(from chapter 4, “The Sioux Transform the Milk River Agency, 1871–1877.”)
Hunkpapas and their close Lakota allies, the Sans Arcs and Blackfeet (Sioux), did not participate in the 1866–1868 engagements led by Red Cloud’s Oglalas and other Lakota, Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho allies in the Powder River area to close the Bozeman Trail and Forts Reno, Kearny, and C.F. Smith. After the Army closed the Bozeman Trail and abandoned Forts Kearny and C.F. Smith in August 1868, Red Cloud eventually went to Fort Laramie in November and signed the famous treaty.[i]
The 1867–1868 treaty commissioners sent Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean de Smet to meet with the non-treaty Hunkpapas, and in June 1868, he visited their camp south of the Yellowstone River near the mouth of the Powder River. Sitting Bull told de Smet that the Lakotas should sell no land, woodcutting along the Missouri River for steamboats needed to stop, and the Army must abandon Forts Rice and Buford. Civil chiefs Four Horns and Black Moon and Sitting Bull, the head war chief, refused to accompany de Smet to Fort Rice to meet with three treaty commissioners waiting there. Instead they dispatched a delegation of lesser chiefs, headed by war chief Gall.
Gall and the others met with the commissioners, and although the treaty was read to them, it seemed clear that Gall and the Hunkpapa leaders had no real understanding of the contents. When given the opportunities to address the commissioners, Gall unequivocally asserted Hunkpapa terms for peace similar to those told earlier to Father de Smet: the Army had to abandon its posts on the upper Missouri and prohibit any further steamboat travel. These conditions openly conflicted with the treaty, yet for unclear reasons Gall and the others signed it. Gall was not authorized to sign for the primary chiefs, and he did not appear to be signing on their behalf. The non-agency Hunkpapas had clearly stated their objections to the 1868 treaty, both to De Smet and to the treaty commissioners at Fort Rice, and the signing by Gall and the other lesser chiefs in no way signified their acceptance of the treaty.[ii]
Sitting Bull continued to raid Fort Buford, until September 1870, when he led his last war party there. By this time, these northern Hunkpapas had changed to a defensive military posture towards whites and the federal government: they would take up arms only if attacked or if their bison lands were threatened. This transformation reflected the western shift of permanent residence away from Fort Buford. By 1870, they lived almost exclusively in the lower Yellowstone and Missouri River prairies of eastern Montana Territory, far from white settlements.
Hunkpapas and their Sans Arc and Blackfeet Lakota allies had quickly pushed the Crows out of the Powder River watershed, and were aggressively moving west towards the Bighorn River area. Lakotas established primary control of the bison-rich lands between the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers as far west as the Musselshell River. In the summer, they hunted primarily south of the Yellowstone with non-agency Oglala, Sicangu, and Minneconjou kinsmen and Cheyennes. Hunkpapa winter camps now increasingly centered south of the Missouri River in the lower Big Dry and Red Water Creeks, directly across from the mouths of the Milk and Poplar Rivers.[iii]
Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas were in this region in May 1871, when Standing Buffalo met with Milk River Agent Simmons. Lieutenant William Quinton had just arrived from Fort Shaw, a military post built on the Sun River in 1867, just west of present-day Great Falls, with Milk River Agency annuity provisions. According to Quinton, Standing Buffalo declared that his Dakotas [something missing] and Struck by the Ree’s Yanktons were merely “the advance guards of the Sioux Nation, which are expected to settle in Montana . . . they are all coming.” Standing Buffalo explained that Sitting Bull and 800 Hunkpapa lodges were just across the river, and “moving in this direction.”
Even more extraordinarily, Standing Buffalo correctly explained that many Lakotas joining Sitting Bull were disenchanted Oglalas from the Red Cloud Agency. He explained that Red Cloud had just visited the Great Father in Washington, and that “Red Cloud saw too much. The Indians say that these things cannot be: that the white people must have put bad Medicine over Red Cloud’s eyes to make him see everything and anything that they pleased.”[iv]
In fact, Red Cloud had demanded and was permitted a June 1870 trip to Washington, D.C., to address a number of injustices concerning the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Most important was Red Cloud’s demand that his agency be established on the North Platte River near Fort Laramie. This placed the Indian Affairs Office and Interior Department in a ticklish position, for these were lands in present-day southeastern Wyoming far removed from the Great Sioux Reservation. Standing Buffalo was correct: Red Cloud achieved nothing from his trip, and his standing among his Oglala tribesmen deteriorated, as did their condition, while federal officials stalled on the agency location.[v]
[i]Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 95, 98-107, 121-25, 132, 134-36; Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 70-82.
[ii]Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 76-84.
[iii]Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 84, 90-2.
[iv]Lieutenant William Quinton to Lieutenant M. C. Danbourne, Post Adjutant, Fort Shaw, May 19, 1871, NARA, RG 75, M234, LRCIA, Roll 491 (1871), frames 1114-15.
[v]Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 79-86, 88-89, 92-95, 100-110, 114-31,
