The Great Sioux War: Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the Winter That Ended the Plains

In December 1875, Washington set a deadline. Every Lakota band still living beyond the agencies, out in the unceded hunting grounds, was to report in by January 31, 1876, or be treated as hostile. In the depth of a northern plains winter the order was barely delivered and never obeyed. The country at stake lay between the rivers, the Powder, the Tongue, the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn: some of the richest buffalo range on the northern plains, left to the Lakota by the treaty of 1868 along with Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, the heart of everything that is. Custer's expedition of 1874 had found gold in the Hills, and the treaty had become an obstacle.

The war runs from the March morning when Crook's cavalry struck a village on the Powder River, through the Sun Dance camp on the Rosebud and the Greasy Grass, where Lakota and Cheyenne fighters destroyed Custer's battalion in June, and on into the hungry campaigns of fall and winter, when the soldiers went after the villages, the horses and the food. By spring the bands were coming in. Crazy Horse surrendered at Camp Robinson in May 1877 and was bayoneted by a guard that September, and Sitting Bull led his people north across the line into the Grandmother's country. The Lakota and Cheyenne had won the battle the whole country would remember. The winter that followed decided the war.