Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851): Difference between revisions
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== The United States and the Treaty Tribes == |
== The United States and the Treaty Tribes == |
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Of the eight tribes signing the Fort Laramie treaty, only the Cheyennes, Arapahoes and Lakotas would clash with the United States army. |
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George A. Custer's attack on Southern Cheyenne chief Black Kettle's winter camp at Washita River in 1868 is rather well known.<ref>Hoig, Stan: The Battle of the Washita. The Sheridan-Custer Indian Campaign of 1867-1869. Lincoln and London, 1979.</ref> |
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Especially the western Lakotas attacked the United States' soldiers and civilians during the mid-1860s in battles like Wagon Box Fight and the Fetterman Fight. The goal was to close down the Bozeman Trail. This emigrant wheel track "crossed land guaranteed to the Crows under the 1851 treaty, but the Sioux attacked the United States anyway, claiming that the Yellowstone was now their land".<ref>Hoxie, Frederick E.: Parading Through History. The making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805-1935. Cambridge, 1995, p. 89.</ref> Nearly all the fights in the mid-1860s and the 1870s "between the army and the Dakota [Lakota] were on lands those Indian had taken from other tribes since 1851".<ref>Ewers, John C.: Intertribal Warfare as a Precursor of Indian-White Warfare on the Northern Great Plains. ''Western Historical Quarterly'', Vol. 6, No. 4 (Oct. 1975), pp. 397-410, quote p. 408.</ref> |
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The majority of the treaty tribes would side with the whites in the decades following the great meeting at Horse Creek.<ref>White, Richard: The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. ''The Journal of American History'', Vol. 65, No. 2 (Sep. 1978), pp. 319-343.</ref> "Many plains tribes regarded the Sioux, and not the Anglo-Americans, as their greatest threat".<ref>Calloway, Colin G.: The Inter-tribal Balance of Power on the Great Plains, 1760-1850. ''Journal of American Studies'', Vol. 16, No. 1 (April 1982), pp. 25-47, quote p. 47.</ref> |
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The Lakota "movement onto lands described as Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Assiniboine and Crow in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 helped to make a shambles of that treaty".<ref>Ewers, John C.: Intertribal Warfare as a Precursor of Indian-White Warfare on the Northern Great Plains. ''Western Historical Quarterly'', Vol. 6, No. 4 (Oct. 1975), pp. 397-410, quote pp. 407-408.</ref> |
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In 2016, the [[Bakken pipeline|Dakota Access Pipeline]], intended to transport up to 570,000 barrels a day of crude to refineries and markets in the Gulf and on the East Coast, was given "fast-track" approval<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://billmoyers.com/story/need-know-dakota-access-pipeline-protest/|title=Explainer: The Protest Against the Dakota Access Pipeline|newspaper=BillMoyers.com|language=en-US|access-date=2016-10-28}}</ref> by the Army Corps of Engineers through territory that Native American protesters claimed were covered by the treaty.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pipeline-dakotaaccess-idUSKCN12O2FN|title=Dakota Access pipeline opponents occupy land, citing 1851 treaty|date=2016-10-24|newspaper=Reuters|access-date=2016-10-28}}</ref> The [[Standing Rock Indian Reservation|Standing Rock Sioux]] filed a lawsuit protesting the limited review and asserting "the Corps effectively wrote off the tribe's concerns and ignored the pipeline's impacts to sacred sites and culturally important landscapes." They accused the agency of violating the treaty, the [[National Historic Preservation Act of 1966|National Historic Preservation Act,]] and other laws by approving the plan.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.grandforksherald.com/news/region/4083858-standing-rock-tribe-sues-over-dakota-access-pipeline-permits|title=Standing Rock tribe sues over Dakota Access pipeline permits|access-date=2016-10-28}}</ref> As of September 2016, thouands of [[Dakota Access Pipeline protests|protesters]] against the pipeline constituted the single largest gathering of Native Americans in more than 100 years.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37249617|title=Life in the Native American oil protest camps|date=2016-09-02|newspaper=BBC News|language=en-GB|access-date=2016-10-28}}</ref> |
