Native American group occupies Mount Rushmore to protest broken Treaty of Fort Laramie

Around dusk on the evening on August 29, 1970, a group of 23 Native American activists climbs to the top of Mount Rushmore. Renaming the landmark Crazy Horse Mountain, in honor of the Lakota leader who famously resisted white Americans’ incursions into the area, the protesters are there to reclaim land they believe to be rightfully theirs under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which guaranteed Indigenous people the right to all of Western South Dakota. The occupation will last for two months, beginning a new chapter in Native American activism.

Signed at Fort Laramie in the Wyoming Territory, the 1868 treaty was meant to end hostilities between the United States and the Lakota people, Yanktonai Dakota and Arapaho Nation. Although it was designed to assimilate Native Americans into white American culture—U.S. courts, not tribal ones, were given jurisdiction over the reservation, and the treaty attempted to incentivize Native Americans to give up their traditional way of life in favor of farming—the Treaty of Fort Laramie allocated the Black Hills and adjacent lands west of the Missouri River, roughly half of what is now South Dakota, to Indigenous peoples. In a sadly predictable turn of events, the United States broke the treaty within a decade. After George Armstrong Custer’s expedition found gold in the Black Hills region in 1874, white prospectors and settlers rushed into the region, leading to the Great Sioux War of 1876 and American occupation of most of the land promised to the Lakota.

READ MORE: Broken Treaties With Native American Tribes: A Timeline

Nearly a century later, the political and social fervor of the 1960s led to the birth of United Native Americans, an activist group founded in San Francisco in 1968 with the mission of fighting for the rights and welfare of Indigenous peoples. It was members of this group that climbed 3,000 feet to the top of Mount Rushmore on August 29, 1970. The site, a memorial to four American presidents that symbolized the advance of white “civilization” into lands considered sacred by the Natives who had lived there before, was an obvious target for the activists. Lehman Brightman, a UNA member and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, chartered a bus for him and his students after hearing of the protest and became a spokesperson for the protesters there. “The federal government said this land would belong to us as long as the grass grows and the water flows and the sun shines,” he told one reporter. “Then they turned around and took this land from us.”

With supporters running supplies up the mountain, protesters continued the occupation until winter weather forced them to withdraw in November. Throughout that time, the monument remained open to tourists, although the occupiers draped a flag reading “Sioux Indian Power” from the mountaintop and greeted visitors with protest chants. Native Americans from around the country also visited during this period, which Brightman said he hoped would be a “spark” for further native activism. Indeed, protesters took to the mountain again the following June in a brief action that led to 12 arrests. The activism of the 1970s received new attention in the 2010s, when protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline took place at the Standing Rock Reservation, a remnant of the original Great Sioux Reservation established in 1868. 

READ MORE: Why Native Americans Have Protested Mount Rushmore

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Osage tribe cedes Missouri and Arkansas lands

Year
1808
Month Day
November 10

In a decision that would eventually make them one of the wealthiest surviving Native American nations, the Osage tribe agrees to abandon their lands in Missouri and Arkansas in exchange for a reservation in Oklahoma.

The Osage were the largest tribe of the Southern Sioux people occupying what would later become the states of Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. When the first Anglo explorers and settlers moved into this region, they encountered a sophisticated society of Native Americans who lived in more or less permanent villages made of sturdy earthen and log lodges. The Osage-like the related Quapaw, Ponca, Omaha, and Kansa peoples-hunted buffalo and wild game like the Plains Indians, but they also raised crops to supplement their diets.

READ MORE: How Horses Transformed Life for Plains Indians

Although the Southern Sioux warred among themselves almost constantly, Americans found it much easier to understand and negotiate with these more sedentary tribes than with the nomadic Northern Sioux. American negotiators convinced the Osage to abandon their traditional lands and peacefully move to a reservation in southern Kansas in 1810. When American settlers began to covet the Osage reservation in Kansas, the tribe agreed to yet another move, relocating to what is now Osage County, Oklahoma, in 1872.

Such constant pressure from American settlers to push Native Americans off valuable lands and onto marginal reservations was all too common throughout the history of western settlement. Most tribes were devastated by these relocations, including some of the Southern Sioux tribes like the Kansa, whose population of 1,700 was reduced to only 194 following their disastrous relocation to a 250,000-acre reservation in Kansas. The Osage, though, proved unusually successful in adapting to the demands of living in a world dominated by Anglo-Americans, thanks in part to the fortunate presence of large reserves of oil and gas on their Oklahoma reservation. In concert with their effective management of grazing contracts to Anglos, the Osage amassed enormous wealth during the twentieth century from their oil and gas deposits, eventually becoming the wealthiest tribe in North America.

