That same year, 1873, far to the west in the lava beds of northern California, a small band of lowly Modocs wrote a bloody page in western history and gave all the western tribes new hope that the white meance could be beaten back. About fifty Modocs and their families had forted up in the lava beds, where they held out for weeks against an army that grew to 1,800 men before the fight was over. The soldier dead totaled more than the whole Modoc fighting force, which lost only three men.
News of the fight spread through all the western tribes. If the Modocs could make such a stand, perhaps a great army from all the buffalo-hunting tribes of the northwest, with 10,000 warriors striking at once, could wipe out the whites group by group or drive them out of the buffalo country entirely. The Sioux chiefs set up a council to discuss the plans, inviting tribes even from the Columbia Basin, 600 miles to the west. They all came together in the lower Yellowstone Valley early in 1874, with most of the tribes voting for war, but the Nez Percé and Flatheads refused to join. The fight was too far from their own country, and they did not like to join with their enemies, the Sioux.
The activities of General Sheridan forced the Sioux to hasten their plans. Sheridan had decided he needed a strong military post in the Black Hills in order to protect the new railroad. He knew he was acting in open violation of the treaty of 1868 when he sent Custer to the Black Hills to reconnoiter and to select a suitable site for the fort. Custer returned with the news that the Black Hills were full of rich placer gold deposits, a report confirmed by another survey party. This led government officials to summon the Sioux chiefs and offer to buy the Black Hills from the tribe. The chiefs refused to sell, and prepared to fight.
A mad stampede of gold hunters soon filled the valleys of the Black Hills with several thousand men, 11,000 in Custer City alone. The Sioux could not stem this mad rush into their sacred hills. They could wipe out small parties of prospectors and cut off many stragglers, but they could not carry out a large-scale attack against a mining camp. Other western tribes had faced this same problem. In all the history of the western mining rushes, no attack was ever attempted against a large mining camp. The tribes lacked the traditions, skills, and discipline necessary to train their men for such fighting. Instead, they planned to fight again on the open plains against the army.
In the face of the obvious Indian unrest the army prepared for trouble. All the Indian bands were ordered to settle on the reservations by January 31, 1876. Any laggards would be classed as hostile and would be subject to attacks on their villages. On March 17 the first attack was made. Colonel J. J. Reynolds struck a combined Oglala and Cheyenne village on Little Powder, but the outcome was indecisive. A month later Sitting Bull, of the Hunkpapa Sioux, called a great war council on the Tongue River for all the tribes.
The council reached a decision to fight that summer, but first they needed some reserve supplies. The whole gathering scattered out in many small bands to make up packs of dried meat. Once the soldiers came, the hunters would be too busy fighting to kill buffalo for fresh meat. The hunting was good, and day by day new warrior bands came from faraway places into the Yellowstone Valley anxious to help in the big fight.
Army scouts soon reported the large-scale preparations of the tribes, and the army massed its troops for action. General Alfred A. Terry, the field commander, marched west from Fort Abraham Lincoln with 400 men, Colonel John Gibbon came down the Yellowstone from the west with 450, while General George Crook moved north from new Fort Fetterman on the Powder River with a column of over 1,000.
Crook's advance was halted on upper Rosebud Creek on June 17, 1876, by about a thousand warriors led by Crazy Horse. All day they fought, with the warriors more than holding their own against the troops, blocking the line of advance and inflicting fifty-seven casualties while suffering seventeen of their own. After the fight Crook retreated about forty miles to the Tongue River, where he had left his wagon train. Here he rested his men and reorganized, and was too late for all the action to the north.
Terry and Gibbon reached the mouth of Rosebud Creek a hundred miles to the north of Crook, unaware of his fight and delay. Their scouts found a broad Indian trail, trampled by countless hooves and scarred by dragged lodge poles, crossing from Rosebud Creek over an open range of hills to the Little Bighorn.
At once Terry planned to encircle the Indians on Little Bighorn and force them to fight. He sent Custer with the Seventh Cavalry to follow the trail the Indians had made, while he and Gibbon moved up the Yellowstone and up the Bighorn to the Little Bighorn Fork. The forces were to be in place by June 26, and would mount a joint attack that day.
But Custer, the glory hunter, could not wait. If he struck the camp before Terry and Gibbon arrived, he could win another overwhelming victory like that against Black Kettle on the Washita. Once his scouts had located the camp on the river bottom, Custer did not even wait to estimate its size. He divided his forces, sending Major Marens A. Reno to charge the camp from the south while he, with 225 men, rode behind the bluffs to the east of the river and struck from the north.
Major Reno led his men in a bold attack, but found himself badly outnumbered. He lost twenty-nine men in the first few minutes and was forced to retreat across the river and take refuge on a hill with Major Fred Benteen and the pack train. Here they beat off the attackers for a day and a night before the warriors finally withdrew.
Custer rode off down the "glory trail" and, like Fetterman at Big Piney, found too many Indians. Also like Fetterman, Custer and all his men died quickly, trapped and hopelessly outnumbered, but not massacred. They died fighting. Terry and Gibbon kept their rendezvous, arriving promptly on June 26 just in time to bury the dead.
After their great victory the Indian forces regrouped in small bands, hunting meat and robes for the winter and seeking new pasture for their horses. They had no reserves of food, supplies, or ammunition, and no steamboats or supply trains on the way. While the Indians could assemble 2,000 or 3,000 warriors in one group for a week or so, they could not keep a large force in the field.
Having been so victorious, the Indians expected the army officers to call another peace council, perhaps would even offer to return the Black Hills to satisfy the Sioux. Instead, the army pursued them with new vigor, hunting down every band they could find, attacking villages in winter, killing the women and children, burning the lodges, destroying the meat and robes, killing the horses. When the pressure forced Sitting Bull north across the Yellowstone, he fought once more in October, then escaped across the border into Canada with about 700 people, but the other Sioux could not evade their pursuers. By May 1877 all the other hostile bands had surrendered and had been penned on reservations. Four years later Sitting Bull, his welcome in Canada worn out, had to come back. With his surrender the resistance of the northern tribes ceased. Two years later the last of the buffalo herds were slaughtered on the Sioux hunting grounds.
22. The Great Slaughter
The marketing of buffalo robes and tanned hides from the central and northern plains areas, begun about 1764 by traders working out of St. Louis, brought rather meager profits per pound of skin. The robes and hides could be carried to market successfully by the traders only if they could be purchased along a stream and taken out in canoes or boats. There is no indication that the traders at that time made any special effort to buy skins, but seemed to buy from the various tribes only to keep the Indians happy and to ensure that the Indians would then sell them their better furs. For a long period the number of skins marketed through St. Louis each year remained constant, at about 5,000 a year, with no estimate of the number of robes compared to the number of hides. There is no record of any untanned skins being handled before 1870.