The Lakota stole the Black Hills. They took them by force from people who already lived there, and they held them for barely a hundred years before somebody else took them away again. That is an irrefutable historical fact. But it is equally true that the United States government promised the Lakota they could keep the Black Hills forever—and then someone found gold.

At that point, the government held a secret meeting at the White House, cooked up a phony report about murdered settlers, and manufactured a war out of thin air. A war whose only real purpose was to steal the Black Hills. That, too, is not a fringe conspiracy. It is documented fact.

But before any of that could happen, there was a much older story of theft, one that began long before the first prospector ever climbed into those pine-covered slopes. The Crow originally split off from the Hidatsa long ago; exactly when is debatable, but by the mid-1700s they were living near the Bighorn Mountains in present-day Wyoming and Montana. According to Crow tradition, their first known contact with white men happened in 1743 near present-day Hardin, Montana—which, as fate would have it, sits just a few miles from the Little Bighorn battlefield. That Bighorn country was the heart of the Crow homeland, not the Black Hills.

The Black Hills lay on the far eastern edge of Crow territory, which at one point they also shared with the Kiowa. That changed by the mid-1700s, first with the arrival of the Arapaho and Cheyenne, and later with the Lakota. Most of the fighting between the Crow and the Lakota, especially during the early nineteenth century, was over hunting ground much farther west, near the Powder River country—land the Lakota eventually took. But the Lakota did not defeat the Crow and settle the Black Hills overnight.

It was a slow squeeze. Their own winter counts record a chief named Standing Bull reaching the Black Hills in the winter of 1775, and from there, over the next few decades, the Lakota gradually pushed out the Arapaho and Cheyenne, a process mostly finished by around 1815. Outside sources corroborate the account. A French trader named Jean Baptiste Truteau, writing in the mid-1790s, described the Teton Sioux—the Lakota—dominating the country west of the Missouri River.

When Lewis and Clark passed through in 1804, they met another French trader who had spent the previous winter in the Black Hills, but he had wintered with the Cheyenne. Did that mean the Lakota had not yet occupied the hills? Not necessarily. By 1804 the Lakota and Cheyenne were already allies, conducting joint raids against the Crow hundreds of miles to the west.

There was never one decisive battle that gave the Lakota control of the Black Hills, and no single uncontested date. But by the 1770s, at the very least, the Lakota had a presence there. They never built a city or lived there year-round. Summers were spent on the Great Plains following the bison herds; winter brought them back to the hills, which served like an oasis—sheltered valleys, fresh water, game, and abundant timber.

It was also where they conducted many of their religious ceremonies. A winter refuge, a grocery store, a lumber yard, and a church rolled into one. The Lakota called the Black Hills the heart of everything that is, and they still consider it sacred to this day. The fact that they took the hills by force does not change that, and neither does the fact that the hills were later taken from them.

The government acknowledged that sacred claim in 1868, when the Fort Laramie Treaty recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation and promised the Lakota they could keep it forever. The treaty also set aside vast tracts of unceded territory to the west, where the non-treaty bands could hunt. For a few years, the arrangement held. The Lakota hunted buffalo in the unceded lands, conducted ceremonies in the hills, and largely stayed out of conflict with white Americans.

General Crook himself, asked by a reporter in August 1875 how the off-agency bands were behaving, answered that they had been quiet. Asked if there was any danger of an Indian war, he said, “Not just now. ” Between the end of Red Cloud’s War and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, nearly all the fighting between the Lakota and white people happened when white people pushed into Lakota territory—army woodcutters, survey crews, prospectors. There were exceptions: a few horse-stealing raids into Nebraska, a couple of killings at the Red Cloud Agency in 1874.

But the image of the Lakota riding around slaughtering homesteaders in the mid-1870s simply does not match the record. What changed things was gold. The country was in bad shape. The panic of 1873 had ushered in a depression; bankruptcies were frequent, crime was up, farm prices were down, partly due to one of the most severe grasshopper plagues ever to hit the Midwest.

Hundreds of thousands of unemployed men, many of them Civil War veterans, were desperate for work. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills, the public clamor to open the land was immense. As historian James Donovan put it, “Some people in the government began to consider another option, buy the Black Hills from their owners. After all, jobs were scarce, other western fields had cooled, and an infusion of gold would be good for the precarious economy.

” Unrestrained newspaper accounts trumpeted potential fortunes, even claiming that Black Hills gold could pay off the national debt. At first, the government tried to do things legally. In September 1875, they met with the Lakota and offered to purchase the Black Hills for six million dollars. The Lakota refused.

And that is when the government decided to take it by force. President Ulysses S. Grant had taken office in 1869 on a pledge to keep the West free of war, and he had staked his administration on a peace policy meant to assimilate the Plains nations into white civilization. But the outcry for annexation brought him to a crossroads.

As historian Peter Cozzens wrote, Grant “had no legal reason for seizing the Black Hills, so he invented one. Convening a secret White House cabal to plan a war against the Lakotas. Four documents held at the Library of Congress and the United States Military Academy Library leave no doubt the Grant administration launched an illegal war and then lied to Congress and the American people about it. ”

In that secret meeting, which included General Sheridan, General Crook, the Secretary of War, and Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler, the administration made a conscious decision not to enforce the laws keeping prospectors out of the Black Hills.

