The Rise of the Lakota — Part 3

Away away with all these cobweb tissues of rights of discovery, exploration, settlement, contingency, et cetera. The American claim is by the right of our Manifest Destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self government entrusted to us. John O'Sullivan Welcome to Ancient to Recent. My name is Joseph Parkinson and today we continue our story of the Lakota.

To support the show, subscribe today and leave a comment or rating. Episodes of Ancient to Recent are out every Saturday and are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. By 1815, the Lakota were becoming something very different from the people the Americans had first encountered on the Missouri. Their world was changing, and at the centre of that transformation were two things, the Black Hills and the horse.

For the Lakota, the Black Hills were not simply another mountain range. They were sacred. The Black Hills occupied a central place in Lakota spiritual traditions and oral histories, but the hills were also practical. They contained water, shelter, woodland, and perhaps most importantly of all, access to the vast herds of bison that sustained life on the plains. The Lakota had been moving W from the Missouri River during the 18th century. By the end of that century, Lakota communities, together with their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies, had become increasingly powerful around the Black Hills and the surrounding plains. But they were not moving into an empty wilderness. The region had long been used by other Indigenous nations, including the Crow, Kiowa, Shoshone, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. The Black Hills were part of a much larger world of hunting grounds, trading routes, alliances, and rivalries, and as the Lakota expanded W, they were entering that world as another power competing for access to its resources. The geography of the Plains made this competition particularly important.

The Great Plains could be extraordinarily productive, but they could also be brutally unpredictable. Rainfall could make the grasslands plentiful, drought could render them barren, and when the Plains dried, animals as well as people responded. Bison migrated to areas where water and forage remained available. The Black Hills, with the higher rainfall, Woodlands and permanent water sources, offered a refuge within the wider plains environment. For a people whose lives were increasingly tied to the bison, that made the hills enormously valuable. The Lakota did not simply hunt the bison, they followed them. Where the herds went, the Lakota went. And this was where another revolution was transforming Lakota society, the horse.

The horse had been spreading across the plains for generations. By the early 19th century, that had changed the possibilities of life on the Great Plains. A horse could carry a hunter, it could carry a teepee, it could carry meat, it could carry possessions, and perhaps most importantly of all, it could make a bison hunt vastly more efficient. The horse did not simply make life easier, it changed the scale on which plain society could operate. For the Lakota, horses became wealth, they became status, they became instruments of war, and they became one of the foundations of their expanding power. Horse riding became an important part of warfare and prestige. A man who could acquire horses increased the wealth of his family.

A community with large herds possessed mobility that its enemies had to reckon with. And the Lakota became increasingly skilled horsemen. They were no longer simply a people who possessed horses. They were becoming a horse society. But there was a problem. The horse was an extraordinary source of power. It was also another mouth to feed. Horses and bisons depended on many of the same resources. Grass, water, land, and the plains did not provide these resources evenly throughout the years.

A large horse herd could therefore become a burden as well as an asset. The more horses the Lakota possessed, the more land and water they needed. The more people they supported, the greater the pressure became, and the more dependent they became upon bison, the more important access to productive hunting grounds became. The Lakota had always been mobile, but the horse changed the meaning of mobility. Now mobility was not simply a way of following the herds. It was a way of managing an entire society built around people, horses, and bison.

If one valley became exhausted, they could move. If the bison moved, they could follow. If drought struck, they could seek better pastures. And if other peoples occupied the land they needed, the Lakota could displace them. This helped explain why Lakota expansion during the early 19th century could be so violent. The Lakota were not expanding simply because they wanted more territory. In the abstract, they were competing for access to the resources on which their society depended. However, this does not mean that every Lakota conflict was simply a struggle for resources.

Warfare on the planes also involve retaliation, prestige, horse raiding, political alliances and long standing rivalries. And other Indigenous nations understood exactly what was happening to them. Lakota expansion could look like a direct threat to their own survival. The result was a series of conflicts across the northern and central plains. The Lakota fought with the Crow, the Pawnee, the Shoshone, the Omaha, and other neighboring people.

The Kiowa were also pushed southward as Cheyenne and later Lakota power expanded across the region. The boundaries of the plains were therefore constantly shifting. One people moved, another followed. An alliance formed. An old enemy became a new ally. A hunting ground became a battlefield. And behind it all was the same fundamental problem. There was only so much grass, only so much water, only so many bison. The Lakota therefore faced a paradox.

Their growing wealth depended upon mobility, but their growing wealth also increased. Their demands upon the land. The horse made them more powerful, but horses required resources. Their population was growing, but more people required more food. The herds of bison provided abundance, but the more heavily the planes were used, the greater the pressure became. And so the Lakota developed another advantage. They were exceptionally good at incorporating people into their expanding world. The Lakota did not exist as one centralized state. They were made-up of many bands and communities with their own leaders and interests.

