Gold Rush

The Black Hills Story

Compiled and with an Introduction

by John D. McDermott

South Dakota State Historical Society Press

Pierre, South Dakota

© 2001 by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press.

All rights reserved. This book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever may not be reproduced without the expressed written approval of the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, Pierre, S.Dak. 57501.

This publication is funded in part by the Deadwood Publications Fund provided by the City of Deadwood and the Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gold rush: the Black Hills story / compiled and with an introduction by

John D. McDermott.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: The military problem and the Black Hills, 1874-1875 / John D. McDermott – Wake up Yankton / Harry H. Anderson – I know... because I was there /James D. McLaird - It started with a (mining) boom / Bob Lee – In Illingworth’s footsteps / Ernest Grafe and Paul Horsted.

ISBN 978-0-9845041-0-7 (eBook)

1. Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.)—Gold discoveries. 2. Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.)—History—19th century. 3. Frontier and pioneer life—Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.) 4. Mining camps—Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.)—History—19th Century. 5. Pioneers—Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.)—Biography. 6. Businessmen—Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.)—Biography. 7. Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.)—Biography. 8. Dakota Indians—Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.)—Government relations—History—19th century. 9. United States—Territorial expansion. 10. Land settlement—Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.)—History—19th century. I. McDermott, John D. (John Dishon)

Printed in the United States of America

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09     9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction

The Military Problem and the Black Hills, 1874-1875

by John D. McDermott

Wake Up Yankton!: Community Efforts to Promote Travel to the Black Hills Gold Fields

by Harry H. Anderson

“I Know... because I Was There”: Leander P. Richardson Reports the Black Hills Gold Rush

by James D. McLaird

It Started with a (Mining) Boom

by Bob Lee

In Illingworth’s Footsteps: Rediscovering the First Photographs of the Black Hills

by Ernest Grafe and Paul Horsted

Selected Bibliography

Index

Contributors

John D. McDermott is a historian, interpretive planner, and heritage tourism consultant from Rapid City. The author of numerous books and articles, he has also served as a historian and administrator for the National Park Service and the President’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

Harry H. Anderson, a retired historian from Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, was on the staff of the South Dakota State Historical Society from 1960 to 1962. In addition to articles in this journal and the South Dakota Historical Collections series, he has published books on Milwaukee and frontier history.

James D. McLaird received his B.A. from Dakota Wesleyan University, where he is now a professor of history, and his M.A. from the University of Wyoming. He has contributed numerous articles to regional history journals and is completing a book-length biography of Calamity Jane.

Bob Lee is a retired Black Hills newspaper editor, historian, and author. A past president of the South Dakota State Historical Society and the Society of Black Hills Pioneers, he was named South Dakota Hall of Fame Writer of the Year in 1991.

Ernest Grafe is a freelance editor and writer in Rapid City. He earned a B.A. in history and journalism from Syracuse University and worked for eleven years as a newspaper and television reporter. He has also written eight series westerns for the Berkeley Publishing Group.

Paul Horsted, a photographer from Custer, has credits in more than two hundred publications, including Reader’s Digest, LIFE, and National Geographic. His work is also featured in books on South Dakota, Mount Rushmore, Badlands National Park, and Custer State Park.

Picture Credits

All illustrations in this issue are property of the South Dakota State Historical Society, State Archives Collection, except for those on the following pages: p. 9, from Frederick Whittaker, A Complete Life of Gen. George A. Custer (New York: Sheldon & Co., 1876); p. 16, from Philip H. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. 2 (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1888); p. 24, from Hamlin Garland, Ulysses S. Grant: His Life and Character (New York: Macmillan Co., 1920); pp. 33-35, from George W. Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory, and George Martin Smith, South Dakota: Its History and Its People, Vol. 1 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co.), 1915; pp. 58, 62, from Edwin A. Curley, Guide to the Black Hills (1877; facsimile ed., Mitchell, S.Dak.: Dakota Wesleyan University Press, 1973); pp. 63-64, 76, from Scribner’s Monthly 13 (Apr. 1877); p. 82, from fames D. McLaird, Mitchell, S.Dak.; pp. 109, 117, 119, 123, 127, from Paul Horsted, Custer, S.Dak.; p. 129, from Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn.

Introduction

In early August 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer sent two letters describing his exploration of the Black Hills to Fort Laramie for transmittal by telegraph to his superiors back East. The army immediately released the dispatches to the press, which pounced upon the key phrase “gold among the roots of the grass.” Reporters with Custer also filed stories, and soon headlines in dozens of papers across the country proclaimed a new El Dorado. On 10 August, the New York Tribune announced “New Gold Country.” Six days later, the New York World declared, “Reports of Surface Gold... Fully Confirmed,” adding, “The Garden of America Discovered.” The Bismarck Tribune for 12 August carried a long story predicting that the land would yield “Gold and Silver in Immense Quantities.” Addressing the economic depression then underway, the Chicago Inter-Ocean stated on 1 August that “the Black Hills will be opened and pull us through.” Such were the hopes and expectations of a country in need of a boost as gold-hungry miners headed for the forbidden Black Hills, a range of pine-covered mountains located in the heart of land set aside for the Lakota, or western Sioux Indians. The ensuing struggle for control of the region changed history and continues today as the Lakotas engage the legal system to regain title to the land.

Gold Rush: The Black Hills Story commemorates the 125th anniversary of the “Days of 76,” when the Black Hills were the center of national attention. It was a pivotal time in the history of the state, leading to the Lakotas’ loss of a significant portion of their reservation and preparing the way for permanent non-Indian settlement. The essays presented here place the movement to acquire the Black Hills in a broad economic and political context, offer new eyewitness accounts of life in the mining camps, and address long-term results of the gold rush. The first essay, “The Military Problem and the Black Hills, 1874-1875,” suggests some reasons for government acquiescence to the country’s demands for opening the region to non-Indians and deals specifically with the role military leaders played in fashioning public opinion. In it, I draw attention to Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan’s role in defining the parameters of the Black Hills and how much of those Indian lands should be annexed. I suggest that his plans were more aggrandizing than hitherto understood and point out the inclusion of expansionist provisions in the 1868 treaty, which are often overlooked in analyses of the document.