Just a few days later, on November 9, 1875, an inspector for the Indian Bureau named Irwin Watkins—who worked directly for Secretary Chandler—filed a report. His official job was to check the account books at the Indian agencies in Montana and the Dakotas, essentially counting rations. But his report claimed the non-treaty bands were “wild and hostile,” that they “richly merit punishment for their incessant warfare and their numerous murders of settlers and their families,” and that they scorned the idea of white civilization. There was not a drop of evidence for any of it.

Yet this false report became the official justification for everything that followed. Three weeks later, in December 1875, the government issued an ultimatum ordering all bands in the unceded territory to report to the agencies. The timing was not accidental. It was the dead of winter, and even if the Lakota had wanted to obey, most of them could not have traveled.

When they did not report, they were declared hostiles. The army came marching in with the deliberate purpose of making war. Eight weeks after the ultimatum, the bands were declared hostile, and the campaign that would end at the Little Bighorn was underway. The Lakota who gathered in the valley of the Little Bighorn in June 1876 were not there to plot war.

They were hunting bison, which is what their entire lives revolved around, and they were on land they had every legal right to occupy under the Treaty of 1868. Just days before, when they fought General Crook on the Rosebud, they had been on territory where they were legally allowed to hunt, at least prior to the ultimatum. The government’s own faulty intelligence had convinced army commanders they were chasing only a few hundred renegades. In reality, they were marching toward the largest gathering of Plains Indians ever assembled on the continent.

George Armstrong Custer was not supposed to be there. Just a few weeks before the expedition got underway, he had testified before Congress against President Grant’s own brother, Orvil, who was implicated in corruption at the Indian agencies. Grant retaliated by yanking Custer off the expedition. Custer had to go through Generals Terry and Sheridan, essentially begging to be allowed to ride along, and Grant only permitted it with Terry in overall command.

So when Custer rode out with the Seventh Cavalry, he was not executing the president’s orders so much as trying to salvage his own career. The orders Terry actually gave him were vague to the point of being almost open-ended. Terry wrote: “It is impossible to give you any definite instructions in regard to this movement, and were it not impossible to do so, the department commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy, and ability to wish to impose upon you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy. He will, however, indicate to you his own views about what your action should be, and he desires that you should conform to them unless you shall see sufficient reason for departing from them.

” It was vague enough for Terry to cover himself no matter the outcome. He gave Custer a great deal of discretion, and Custer used it. On the morning of June 25, 1876, Custer divided his regiment. He sent Major Marcus Reno with three companies to charge the southern end of the village, took five companies himself toward the northern end, and held Captain Frederick Benteen’s three companies in reserve with the pack train.

The plan, as Custer had done before, was to capture the women and children and force the warriors to break off the fight. Around the time Reno began his charge into the valley, two of the Hunkpapa leader Gall’s wives and three of his children were shot dead. Many people believe the shots came from the Arikara scouts riding with Reno, among them a man named Bloody Knife. Bloody Knife was Custer’s favorite scout, half Lakota on his father’s side, who had grown up with the Hunkpapa—Sitting Bull’s people.

He had been tormented mercilessly for being half Arikara, most memorably by a young man named Gall, who once jumped him, beat him, stripped him naked, and spat on him. Gall later led a war party that killed two of Bloody Knife’s brothers. Bloody Knife eventually got a measure of revenge, leading soldiers to Gall’s lodge, where Gall was bayoneted and left for dead. Bloody Knife tried to put a bullet into him for good measure, but an officer stopped him, figuring Gall was already gone.

Gall survived and became one of the great leaders at Little Bighorn. In the timber along the river, as Reno’s charge collapsed into a desperate defensive fight, Bloody Knife was shot in the head. His blood and brains splattered across Reno’s face. Reno fell apart.

His command routed back across the river to the bluffs, where they dug in and held on, joined later by Benteen. Custer rode north along the bluffs, descending at Medicine Tail Coulee, only to find that the village was far larger than anyone had imagined—and that he was not at its far end but in the middle of it. He sent the famous message to Benteen: “Come on. Big village.

Bring packs. ” It was too late. The warriors, their families already sent to safety in the hills, turned on Custer’s five companies. Within a matter of hours, Custer and every man under his immediate command—more than two hundred troopers—were dead.

The exact manner of Custer’s death remains a mystery. Some claimed he killed himself with a pistol he carried; others said he was killed by this warrior or that one, or by a woman, or shot down trying to cross the river. None of it has ever been proven. If any genuine document existed showing that Custer took his own life—a burial report, a suppressed affidavit—it would be among the most famous documents in American history.

No such document has ever surfaced. His widow, Libby, outlived him by more than fifty years, spending most of that time defending his memory, writing books, giving lectures, casting Custer as a martyr hero. Many men who survived the battle kept their mouths shut, whether out of respect or fear is unknown. It was not until after Libby’s death that survivors finally began to talk.

