So when Red Cloud settled down upon his reservation near Fort Robinson, Sitting Bull continued to range about the Plains and in the valleys of the Tongue, Powder, Yellowstone and Big Horn Rivers. Some of the turbulent element in Red Cloud’s camp joined him, but by far the greater portion of those who followed Sitting Bull until after the Custer fight were not Oglalas. In 1874–’75, when Professor Marsh of Yale, passed through the agency, he noted that there were some 13,000 Indians under the care of the authorities. He reported that the provisions issued them were of poor quality and insufficient, and tardily delivered. Lieutenant Carpenter also complained that the Indians were compelled to eat ponies, dogs and wolves to avoid starvation. Professor Marsh stated that the goods purchased by the Government, carefully and honestly delivered and distributed, would prevent all suffering. Eastern newspapers published Marsh’s charges, and the “Indian ring” of politicians was defeated. Marsh was well received by Red Cloud, who accompanied him East. The two were photographed together, holding the peace-pipe in common. The Sioux called Professor Marsh the “Big Bone Chief,” because he hunted fossils in the Bad Lands. And while Bills and Dicks of frontier fame howled about the “hostile Injuns” and engaged in frequent fights with the Sioux, Marsh came and went in that wild country safe. The “murderers” knew he was to be trusted! (_See page 176_)
Son of the War Chief of all the Sioux. Pine Ridge, 1909. Photographed by W. K. Moorehead. The older Indians say Jack looks exactly as did his father in the early seventies. ]
Garrick Mallery, in the Fourth Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, in an illustrated article entitled “Pictographs of the North-American Indians,” includes the Dakota winter-counts of Lone Dog, an aged Indian of the Yanktonai tribe of Dakotas, which covers the winters from 1800–’01 to 1876–’77.
From the Minnesota Historical Collections, page 434, volume 9, we learn than on Sunday, August 17, 1862, a small party of Sioux, belonging to Little Crow’s band, while out ostensibly hunting and fishing at Acton, Meeker county, Minnesota, obtained from a white man some spirituous liquor, became intoxicated, and murdered a white man and part of his family, and this act precipitated the Sioux war. Little Crow said that since blood had been spilled the war would have to go on, and he summoned warriors from Montana and what is now North and South Dakota. The war began August 18 and lasted about twelve days. The number of white people killed was about 500. The whole or a large part of some fifteen or twenty counties was fearfully desolated, and for a time almost entirely depopulated. In one of the engagements between the Indians and a company of regular troops, twenty-three soldiers were killed and about sixty wounded, and also ninety-two horses were killed. Chief Big Eagle makes a statement of the causes which led up to the trouble. The Whites were constantly urging the Indians to live like the white man. Some were willing, but others were not and could not—the Indians were annoyed, and wanted to do as they pleased. “Then,” he says, “some of the white men abused the Indian women in a certain way and disgraced them, and surely there was no excuse for that.”