But these communities could form alliances, absorb outsiders, and build relationships with neighboring peoples. Cheyenne and Arapaho communities became important allies. Other indigenous peoples could join Lakota communities or establish relations with them. And the horse made all of this easier. Mobility meant that Lakota power could spread over enormous distances. By the 1820s and 1830's, the transformation was becoming increasingly impossible to ignore.

The Lakota were no longer simply one of several indigenous peoples operating around the Missouri. They were becoming one of the dominant powers of the Northern Plains, and their growing power was beginning to attract the attention of another expanding force, the United States of America. The United States was also moving W American traders were following the rivers, fur companies were establishing posts, and increasingly American merchants were discovering that there was money to be made from something the Lakota already understood extremely well bison.

The Beaver trade was declining, the Buffalo robe trade was growing, and the centre of the American fur economy was beginning to move West. The Americans therefore came looking for trade. The Lakota saw something else opportunity. A new source of guns, a new source of ammunition, a new source of manufactured goods, and perhaps most importantly, another group of outsiders whose presence could be manipulated to Lakota advantage.

The Americans had spent the previous decades trying to make their sovereignty in the centre of the North American landmass real. Now they were discovering that the peoples they had once imagined as inhabitants of the lands of the Louisiana Purchase were becoming a major political and economic power in their own right. The Americans had their thoughts. The Lakota had their horses. The Americans had their trade companies. The Lakota had the bison, and between them lay one of the most valuable pieces of territory on the Great Plains, the Black Hills.

The struggle for the West was entering a new phase. In 1837, smallpox once again returned to the Missouri Valley. The disease was carried by crews of steamships piloted by American fur trading companies. The trading companies refused to let the, as they saw it, minor matter of lethal pathogens present amongst its employees result in a lengthy and costly quarantine. With every stop, the steam has deposited its goods and transmitted its diseases that spread through the indigenous traders, wiping out whole communities. By the time the disease had burned itself out, some 20,000 indigenous people, mainly children, had perished. The Lakota, however, were less affected than their neighbors. Their migratory lifestyle, coupled with vaccines distributed by U.S. officials after the 1832 Indian Vaccination Act, offered them a level of protection not enjoyed by other people's.

The smallpox epidemic greatly weakened the Lakota's rivals, especially the Pawnee and Omaha, and the Lakota had every intention of taking advantage. Shooken by disease, the Pawnee and Omaha were soon being pushed back by Lakota raids. Keen to secure the Great Plains and their bison for themselves, the US government policy towards the Pawnee in Omaha was to encourage them to give up their land in return for signing away vast tracts of hunting grounds. Indigenous peoples would be allocated a reservation where they would be encouraged to take up farming and the Christian faith.

These people, once sustained by a diet of wild fruits and abundant game, would be issued government rations by federal agents that consisted of canned meat, bacon, lard, coffee and flour. US agents watched as the Lakota reigned death on the Pawnee in Omaha, burning their villages, stealing their horses and driving the survivors off. But Lakota expansion was brought about not just by opportunism, but by necessity. The wet 1820s and 30s had given way to a drier spell. With the passing of the rain, the abundance of grass on the green Plains diminished.

The Lakota needed more land to sustain their herds and were not going to stand on ceremony when survival was at stake. Where the Lakota reacted with aggression, others turned to desperation. Unable to mount the military challenge of the Lakota, the Otos entered a spiral of poverty, trading what little they had for whiskey. U.S. officials noted the outbreak of unrest on the Great Plains, the violence, desperation, and, as they saw it, lethargy. But U.S. officials did not attribute the sorry state of affairs to a combination of the consequences of the policies of Washington and environmental factors. Instead, they saw native peoples either turning to violence or giving into despair, and drew overtly racist conclusions. The actions of the Plains people, so US agents believed, were due to their base savagery.

From this, U.S. officials concluded that such people have been passed over by history. Surely the natives of the Great Plains were neither capable nor deserving of survival. The Pawnee population had been devastated by epidemic disease and continue to decline under pressure from warfare, displacement, and later US expansion. With one of the Lakotas great rivals diminished, it seemed that once again fate had cast its lot, for the Lakotas stretched before the Lakota was a vast domain, rich in bison with an abundance of game and endless grass for their herds.