But even then, no conclusive evidence emerged. After more than a century of exhaustive research, the truth is simply that nobody knows exactly when or how Custer died. What is known is that the battle did not have to happen. A chain of bad decisions and delayed actions across every level of the campaign brought it about.

Reno should have pressed his charge. Benteen should have come faster. Custer should have done more reconnaissance and not split his force so widely. Crook should not have pulled back after the Rosebud.

Terry and Gibbon should have arrived earlier. The Indian agents had inflated the number of Indians still on the reservations in order to pocket the annuities allotted to those who had left, creating fatally faulty intelligence about what the campaign would face. And behind it all lay an illegal war, launched by a government that had manufactured a justification out of a false report because it wanted the gold in the Black Hills. As one commenter pointed out, nobody in the government had any idea Custer would come up against such a huge village—they assumed they were chasing a few hundred renegades.

When Custer found the village, he assumed the natives would turn tail and run. It was not a grand conspiracy to destroy Custer; the conspiracy was to take the Black Hills, and that was going to happen whether Custer lived or died. The aftermath was swift and brutal. Within five years of Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse was dead, Sitting Bull had surrendered, and the Lakota were no longer a free people.

They lost, plain and simple. The government did not even wait that long to take what it wanted. In 1877, it formally seized the Black Hills, and in 1980 the Supreme Court ruled that the seizure was an illegal taking of tribal property—”a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history. ” The court awarded the Lakota seventeen million dollars, the value of the land, plus five percent interest running back to 1877.

The government appealed, including the interest, and lost. The award grew to around one hundred million dollars. The Lakota refused to accept the money, and federal law required it be placed in an interest-bearing trust account. Decades later, that fund is now thought to be worth somewhere around two billion dollars.

The Lakota still refuse to take it. They want the land back, not the money. The war itself was justified to the American public on the basis of the Watkins report—a fabricator whose claims of Lakota depredations were never substantiated. The government needed a pretext because the Lakota had given them none.

They had been quiet. General Crook had said so himself, just months before the administration manufactured the war. As for Custer himself, the debate over his character rages on, and the truth is messy. He was brave; he led from the front his entire career.

During the Civil War, eighty officers requested transfers to serve under him. He helped doom Pickett’s charge by cutting off Stuart’s flanking movement, leading charge after charge from the absolute front. At Appomattox, he captured all seven of Lee’s supply trains, forcing the surrender, and Grant was delighted with him. He was one of the most famous men in America, a celebrity who dined with presidents, published a memoir at thirty-four, and wrote for magazines.

He was also a glory hound who committed atrocities. At the Battle of the Washita in 1868, he deliberately took women and children hostage, using them as human shields—a plan made in advance, not a desperate act in the heat of battle. The government’s own Indian agent for the Cheyenne, Edward Wynkoop, resigned over the affair and called it a massacre. Custer tried the same tactic again at Little Bighorn, and it cost him everything.

He was also a Democrat in the middle of a Republican administration riddled with scandals, which fed rumors that he wanted to run for president in 1876. The only evidence, as far as anyone has found, is a single remark made to a scout named Red Star, who claimed Custer said he would become the “Great Father”—the president—if they won a big victory over the Sioux. It was one remark, made through an interpreter. Custer was thirty-six years old when he died.

He never got the chance to try. Those who argue the Lakota were simply peace-loving people living in harmony until the evil Europeans arrived are ignoring a great deal of history. The Lakota were aggressive against other tribes—the Crow, the Pawnee, the Shoshone, the Arikara—and some of what they did was every bit as ugly as what Chivington did at Sand Creek. In August 1873, a large war party of Lakota, possibly including Chief John Grass—though that claim comes from only one unverified source—attacked a Pawnee village, killing between seventy and 150 people, most of them women and children.

During the Dakota War of 1862, over four hundred unarmed settlers were slaughtered in about six weeks, and roughly one hundred of the dead were children ten years old or younger. Some were infants. The raids in Colorado during the 1860s were especially brutal, with women and children massacred. Some of the very men who helped defeat Custer at Little Bighorn had participated in such atrocities.

Yet none of that justifies what the government did to the Lakota, any more than the government’s crimes erase the Lakota’s own. Two things can be true at once. And there is the deeper problem, one that the comment sections exposed time and again. People want only half the story.

Those who love Custer embrace the fact that the Lakota took the Black Hills from other tribes and ignore that the government manufactured an illegal war to take them. Those who hate Custer embrace the government’s theft and ignore what the Lakota did to the Pawnee. History, though, does not care which side anyone is on. Custer was brave and Custer was a glory hound who committed atrocities.

The Lakota were victims of one of the most dishonorable land grabs in American history, and three years before Little Bighorn, some of their warriors massacred a village full of women and children. Grant helped save the Union, and then as president he launched an illegal war. The government broke its word, and so did the Lakota, in smaller ways. You do not get to keep only the half you like.

That is the real lesson of the Black Hills and of the Little Bighorn. The Lakota stole the hills, and the hills were stolen from them. Both of those things are true, and both of them happened.

The evidence does not care which team you are on.