The second essay by Harry H. Anderson, “Wake Up, Yankton!: Community Efforts to Promote Travel to the Black Hills Gold Fields,” centers on the activities of entrepreneurs to create and promote a route from Chicago through Yankton to the Black Hills. It includes the journal of George Henchel, one of the men who laid out the new road that was the last link in a plan involving railroad, steamboat, and stagecoach transportation. Besides giving insights into the mindset of frontier capitalists, Henchel’s account offers a fresh look at activity in the Black Hills in February 1876. While the grandiose transportation plan never materialized, the episode illustrates the unusual skills often found in frontier communities and the willingness of leaders to tackle ambitious undertakings. Today we call it the “frontier spirit.”

James D. McLaird also gives us a new look at the gold-rush town of Deadwood in “1 Know... because I Was There’: Leander P. Richardson Reports the Black Hills Gold Rush.” His account of the visit of journalist Leander P. Richardson during the summer of 1876 brings to light new data and corrects some errors in the previous record. Richardson’s descriptions of James Butler (“Wild Bill”) Hickok, his personality and lifestyle, are particularly revealing. The writer’s five days in Deadwood began 30 July, and he found accommodations in the camp of C. H. (“Colorado Charley”) Utter, where Hickok also stayed. Richardson was in Deadwood when Jack McCall killed the famous gunfighter on 2 August. Throughout his career, the journalist drew on his Black Hills experiences, authoring a number of newspaper articles and dime novels, including one featuring Wild Bill Hickok and Colorado Charley Utter.

In the fourth essay, “It Started with a (Mining) Boom,” Bob Lee looks at the region after 1876. He examines the businesses and industries the mining boom spawned and describes their development and growth. Many of these enterprises, such as logging and agriculture, continue to make the Black Hills economically important today. Ironically, the 125th anniversary of the Black Hills gold rush also coincides with the closure this year of the Homestake gold mine in Lead, which began operations in 1877 and at one time was the largest producer of gold in the western hemisphere. This event signals the start of a new economic era for the region. Perhaps tourism will fill the gap, having pumped $240 million into the economy in 1999 alone, proving that Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and George Custer are alive and well in the national memory.

Ernest Grafe and Paul Horsted, coauthors of “In Illingworth’s Footsteps: Rediscovering the First Photographs of the Black Hills,” describe their efforts to locate and photograph sites originally recorded by the official photographer with Custer’s 1874 Black Hills Expedition. Using resources preserved for over 125 years and new technology, the men seek to locate and preserve evidence of Custer’s route through the Black Hills.

In conclusion, Gold Rush: The Black Hills Story focuses in large part on the business and promotion of the gold rush, from discovering the resource to appropriating the land, building transportation networks, founding communities, and developing related industries. It is not meant to be comprehensive. The Great Sioux War fought for the Black Hills in 1876-1877, for example, has received extensive treatment elsewhere and is not covered here. Instead, this compilation is designed to provide a glimpse of some of the less well-known people, places, events, and aspects of the “Days of 76” in South Dakota’s Black Hills.

The Military Problem and the Black Hills, 1874-1875

John D. McDermott

In 1874, a war raged on the Northern Great Plains. The United States government did not officially recognize it; yet, it existed nevertheless. A war between cultures had begun in the West in 1806 when Meriwether Lewis and his men killed two Blackfeet Indians following their attack on his party on the Marias River in northern Montana. It continued more visibly in 1854 with the Grattan Fight near Fort Laramie and General William S. Harney’s follow-up campaign against the Lakota, or western Sioux Indians, which culminated in the Battle of the Blue Water near Ash Hollow, Nebraska, in 1855. Like sparks embedded in the duff of a forest, the conflict occasionally burst into flames, as in southern Minnesota or along the Bozeman Trail, but most of the time it burned slowly and insidiously.

Aside from a few big confrontations on battlefields, this war involved years of day-to-day conflict—assaults on isolated individuals, the murder of innocent Indians by vengeance-seeking whites, the slaughter of women and children on both sides, skirmishing between small parties of troops and tribesmen, and the harassment of people on the road, in forts, or on ranches by horse-seeking warriors. For these small conflicts to become a conflagration, some major tinder was needed, something that involved enough people and economic impact to cause the government to act. The impetus was to be found in the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota, a region clouded in mystery, where some believed the next El Dorado lay. Although military leaders followed the letter of the law in ejecting trespassing prospectors from the Black Hills, which had been reserved for the Lakotas, they used the situation to win the support of the mining, transportation, and development interests that would benefit from the opening of the region to non-Indians. Through their public pronouncements, they fanned the flames of gold fever in order to bolster the position of the army in an era that viewed a powerful military as a threat to democracy.

