The Fort Laramie Treaty and the Gold That Broke It

In eighteen sixty-eight, beginning on April twenty-ninth, United States commissioners and representatives of the Lakota, Arapaho, and affiliated peoples signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The terms were explicit: the Black Hills and a vast surrounding territory were recognized as the Great Sioux Reservation, set aside for the exclusive use of the Sioux people. No cession of this land would be valid, the treaty stated, without the agreement of at least three-quarters of all adult male Lakotas. The United States signed. The war along the Bozeman Trail ended.

It lasted six years.

In the summer of eighteen seventy-four, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a thousand-man military expedition into the Black Hills, a direct violation of the treaty. His orders were to locate a site for a fort. But the expedition carried civilian miners, and on August second, Custer sent a dispatch eastward: gold had been found, he reported, right from the grass roots down. Within weeks, that sentence appeared in newspapers from New York to San Francisco. By eighteen seventy-six, thousands of miners had pushed into the Black Hills, ignoring army attempts to remove them, defying the treaty that protected Lakota land.

The federal government offered to purchase the hills. The Lakota refused. In eighteen seventy-seven, Congress simply seized the territory by legislation, without the three-quarters consent the treaty required. The Supreme Court ruled in nineteen eighty that the taking had been unconstitutional and awarded the Lakota a settlement that has grown, with interest, to more than a billion dollars. The Lakota have never accepted the money. The Black Hills, they say, are not for sale.