Although it’s displayed without carvings, the Lakota Sioux saw a different set of portraits: The mountain was known as Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe (the Six Grandfathers). The six entities honored at Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe are the supernatural deities responsible for Lakota creation: North, South, East, West, Above (sky), and Below (Earth).

In addition to the supernatural deities, six chiefs [Chief Conquering Bear, Little Crow, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Lame Deer]  are honored because they bravely went to war against white settlers to save their way of life.

WARS

I. The Sioux Wars tell the dramatic story of a people. falling to overwhelming odds and the destruction of their food source. The wars had five distinct phases, the first beginning soon after the signing of the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1851. This treaty allowed safe passage for white settlers along the Oregon Trail. An unfortunate incident broke the peace. A cow escaped from a Mormon party in 1854 and it wandered into a Sioux (Brule) camp. The Mormons searched for it and became afraid upon seeing Indians. They returned to their own camp and reported the incident to the army at Ft. Laramie, telling the soldiers the cow had been stolen. Lt. John Grattan led a force into the village and tried to arrest the man whom he insisted had killed the cow. When the man claimed innocence and refused to turn himself in, Grattan ordered cannons to be fired upon the Indians. Chief Conquering Bear, a spokesman for the Sioux, was killed. The Sioux were so incensed they launched a counterattack and killed the entire detachment. In retaliation, in September of 1855, General William S. Harney took 600 troops and overran a Brule village at Blue Water, killing 85 people and taking 70 women and children captives.

II. In the east, the Santee Sioux were inundated with white settlers constantly wanting more of their land and defrauding them. During a disagreement about how the situation was being handled, four braves killed five settlers. In August 1862, the Santee Sioux opened the war with raids on white settlements and trading posts. Little Crow, chief of the Santee, led several assaults on Ft. Ridgely. The troops inside the fort fired howitzers at the Indians, killing as many as 100 warriors. The Santee continued to raid, drawing the ire of General Henry H. Sibley who arrived at Ft. Ridgely with 1500 troops.

III. Little Crow led more successful raids, but finally, Sibley moved against the Santee and at Wood Lake, the warriors were no match for the artillery of the army. Many of the scattered Sioux escaped and fled to the Dakota Territory or further on to Canada. Those who stayed were ordered hanged by President Abraham Lincoln. On December 26, 1862, at Mankato, Minnesota, the largest mass execution in American history took place. Thirty-eight Santee Sioux were hanged. General Sibley continued to pursue the Santee remnants. In the spring of 1864, General Alfred Sully defeated a coalition of tribes at Whitestone Hill and Killdeer Mountain. Once again Native Americans paid dearly for trying to keep their lands.

IV. The opening of the Bozeman Trail led to the Red Cloud War in the years following the Civil War. A new trail discovered by John Bozeman brought more miners and settlers to Montana. The trail shortened the trip from the east but went through the heart of the hunting grounds of the Cheyenne and Sioux. Oglala Tetons, Hunkpapa Tetons, and Brule Tetons joined with the Northern Cheyennes and Northern Arapahos to raid white migrants and military patrols along the trail. In June 1866, Red Cloud and other chiefs met with Army officers at Ft. Laramie to discuss the new trail. While some of the chiefs signed a non-aggression treaty, Red Cloud left to prepare for war. The army sought to reinforce Ft. Reno and to add two new forts, Ft. Phil Kearney and Ft. C.F. Smith to the Bozeman Trail route.

V. In 1866 Crazy Horse sought to deceive the soldiers sent out to find wood. The men from the wood train thought that the Indians were going in one direction and when they tried to avoid the party of warriors they were led directly into an ambush. A relief party led by Capt. William Fetterman fell into another trap and the entire 80-man party was killed. More soldiers were sent, this time with breech-loading rifles, a new type of weapon that was much easier and faster to load and shoot than the old type of rifle. The Native warriors first saw these weapons at the Hayfield and Wagon Box Fights. While the warriors chased both parties back into their forts, they suffered many casualties.

Finally, with the transcontinental railroad south of the Platte River near completion, the government relented. The Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868 granted Red Cloud’s demand for abandoning the Bozeman forts in exchange for stopping the raids. The Sioux burned down the forts once they were abandoned.

With the arrival of the railroad, the source of the Plains Indians’ lifestyle, the buffalo, was disappearing. Not only was the new railroad frightening these once numerous animals, but the soldiers and settlers were also hunting them by the thousands. Additionally, by the 1870s, both sides had violated the Ft. Laramie Treaty. Now surveys for another railroad, the Northern Pacific, would make matters even worse by bringing in more settlers to homestead on the surveyed land. But it was the discovery of gold in 1874 in the Santees’ sacred Black Hills that would be the event to cause the next round of fighting.

Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse led the Native warriors. General William T. Sherman and General Philip H. Sheridan led the federal troops. War broke out when the military ordered Indian hunting bands to come into the agencies or be declared hostile. The Indian warriors won a battle at Montana’s Powder River in March of 1876 with heavy bluecoat casualties. Then in the late spring, a three-pronged campaign was started with General George Crook coming from the south, Col. John Gibbon coming from the west, and General Alfred Terry with Col. George A. Custer advancing from the east. Crook’s troops arrived from the south along Rosebud Creek.