From the perspective of 127 years later, it seems strange that the presence of gold in the Black Hills was a matter of debate for so long. As early as 1804, fur trader Régis Loisel informed Spanish authorities in New Orleans that gold could be found in the Black Hills, and both Indian and non-Indian sources contain similar accounts for nearly every decade thereafter. In 1862 and 1866, the legislature of Dakota Territory sent memorials to Congress, claiming to have conclusive proof of great mineral wealth in the region and requesting a geological survey. Moses K. Armstrong, in his 1866 History and Resources of Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, noted that the same formations of stratified rocks found in the gold-bearing gulches of the Wind River and Big Horn Mountains occurred in the Black Hills, a clear indication, he asserted, that precious metals abounded. The claims received further promotion in 1869, when Ferdinand V. Hayden, the geologist with Lieutenant Gouverneur Kemble Warren’s 1857 exploration of the region around the Black Hills, described his discoveries of gold in streams leading from the Hills in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. In 1870, George A. Batchelder published A Sketch of the History and Resources of Dakota Territory, in which he cited the official reports of Lieutenant Warren, Captain John Mullen, and others to build a case for the existence of gold in the Black Hills.[1]

Obviously, a thorough exploration of the Black Hills was in order, either to confirm the claims or put rumors to rest. The problem was, of course, that the Black Hills were part of the Great Sioux Reservation, which covered the western half of present-day South Dakota and had been guaranteed to the Sioux Indians under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Except for government officials, non-Indians had no business on the reservation, and to permit mining was unthinkable. Intended to end conflicts along the Bozeman Trail to the Montana gold fields, the 1868 treaty pledged the United States to prohibit all persons, except authorized officers, agents, and government employees, from entering the lands set aside for the Sioux.[2] However, the document also contained a clause stipulating that the Indians “will not in the future object to the construction of railroads, wagonroads, mail-stations, or other works of utility or necessity, which may be ordered or permitted by the laws of the United States.” In the event that such roads became a reality, the government would “pay the tribe whatever amount of damage may be assessed by three disinterested commissioners to be appointed by the President.” This condition gave non-Indians the eventual right to cross the reservation, whetting the appetites of entrepreneurs and business interests, especially the railroads. The treaty also set aside the region between the Black Hills and the Big Horn Mountains as “unceded Indian territory,” where reservation Indians were free to hunt but not to settle.[3] Here again, the treaty-makers had left the door open for white expansion.

Fort Laramie Treaty commissioners (from left) Alfred Terry, William S. Harney, William T. Sherman, unidentified woman, John B. Sanborn, S. F. Tappan, and C. C. Augur

While the 1868 treaty not only provided a structure for future development, it also proved less than effective in pacifying the Lakota. The attempt to settle the Indians on a reservation and transform them into farmers proved a failure, and many young men continued to leave the reservation boundaries to experience the nomadic life of the Plains Indian warrior. The year 1874 was no exception. In early January, Lakota raiders rampaged through the country around Cheyenne, Wyoming, killing stock, stealing horses, and frightening settlers. The depredations climaxed on 8 February with the shooting death of clerk Frank D. Appelton by a Miniconjou warrior who scaled the stockade at Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska. Alarmed agents at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail called for protection. In response, troops from Fort Laramie arrived in early March with orders to make temporary camps near both agencies. The first, near Red Cloud, was Camp Robinson. This five-company outpost became the main bulwark in the army’s attempt to control the reservation Sioux over the next few years. On 10 March, troops moved forty miles east, establishing Camp Sheridan to watch over Spotted Tail Agency. Both the agency and camp were moved to a better site on Beaver Creek, about twelve miles to the southeast, on 9 September. There soldiers constructed temporary log quarters, barracks, and stables for three companies.[4]

In order to deal more effectively with the situation, Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan, commander of the Division of the Missouri, had come to the conclusion that a military post in the Black Hills would soon be needed to protect Nebraska settlements from raids by Lakota warriors. Contending that the recent depredations began only after raiders had secured a place for their families in the remote Black Hills area, Sheridan believed that an army outpost there would take away the Indians’ safe haven. In the spring of 1874, he ordered his subordinate, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, to explore the region.[5]

Custer’s Black Hills Expedition, based at Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, included ten companies of the Seventh Cavalry, two companies of the Seventeenth and Twentieth infantries, and a detachment of six army engineers commanded by Captain William Ludlow. Two miners, a photographer, a geologist, a topographer, a naturalist, civilian teamsters and herders, four newspaper reporters, and a group of about one hundred Indian and two white scouts rounded out the group. Lieutenant Colonel Frederick D. Grant, the president’s son and aide to General of the Army William T. Sherman, and Lieutenant Colonel George A. Forsyth, aide to General Sheridan, were also in the party. In all, it consisted of one thousand men, 110 wagons, and two thousand animals. The expedition left Fort Abraham Lincoln on 2 July, reached the Black Hills proper on 25 July, and began the return trip on 6 August, arriving in Bismarck on 30 August. Custer had covered 1,025 miles, most of it in uncharted territory where few whites had ever been.[6]

Black Hills Expedition wagon train

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer

Custer’s preliminary report of the expedition appeared in two letters. In the first, the Seventh Cavalry commander widely praised the many resources found in the Black Hills. “I know of no portion of our country,” he wrote, “where nature has done so much to prepare homes for husbandmen, and left so little for the latter to do, as here.” He noted the meadows and timbered lands with pure streams flowing through their length and breadth and compared the soil to that in a rich garden. Wild berries grew in profusion, game was abundant, and there was grass in sufficient quantity to permit cattle to winter unattended. In conclusion, he mentioned that the miners who had accompanied him had found traces of gold. He noted, however, that the question of profitability was yet to be settled and that the scientists with his expedition would make a separate report.[7] In his second letter, dated 15 August, Custer again mentioned the presence of gold in the Black Hills, stating that his prospectors had found traces of gold “among the roots of the grass,” which suggested that paying quantities were present.[8]

Custer telegraphed his letters to his superiors, and the army soon released them to the public, which was stimulus enough to stir the populace and start miners towards the forbidden Hills. Headlines in the New York Tribune on 10 August, for example, proclaimed, “New Gold Country,” and the New York World declared on 16 August, “Reports of Surface Gold... Fully Confirmed.” According to the Chicago Inter-Ocean for 1 August, “There could be hardly a more fortunate event for the country.” The newspaper cited the economic depression then just beginning and predicted that “the Black Hills will be opened and pull us through” by providing thousands with occupations and stimulating trade and enterprise in every direction. On 12 August, the Bismarck Tribune devoted two full columns to the story, stating, in headlines, that the Hills would yield “Gold and Silver in Immense Quantities.”[9]

