed all 225 men of a company of United States cavalry. The Battle of the Little Big Horn was also the last stand for the Amerindians. The American government and people were angry at the defeat of their soldiers. They felt that they had been humiliated. More soldiers were sent west to hunt down Custer 's killers. The Sioux were too weak to fight back. With the buffalo gone, more of their people were dying every day of starvation and disease. The Sioux surrendered and the soldiers marched them away to the reservations.  Other Amerindians were no more fortunate than the Sioux. By 1890 most of the American West, from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, was occupied by cattle ranchers, farmers, or millers. The Amerindians had nothing left except the reservations. The United Scares government said that it would help and protect the reservation Amerindians. In 1890 a religious prophet told the Sioux to dance a special dance called the Ghost Dance. He told them that if they did so great miracle would take place. Their dead warriors would conic bark to life, the buffalo would return and all white men would be swept away by the great flood.

The Ghost Dancers ' Song

Father, have 'pity on us

We are crying for thirst

All is gone!

We have nothing to eat

Father, we are poor.

We are very poor.

The buffalo are gone.

They are all gone.

Take pity on us, Father,

We are dancing as you wished

Because you commanded us.

We dance hard, we dance long

Have pity,

Father, help us

You are close by in the dark

Hear us and help us.

Take away the white men

Send hack the buffalo

We are poor and weak

We call do nothing alone

Help us to be what we: once were.

Happy hunters of buffalo.

The Ghost Dance movement was peaceful. But the Dancers' beliefs worried the government. So did the fact that some of them waved rifles above their heads as they danced. It ordered the army to arrest the movement's leaders. On cold December day in 1890 a group of 350 Sioux, 120 men 230 women and children, left their reservation. Led by a chief named Big Foot, they set off to join another group nearby for safety. But a party of soldiers stopped them on the way and marched them to an army post at Wounded Knee Creek. The soldiers began shooting down the Sioux women and children as well as the men. Within minutes most of the Sioux were dead or badly wounded. Many of the wounded who crawled away died later in a blizzard that swept over the camp. But the Sioux, like other Amerindians, survived. In 1924 Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act. This recognized Amerindians as full citizens of the United States gave them the right to vote. In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act encouraged them to set lip their own councils to run the affairs of their reservations.

Bibliography:

1.    The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

2.    A History of American Literature, A. Grey

3.    An Outline of American History.

4.    An Illustrated History of the USA.