Drawn by the migration of the bison, the Lakota drew further into the West and away from their base on the Missouri Valley. Their focus now turned to the Black Hills, which became the centre of their world. But the appeal of the Black Hills was not limited to the Lakota. The Crows were a warrior people with a martial tradition much like the Lakota. Also, much like the Lakota, they were themselves a horse born society. The Crows skill and horseback was if anything superior to that of the Lakota and their extensive trade networks gave them ready access to abundant supplies of firearms and ammunition.

The Crow presented a significant challenge to Lakota expansion not seen since the days of the Iroquois in the mid 18th century, and yet the Lakota possessed advantages the Crows could not draw upon. By the 1830's the Lakota's population was approaching 15,000. The Crows had peaked at 10,000 and was in steep decline due to smallpox. The Crows were further pressed by fighting a war on 2 fronts, caught in a vice between the expanding Lakota and the advancing Black Feet.

For all their martial might, the Crows lost territory and by the 1840s have been pushed out of the Black Hills. It was during these decades of expansion and conflict the two young Lakota men began to emerge they would eventually become the most famous Lakota leaders of the 19th century. Crazy Horse was born into the oglala Lakota, probably around 1840, in or near the Black Hills as a young man, he developed a reputation for courage and skill in battle, but there was something distinctive about him. Crazy Horse did not seek well for prestige in the way some leaders did.

He became known for his personal bravery, his discipline, and his refusal to to accept the growing American presence on the Kota land. His resistance would eventually make him one of the principal war leaders of the Lakota. Around a decade older was another warrior from the Lakota. His name was Sitting Bull. He had already established himself as a hunter and warrior while still young, and by his early adulthood he was becoming an influential figure within his community. But Sitting Bulls importance would extend beyond warfare. He was also becoming a spiritual leader. And unlike some Lakota leaders who were prepared to negotiate with the Americans, Sitting Bull became increasingly opposed to the growing American presence and to the idea that the Lakota's should abandoned life on the Plains. The two men were very different.

Crazy Horse would become one of the Lakota's greatest battlefield leaders. Sitting Bull would become a warrior, diplomat and spiritual figure. But they shared something fundamental. Neither believed that the Lakota should simply surrender their independence because an expanding American government had decided that the Plains belonged to the United States. In the mid 19th century, the United States of America was a bundle of contradictions, a society at the forefront of capitalism, but one where feudalism and aristocracy was held in pride of place. A nation born of liberty but carried on the backs of millions of enslaved Africans, slavery had existed in almost every human civilization.

Native Americans practised slavery before Europeans arrived, and continued to enslave each other long after European colonization began. Europeans brought their own slaves with them, captured and traded from African kingdoms, brought in chains to work the cotton plantations of the Deep South. By the time of American independence, slavery was dying out in the northern states, and even some in the South began contemplating the life without human bondage. Opponents of slavery, unable to bring about abolition, comforted themselves with the thought that slavery would perish on its own, while slaveholders worried about a system that seemed bound to a previous age.

For slavery in the 18th century suffered from a crucial flaw. It was deeply inefficient. A slave could take up to 10 hours to produce a single pound of lint if working by hand. But in 1793, a Massachusetts invented by the name of Eli Whitney invented a new machine called the cotton gin. Mr. Whitney's gin allowed a slave to produce 50 lbs of lint a day. Production boomed as production soared, so too to demand for slaves.

It was a Northerner who taught the South how to make slavery pay. Slavery was revitalized as an industry. The Southern cotton plantations became a major powerhouse of American economic development and southern plantations were soon producing 3/4 of the raw cotton in the world. the United States had been somewhat peripheral to the global economy post independence. Now, the cotton boom placed the US at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, providing cotton for the burgeoning mills of Great Britain. As demand for cotton surged, so too did demand for slaves, and with more slaves, more fertile land was needed to grow cotton. But much of the most fertile land was inhabited by native peoples living either beyond the bounds of the United States or on land where US sovereignty existed in name only. If the US was to cash in on the boom in cotton production, then more land would be needed to be cleared to meet demand, and the people who called these lands home would have to go. American officials had contemplated the removal westward of native peoples since before 1776. Indeed, British restrictions on American colonists have been a contributing factor to American calls for independence. Now the cotton boom turned theoretical arguments into economic necessity.

General Andrew Jackson, hero of the War of 1812, fought numerous brutal campaigns of expulsion against Native peoples. In 1828, Jackson was elected the 7th President of the United States and turned expulsion from expedience into policy with the 1830 Indian Removal Act. What resulted was the mass expulsion, or to give it its proper name, ethnic cleansing of 10s of thousands of indigenous peoples from their native lands, a tragedy remembered by Native Americans as the Trail of Tears.