Controversy developed, however, when the Black Hills Expedition’s geologist, Newton H. Winchell, released his report discounting Custer’s statements. Winchell stated that “the miners that accompanied the expedition report the finding of gold and silver in some of the gulches in the southeastern portion of the Hills, though I saw none of the gold, nor did I see any auriferous quartz.”[10] Neither did the son of the president wax enthusiastic. Lieutenant Colonel Fred Grant noted that not more than three dollars’ worth of gold had been brought under his observation during the entire expedition.[11]

“Struck It Rich!”—Prospecting in the Black Hills,” Harper’s Weekly, 12 August 1876

Nevertheless, the press continued to report Custer’s findings with enthusiasm, and General Sheridan was one of the first officials to push for cession of the region from the Sioux. Interviewed by a reporter from the New York Tribune on 3 September 1874, Sheridan stated that he would use “all his influence to have the [Black Hills] country properly opened to settlement by Congressional legislation,” adding that, at present, the Indian treaty must be respected.[12] In his annual report for 1874, Sheridan recommended establishment of a military post in the Black Hills.[13] Other affirmative voices from the expedition soon appeared in print. In early September, George Forsyth returned to Chicago, where a reporter from the Tribune interviewed him. When asked if the rumors about the Black Hills were true, he replied, “There is no doubt that there is a great deal of gold there.”[14] In a letter to Sheridan, dated 15 August and later published in the Cheyenne Daily Leader, Forsyth reported that the two miners with the expedition had found “color” in every pan of dirt they washed near Harney’s Peak and that the diggings in Custer Gulch would pay ten dollars per day.[15]

The gold rush was on, and seekers of the precious metal came from every direction. The army, however, was obliged under the 1868 treaty to keep trespassers out of the area, and it worked within its organizational structure on the Northern Great Plains to meet that responsibility. Lieutenant General Sheridan exercised overall command as head of the Division of the Missouri from his office in Chicago. Next down the line were Brigadier General Alfred Terry and Brigadier General Edward O. C. Ord, who commanded the Departments of Dakota and the Platte, respectively. Because the Black Hills straddled department lines, both entities were involved. Headquartered in Saint Paul, the Department of Dakota included the present states of Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. The Department of the Platte, headquartered in Omaha, comprised the present states of Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah. In May 1875, Brigadier General George Crook would replace Ord as department commander, bringing with him a reputation as a man of action.[16]

Within the Department of Dakota, two districts were important: the Southern District, which included Fort Randall, and the Middle District, commanded by Custer, with headquarters at Fort Abraham Lincoln. In the Department of the Platte, the key unit was the District of the Black Hills. Created in 1872, it was headquartered at Fort Laramie and commanded Fort Fetterman, Camp Robinson, and Camp Sheridan. The army hierarchy acted quickly after Custer’s report hit the papers. General Terry received instructions on 27 August to stop parties then organizing in Yankton, Sioux City, and Bismarck, and on 3 September General Sherman ordered him to use force to capture treaty violators, destroy their property, and confine them at the nearest military post.[17]

The first miners to enter the Black Hills illegally in the fall of 1874 were the Gordon party from Sioux City, named for member John Gordon. Consisting of twenty-six men and one woman (Annie Tallent) and her young son, the group reached the site that had been Custer’s main campsite on 23 December. They constructed a stockade about eighty feet square, with walls about ten feet high and bastions at each corner. Learning of the entry, the army sent out no fewer than six expeditions to find and bring the Gordon party in. Troops disembarked from Camp Robinson, Fort Sully, Fort Randall, and Fort Laramie. One contingent, under Captain Guy V Henry, suffered greatly from the below-zero temperatures in mid-January, when forty men were hospitalized with frostbite and frozen limbs. In early April, soldiers succeeded in returning the trespassers to Fort Laramie, where they were detained for two days and then released.[18]

As the month drew on, the army continued to act. On 25 April, the commanding officer of Fort Sully received notice that a good many people were en route to the Black Hills by way of Fort Pierce and that he should take necessary steps to remove all violators. On 28 April, the commander of Fort Randall reported that he had sent three companies toward the crossing of the White River and another company to occupy the line of the Keya Paha River on the same route. On 5 May, a Lieutenant Rogers returned to Camp Sheridan with five miners in tow, and post commander Captain Anson Mills reported troops in camp one hundred miles east on the South Fork of the White River and another detachment ready to scout Wounded Knee and Porcupine Tail creeks.[19]

At the same time that the army issued orders to prevent settlement of the Black Hills, its leaders were extolling the virtues of the region. In a January 1875 letter to the New York World, reprinted in the Cheyenne Daily Leader, Custer publicly praised the Hills, describing the climate as “healthful and temperate; the water pure; the mountains covered with pine timber; building stone present in abundance; the soil fertile, and the prairies covered with nutritious grasses.” Going so far as to call the area “the best hunting ground in America,” he again stated his belief that “gold may be mined with profit” but added that sufficient evidence did not yet exist to be certain.[20]

Troops on Fort Randall parade ground

In response to a request from General Sherman to tell him about the Black Hills, Sheridan wrote a letter on 25 March 1875 that quickly appeared in western newspapers. In it, the commander fully laid out his concept of what was at stake, and he did not confine the potential gold-producing regions to the area Custer had explored in 1874:

The Black Hills country is much more extensive than that particular locality brought to the notice of the public by the recent explorations of Gen. Custer, and... comprises the whole country bounded on the east by longitude 102 degrees, on the south by the Sweetwater and Laramie Rivers, on the west by the Big Horn and Wind Rivers, and on the north by the Yellowstone River. This is really the country of the Black Hills, but embraced in it are several localities called Black Hills; for instance: the Black Hills of Laramie, the Black Hills of Powder River, and the Black Hills of Cheyenne River, the latter being the locality in which Gen. Custer made his reconnoisance [sic] last summer....

