Plains Wars

Plains Wars, series of conflicts from the early 1850s through the late 1870s between Native Americans and the United States, along with its Indian allies, over control of the Great Plains between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.

Early conflicts

The initial major confrontation, sometimes known as the First Sioux War, broke out in the Dakota Territory near Fort Laramie (in present-day Wyoming) following a dispute over a killed cow between white settlers traveling to the far west and the local Lakota (a Western Sioux group). On August 19, 1854, brevet Second Lieut. John L. Grattan set out from the post with 30 men and two cannons and, after rashly demanding that a far superior Indian force turn over the suspected culprit, he opened fire. In response, the Lakota killed Grattan and his entire assembly. Most Lakota denied the legitimacy of this war, however, effectively isolating those who had been directly involved in the Grattan affair. On September 3, 1855, brevet Brig. Gen. William S. Harney’s regulars routed the hostile Lakota at Blue Water Creek (in present-day Nebraska). Although the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the resulting treaty, Harney’s blow produced what amounted to a regional armistice.

The following year, open conflict spread southward. Leading about 300 cavalrymen on July 29, 1856, Col. Edwin V. Sumner encountered an equal force of mounted Cheyenne near the south fork of the Solomon River, Kansas Territory. The Cheyenne were eager to engage in battle, assured that magical waters would keep them safe from their white opponents’ bullets. As both sides thundered forward, Sumner gave the unusual order for his men to draw their sabres; the stunned Cheyenne, whose medicine did not cover the steel blades, fled in disarray, leading to a period of relative peace in the central Plains.

The atmosphere was not so quiet, however, in Comanche territory along the northern borders of Texas. On May 12, 1858, Capt. John S. (“Rip”) Ford, leading a collection of Texas Rangers and allied Indians, surprised and destroyed chief Iron Jacket’s camp near the Antelope Hills, Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). In October brevet Maj. Earl Van Dorn and a regular force hit chief Buffalo Hump’s encampment at Rush Spring (now Rush Springs, Oklahoma). Unfortunately, Van Dorn struck the wrong village, for these people represented the vanguard of the Comanche peace faction. The violence thus continued, with Van Dorn, having recovered from arrow wounds received at Rush Spring, trapping or killing about a hundred Comanche the following May at Crooked Creek, Kansas Territory.

The Civil War on the Plains

Secession of Texas and 10 other Southern states from the Union in 1860–61 brought no end to the military contest in the southern Plains. The Comanche launched particularly devastating raids into north Texas (December 1863) and against a settlement at Elm Creek (October 13, 1864). On January 8, 1865, a group of Kickapoo that was migrating south to Mexico defeated more than 300 Texas volunteers at Dove Creek.

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In Minnesota, meanwhile, Dakota (a Sioux group) tribes had during the 1850s given up claims to most of their lands in return for yearly annuities and life on reserved lands, overseen by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. The continuing onslaught of westward-moving white populations and the mismanagement of the reservations by government officials, however, spawned great bitterness among the Dakota, and in August 1862 their most influential leader, Little Crow (Taoyateduta), led attacks that brought the demise of hundreds of white settlers in a single week. The bloodshed sparked a massive backlash, and on September 23 Col. Henry Hastings Sibley handed the Dakota a stinging defeat at the Battle of Wood Lake. Peace factions then regained the ascendancy in many circles, and, as a result, hundreds of those who had been involved in the early attacks were surrendered to the white authorities. The government subsequently hanged 38 Indian prisoners at Mankato.

Little Crow and others who were determined to fight had in the meantime fled west, only to be pursued by the army in mid-1863. In present-day North Dakota, Sibley, now a brigadier general, fought pitched battles at Big Mound (July 24), Dead Buffalo Lake (July 26), and Stony Lake (July 28) and claimed to have inflicted over 150 casualties and destroyed huge quantities of winter stores in the process. Farther south, Brig. Gen. Alfred Sully descended on roughly 1,000 Dakota at Whitestone Hill on September 3, killing a few hundred warriors and capturing about as many women and children. The army continued the blows into 1864, with Sully and 2,200 men driving off Indian attacks at Killdeer Mountain (July 28) and torching another massive stockpile of supplies and equipment.

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In response to the turmoil in the northern Plains, nervous officials in the Colorado Territory convinced themselves that the bloodbath would spread to the southwest. During the first half of 1864, regulars and volunteers thus engaged in a series of skirmishes with Kiowa, Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho mounted parties. Col. John M. Chivington then determined to take matters into his own hands, reportedly hoping that a victory over the Indians would jump-start his political career. Camped near Sand Creek, Colorado Territory, were about 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho followers of Black Kettle, who was known to be attempting to make peace. Swearing, according to a fellow officer, to “damn any man that was in sympathy with Indians,” Chivington and his Colorado volunteers swept into the village just after sunup on November 29. They slaughtered between 150 and 200 Indians, mutilating most of the corpses in the process.

News of the Sand Creek Massacre ignited a full-scale war. “We have raised the battle-axe until death,” one Cheyenne leader reportedly vowed. Attacks against non-Indian travelers increased in early 1865, and for a month that spring all contact between the city of Denver and points east was severed. Tribal economies could not long support such a conflict, however, and most native peoples of the central Plains soon returned to their normal patterns of life, the raids having satisfied their need for revenge. Midyear offensives by the army, in turn, failed to locate significant numbers of Indians. The prohibitive costs of the U.S. military campaigns (amounting to more than $20 million that year alone), the scathing humanitarian criticism of the butchery at Sand Creek, and the general weariness after four long years of civil war led federal officials to sign peace agreements later in 1865 with a variety of Native American emissaries.