United States or Tunisia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Although they listened to the prophecy of Sitting Bull, they really did not expect that the soldiers would find them. Chief Gall, a fine man, of the Hunkpapas, was head war chief; his aide was Crow King. Crazy Horse commanded the Northern Cheyennes. The head of the Miniconjou Sioux was Lame Deer. Big Road commanded the Oglalas.
They were a small fighting band, but he was a noted brave. His count showed more coups, or strike-the-enemy feats, than the count of any other warrior of the Oglalas. Before he retired from war, his coups numbered eighty. He was born in 1822. His Sioux name was Makh-pia-sha, meaning Red Cloud.
So certain was the Government that the road would be opened, that even while the council with the Red Cloud Oglalas was in session, there arrived at Fort Laramie Colonel Henry B. Carrington of the Eighteenth Infantry, with seven hundred soldiers. Red Cloud saw the camp. "Where are those soldiers going?" "They are sent to open the new road and build forts."
Some of the Sioux chiefs did sign a treaty for the new road. The only Oglalas who signed were subchiefs. Red Cloud did not sign. The United States went ahead, anyway. Troops were sent forward, to begin the work of building the road. Red Cloud, with his Oglalas and some Cheyennes, surrounded them and captured them; held them prisoners for two weeks, until his young men threatened to kill them.
Then there was a wide strip of land which had been sold, with the small Lower Brulé reservation in the east end of it. Then, side by side against the Nebraska line, south, there were the Rosebud reservation, for the other Brulés; and Chief Red Cloud's Pine Ridge reservation, for his Oglalas, and various bands. The Sioux numbered twenty-five thousand.
The soldiers marched upon them right through the blizzards, and no place seemed safe. The other bands were being captured. The walking soldiers and the big-guns-that-shot-twice were everywhere, to south, east and west. The Crazy Horse Cheyennes and Oglalas were taken. They agreed to go upon the reservation.
He was a Hunkpapa Sioux, of the Teton division in which Spotted Tail was leader of the Brulés and Red Cloud of the Oglalas. But Sitting Bull was no chief. By his own count he laid claim to being a great warrior; by the Sioux count he had powerful medicine he could tell of events to come. And this was his strong hold upon the Sioux. They feared him.
The last treaty, signed only this year, had left them five tracts, as reservations. On the Missouri River at the middle north line of South Dakota there was the Standing Rock reservation, where lived Sitting Bull and many of the Hunkpapas and Oglalas whom he had led. Next to it, on the south was the Cheyenne River reservation, for the Miniconjous, Without Bows, Two Kettles, and others.
Word Of The Day