...I have seen nuggets from the Big Horn and Tongue Rivers, and many specimens from near Fort Stambaugh, in the Upper Wind River country, where mining failed from want of water for alluvial washing, and from hostilities of Indians, and I have good reason to believe, in fact, quite certain, that gold exists in the Owl Creek Mountains, in the Lower Wind River and in the head waters of the Powder River and Rosebud, all these locations being under the general meaning, in the Black Hills, and outside of [the 1868 treaty], except so far as the privilege to hunt game.

Sheridan clearly desired expansion into the unceded Indian hunting grounds where the Lakotas, including a number of nontreaty bands, roamed free, representing a threat to peace and an invitation to war. Neither was the lieutenant general unaware of the great economic boon the potential gold deposits represented. In 1872, he recalled, a prominent businessman had suggested that the government take Black Hills gold to pay off the national debt. When the Panic of 1873 struck, plunging farm prices to an all-time low and pushing unemployment and crime rapidly upward, the need for relief became even greater. In his letter, Sheridan suggested that a new expedition be sent to explore the Yellowstone River Basin from Camp Stambaugh and Camp Brown to the mouth of the Big Horn River. In the meantime, he concluded, “We can occupy the two or three gaps in the Black Hills and effectually exclude trespassers.”[21]

Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan

While pressure continued to build for the Indians’ cession of the Black Hills, the army continued to do its job. On 7 April, the Cheyenne Daily Leader reported that troops were patrolling the west bank of the Missouri River, turning back immigrants from Bismarck. Soldiers from Fort Laramie blocked access from the west. In mid-May, a detachment of thirty men from Fort Randall under Captain Mark Walker intercepted and attempted to arrest a second party under John Gordon from Sioux City. When the group of 150 miners ignored the smaller military force, Walker sent to Camp Sheridan for assistance. Coming to the rescue was Captain Anson Mills, with seventy-six men and a gatling gun. On the morning of 14 May, Mills took the party by surprise, arrested the lot, and burned their wagons. Mills decided to put Gordon in his guardhouse, gave up another man to the United States marshal, and let the rest go. On 20 July, Lieutenant Emmet Crawford and Company G., Third Cavalry, turned back another party from Sidney, Nebraska.[22] Miners, however, continued to arrive singly and in groups, avoiding military patrols and setting up camp in the French Creek area.

At the same time it expelled civilian gold seekers, the army was conducting its own “prospecting” expedition. On 26 March, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward P. Smith had appointed Walter P. Jenney, a Columbia School of Mines professor who had formerly worked on the Texas & Pacific Railroad survey, to undertake a thorough mineral study of the area. The purpose of the survey was to obtain the true facts regarding the nature and value of mineral deposits in the Black Hills, in order to prepare for negotiations with the Indians. Heading the military escort was Lieutenant Colonel Richard I. Dodge, commanding about four hundred men of the Ninth Infantry and the Second and Third cavalries. The expedition reached the Gordon stockade on 14 June and went into permanent camp, dubbed Camp Harney, on French Creek. While one party under Jenney spent the summer investigating mineral resources, three other groups conducted a topographical study of the Black Hills. The scientists completed work in late September and returned to Fort Laramie on 14 October. Initially pessimistic, Jenney soon began to change his mind. In his final report, he concluded that gold did exist in the Black Hills in paying quantities and lauded the region’s prospects for supporting livestock after the minerals had been extracted.[23]

Perhaps as important as Jenney’s scientific study was information Lieutenant Colonel Dodge gathered about the significance of the Black Hills to the Sioux. According to Dodge, the Black Hills had never been a permanent home for any Indians, although small parties traveled a short way into the Hills each fall to gather lodge poles. Indian informants told him that the Black Hills were bad medicine and the abode of spirits, that game was scarce, and that ponies quickly became lost in the dense thickets. Moreover, the region’s frequent thunderstorms tore trees apart and set fire to the woods. Dodge’s report contradicted conventional wisdom that the Black Hills were precious to the Sioux.[24]

Other signs seemed to confirm Dodge’s conclusions. As early as 22 January, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail had let it be known that they were interested in going to Washington, D.C., with some of the young and most influential chiefs in their bands to negotiate the sale of the Black Hills. On 26 May, a nineteen-man delegation met with President Ulysses S. Grant and other officials in his private office. On 15 June, the secretary of the interior, acting under instructions from the president, appointed a treaty commission to meet with the Lakotas, the Northern Cheyennes, and the Northern Arapaho near Red Cloud Agency on 1 September. When the Omaha Weekly Bee quoted Spotted Tail in August as being in favor of the sale of the Black Hills for a reasonable price, a solution to the problem seemed near.[25]

The Indian response to trespassers entering the Black Hills had been slow in coming, but by the spring of 1875 incidents of violence had begun to occur. Hostilities opened with an Indian blockade of the only two roads leading into the Black Hills from the south, one through Red Canyon and the other by way of Buffalo Gap. Around the same time, Henry Dodge, who had settled near present-day Rapid City with some dairy cattle, was found dead, shot full of arrows. His partner, Ben Ash, said that two other men had been killed by Indians that spring. Moreover, signs of general discord among the Lakotas themselves were appearing. Prominent leaders of northern bands not represented in the treaty party that traveled to Washington, D.C., declared that they intended to fight if Spotted Tail and Red Cloud disposed of the Black Hills. Other Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes raided in western Wyoming, stealing horses from whites and fighting a battle on 4 July in which twenty-six Cheyennes and four soldiers were killed. The New Northwest complained that Montana’s eastern borders were being overrun by raiders who were murdering citizens, stealing stock, and destroying property because the area had been left vulnerable by the movement of troops to intercept Black Hills prospectors.[26]