The government in Washington struggled to legally define Native Americans. the United States, with few exceptions, was not willing to confer citizenship on Native Americans and therefore rights to property and protection by the law. Congress did not extend US citizenship to all Native Americans until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Nor did the US want to recognise Native peoples as members of a separate nation with sovereign rights to their land and freedom to enter into alliances or seek the protection of other states.

Native Americans therefore, existed in a sort of legal limbo. To attempt to square this logical circle, the United States founded the Office of Indian Affairs on the 11th of March 1824. Within the War Department, Native peoples were to be overseen by federal agents, subject to treaties and corralled into reservations where their movements could be contained and their transformation into Christian farmers could be overseen, all under the guise of the United States civilizing mission. Such a system would also facilitate the confiscation of NATO people's lands.

While susuasion the guilty consciences of liberals and bleeding hearts in Washington and New York, many of those who served in the United States very own Colonial office were far from hostile to Native Americans. Many sincerely believed that they were doing the best they could to help Indigenous peoples. It was, however, such agents on whose shoulders felt the responsibility of enforcing the removal and confinement of Native peoples into reservations, where many Native people sank into poverty, despair, alcoholism, sickness and ultimately death. These agents were, after all, just following orders. There was no lack of hand wringing and conscience racking undertaken by U.S. officials over the removal of indigenous peoples.

Displacing people was clearly immoral, and newspapers filled with horror stories sent back from federal agents and missionaries of the cruelty of the removals. Editorials and pulpits rang out with outrage as journalists and preachers denounced the campaigns as an affront to decency and a stain on the honor of the nation. However, Western expansion was vital to the strategic and economic interests of the United States, but economic interest is rarely enough to steal the troubled hearts of men.

A justification was needed. John O'Sullivan was a journalist who, in 1845, advanced the argument of what he described as the United States Manifest Destiny. the United States was, so Sullivan believed, a nation chosen by God, imbued with virtues denied others, and a providential mission to spread over the vastness of the entire continent from sea to shining sea. It was therefore, the United States mission and duty to establish itself as a shining city on the hill, a beacon of liberty to serve as God's example unto the nations of the world.

Western expansion, and with it native expulsion, was both inevitable and moral. Because God had willed the United States as His chosen nation, anything that stood in the path of the progress of the United States was an affront to the will of God. With O'sullivan's words to soothe the consciences of U.S. officials, the American Eagle was free to bear it's talons against native peoples, safe in the thought that the suffering of the indigenous nations was part of the Lord's divine plan. In the decades between the wars of 1812 and 1861, southern slave interest in northern capital, messianic religious fever, and nationalist ambition, spurred on by a dream of empire, combined to push the native peoples in the South and Mississippi Valley into a life of abject subjugation. The Spanish Empire was the first European empire established in the Americas.

Spain, initially an ally of Napoleonic France, soon learned the hard way the cost of entering a marriage of convenience with histories most notorious political philanderer. Napoleon deposed the Bourbon monarchs of Spain in an effort to install his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne in 1808. What followed was a brutal war on the Iberian Peninsula pitting Portugal, Spain and Britain against Napoleon's legions. The invasion of Spain sent shock waves to the vast Spanish Empire in the Americas, with many loyalists rushing to establish provisional governments to support the mother countries war effort. Others saw an opportunity not to profess their loyalty, but to establish their independence.

Mexican rebels rose against the Spanish crown in 1810, beginning a bloody 11 year civil war that resulted in the establishment of Mexico as an independent state on September the 27th, 1821. But independence did not bring stability. The Spanish may have gone, but that did not mean that all the former lands of New Spain, stretching from Costa Rica to California, had recognized the new authority of Mexico City and its short lived Emperor Augustine the 1st.

Over the next several decades, officials in Mexico City would spend almost as much time fighting secessionist movements as they did fighting each other. The northern Mexican territory of Tejas Bonde, Texas was a backwater of the Mexican state, sparsely populated with the Mexican government to absorb in its own problems to properly exert control. Concerned by the ever advancing power of the United States, Mexican authorities conceived through a plan that seemed, on paper at least, to have many benefits.

They would invite American settlers to move to Tejas and on the condition they they swore loyalty to the government in Mexico City and converted to Roman Catholicism, these settlers will receive enormously generous terms. A huge land grant, thousands of acres per head of family, accompanied by a 10 year tax exemption, was more than enough to induce thousands of Americans to move to Mexico. It turned out that Mexico was worth a mass, but though these offers were enough to get the settlers to come, once they had arrived and received their bounty, there was little incentive for them to stay loyal to Mexico.