In 2016, the [[Bakken pipeline|Dakota Access Pipeline]], intended to transport up to 570,000 barrels a day of crude to refineries and markets in the Gulf and on the East Coast, was given "fast-track" approval<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://billmoyers.com/story/need-know-dakota-access-pipeline-protest/|title=Explainer: The Protest Against the Dakota Access Pipeline|newspaper=BillMoyers.com|language=en-US|access-date=2016-10-28}}</ref> by the Army Corps of Engineers through territory that Native American protesters claimed were covered by the treaty.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pipeline-dakotaaccess-idUSKCN12O2FN|title=Dakota Access pipeline opponents occupy land, citing 1851 treaty|date=2016-10-24|newspaper=Reuters|access-date=2016-10-28}}</ref> The [[Standing Rock Indian Reservation|Standing Rock Sioux]] filed a lawsuit protesting the limited review and asserting "the Corps effectively wrote off the tribe's concerns and ignored the pipeline's impacts to sacred sites and culturally important landscapes." They accused the agency of violating the treaty, the [[National Historic Preservation Act of 1966|National Historic Preservation Act,]] and other laws by approving the plan.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.grandforksherald.com/news/region/4083858-standing-rock-tribe-sues-over-dakota-access-pipeline-permits|title=Standing Rock tribe sues over Dakota Access pipeline permits|access-date=2016-10-28}}</ref> As of September 2016, thouands of [[Dakota Access Pipeline protests|protesters]] against the pipeline constituted the single largest gathering of Native Americans in more than 100 years.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37249617|title=Life in the Native American oil protest camps|date=2016-09-02|newspaper=BBC News|language=en-GB|access-date=2016-10-28}}</ref> |
Revision as of 12:41, 15 November 2016
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was signed on September 17, 1851 between United States treaty commissioners and representatives of the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations. The treaty is an agreement between nine more or less independent parties. The treaty set forth traditional territorial claims of the tribes as among themselves.[1] The United States acknowledged that all the land covered by the treaty was Indian territory and did not claim any part of it. The boundaries agreed to in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1851 would be used to settle a number of claims cases in the 20th century.[2] The Native Americans guaranteed safe passage for settlers on the Oregon Trail and allowed roads and forts to be built in their territories in return for promises of an annuity in the amount of fifty thousand dollars for fifty years. Above all, the treaty should "make an effective and lasting peace" among the eight tribes, each of them often at odds with a number of the others.[3]
Background
Although many European and European-American migrants to western North America had previously passed through the Great Plains on the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails, the California gold rush beginning in 1848 greatly increased traffic. The next year, both Thomas Fitzpatrick (agent of Upper Platte and Arkansas) and David D. Mitchell (superintendent at Saint Louis) recommended a council with the Indians to prevent a conflict.[4] The United States government undertook negotiations with the Native American Plains tribes living between the Arkansas and Missouri rivers to ensure protected right-of-way for the migrants.[5] The Congress had appropriated one hundred thousand dollars to the assembly, endorsed by Luke Lea (the Commissioner of Indian Affairs).[6]
Because the area around Fort Laramie lacked forage for the Indians' horses, the treaty was negotiated and signed 30 miles downriver from the fort at the mouth of Horse Creek. Many Indians have referred to the treaty as the Horse Creek Treaty. Representatives from the Lakota, Cheyenne, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, Shoshone, Crow, and Arapaho took part in the treaty discussions.[7]
The United States Senate ratified the treaty, adding Article 5, to adjust compensation from fifty to ten years, if the tribes accepted the changes. Acceptance from all tribes, with the exception of the Crow, was procured. Several tribes never received the commodities promised as payments.