Delegation in Washington, D.C., 1875

Brigadier General George Crook decided to make a dramatic visit to the Black Hills to deal with the situation firsthand. On 27 July 1875, the Department of the Platte commander and several other officers arrived at the large miner’s camp near present-day Custer. A panic ensued, and many prospectors fled further into the Hills, where they prepared to defend themselves against the troops. After a short parley and assurance that they would not be arrested, they came back and recommenced operations. Two days later, the general issued a proclamation ordering the miners and other unauthorized citizens to leave the Black Hills by 15 August but advising them to meet and organize to secure their discoveries. He stated that they might have forty days after the expected treaty was concluded to reestablish their Black Hills claims, and he permitted seven men to remain behind to protect the group’s interests. Crook sympathized with the miners and was quoted in the New Northwest as stating that they did not violate the 1868 treaty until the Indians had ceased to regard it.[27] Crook also wrote in his annual report for 1876 that the “Indians have without interruption attacked persons at home, murdered and scalped them, stolen their stock, [and] in fact, violated every leading feature of the treaty.”[28]

The next attempt to settle the problem was a treaty commission headed by Senator William B. Allison of Iowa. The group reached Red Cloud Agency on 4 September 1875. About forty-five hundred Indians also gathered to attend the council, which finally got underway on 20 September. To begin with, the government offered to pay six million dollars for the Black Hills or to lease the region for four hundred thousand dollars a year. The Lakotas were also to give up their hunting rights on unceded lands. While the reservation Indians adjourned to discuss the matter, members of the nontreaty bands under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse promised war if the Black Hills were sold. When the meeting reconvened on 23 September, Little Big Man, a leader of the northern nontreaty bands who had refused to recognize the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, made a dramatic appearance. Circling the assembled Indians and commissioners, he threatened to kill any man who would sell his land.

Twenty head chiefs, among them Red Cloud, He Dog, and Little Wound, went into council, stating that they would not meet the commissioners for two days. The talks, along with heated discussions in the camps, continued for the next four days. According to one eyewitness, the final Indian demands for the Black Hills were oxen, horses, wagons, and furniture, as well as subsistence annuities for six hundred years. They also wanted the reservation extended to the middle of the Platte River in Nebraska. The agency chiefs refused to consider parting with the Powder River and Big Horn country, putting their hands over their ears at its very mention. The treaty commissioners claimed that at one point the Indians had asked for $70 million for the Black Hills.

Brigadier General George Crook

In the end, the commissioners concluded that agreement was not possible, given the discord of the northern Sioux. In its final report, the Allison Commission recommended that Congress determine a fair price for the Black Hills and present it to the Indians. If they rejected it, the government would end subsistence allotments. The commissioners also recommended that the Sioux then residing in northwestern Nebraska be forced to occupy lands within the Great Sioux Reservation and called for army officers, rather than Indian agents, to oversee administrative details such as issuing supplies and publishing annual reports.[29]

Little Big Man

On 3 November, President Grant stepped in. Called to meet with him in his office were Secretary of War William Belknap, Secretary of the Interior Zacharia Chandler, Assistant Interior Secretary R. B. Cowan, Indian Commissioner Edward Smith, General Sheridan, and General Crook. Two decisions resulted. First, that while the president’s dictum to protect the reservation from white intrusion would remain in effect, the army would no longer enforce it. Second, because participants believed that the nontreaty bands had been responsible for failure of the Allison Commission to secure the Black Hills, these Indians needed to be brought under control. If they refused to return to the agencies, the army would force them back.[30]

Some observers have puzzled over the quick agreement of Interior Secretary Chandler and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Smith to settle the problem with military force, in view of the long-time jealousies and power struggles between the Interior and War departments. Smith, however, had already recommended the use of federal might to enforce laws among Indians in his 1873 and 1874 annual reports, reflecting a new approach to the treatment of tribal people. The change had been signaled in 1871, when Congress eliminated treaties in favor of “administrative agreements,” delisting tribes as sovereign nations and henceforth purporting to deal with them as wards of the federal government. As early as 1874, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano had recommended opening the Black Hills to whites. His replacement, Zacharia Chandler was a Republican political boss in Michigan and former United States senator who had long supported the military, even championing return of the Indian Bureau to the War Department. On 6 December, the order went out to the Sioux: be back at your respective agencies by 31 January 1876, or the army will bring you in. When sufficient numbers did not return, General Sheridan made plans for a campaign, and the war was officially enjoined.[31]

Traditionally, the role of the military in the United States had been to eschew politics, but occasionally, as in the case of the Black Hills, strong motivating factors led army leaders to speak out. For decades, silence had been a safe way to divert the distms tof the military that had been much on the minds of the Founding Fathers, who feared that a large standing army could lead to a military overthrow of the government.[32] Thus, following the Revolutionary War, the regular army consisted of only one company of artillery, assigned to guard West Point, Pittsburgh, and a few other posts. The needs of the nation prompted some military growth, but on the eve of the Civil War, the regular army of 13,024 men was still inconsequential. While the states mobilized most of the manpower—slightly over one million troops—to fight the Civil War, the regular army did grow to about fifty-seven thousand. By 1875, however, only about half remained, and Congress threatened to reduce the number even further. The army needed a new war, and the Black Hills answered the need.[33]