Mexico in the early 19th century was a land in near constant state of anarchy and the settlers cultural and economic links ran east and north, not South and West. Soon rebellion broke out in Texas. The Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana advanced at the head of the Mexican army to reassert Mexican authority and teach the American settlers a lesson. But the Texans were made of stern stuff. Rallied by their leader, Sam Houston, and fired by the sacrifice of the doomed defenders of the Alamo, the Texans defeated the Mexican army and one Texan independence on the 21st of April 1836. Defeat in the Texan War of Independence may have rid Mexico of a troublesome province, but Texas didn't take any of Mexico's problems with her In 1845, Texas joined the United states, and with an ambitious imperial power now on its border, the Mexican government knew it would not be long before war broke out.

The following year, U.S. troops entered territory claimed by both countries, and fighting broke out with Mexican troops 11 Americans were killed in the initial clash. In may 1846, Congress declared war James Polk, president of the United States, had the war he so craved, and within two years the US had defeated Mexico, occupying Mexico City on the 18th of September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe, the end of the war holds a rare place of shame and scandal in the annals of history for the sheer brazenness of its rapacity.

The head of the US diplomatic team that negotiated the treaty, Nicholas P Tryst, describe the terms as so harsh he felt a sense of personal shame for his part in negotiating them. The treaty forced Mexico to relinquish a full 55% of its land to the United States. 525 1000 square miles of land were handed over to Washington. It was almost as large a territorial expansion as the Louisiana Purchase in 18 O3. With the Treaty of Guadalupe, the battle for domination of the North American landmass seemed to have been permanently and decisively settled in the United States favour. the US had bought off the French, seen off the British and driven off the Mexicans, but the land the Lakota inhabited seemed of little interest to the United States.

The land was too dry for the production of cotton, and the herds of bison alone were not enough to draw American settlers in great numbers. It seemed for a moment that American expansion might pass the Great Plains by. A conversation began amongst American intellectuals and policy makers as to what the natural frontier of the United States might be. For some, the entirety of the North American landmass and nothing less would do.

Some even dreamed of annexing Canada and absorbing Mexico. But others peered across the Great Plains into the West and saw little of interest. The United States was already a nation on the rise. She possessed a growing population, booming economy, and few natural predators. Some imagine the Mississippi as being the natural and lasting frontier of American expansion, beyond which was little more than grass, rocks and natives. But in far off California, just days before the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed, an American Carpenter named James W Marshall discovered gold.

The Californian Gold Rush about to begin. Along dusty roads they came at first a trickle wagons piled high with goods. But these newcomers were not the Americans the natives were used to. Their wagons were not bulging with goods to sell, but instead with tools for farming and carpentry. These Americans came not as single men, soldiers, officials and traders, but instead with wives and children. For the newcomers had come to stay.

First they came in their hundreds, then thousands, then in the 10s of thousands, a flood, a torrent of white settlers speaking a multitude of languages from English, German, Dutch, Italian, Danish and Polish, all heading West. The news of the discovery of gold had sent shock waves through American Society. Now the West had gold to offer and land aplenty. Enough opportunity to make any who so willed a millionaire. Western migration was the 19th century's get rich quick scheme and there were hundreds of thousands who dreamed of striking it big and living out their days in luxury. As they came they transformed the environment around them. They brought oxen and mule that devoured great quantities of grass.

Their wagons rutted the prairies, casting up vast clouds of dust. They fell trees for firewood. They pitched their tents by water flows and defecated into the streams, causing an outbreak of cholera that devastated the native relations, and they chased away the bison, her first. Native peoples had been welcoming to the newcomers, but soon the toll on the land and disturbance to the delicate ecosystem drew anger. As tensions rose, government officials began to worry about a violent backlash. If the Lakota rose against the settlers, there would be little Washington could do. the US had a thin chain of thoughts scattered across an enormous frontier, with relatively few soldiers available to intervene quickly. Ranged against thousands of Lakota, they would stand little chance, and Lakota violence would lead the settlers to arm themselves.

A spark could set off an entire plane and also severely weaken US control over newly acquired territories. In September 1851, thousands of Lakota. Cheyenne, Arapaho. Crowe, Asibwane, Mandan, Hidance and Arikara gathered beside the northern Plate River. More than 10,000 indigenous people. It was an extraordinary gathering. The Americans called it the Horse Creek Treaty. Officially it was the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

The meeting had originally been planned at Fort Laramie, but there were simply too many people, too many horses and not enough grass. So the council was moved around 30 mile east to the mouth of the Horse Creek, and there the United States hoped to come to an accommodation with the native peoples that might regulate the western migration of settlers. The settlers were coming. They were crossing indigenous lands in ever greater numbers. They were cutting timber, their cattle, consuming grass, hunting game, and increasingly coming into conflict with people whose lands they were crossing.

