The Great Sioux War of 1876, also known as the Black Hills War, was a series of battles and negotiations occurring in 1876 and 1877 involving an alliance of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne against the United States. The conflict arose from the US government's desire to obtain ownership of the Black Hills, where gold had been discovered. As settlers began to encroach onto Native American lands, the Sioux and Cheyenne refused to cede ownership, leading to military confrontation.
The war consisted of many battles and skirmishes, with the Battle of the Little Bighorn—often known as Custer's Last Stand—being the most storied encounter between the US Army and mounted Plains Indians. This battle represented a significant Indian victory. However, the article notes that the Indians ultimately did not prevail in the broader conflict. While historians traditionally place the Lakota at the center of the conflict due to their numbers, some Native Americans believe the Cheyenne were the primary target of the American campaign.
Despite the Indian victory at Little Bighorn, the Americans leveraged national resources to force the Indians to surrender. The US military achieved this primarily by attacking and destroying Indian encampments and property rather than through direct military victory. The war took place under US Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes, and concluded with the Agreement of 1877.
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.
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