Analysis: Treaty of Fort Laramie

Date: April 29, 1868

Authors: William T. Sherman, et al.

Genre: law; legislation

Summary Overview

From the beginning of European colonization in the Americas, conflict with the American Indian tribes that inhabited the land was constant. As Americans spread into the western frontier in the nineteenth century, that conflict increased, especially when the trails that immigrants took to the West passed through territory inhabited by Indians. In 1868, the federal government sent out a peace commission, whose job it was to sign treaties with the tribes in order to facilitate their move onto reservations, out of the way of settlement. One of the groups that had proven most troublesome to settlers was the Lakota Sioux, led by Red Cloud. During the years 1866–68, Red Cloud had fought against the US Army because the government had blazed the Bozeman Trail through Lakota hunting grounds without permission. In spring 1868, a treaty conference was held at Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory, to end the war and convince the Lakota to settle on the reservation in Dakota Territory.

Defining Moment

After the Civil War concluded in 1865, many Americans headed west, as the construction of railroads and the passage of the Homestead Act in 1863 had made establishing a farm an attractive option for many living in the East. At the same time, the discovery of gold in Montana started a rush of people looking to come west to find their fortunes. This influx of settlers meant that more and more Americans were passing through territory used by Indian tribes, such as the Sioux tribes and the Arapaho. From 1865 to 1867, a congressional committee studied the so-called Indian problem and recommended that a peace commission be sent out to negotiate treaties that would result in the Indian tribes being confined to reservations in order to allow non-Indian settlement to proceed unimpeded.

While this was happening, the Montana gold rush was beckoning settlers up the Bozeman Trail, through the Sioux and Arapaho hunting grounds near the Powder River in north-central Wyoming. During the 1850s, mountain man Jim Bridger had warned that a trail through the region was a bad idea, but in 1863, John Bozeman, acting with the approval of the federal government, blazed a trail directly through the Powder River Basin. The tensions heightened with the news that Colonel John M. Chivington's troops had massacred about 150 Arapaho and Cheyenne peacefully camped on Sand Creek in Colorado Territory in November 1864.

Warfare began in the region with the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors attacking Platte Bridge Station in June 1865, killing twenty-six American troops. Three columns under the command of Brigadier General Patrick Connor were dispatched, but arrived at what they dubbed Fort Connor in poor condition and demoralized by their trip through the Dakota Territory's Badlands. In 1866, the federal government called for a peace conference at Fort Laramie, but at the same time sent Colonel Henry B. Carrington with 1,300 troops, which only angered Red Cloud and convinced him to continue fighting. In December, Red Cloud and war leader Crazy Horse defeated Captain William J. Fetterman and his eighty troops, but the following summer saw a change in the Sioux fortunes, as the US troops were outfitted with new quick-firing breech-loading rifles. After a number of poor showings, Red Cloud and his people agreed to meet with the peace commission, under the leadership of General William T. Sherman, at Fort Laramie.

For the Sioux tribes, the central point of the treaty would be that they would be allowed to settle in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. To the Sioux, there is no more sacred spot on earth than the Black Hills. For the federal government, the central point of the treaty would be that peace would be established and the Sioux and other tribes would not be able to leave their reservations, thus allowing western immigration to continue.

Author Biography

General William Tecumseh Sherman, the hero of the Civil War March to the Sea, was commander of the Missouri District, encompassing the region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, after the war. He was convinced that the only practical policy of the United States toward Native American peoples was to confine them all to reservations and make war against any Indians that dared leave. As the highest profile member of the peace commission that had negotiated the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 and was now sent to make peace with Red Cloud at Fort Laramie, the influence of Sherman's ideas is plainly visible in the treaty, with its strict conditions that the Sioux remain on their reservation in the Dakota Territory and no longer venture into their former hunting grounds or otherwise disrupt the continued immigration of easterners and that the Sioux be assimilated through education of children in boarding schools and conversion to Christianity.

Document Analysis

Written on April 29, 1868 and signed by the Ogallala Lakota on May 25, 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which ended Red Cloud's War and established the Great Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory, set forth the terms under which the Ogallala Lakota Sioux, along with the Arapaho, Brulé Sioux, Miniconjou Sioux, Yanctonais Sioux, would settle on the reservation and promise not to leave nor make war against the US Army or settlers who were coming across into what had been their territory.

The treaty sought to guarantee peace between the United States and the tribes by setting forth the reservation's boundaries; encouraging the Indians to take up settled agriculture by guaranteeing individual Indians land; and promising the establishment of an agency to oversee the following: the reservation, a school and other facilities, distribution of the annual goods and cash annuity for the next thirty years, and the provision that Indian children be compelled to attend school and receive agricultural instruction. In return, the Indians agreed: not to oppose the construction of railroads across the Plains, so long as they did not cross their reservation; not to attack any settlers proceeding west; not to kidnap white women or children or scalp or otherwise harm white men; and not to oppose the presence of military forts south of the North Platte River.

The Great Sioux Reservation, which encompassed nearly the entire western half of present-day South Dakota and included the sacred Black Hills, was guaranteed to the Sioux tribes forever. The treaty gave the Sioux a degree of sovereignty, with the federal government promising that nobody “shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in [this] country.” Additionally, any lands in the Great Sioux Reservation could not be sold unless the sale was approved by three-fourths of the adult men of the tribes. Any Indians or non-Indians who violated the terms of the treaty were to be arrested and punished. However, it also took away much of the autonomy the Sioux had always prized, as they now could not leave the reservation without being subject to warfare at the hands of the US Army, and they now promised “to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school.” Further, the treaty mandated that nearly all of the Sioux would engage in settled agriculture, which was nearly the antithesis of their prior semi-nomadic, hunting-based culture.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Bantam, 1970. Print.

Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Print.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984. Print.

Wilkinson, Charles F. American Indians, Time, and the Law: Native Societies in a Modern Constitutional Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1987. Print.