The Americans wanted the roads to remain open. The native peoples wanted compensation for what those emigrants were taking. And so the bargain was straightforward. the United States would recognize the territories of different indigenous nations. It would promise to protect them from American settlers. And in return, the nations would allow roads and military post to be established through their territories and agreed to peaceful passage for the immigrants.

In other words, the Americans could cross, but they would have to pay for the privilege. At least that was the idea. And this is where the treaty became particularly revealing, because the United States did not simply want peace, it wanted a system. For generations, the Lakota and other planes people had organized themselves through bands, families, communities, alliances and personal relationships. Political authority was real, but it did not necessarily look any thing like the political structures Washington recognized.

The Americans wanted something they could understand. They wanted nations, they wanted territories. And, crucially, they wanted recognized leaders. Article 6 of the treaty required the participating nations to select principal or head chiefs through whom what the treaty called national business could be conducted. To American officials, this made sense. One nation, one treaty recognized leaders. Negotiations could happen with those leaders.

Agreements could be signed, promises could be made, and responsibility could be assigned. It was a very American way of trying to make sense of a political world. It was considerably more complicated than the categories Washington wanted to assign it to. And there was another problem. The Americans believed that if they could establish relationships with particular chiefs, they could make these men the intermediaries between Washington and their people.

Goods could be distributed, medals could be presented. Prestige could be attached to cooperating with the United States. The government could, in effect, strengthen the authority of leaders it considered useful. And that would make governing the planes easier. But there was a fundamental misunderstanding here. The Americans were imagining A hierarchy, but the Plains people were not thinking in the same terms. A chief did not simply possess the power to command every member of a Bass nation. He had to maintain relationships. He had to persuade.

He had to retain the respect of his people. And if his people decided not to follow him, a medal from Washington was not going to change that. The treaty also tried to put something even more complicated onto paper land. For the first time, the United States formally mapped out territories associated with the different Plains nations. The Lakota had their territory, the Cheyenne had theirs, the Crow had theirs, and so on.

On an American map, this looked neat. Lines, borders, nations, territories. But the Plains did not work like a map. Bison moved, People moved. Horses moved. Hunters crossed boundaries. War parties crossed boundaries. Alliances shifted, and the treaty itself acknowledged that the tribes retained rights to hunt, fish and travel beyond the territories it described. The boundaries were therefore less like modern state borders than an American attempt to put a complicated and Mobile World onto paper.

In return, U.S. officials agreed to pay the native peoples. the United States agreed to provide the participating nations with $50,000 a year in provision merchandise, domestic animals, and agricultural implements. Originally, the the agreement was supposed to last for 50 years. That was the understanding at Horse Creek. But the treaty that eventually came back from Washington was different. Congress reduced the annuity period from 50 years to 10, with the possibility of another five years at the president's discretion.

But the indigenous people did not agree to these new changes. They were not invited to renegotiate. They were simply informed of the new and much less generous terms. It was a bitter lesson. And there was another problem. The treaty itself was never formally ratified by the Senate. The agreement negotiated at Horse Creek therefore occupied an awkward legal position from the beginning for indigenous peoples. The men who had sat opposite them at Horse Creek were the men negotiating on behalf of the United States and the Great Father in Washington. They had agreed to terms, so when Washington later changed those terms, the Americans could regard it as an amendment to a treaty.

The people on the plains would regard it as something very different. The agreement had been changed after the negotiations were over, and this was not simply a disagreement over money. It was at the heart of the relationship between the two sides because the Americans believed they had created an agreement, the Lakota and other nations believed that they had reached an understanding, and those are not necessarily the same.

The treaty was signed on the 17th of September 1851, and the Americans could tell themselves that they had solved the problem. There was one significant flaw. the United States had promised to protect indigenous nations from American depredations, and it had promised that the tribes would be compensated for the enormous disruption caused by the immigrant traffic. Yet the American population moving W was growing faster than the government's ability or willingness to control it. The treaty had drawn lines across the plains, but the people crossing these lands were not going to stop. And the bison were not going to wait. The Lakota had agreed to let the Americans pass through their country.

What they had not agreed to was the transformation of their homeland. And increasingly, to the Lakota, that seemed to be exactly what was happening. For a moment it seemed that perhaps a solution had been reached, but soon the Lakota realised that the sheer size of Western migration was beyond anything that they had ever imagined and represented an existential threat to their way of life. In 1852 alone, around 70,000 people passed Fort Laramie on their way West.

The passage of so many people in cattle was destabilising the delicate ecological balance the Lakota way of life depended on. The planes that once teamed with bison as far as the eye could see now appeared enmity. And then came the news of Congress's decision to reduce the terms of the treaty. An insult, a slap in the face to a proud people. Lakota leaders found restraining such men as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, long advocates of confrontation with the Americans, an ever greater challenge.

