Sanctuary: Native Border Crossings and the North American West

Abstract

The Sioux, Sitting Bull, and Border The forty-ninth parallel boundary between western Canada and United States appears like a quiet and unexplained guest in North American history, with its seemingly arbitrary straight slightly mysterious origin, and hazy significance, and to none more so than North America's Native peoples, whose territories it divided. Throughout 1870s and 1880s line, as many Native groups came to call boundary, became, however briefly, their friend. [1] As they were pushed and pulled across it, groups on both sides of line saw in its medicine hope of political refuge from American or Canadian government on other side. The first were American Sioux, when suddenly in 1877 American side meant exposure, pursuit, and captivity, and Canadian side, sanctuary. Cross line into Mother's country and there was still hope of living as hunters rather than as hunted. Cross it, said Robert Higheagle, a Sioux, and you altogether different. On one side you a re perfectly free to do as you please. On other you are in danger. It was a simple formula, less a tale of two nations than of one North American West, upon which history tells a story of variations (Higheagle n.d.). Their camp stretched along west bank of Greasy Grass Creek in south central Montana, probably largest off-reservation gathering of Indians ever seen. The Blackfeet, Hunkpapa, Ogalala, Sans Arc, Brule, Minneconjous, and Cheyenne, strung together like segments of a caterpillar. At around noon on 25 June 1876, attack of Lt. General George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalry took them by surprise. Suddenly, the squaws were like flying birds, recalled Sitting Bull, leader of Hunkpapa; the bullets were like humming bees. The women, it turned out, thought of seeking sanctuary first. By dusk, women and children were moving camp, and by morning they had crossed Greasy Grass Creek, beyond sound of gunfire, where groups of warriors began to join them. Their annihilation of Custer's forces that day and next is most famous defeat of U.S. army in history of West. It is most famous Indian military victory, it was also, for remaining Plains tribes, beginning of end of freedom. We kept moving all summer, a man named Red Horse recalled, the troops being always after us (Graham 1995, 54-55, 86, 70, 104; Neihardt 1961, 108-09; Hardorff 1991, 92-95). The Indians had seen this coming. The Sioux and United States were both expanding their territories, Sioux ever since many of them left Lakes region for plains in late-eighteenth century, and United States in its relentless westward migration that poured across and onto western plains beginning in 1840s. They fought bloody battles throughout 1850s and 1860s and made treaties--at Fort Laramie on North Platte River in 1851 to control intertribal warfare and protect westering whites, and in 1868 to create a Great Sioux Reservation out of what later became South Dakota, with added hunting grounds west in Yellowstone and Powder River country of present-day Montana and Wyoming. At same time, in 1869 Grant administration formed an idealistic Indian Peace Commission just as determined to turn Plains Indians into crop-growing Christians as U.S. Army was to round them up or kill them. Even in 1870s, many Indians disregarded treaties entirely, e specially young hotheaded ones and those most resistant to change. The Sioux still pushed westward, gaining turf from Crow. Faced with a choice of falling into hands of earnest humanitarians or fighting and starving, many chose latter (Utley 1993, 43, 82; Prucha 1984, 17-21; Greene 1991, 4-5). By time Custer and Seventh Cavalry arrived at Greasy Grass, Sioux were restive. In summer of 1874, Custer himself had led an expedition of soldiers and miners into Paha Sapa, Black Hills, which jut four thousand feet from plains in what was then western third of Sioux Reservation, and they found substantial gold deposits there. …