President Ulysses S. Grant

Then, too, the position of the army in dealing with frontier matters had always been difficult. First, frontier soldiers served in isolated areas, where their worth could not be appreciated firsthand. This separation cost them public and governmental support.[34] Second, they seemed always to occupy the middle ground in Indian policy disputes. As General Sherman stated: “There are two classes of people, one demanding the utter extinction of the Indians, and the other full of love for their conversion to civilization and Christianity. Unfortunately the army stands between them and gets the cuff from both sides.”[35] Furthermore, the United States Army had become the enforcer of Reconstruction, which won it few friends below the Mason-Dixon line, and the newly invigorated Democratic party, whose hard core was the Solid South, labored long and hard to reduce military resources and influence. When Democrats won the House of Representatives in the 1874 election, they became an important force and potentially destructive to military operations.[36]

By the time the Black Hills controversy arose, however, the army had found a new voice. As the Army and Navy Journal pointed out in 1871, for the first time in decades officers could be heard because of the election of a soldier, Ulysses S. Grant, to the presidency. General Sheridan, in particular, vocalized his thoughts about the future of the country and became one of the West’s greatest boosters, proclaiming the value of western lands and promoting settlement. In fact, the propensity of military men to attempt to influence the political process had resulted in an order from the secretary of war, dated 15 March 1873, that prohibited officers from soliciting, suggesting, or recommending action by the members of Congress for or against military affairs, unless called upon by the proper authority to do so.[37]

In expressing their personal views about the disposition of the Black Hills and the lands in unceded Indian territory, the leadership of the United States Army, particularly Sheridan, Crook, Custer, Dodge, and Forsyth, contributed significantly to the movement that ended in the use of force to wrest the Black Hills from the Sioux. By issuing statements, posting warnings, and removing trespassers, the men in blue followed orders, but their vocal support for Indian cession of the Black Hills made their actions, however forceful, appear reluctant, reactive, and lacking in resolve. Thus, motivated by a need to bolster political influence in an era that looked upon the army as a tool of radical Republicans and an inherent threat to democracy, the leadership saw an opportunity to gain friends on the frontier and deflect the efforts of the Democratic party to reduce its presence and power. By espousing the interests of miners, transportation interests, and town developers, and with the enthusiastic response they received to their ideas and pronouncements, the military leadership helped to bring prospectors to the Black Hills by the thousands, apply pressure to the president and his cabinet, and bring warfare to the plains in 1876.

Notes

The Military Problem and the Black Hills, 1874-1875

1. Watson Parker, Gold in the Black Hills (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), p. 8; Armstrong, History and Resources of Dakota, Montana, and Idaho (Yankton, D.T.: Geo. W. Kingsbury, Printer, 1866), pp. 53, 57; H. N. Maguire, The Black Hills of Dakota: A Miniature History of Their Settlement, Resources, Populations, and Prospects (Chicago: Jacob S. Gantz, 1879), p. 2; Hayden, “On Scarcity of Timber in Certain Parts of Missouri,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 10 (1867): 322-26; Batchelder, A Sketch of the History and Resources of Dakota Territory (Yankton, D.T.: Press Steam Power Printing Co., 1870), pp. 41-44.

2. Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs. Laws and Treaties, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), 2: 989-99.

3. Ibid., 2: 1002. See also Valentine T. McGillycuddy, “First Survey of the Black Hills,” Motor Travel 20 (Oct. 1928): 19.

4. Omaha Republican, 4 Mar. 1874; Omaha Weekly Bee, 11 Nov. 1874, 5 May 1875; Army and Navy Journal, 7 Mar. 1874; Col. John E. Smith, Sioux Expedition, to Capt. J. J. Vanhorn, 8 Mar. 1874, Letters Sent (LS), Records of the Sioux Expedition, Entry 3954, Department of the Platte, Records of United States Army Continental Commands, 1821-1920, Record Group 393, National Archives, Washington, D.C (hereafter cited RG 393, NA); Thomas R. Buecker, Fort Robinson and the American West, 1874-1899 (Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society, 1999), pp. 6-9, 19-22.

5. Sheridan to Sherman, 25 Mar. 1875, reprinted in Cheyenne Daily Leader (Wyo.), 29 Mar. 1875.

6. The standard work on the Black Hills expedition is Donald Jackson, Custer’s Gold: The United States Cavalry Expedition of 1874 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966). See also Max E. Gerber, “The Custer Expedition: A New Look,” North Dakota History 40 (Winter 1973): 4-23.

7. Custer to Sheridan, 2 Aug. 1874, reprinted in U.S., Congress, Senate, Letter from the Secretary of War, S. Ex. Doc. 32, 43rd Cong, 2d sess., 1874-1875 (Serial 1629), p. 6.

8. Custer to Sheridan, 15 Aug. 1874, reprinted ibid.

9. New York Tribune, 10 Aug. 1874; New York World, 16 Aug. 1874; Chicago Inter-Ocean, 1 Aug. 1874; Bismarck Tribune, 12 Aug. 1874.

10. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 22 Sept. 1874. Custer later reported that Winchell had not seen the gold because he had remained in his tent while others made the discoveries. Custer to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, 8 Sept. 1874, Letters Received (LR), Department of Dakota, RG 393, NA.

11. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 25 Sept. 1874.

12. New York Tribune, 3 Sept. 1874.

13. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 11 Nov. 1874.

14. Quoted ibid., 8 Sept. 1874.

15. Ibid., 2 Oct. 1874.

16. For a discussion of the relationships between Sheridan and his department commanders, see Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), pp. 122-32.

17. Gerber, “Custer Expedition,” p. 20.

18. Annie D. Tallent, The Black Hills; or, the Last Hunting Ground of the Dakotahs (Saint Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1899), pp. 24, 60-71; Cheyenne Daily Leader, 14, 21, 27 Jan., 22 Mar., 17 Apr. 1875; Special Order No. 10, 23 Dec. 1874, Order Book, District of the Black Hills, RG 393, NA.