If the Americans could go back on their word, then what were the treaties the Americans pressured the Lakota to sign worth nothing more than the paper they were written on? With tension rising and promises broken, it would not take long to turn wounded pride into dead bodies. In the summer of 1854, a cow wandered into a Lakota camp. It belonged to a Mormon emigre travelling W. The Lakota killed and ate it. The owner complained.

The owner wanted the person responsible handed over for punishment. But this was on Lakota land, and on Lakota land it was Lakota law that rained. Settlers and U.S. officials were furious, but the laws of the United States did not find the Lakota people. The Lakota refused to surrender the man who killed the cow. In response, Lieutenant John Gratton, known for his hatred of Native peoples, marched out from Fort Laramie with a detachment of soldiers. With 31 men, Graton entered a Lakota camp. Graton's high handed and arrogant attitude insulted the Lakota.

The situation became increasingly tense. A shot was fired. Exactly who fired the first shot remains uncertain, but once the shooting began, the confrontation was over. Almost immediately, Graton's entire command was killed. Their mutilated bodies left a rot on the planes. The fragile peace established by the Fort Laramie Treaty had collapsed. Washington, fearing the challenge the Lakota posed to US authority in the West, set upon a policy of swift retaliation.

But the American government faced a problem. The Lakota were not some small, isolated community that could simply be ordered into submission. They were a major military power on the northern Plains, across the enormous territory between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. The American military presence was remarkably thin. The government had thousands of miles of frontier to defend, thousands of immigrants to protect, and the United States had very few soldiers available.

Secretary of War Jefferson Davis decided to send someone who could be trusted to deal with the Lakota threat quickly, General William S Harney. Harney was an experienced soldier. He was also a man who believed in military might. A show of were forced to teach the native peoples who was in charge. In 1855 he was given command of an expedition against the Lakota. His mission was simple, restore American authority and make sure the immigrant trails remain open. Harney found a Lakota village near Blue Water Creek. There were around 250 people, men, women, children, warriors, family.

Harney's troops surrounded the village. The Lakota tried to negotiate, but the fighting began. What followed became same known to the Americans as the Battle of Ash Holland. To the Lakota it had a different name, the Hani Massacre. The American soldiers attacked, the Lakota warriors resisted, women and children attempted to flee, and by the end of the shooting, 86 Lakota men, women and children were dead. Dozens more women and children were taken as hostages. the United States had avenged Gratin, but Harney's expedition would have unintended consequences. The Lakota had rarely been confrontational with the United States, preferring trade and cooperation. But in short order, promises had been broken, honour had been repaid with insults, and Lakota blood had been shed. To the growing band of Lakota who turned to Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the answer was simple. No matter what the American said, the time for passing the peace pipe and appealing to the benevolence of the Indian agents and the Great Father in Washington had passed. If the Lakota were to survive in the Great Plains and they would have to fight to defend their way of life, why had U.S. officials settled on a policy of military confrontation to deal with the Lakota?

U.S. policy had traditionally been to avoid open confrontation with Native peoples where possible, preferring compromise and peace to open conflict. Why the sudden change? the United States in the 1850s was the society on edge, and one issue seemed poised to push the United States over the abyss. For decades, Americans had argued over slavery. The Western expansion made the argument impossible to avoid. Every time the United States acquired a new territory, the question reasserted itself. In newly acquired territory, would slavery be permitted or forbidden?

The answer mattered enormously because slavery was not simply a moral issue. It was also a question of political power. Under the Constitution's 3/5 Clause, enslaved peoples were counted as 3/5 of a person for purpose of representation and direct taxation. They could not vote, but their numbers increase the representation of states where slaveholders held power. So the expansion of slavery westward threatened to change the balance of power in Congress.

Northerners feared that if slavery spread into the western territories, slave states would maintain their political influence indefinitely. Southerners feared the exact opposite. They believed that if slavery was prevented from expanding the political balance. Would eventually turn permanently against them. And so the question of the West became inseparable from the question of slavery. In 1854, President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas Nebraska Act.

It allowed settlers in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether slavery was to be permitted. The principle was called popular sovereignty. Let the settlers decide. But there was an obvious problem. Who would these settlers be? And what if thousands of people arrived specifically to make sure that the vote went their way? And that is exactly what happened. Pro and anti slavery settlers crossed into Kansas. They were no longer simply migrating W to build farms, they were migrating to win a political battle and bleeding Kansas as it became known became a killing field. Raids, murders, burned buildings, armed bands, neighbor fighting neighbor, and deep resentments that sent a clear message to the the two sides of the slavery debate. What's more, Bleeding Kansas gave the opposing camps martyrs, those who had sacrificed their blood either to make the nation free or to save the Southern way of life. Increasingly, the language of American politics became ever more divisive.

