The Army's attempt to enforce the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty by excluding miners from the Black Hills collapsed under the sheer volume of the gold rush in 1875. The Army expelled miners repeatedly but they returned. Sioux war parties raided mining camps. Gen. Sheridan acknowledged privately that it was impossible to keep miners out. The government's failure to enforce the treaty — and its subsequent ultimatum demanding the Sioux surrender the Black Hills — set the stage for the Great Sioux War of 1876.
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.
Several miners killed in Sioux raids; some confrontations between Army and miners
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