Lakota (Sioux)

01Summary

Horse-riding bison hunters who by the trail years held the plains north of the Platte, from the Missouri River to the Black Hills and beyond. Emigrants met Lakota families near Fort Laramie. The 1851 treaty promised yearly payments for safe passage, but conflict over land and game grew into decades of war.

02History

The Lakota, or Teton Sioux, are one of three divisions of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires, together with the Eastern and Western Dakota. From homelands near the western Great Lakes they moved onto the northern plains in the 1600s and 1700s, took up horses around 1730 and reached the Black Hills by the 1770s. The Lakota are made up of seven bands: Oglála, Sičháŋǧu (Brulé), Húŋkpapȟa, Mnikȟówožu, Itázipčho, Sihásapa and Oóhenuŋpa.

Through the 1840s most meetings with emigrants were peaceful, and Lakota families traded at Fort Laramie. But the wagon trains used up grass, wood and game along the Platte, and cholera reached the plains nations in 1849. By 1851 the bison were so scarce near the road that a treaty commissioner riding west saw only one between Fort Kearny and Fort Laramie.

That September about 10,000 people from many nations gathered near the mouth of Horse Creek, and the Treaty of Fort Laramie promised $50,000 a year in goods in return for safe passage and the right to build roads and forts. The Senate then cut the payments from 50 years to 10.

In August 1854 near Fort Laramie, Lieutenant John Grattan marched about 30 soldiers into a Brulé camp over a cow taken from a Mormon emigrant. Shooting broke out, and Grattan, his men and the Brulé leader Conquering Bear were killed.

The next year, in revenge, Colonel William Harney's troops attacked Little Thunder's Brulé village at Blue Water Creek while Harney kept the chief talking. Red Cloud's War of 1866 to 1868 forced the Army to abandon its forts on the Bozeman Trail, and the second Treaty of Fort Laramie, in 1868, guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota.

After gold was found in the Black Hills in 1874, the United States took them in 1877, breaking the treaty. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the United States had to pay for the land, with interest, but the Lakota nations have refused the money, which now exceeds a billion dollars, because accepting it would mean giving up their claim to the land.

03Notable leaders

• Red Cloud (Maȟpíya Lúta)
  Oglála leader, c. 1822-1909, whose war of 1866 to 1868 forced the U.S. to abandon the Bozeman Trail forts, and who signed the 1868 treaty.
• Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake)
  Húŋkpapȟa holy man and leader, c. 1831-1890, a central figure of Lakota resistance in the 1870s, killed at Standing Rock in 1890.
• Crazy Horse (Tȟašúŋke Witkó)
  Oglála war leader, c. 1840-1877, who fought at the Little Bighorn in 1876 and was killed at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in 1877.

04Today