Fighting broke out on the Senate floor. Congressmen beat each other with canes. Northerners and Southerners were no longer simply disagreeing over policy. Increasing numbers of Americans were beginning to see the people on the other side as traitors. Southerners feared that Washington would eventually destroy the institution on which their society and economy depended. Some began talking openly about secession. The word itself had once seemed almost unthinkable. Now it was entering mainstream political discussion in the North.

Meanwhile, patience was running out. The idea that slavery could continue expanding across the continent was becoming unacceptable to many northerners. America was becoming 2 political societies occupying 1 country, and both believed the other was a threat. At precisely the moment when the United States needed to maintain control of the West, it was becoming increasingly uncertain whether it could maintain control of itself. And there was a serious problem because on the Plains the Lakota were watching.

The treaty had failed to stop the emigrants, the treaty payments had been altered, the Buffalo herds were diminishing, and now American soldiers had fought their way into Lakota territory. the United States could not afford a major war in the Plains, but it could not afford to appear weak either. So Washington chose a familiar solution. In March 1856, Lakota and other Sioux leaders gathered at Fort Pierre to meet U.S. officials. the United States wanted peace, but this was no longer the confident piece of Horse Creek.

The balance had changed. Both sides understood that the Fort Laramie Treaty had not settled the West. The Americans wanted the emigrant roads open. The Lakota wanted their country left intact. And neither side was prepared to give the other what it wanted. But with US attention turning, S Washington knew it could. I'll afford a protracted and bloody war in the West. Lakota leaders also feared the consequences of open war and sought to negotiate for the release of Lakota women and children taken hostages by Harney.

For the moment, both sides wanted the same thing, peace. In March 18569 Lakota bands reached an agreement with Harney at Fort Pierre. The Lakota agreed to surrender those accused of serious crimes against Americans, returned stolen property, and keep away from the main immigrant routes. In return, the United States agreed to release prisoners who were not accused of serious crimes and restore the arrangement for their annuities. It was a compromise.

Neither side had achieved everything it wanted, but both sides had reason to accept it. The Americans wanted the Plains quiet. The Lakota wanted time. But beneath the surface, tension continued to grow. In 1857, the Lakota gathered for their own council to decide their future. As they spoke, the leaders recounted the history of their relationship with the Americans, the pressure US expansion and put on their way of life, the broken promises, insults, worthless treaties and violence.

The Dakota hardliners were increasingly finding a receptive audience amongst warriors tired of backing down to American demands and accepting US interference in Lakota affairs. The Lakota were determined to hold the line and prevent US expansion into the Black Hills. But the Lakota had made a terrible discovery. Goals. A decision was made. Any native that showed goal to whites was to be killed. The border was to be closed.

Lakota leaders communicated the decision to U.S. officials without, of course, telling them of the discovery of the precious metal. They further informed U.S. officials that any violation of Lakota territory was to be considered an act of war. But if the United States were to leave the Lakota alone, then the Lakota would not interfere with the western flow of settlers. Once again, Lakota and other Native peoples hoped the American encroachment on their lands would finally be halted. But Gold Bison and US internal affairs will continue to affect the fate of the Lakota and other Plains peoples. In 1860, an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States on the Republican ticket. The Republican Party opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories, although Lincoln did not campaign in 1860 on a programme of immediate abolition of slavery in the states where it already existed.

So hated was Lincoln in the South that in many states he did not even appear on the ballot. For many white Southerners, the election of a Republican opposed to the expansion of slavery was the final indication that the political balance of the Union was turning against them. Within weeks of Lincoln's election, meetings were called in the South to discuss the Southern response. On the 20th of December, a convention of the people of South Carolina gathered in Charleston to discuss the future of their state.

A vote was cast on South Carolina's place within the Union. The convention voted unanimously, 169 to 0, for secession from the United States of America, where South Carolina LED. Soon other states followed. Mississippi on the 9th of January, Florida on the 10th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 26th, Texas on the 1st of February, Virginia on April 17th, Arkansas on the 6th of May, North Carolina on the 20th, and Tennessee on the 8th of June. 11 states in total seceded from the Union and established the Confederate States of America. The most bloody conflict in American history was about to begin, and the impact on the Lakota would be devastating. Thank you for listening to Ancient Recent, My name is Joseph Parkinson.

To support the show, leave a comment or rating. Next week we will continue the story of the Lakota. Episodes of Ancient Recent are out every Saturday and are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.