On June 17, 1876, Crazy Horse with 700 Sioux and Cheyenne braves moved against the 1,000-man force of General Crook. The Indian warriors’ well-organized, repeated attacks drove Crook’s men back to their base with numerous casualties. The Sioux and Cheyenne now regrouped on a meadow called Greasy Grass along the Little Bighorn River. The total encampment contained 7,000 Natives with approximately 1,800 of them warriors.

On June 21st Terry’s and Gibbon’s columns united. Major Marcus Reno’s scouting party reported the general location of the Indian camp and Terry sent Custer’s 7th Calvary to cut them off while the rest of the troops approached from the north. When Custer’s scouts discovered the encampment, instead of waiting for the rest of the army, Custer organized an immediate attack. His plan proved disastrous and on June 25th Custer’s entire force of approximately 200 men was wiped out. This would be the last major victory for the warriors led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall.

In July of 1876, a force under Col Wesley Merritt intercepted and defeated 1000 Cheyennes who had been planning to join Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. On September 8th Crook captured and defeated American Horse’s band at Slim Buttes. In November of the same year, Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyennes were routed by Crook. Crazy Horse lost at the Battle of Wolf Mountain in January of 1877 and Lame Deer was defeated in Montana.

Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa Sioux fled to Canada. Crazy Horse surrendered in 1877 only to be bayoneted to death while resisting orders for his imprisonment. Sitting Bull returned in 1881 and surrendered at Ft. Buford. He was moved to Standing Rock Agency and was killed in 1890 while resisting arrest.

The final chapter of the Sioux Wars would be played out in 1890. Wovoka, a Paiute mystic, started the Ghost Dance Religion. He taught that the Ghost Dance would bring the “old world” back. The dead would come alive, the buffalo would return and all whites would be removed from the plains. In order to hasten the event, Native American warriors should dance the ghost dance. To an impoverished, defeated and despondent people, most living on reservations, the new religion gave them hope. It was also thought that the ghost dance shirts would protect the wearer from white men’s bullets.

In November of 1890, the U.S. Government banned the Ghost Dance on the Sioux reservations. Indian police were ordered to arrest Sitting Bull, a staunch supporter of the Ghost Dance. In the scuffle that ensued, Sitting Bull and six of his warriors were killed. Big Foot was also to be arrested but before soldiers arrived, he and his followers set out for the Pine Ridge Agency.

General Nelson Miles, now in charge of the Division of Missouri, sent the 7th Cavalry under Major S.M. Whiteside to intercept the band of Miniconjous. When the cavalry finally found the tribe the soldiers ordered them to camp for the night at Wounded Knee Creek. On the morning of December 29th, while Big Foot and other leaders were meeting with the Army officers, a rifle accidentally discharged. Colonel James Forsyth who had arrived to take charge ordered the troops to shoot. Hotchkiss artillery was used to cut down those men, women, and children trying to flee the carnage. One-hundred-fifty people including Big Foot had been killed.

The Trail of Tears was a series of forced displacements of American Indians between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. As part of the Indian removal, the ethnic cleansing was gradual, occurring over a period of nearly two decades.

In 1838 Cherokee people were forcibly moved from their homeland and relocated to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma.  They resisted their Removal by creating their own newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, as a platform for their views.  They sent their educated young men on speaking tours throughout the United States.  They lobbied Congress and created a petition with more than 15,000 Cherokee signatures against Removal.  They took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that they were a sovereign nation n Worcester vs. Georgia (1832).  President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court decision, enforced his Indian Removal Act of 1830, and pushed through the Treaty of New Echota.

In 1838 Cherokee people were forcibly taken from their homes,  incarcerated in stockades, forced to walk more than a thousand miles, and removed to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died and many are buried in unmarked graves along “The Trail Where They Cried.”

At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida–land their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. But by the decade’s end, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian Territory” across the Mississippi River. This difficult and often deadly journey is known as the Trail of Tears.

During the purchase of Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and Mississippi, the United States recognized four Native American tribes in Louisiana:

the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, and the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe of Louisiana.

However, The State of Louisiana recognized eleven tribes: the Adai Caddo Indians of Louisiana, the Bayou Lafourche Band of BCCM, the Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb, the Clifton Choctaw Tribe of Louisiana, the Four Winds Cherokee Tribe, the GrandCaillou/Dulac Band of BCCM, the Isle de Jean Charles Band of BCCM, the Louisiana Band of Choctaw, the Natchitoches Tribe of Louisiana, the Point au Chien Tribe, and the United Houma Nation. 

Although each tribe had different characteristics and cultivated their land, the US government committed genocide against them or forced them to live on plantations as they stole their land. This morbid process was known as the “Trail of Tears.”

The Louisana purchase nearly doubled the size of the country. The purchase included land from fifteen present U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. Out of this empire were carved in their entirety the states of Louisiana,  Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Oklahoma; the area included most of the land in Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Minnesota.

The Sioux wars ended in 1890,  nearly 40 years.

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The creation of Mount Rushmore is a story of struggle — and to some, desecration. The Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota Sioux, the original occupants of the area when white settlers arrived.

For some, the four presidents carved in the hill angered Sioux tribes because they represent negative symbolism–disrespect. The Sioux have never had much luck dealing with white men.

The United States broke up the territory after gold was discovered in the Black Hills. In the Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government promised the Sioux territory that included the Black Hills in perpetuity. Perpetuity lasted only until gold was found in the mountains and prospectors migrated there in the 1870s. The federal government then forced the Sioux to relinquish the Black Hills portion of their reservation.

Mount Rushmore