The Yellowstone Expedition of 1873 was a United States Army military operation conducted during the summer of 1873 in Dakota Territory and Montana Territory. The expedition's primary objective was to survey a route for the Northern Pacific Railroad along the Yellowstone River. The military column, under the overall command of Colonel David S. Stanley with Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer as second in command, was tasked with protecting and supporting the Northern Pacific Railway survey party as it surveyed the north side of the Yellowstone River west of the Powder River in eastern Montana.
The expedition involved a substantial military force of 1,530 soldiers comprising cavalry, infantry, and artillery units, accompanied by 275 mule-drawn wagons, 353 civilians involved in the survey work, and 27 Indian and mixed-blood scouts. The column departed Dakota Territory in June 1873, equipped with 60 days' rations and two 3" rifled Rodman guns for artillery support. During the expedition, the U.S. Army forces encountered Native American resistance from the village of Sitting Bull, estimated at anywhere from 400 to 500 lodges, who opposed the survey efforts.
The military engagement resulted from the collision between westward expansion efforts, represented by the Northern Pacific Railroad survey, and Native American resistance to the intrusion into their territory. The expedition's successful completion of its surveying mission while maintaining a military presence demonstrated the U.S. Army's commitment to facilitating railroad construction across the western territories, even in the face of organized Native American opposition.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
us: 4; native: 20
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