The Treaty Territories
The Lakota got some rather new territorial claims recognized. In 1823, a number of Lakotas had helped the United States army attack an Arikara village at Grand River (present South Dakota).[8] The Lakotas had kept on pushing the village tribe north, so they got treaty on the former Arikara homeland along the Grand.
The Lakota got exclusive treaty right to the Black Hills (present South Dakota), to the consternation of the Cheyenne and the Arapahoe. "... the Sioux were given right to the Black Hills and other country that the Northern Cheyennes claimed. Their home country was the Black Hills", declared a Cheyenne historian in 1967.[9] Arapahoe chief Black Coal complained in 1875: "I have never got anything yet for my land [the Black Hills]. It is part mine, and part the Sioux... In the first place, they came from the Missouri River and reached this place, and now they have got up this far, and they claim all this land."[10]
The Cheyenne and Arapaho, the southernmost of the treaty tribes, held an area southward of the North Platte in common (mainly in present Wyoming and Colorado).
The Crow treaty territory (in present Montana and Wyoming) included the area westward from Powder River. Little Bighorn River ran through the center of the Crow domain.[3]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/Sioux-treaty-lands.png/220px-Sioux-treaty-lands.png)
After the Treaty
All treaties were eventually broken and dismissed by the u.s. government, the military and the invading Europeans. It has been said by an elder of the shoshone tribe which lands stretch from lower California through Nevada, Utah and Idaho, "Our tribe has been bombed by hundreds of nuclear weapons for decades." The u.s. military constructed military bases and conducted 928 nuclear bomb tests on the ancient Shoshone tribal lands for decades.
The treaty produced a brief period of peace, but it was broken by the failure of the United States to prevent the mass emigration of miners and settlers into Colorado during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush. They took over Indian lands in order to mine them, "against the protests of the Indians,"[12] and founded towns, started farms, and improved roads. Before 1861 the Cheyenne and Arapahoe "had been driven from the mountain regions down upon the waters of the Arkansas."[12] Such emigrants competed with the tribal nations for game and water, straining limited resources and resulting in conflicts with the emigrants. The U.S. government did not enforce the treaty to keep out the emigrants.[12] In 1864 came the Sand Creek massacre on a camp of mostly Cheyennes by Colonel John M. Chivingtons army of one hundred days volunteers. The consequence was years of war between the Cheyennes and the United States.[13]
Despite the peace treaty of 1851, Hunkpapa Lakota chief Running Antelope killed four Arikaras already in 1853.[14]
Around the same year, a joint Cheyenne and Lakota war party found a big Crow camp in the valley of the Little Bighorn River. The Lakota One Bear killed a Crow woman taken captive by the Cheyennes.[15]
Warriors from the other eight tribes may also have violated the treaty by intertribal fighting at that time.
Much of the intertribal fighting can be attributed to mass killings of bison by white settlers and government agents. This was one of the many tools of genocide use by the encroaching invading Europeans. These mass killings affected all tribes thus the tribes were forced onto each other's hunting grounds and therefore fighting may have broken out. [citation needed]
If not before, the United States was caught in the tangle of treaty breaking with the Grattan affair in 1854.[16]
The Lakota would soon continue their harassment of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara.[17] By summer 1862, all three tribes had been forced out of their shared treaty territory.[18] "We, the Arikara, have been driven from our country on the other side of the Missouri River by the Sioux", stated chief White Shield in 1864.[19]
Before long, the Crows saw their western Powder River area flooded with trespassing Lakotas in search of bison, and "... large scale battles with invading Sioux" took place near present-day city of Wyola, Montana.[20] The outnumbered Crows were little by little displaced. "The country from the Powder River to the Yellowstone River was their country [the Crows'], until 1859, when they were driven from it by the Sioux".[21] In 1868, after a series of battles with the United States army in the contested area, the Lakotas finally succeeded in turning a part of the Crow Indian territory of 1851 into unceded Indian territory of their own.[22]
Later again, huge parts of the different Indian territories would in one way or another be added to the holdings of the United States. Smaller areas of the initial Indian territories became separate reservations, usually populated with Indians from the tribe, which held the treaty right in 1851.[23]
However, the Crow territory provided in the end acreage to two different reservations. The Crow Reservation was created in the center of the original territory in 1868.[24] The reservation of the Northern Cheyennes became a reality in 1884. It is located entirely within the boundaries of the 1851 Crow territory, after the Indians in question had "earned the right to stay in the north" after the Fort Robinson outbreak.[25]
The Arapahoe (Northern Arapaho) settled down on the reservation of their past enemies, the Shoshone, in present Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.[26] The Southern Cheyenne and the Arapaho live in a common reservation in present Oklahoma, also far from their 1851 treaty land.[27]
The Assiniboine in the United States has since 1888 lived in partly Fort Peck Reservation and partly Fort Belknap Reservation, both placed north of the Missouri in present Montana.[28] The treaty territory of the Assiniboine south of the Missouri was just a small portion of the wide range used by these northern plains Indians.
