Treaty of Fort Laramie 1868
The Treaty of Fort Laramie 1868 is the most significant and best known of several treaties that were signed at Fort Laramie . It was completed on November 6, 1868 and covered the entire present-day US state of South Dakota west of the Missouri, including the Black Hills (from the northern border in Nebraska to the 46th parallel and from Missouri in the east to the 104th meridian in the West) as Indian land for unrestricted and unmolested use and settlement by the Great Sioux Nation . Land assignments should only be possible if at least three-quarters of all adult male Sioux living on reservation areas agree.
In 1874, the US government sent an expedition under the military protection of George Armstrong Custer to the Black Hills , where gold was discovered. The gold rush that followed immediately in the Black Hills finally led to another Indian war. In the course of this, the tribes involved were able to achieve their greatest military success in the Battle of Little Bighorn , but this never averted their fate. An unknown number of prairie Indians were killed, starved, or died of disease by the spring of 1877. Some managed to escape to Canadian territory. The Sioux and Northern Cheyenne lost most of their tribal territory to the whites, including the Black Hills. In 1979 they were awarded financial compensation of $ 101 million for violating the Fort Laramie Treaty and other agreements . To this day, however, the Sioux refuse to accept the money. They want their ancestral land back, especially the Black Hills (Paha Sapa), which are sacred to them.
Problems of the Ponca
In 1858 the tribe of the Ponca signed a contract with the US government in which the tribe ceded large areas to the federal government, but reserved areas in northeastern Nebraska for its members. In another treaty in 1865, the tribe swapped these reserved areas for areas south of the Niobarara River and Ponca Creek. One of the reasons for the swap of territory was problems with the Sioux, which led to armed conflict. These 96,000 acres were part of the Great Sioux Reservation. The drafters of the treaty had simply overlooked the 1865 treaty with the Ponca. 96,000 acres of land had now been reserved twice. The Fort Laramie Treaty resulted in the forcible relocation of the Ponca to Oklahoma .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nebraska Studies: The Story of the Ponca Broken Promises in Treaties (accessed: May 29, 2019)
See also
Web links
- Contract text at The Avalon Project (English)
- History of the Treaty of Laramie on ourdocuments.gov (English)
This article is based on the article Treaty of Fort Laramie 1868 ( memento of July 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) from the free encyclopedia Indianer Wiki ( memento of March 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) and is under Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 . A list of the authors was available in the Indian Wiki ( Memento from July 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).