19. Post Adjutant, Fort Randall, to Commanding Officer, Fort Sully, 25 Apr. 1875, and Commanding Officer, Southern District, Fort Randall, to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, 28 Apr. 1875, both in LS, Southern District, Department of Dakota, RG 393, NA; Mills to Gen. Bradley, 5 May 1875, LS, Camp Sheridan, Department of the Platte, RG 393, NA.

20. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 26 Jan. 1875.

21. Sheridan to Sherman, 25 Mar. 1875, reprinted in Cheyenne Daily Leader, 29 Mar. 1875. See also Hutton, Phil Sheridan, p. 283; Cheyenne Daily Leader, 8 Apr. 1875; Richard S. Slotkin, “Signifying on the Little Bighorn,” in Legacy: New Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn, ed. Charles Rankin (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1996), p. 297.

22. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 7 Apr., 27 May 1875; Mills to Gen. Ruggles, 23 May 1875, LS, Camp Sheridan, Department of the Platte, RG 393, NA; Commanding Officer, Southern District, Fort Randall, to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, 24 May 1875, and Commanding Officer, Southern District, Fort Randall, to Lt. R. G. Armstrong, 15 May 1875, LS, Department of Dakota, RG 393, NA; Omaha Daily Bee, 2, 4, 11 Aug. 1875; Western Nebraskan (North Platte), 14 Aug. 1875.

23. Col. R. I. Dodge, “Report of Black Hills Expedition, May to October 1875,” 22 Dec. 1875, in Reports of Scouts and Reconnaissances, Department of the Platte, 1868-1875, Entry 3817, RG 393, NA; “The Black Hills,” Motor Travel 19 (Aug. 1927): 20; McGillycuddy, “First Survey of the Black Hills,” Motor Travel 20 (Sept. 1928): 12, and (Oct. 1928): 18-21; New Northwest (Deer Lodge, Mont.), 20 Aug. 1875.

24. Dodge, “Report of Black Hills Expedition.” See also Dodge, The Black Hills: A Minute Description of the Routes, Scenery, Soil, Climate, Timber, Gold, Geology, Zoology, Etc. (1876; reprinted., Minneapolis, Minn.: Ross & Haines, 1965), pp. 136-38.

25. Luther P. Bradley, Fort Laramie, to Adjutant General, Department of the Platte, 22 Jan. 1875, LR, Department of the Platte, RG 393, NA; Cheyenne Daily Leader Extra, 26 May 1875; Omaha Weekly Bee, 12 Aug., 22, 29 Sept. 1875; Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 Nov. 1875.

26. James E. Smith, A Famous Battery and Its Campaigns: The Career of Corporal James Tanner in War and in Peace, and Early Days in the Black Hills (Washington, D.C.: W. H. Loudermilk & Co., 1892), pp. 218-19; Rapid City Journal, 8 Jan. 1935; Cheyenne Daily Leader, 10 May 1875; National Tribune, 31 Aug. 1911; Theophilus F. Rodenbough, comp., From Everglade to Canon with the Second Dragoon (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1875), pp. 396-99; David M. Delo, “The Little Known Battle of Snake Mountain,” Annals of Wyoming 59 (Fall 1987): 28-35; New Northwest, 16 July 1875.

27. Hyman Palais, “A Survey of Early Black Hills History,” Black Hills Engineer 27 (Apr. 1941): 39-41; Omaha Daily Bee, 6, 19 Aug. 1875; New Northwest, 29 Dec. 1876. Although General Sherman generally stayed out of the debate, he did speak out in support of Crook, declaring that “inasmuch as the Sioux have not lived at peace, I think Congress has the perfect right to abrogate the whole treaty or any part of it” (quoted in Edward Lazarus, Black Hills, White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present [New York: HarperCollins, 1991], p. 84).

28. Quoted in Mark H. Brown, The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone (New York: Putnam, 1961), p. 230.

29. The Chicago Daily Tribune printed the report of the Allison Commission in its 18 November 1875 issue. See also Omaha Weekly Bee, 29 Sept., 6, 13 Oct. 1875; Chicago Daily Tribune; 19 Nov. 1875; Chicago Daily Sun, 16 Oct. 1897; Man Sandoz, The Great Council, ed. Caroline Sandoz Pifer (Crawford, Nebr.: Cottonwood Press, 1982), p. 25.

30. Hutton, Phil Sheridan, pp. 298-99.

31. Harry H. Anderson, “Challenge to Brown’s Sioux Indian Wars Thesis,” Montana, the Magazine of Western History 12 (Jan. 1962): 47-48; U.S., Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, 1874 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875), p. 16; U.S., Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1874 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875), p. xi.

32. In 1876, Senator John A. Logan of Illinois used the fear of a burgeoning and politically dangerous military to defeat a proposal to return the Indian Bureau to the War Department. John D. McDermott, A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 10-11.

33. McDermott, Guide to the Indian Wars, p. 9; Harold D. Langley, ed., “The Custer Battle and the Critique of an Adventurer,” Montana, the Magazine of Western History 22 (Apr. 1972): 23-24, 28-29.

34. Robert M. Utley, “The Contribution of the Frontier to the American Military Tradition,” in The Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History, 1959-1987, ed. Harry R. Borowski (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, United States Air Force, 1988), p. 533.

35. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1984), p. 237.

36. Brian W. Dippie, “The Southern Response to Custer’s Last Stand,” Montana, the Magazine of Western History 21 (Spring 1971): 18-31.

37. Army and Navy Journal, 11 Feb. 1871, p. 407; Paul A. Hutton, “Phil Sheridan’s Frontier,” Montana, the Magazine of Western History 38 (Winter 1988): 16-31.