1854-Jun 25, 1876: Plains Wars (1 jan 1854 ano – 25 jun 1876 ano)

Descrição:

1854: First Sioux War, Dakota Territory, following a dispute over a killed cow between white settlers traveling to the far west and the local Lakota (Western Sioux group)

1855: Minnesota...Dakota (Sioux group) tribes had given up land in the 1850s for money and reserved land, overseen by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Westward-moving white populations and mismanagement of reservations by government officials spawned great bitterness among the Dakota
August 1862: Little Crow (Taoyateduta), Dakota's most influential leader, led attacks that brought the demise of hundreds of white settlers in a single week. The bloodshed sparked a massive backlash

Early 1864: regulars and volunteers fought Kiowa, Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho

Nov 29, 1864: Sand Creek Massacre, Col. John M. Chivington slaughtered 150-200

Early 1865: News of the Sand Creek Massacre ignited a full-scale war....Attacks against non-Indian travelers increased,
for a month that spring all contact between the city of Denver and points east was severed...[However, peace treaties were signed by late 1865].

The treaties of 1865 did not hold, as the Indians who signed the documents had no authority over all of the individualistic Plains peoples
the government had no practical (or politically palatable) means of controlling a tide of white pioneers eager to exploit western opportunities.
The flash point came along the Bozeman Trail, which ran from Fort Laramie to Virginia City, Montana Territory.
Red Cloud, a charismatic Oglala (Sioux group) chief, gathered a coalition of Lakota (Sioux), Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho to keep those lands from white intruders

1867: Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado Territory, a large army expedition burned an abandoned village

Oct 1867: an accord was reached at Medicine Lodge Creek, whereby the Indians were to live on reservations in western Indian Territory and refrain from attacking white settlers in return for government annuities and the right to hunt buffalo south of the Arkansas River.
Neither side, however, seemed enthusiastic about fulfilling either the spirit or the letter of the agreements...
Army columns continually scoured Kansas, the Indian Territory, and northern Texas for the next eight months.
Emotionally exhausted and with their economies shattered by the constant flight, many Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and southern Cheyenne consented to try life on reservations

The division of authority between the Department of the Interior, which oversaw the reservations, and the War Department, which was responsible for maintaining security, rarely worked well;

meanwhile, the Indians, restless with the cultural and economic poverty of reservation life, continued to launch raids into Texas...The punishing marches, which continued through droughts and blizzards, took a greater toll on Indian resistance than did the Plains campaign’s many skirmishes

Mid 1875: military power of the southern Plains tribes was shattered.

Fort Laramie peace negotiations unsteady as interest in the Yellowstone River country (now Wyoming and Montana) grew

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