The cave fight at Slim Buttes was one of the most poignant episodes of the Great Sioux War. American Horse, a respected Oglala sub-chief, held off soldiers from a cave with a bullet in his stomach, refusing to surrender until his women and children were safe. When he finally emerged, he was dying; he is said to have held his own intestines in his hands while negotiating the terms. His death symbolized the desperate straits the Oglala faced in the autumn of 1876 following Little Bighorn.
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.
American Horse mortally wounded and died; several Sioux killed; 2 US soldiers killed
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