READ MORE: Native American History Timeline

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Colonel George Custer massacres Cheyenne on Washita River

Year
1868
Month Day
November 27

Without bothering to identify the village or do any reconnaissance, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer leads an early morning attack on a band of peaceful Cheyenne living with Chief Black Kettle.

Convicted of desertion and mistreatment of soldiers earlier that year in a military court, the government had suspended Custer from rank and command for one year. Ten months into his punishment, in September 1868, General Philip Sheridan reinstated Custer to lead a campaign against Cheyenne Indians who had been making raids in Kansas and Oklahoma that summer. Sheridan was frustrated by the inability of his other officers to find and engage the enemy, and despite his poor record and unpopularity with the men of the 7th Cavalry, Custer was a good fighter.

Sheridan determined that a campaign in winter might prove more effective, since the Indians could be caught off guard while in their permanent camps. On November 26, Custer located a large village of Cheyenne encamped near the Washita River, just outside of present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Custer did not attempt to identify which group of Cheyenne was in the village, or to make even a cursory reconnaissance of the situation. Had he done so, Custer would have discovered that they were peaceful people and the village was on reservation soil, where the commander of Fort Cobb had guaranteed them safety. There was even a white flag flying from one of the main dwellings, indicating that the tribe was actively avoiding conflict.

Having surrounded the village the night before, at dawn Custer called for the regimental band to play “Garry Owen,” which signaled for four columns of soldiers to charge into the sleeping village. Outnumbered and caught unaware, scores of Cheyenne were killed in the first 15 minutes of the “battle,” though a small number of the warriors managed to escape to the trees and return fire. Within a few hours, the village was destroyed—the soldiers had killed 103 Cheyenne, including the peaceful Black Kettle and many women and children.

Hailed as the first substantial American victory in the Indian wars, the Battle of the Washita helped to restore Custer’s reputation and succeeded in persuading many Cheyenne to move to the reservation. However, Custer’s habit of charging Native American encampments of unknown strength would eventually lead him to his death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

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Chiricahua Apache leader Victorio is killed south of El Paso, Texas

Year
1880
Month Day
October 15

The warrior Victorio, one of the greatest Apache military strategists of all time, dies on October 15, 1880, in the Tres Castillos Mountains south of El Paso, Texas.

Born in New Mexico around 1809, Victorio grew up during a period of intense hostility between the native Apache Native Americans of the southwest and encroaching Mexican and American settlers. Determined to resist the loss of his homeland, Victorio began leading his small band of warriors on a long series of devastating raids against Mexican and American settlers and their communities in the 1850s.

After more than a decade of evading the best efforts of the Mexican and American armies to capture him, the U.S. Army managed to convince Victorio to accept resettlement of his people on an inhospitable patch of sunburnt land near San Carlos, Arizona, in 1869. But with summer temperatures reaching 110 degrees on the San Carlos reservation (an area also known as Hell’s Forty Acres) and farming nearly impossible, Victorio decided the new reservation was unacceptable and moved his followers to more pleasant grounds at Ojo Caliente (Warm Springs), thus again becoming an outlaw in the eyes of the United States. In 1878, the U.S. Army attempted to force the Apaches back to the San Carlos reservation, but Victorio eluded capture, disappearing into the desert with 150 braves. Surviving by raiding the towns and farms of Chihuahua, Mexico, Victorio and his men began to ambush U.S. troops as well as Mexican or American sheepherders.

In 1880, a combined force of U.S. and Mexican troops finally succeeded in tracking down Apache and his warriors, surrounding them in the Tres Castillos Mountains of Mexico, just south of El Paso, Texas. Having sent the American troops away, the Mexican soldiers proceeded to kill all but 17 of the trapped Apaches, though the exact manner of Victorio’s death remains unclear. Some claimed a Native American scout employed by the Mexican army killed the famous warrior. But according to the Apache, Victorio took his own life rather than surrender to the Mexicans. Regardless of how it happened, Victorio’s death made him a martyr to the Apache people and strengthened the resolve of other warriors to continue the fight. The last of the great Apache warriors, Geronimo, would not surrender until 1886.

READ MORE: How Geronimo Eluded Death and Capture for 25 Years

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300 Santee Sioux sentenced to hang in Minnesota

Year
1862
Month Day
November 05

In Minnesota, more than 300 Santee Sioux are found guilty of raping and murdering Anglo settlers and are sentenced to hang. A month later, President Abraham Lincoln commuted all but 39 of the death sentences. One of the Native Americans was granted a last-minute reprieve, but the other 38 were hanged simultaneously on December 26 in a bizarre mass execution witnessed by a large crowd of Minnesotans.