The United States and the Treaty Tribes
In 2016, the Dakota Access Pipeline, intended to transport up to 570,000 barrels a day of crude to refineries and markets in the Gulf and on the East Coast, was given "fast-track" approval[29] by the Army Corps of Engineers through territory that Native American protesters claimed were covered by the treaty.[30] The Standing Rock Sioux filed a lawsuit protesting the limited review and asserting "the Corps effectively wrote off the tribe's concerns and ignored the pipeline's impacts to sacred sites and culturally important landscapes." They accused the agency of violating the treaty, the National Historic Preservation Act, and other laws by approving the plan.[31] As of September 2016, thouands of protesters against the pipeline constituted the single largest gathering of Native Americans in more than 100 years.[32]
References
- ^ Paragraph 69 REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT BY THE INDIAN PEACE COMMISSION, JANUARY 7, 1868
- ^ See e.g. Meyer, Roy W.: The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri. The Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras. Lincoln and London, 1977, p. 186. Sutton, Imre (Ed.): Irredeemable America. The Indians Estate and Land Claims. Albuquerque, 1985.
- ^ a b Kappler, Charles J.: Indian Affairs. Laws and Treaties. Washington, 1904. Vol. 2, p. 594. http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/Vol2/treaties/sio0594.htm
- ^ Kvasnicka, Robert M. and Herman J. Viola: The Commissioners of Indians Affairs, 1824-1977. Lincoln and London, 1979, p. 43.
- ^ Paragraph 33 Report to the President by the Indian Peace Commission, January 7, 1868
- ^ Kvasnicka, Robert M. and Herman J. Viola: The Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1824-1977. Lincoln and London, 1979, p. 52 and pp. 49-55.
- ^ "Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 (Horse Creek Treaty)" (PDF). Retrieved August 28, 2016.
{{cite web}}
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suggested) (help) - ^ Robinson, Doane: Official Correspondence Pertaining to the Leavenworth Expedition into South Dakota in 1823 for the Conquest of the Ree Indians. South Dakota Historical Collections, Vol. 1 (1902), pp. 179-256.
- ^ Stands In Timber, John and Margot Liberty: Cheyenne Memories. Lincoln and London, 1972, p. 162. See also p. 54.
- ^ Fowler, Loretta: Arapahoe Politics, 1851-1978. Symbols in Crises of Authority. Lincoln and London, 1982, p. 56. See also Bass, Althea: The Arapaho Way. A Memoir of an Indian Boyhood. New York, 1966, p. 11. Anderson, Jeffrey D.: One Hundreds Years of Old Man Sage. An Arapaho Life. Lincoln and London, 2003, p. 72.
- ^ http://www.ndstudies.org/resources/IndianStudies/standingrock/1851treaty.html
- ^ a b c Paragraph 35 REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT BY THE INDIAN PEACE COMMISSION, JANUARY 7, 1878
- ^ Hyde, George E.: Life of George Bent. Written form His Letters. Norman, 1987, pp. 137-163 and 164-222. Hoig, Stan: The Sand Creek Massacre. Norman, 1961.