The Santee Sioux were found guilty of joining in the so-called “Minnesota Uprising,” which was actually part of the wider Indian wars that occurred throughout the West during the second half of the nineteenth century. For nearly half a century, Anglo settlers invaded the Santee Sioux territory in the Minnesota Valley, and government pressure gradually forced the Native peoples to relocate to smaller reservations along the Minnesota River.

At the reservations, the Santee were badly mistreated by corrupt federal Indian agents and contractors; during July 1862, the agents pushed the Native Americans to the brink of starvation by refusing to distribute stores of food because they had not yet received their customary kickback payments. The contractors callously ignored the Santee’s pleas for help.

Outraged and at the limits of their endurance, the Santee struck back, killing Anglo settlers and taking women as hostages. The initial efforts of the U.S. Army to stop the Santee warriors failed, and in a battle at Birch Coulee, Santee Sioux killed 13 American soldiers and wounded another 47 soldiers. However, on September 23, a force under the leadership of General Henry H. Sibley finally defeated the main body of Santee warriors at Wood Lake, recovering many of the hostages and forcing most of the Native Americans to surrender. 

The subsequent trials of the prisoners gave little attention to the injustices the Native Americans had suffered on the reservations and largely catered to the popular desire for revenge. However, President Lincoln’s commutation of the majority of the death sentences clearly reflected his understanding that the Minnesota Uprising had been rooted in a long history of Anglo abuse of the Santee Sioux.

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Mohawk Chief Thayendanegea dies

Year
1807
Month Day
November 24

On November 24, 1807, Mohawk Chief Thayendanegea, also known by his English name, Joseph Brant, dies at his home in Burlington, Ontario. Before dying, he reportedly said, “Have pity on the poor Indians. If you have any influence with the great, endeavour to use it for their good.”

Thayendanegea ranked among Britain’s best commanders during the American War for Independence. He was an educated Christian and Freemason who studied directly with Eleazer Wheelock at Moor’s Indian Charity School, the parent institution of Dartmouth College. His older sister Mary was founding father Sir William Johnson’s common-law wife and also played a significant role in colonial and revolutionary Indian affairs.

The Iroquois, an alliance of Native Americans including the Mohawk, attempted to maintain neutrality at the beginning of War for Independence, but by 1777, Thayendanegea had led the Iroquois into an alliance with Britain. He, like most Native Americans, saw Great Britain as their last defense against the land-hungry colonial settlers who were encroaching into their ancestral territory.

Following the alliance with Britain, Thayendanegea led successful raids in the civil war for upstate New York. On August 6, 1777, with the Patriots en route to relieve British-occupied Fort Stanwix, a mixed party of British regulars and Thayendanegea’s Mohawk Indians launched the ambush known as the Battle of Oriskany, during which Patriot General Nicholas Herkimer was wounded and his horse was shot.

One year later, on September 17, 1778, Thayendanegea launched a successful attack on German Flats, now known as Herkimer, New York. Thayendanegea led a force of 150 Iroquois and 300 British Loyalists under the command of Captain William Caldwell against the small community, which had been left virtually undefended by Patriot troops.

The following summer, on July 20, 1779, Thayendanegea’s party of 90 Tories and Loyalist Iroquois executed a successful raid in the Neversink Valley of New York, during which they destroyed a school and a church, as well as farms in Peenpack and Mahackamack. When the Patriot militia responded by attempting to ambush Brant as he traveled up the Delaware River on July 22, Brandt again defeated them, killing between 45 and 50 Patriots at what is known as the Battle of Minisink.

A little over a month later, on August 29, in southwestern New York near present-day Elmira, Continental forces led by Major General John Sullivan and Brigadier General James Clinton defeated a combined force of Loyalists and Indians commanded by Captain Walter Butler and Thayendanegea in what is known as The Battle of Chemung. Sullivan subsequently embarked on a scorched-earth campaign against the Iroquois in retaliation for their raids against frontier settlements. At least 40 of the tribe’s villages were destroyed along with valuable supplies. As a result, the winter of 1779 was particularly brutal for the Iroquois. Nonetheless, they managed to increase their pressure on frontier settlements in 1780.

Despite the best efforts of the Iroquois, however, the Chemung Valley fell into the hands of American settlers following the war. As a result, Iroquois attached to Chief Thayendanegea followed him in a resettlement to Canada, where they found land and safety with their British allies.

READ MORE: Broken Treaties With Native American Tribes: Timeline

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