- ^ Mallery, Garrick: Picture-writing of the American Indians, 10th annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1888-89. Washington, D.C., 1893, pp. 572-573. For an exploit by Sitting Bull about two years after the signing of the treaty, see Greene, Candance: Verbal Meets Visual: Sitting Bull and the Representation of History. Ethnohistory, vol. 62, No. 2 (April 2015), pp. 217-240. Picture on page 228.
- ^ Red Cherries' Account to George Bird Grinnell, Envelope 118, George Bird Grinnell Papers. Southwest Museum Library, Los Angeles, page 1.
- ^ See e.g. Bettelyoun, Susan Bordeaux and Josephine Waggoner: With My Own Eyes. A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History. Lincoln and London, 1998, pp. 53-54. Fowler, Loretta: Arapaho and Cheyenne Perspectives. From the 1851 Treaty to the Sand Creek Massacre. American Indian Quarterly, Fall 2015, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 364-390, p. 367.
- ^ Hunkpapa chief Running Antelope alone killed 17 Arikaras in the years 1853-1865. Mallery, Garrick: Picture-writing of the American Indians, 10th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1888-89. Washington, D.C., 1893, pp. 572-573.
- ^ Meyer, Roy W.: The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri. The Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras. Lincoln and London, 1977, p. 108.
- ^ Serial 1220, 38th Congress, 2. Session, Vol. 5, House Executive Document No. 1, p. 408.
- ^ Medicine Crow, Joseph: From the Heart of the Crow Country. New York, 1992, p. 84.
- ^ Serial 1308, 40th Congress, 1st Session, Vol. 1, Senate Executive Document No. 13, p. 127.
- ^ Kappler, Charles J.: Indian Affairs. Laws and Treaties. Washington, 1904. Vol. 2, pp. 998-1003. http://digital,library.okstate,edu/kappler/Vol2/treaties/sio0998.htm
- ^ American Memory. Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1784 to 1894. See the different tribes. http://memory.loc.gov./cgi-bin
- ^ Kappler, Charles J.: Indian Affairs. Laws and Treaties. Washington, 1904. Vol. 2, pp. 1008-1011. (Treaty with the Crows, 1868). American Memory. Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1784 to 1894. Map: Montana 1. http://memory.loc.gov.
- ^ Weist, Tom: A History of the Cheyenne People. Billings, 1894, p. 84 and p. 104. Serial 4015, 56th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 918-919. Compare the location of the Northern Cheyenn Reservation with the boundaries of the Crow territory of 1851.
- ^ Fowler, Loretta: Arapahoe Politics, 1851-1978. Symbols in Crises of Authority. Lincoln and London, 1982, pp. 66-67.
- ^ Serial 4015, 56th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 852-853.http://memory.loc.gov.
- ^ Kappler, Charles J.: Indian Affairs. Laws and Treaties. Wasington, 1904. Vol. 1, pp. 264-265.
- ^ "Explainer: The Protest Against the Dakota Access Pipeline". BillMoyers.com. Retrieved 2016-10-28.
- ^ "Dakota Access pipeline opponents occupy land, citing 1851 treaty". Reuters. 2016-10-24. Retrieved 2016-10-28.
- ^ "Standing Rock tribe sues over Dakota Access pipeline permits". Retrieved 2016-10-28.
- ^ "Life in the Native American oil protest camps". BBC News. 2016-09-02. Retrieved 2016-10-28.
External links
- "Treaty of Fort Laramie with Sioux, Etc., 1851." 11 StatsAffairs: Laws and Treaties — Vol. II: Treaties. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904, pp. 594–596. Through Oklahoma State University Library, Electronic Publishing Center.
- Map of North America following the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie at omniatlas.com