Sioux War Research Articles

John Finerty Reports the Sioux War by John Finerty

John Finerty Reports the Sioux War by John Finerty

Remembering the Battle of Pezi Sla (Greasy Grass—aka Little Bighorn) with the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Victory Riders: An Autoethnographic Photo Essay

If one travels to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Park in late June, one can witness at least three events that simultaneously take place each year commemorating what has been called “one of the great mythic and mysterious military battles of American history” (Frosch, 2010). The National Park Service rangers give “battle talks” on the hour to visiting tourists. Two miles away, the privately run U.S. Cavalry School also performs a scripted reenactment called “Custer’s Last Ride”—with riders who have been practicing all week to play the role of soldiers from the doomed regiment of Custer’s 7th Cavalry. On this same day, a traveling band of men, women, and youth from the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Nations who have journeyed by horseback and convoy from the Dakotas and Wyoming will reach Last Stand Hill to remember this “Victory Day” from 1876—one that historians have called the “last stand of the Indians” during the period of conflict known as the “Great Sioux War.” This photo essay offers an autoethnographic account of what some have dubbed the annual “Victory Ride” to Montana based upon my participation as a non-Native supporter of this Ride in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Powder River: Disastrous Opening of the Great Sioux War. By Paul L. Hedren

Powder River: Disastrous Opening of the Great Sioux War. By Paul L. Hedren

The Face of Battle without the Rules of War: Lessons from Red Horse & the Battle of the Little Bighorn

This essay analyzes the extraordinary drawings of Red Horse, a Minneconjou warrior who fought at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, to provide insights into what warfare was like without just war doctrine or the laws of armed conflict to place constraints on violence. The artist's candid vision of the battle and its aftermath portrays the indiscriminant brutality of the Great Sioux War, the disrespect given to a hated enemy, and the lingering desire for revenge. But the drawings also reveal the pride of victory and the trauma of defeat. In addition to providing a window into the past, the Red Horse drawings provide a lens to help us understand the atrocities committed by the Islamic State and Al Qaeda today and a mirror that can help us more clearly see ourselves.

Last Days of Red Cloud Agency: Peter T. Buckley’s Photograph Collection, 1876–1877. By Thomas R. Buecker. Foreword by R. Eli Paul

Last Days of Red Cloud Agency is a gorgeous book with full spreads of Peter Buckley’s collection of stereo view photographs that he assembled through purchase during his two years at Camp (later Fort) Robinson in northwest Nebraska. As scholars, we often like to think that our sources are unique, but in this case it happens to be true. As Thomas Buecker states, Buckley’s collection “greatly adds to our knowledge of the western experience and the events and places recorded by the work of early photographers” (p. 219). Looking through the images, one can almost sense what it would have been like for Buckley to stand in one place and witness history as it swirled around him: the construction, establishment, and movement of army cantonments and permanent camps; the end of the Great Sioux War; the convergence of thousands of people from bands of Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota; the Black Hills Gold Rush; and Crazy Horse’s surrender and subsequent death, to name a few events. Buckley’s collection is emblematic of the deluge of photographers capturing Indian Country in the 1870s, largely for sale to easterners hungry for western paraphernalia, but also (and less often) for local soldiers and Native Americans wanting to commemorate their lives. An active consumer of these images, Buckley curated a gallery of views that reflected his experiences at a tumultuous moment in time.

Black Hills Forestry: A History. By John F. Freeman.

Black Hills Forestry: A History . By John F. Freeman. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015. xv + 246 pp. Illustrations, map, graph, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.) For most of the United States, the Black Hills is the place with Mount Rushmore’s stone presidents’ heads, or perhaps Sturgis, where Harley-Davidson bikers gather. Even the historically inclined might first associate the Black Hills with the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Great Sioux War. However, as John F. Freeman shows in his traditional narrative history, Black Hills Forestry , the Black Hills have also played an important role in national forestry policy in the United States. … jorth{at}calpoly.edu

Memories of Western Violence, Lost and Found

Memories of Western Violence, Lost and Found Andrew Denson (bio) Ari Kelman. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. xiii + 384 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $35.00. On November 29, 1864, Colorado militia attacked a group of around 700 peaceful Cheyennes and Arapahos camped along Sand Creek, near the Kansas-Colorado border. Led by Colonel John Chivington, an abolitionist and former Methodist minister, the soldiers had orders to find and punish “hostile” Indians responsible for raids on Colorado settlements. Chivington, however, failed to locate militant Cheyennes and chose instead to assault the “friendly” bands at Sand Creek, claiming that hostiles were hidden among them. Firing into the camp with rifles and field artillery, the soldiers killed more than 150 Indian people, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly. After setting the survivors to flight, the militia returned to the site to scalp and mutilate the dead. The incident had far-reaching consequences. It sparked intensified warfare on the southern plains, as Cheyennes and Arapahos retaliated with attacks of their own. It also helped to inspire a reform movement in American Indian affairs. When reports of the atrocity circulated in the Eastern press, critics of federal Indian policy cited the massacre as evidence that the United States must reorient its approach to emphasize peaceful assimilation over military conquest. Congress investigated the episode, condemning Chivington’s actions, and the United States even promised reparations to the Indian survivors. The massacre quickly became a symbol of the violence of American westward expansion. By the twentieth century, it joined the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the Navajos’ Long Walk, and the massacre at Wounded Knee on the short list of tragic events that Americans invoked as emblems of the nation’s unjust treatment of Indian peoples. In A Misplaced Massacre, historian Ari Kelman examines the public memory of Sand Creek, focusing on the campaign by the National Park Service (NPS) to create a historic site interpreting the event. Launched in the late 1990s, the project enjoyed broad support among a variety of different interests. Local residents hoped that increased heritage tourism might help improve eastern [End Page 273] Colorado’s stagnant economy. Cheyennes and Arapahos recognized the commemoration as an opportunity to honor their ancestors and bear witness to their people’s past suffering. NPS officials, meanwhile, saw the site as an opportunity to demonstrate the agency’s commitment to cultural pluralism, while showcasing its ability to interpret the darker chapters of American history. They also hoped it might become a model for future cooperative endeavors between the agency and Indian nations. As Kelman demonstrates, however, the Sand Creek project quickly became the focus of a series of rancorous arguments that, at times, came close to ending work on the site. While almost everyone agreed that commemorating Sand Creek was a good idea, the process of commemoration revealed fundamental incongruities over the meaning of the massacre and the uses of its memory in the present-day West. Kelman’s book joins a small but significant recent literature on the public memory of Western violence. In the last decade, Michael Elliot has analyzed contemporary struggles over the Battle of the Little Bighorn, while Karl Jacoby has dissected memories of the Camp Grant Massacre in Arizona. As both a scholar and a participant, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson has written on the Dakota people’s commemorations of the Sioux War in Minnesota.1 A Misplaced Massacre also reflects the renewed emphasis among Native American historians on charting the violence unleashed by American settler colonialism, a turn exemplified by Ned Blackhawk’s prize-winning study of Great Basin communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 In examining Sand Creek, Kelman adopts what he terms a “nontraditional architecture” (p. x). His main subject is the creation of the Sand Creek National Historic Site, which opened to the public in 2007. While telling that story, however, he frequently flashes back to previous commemorations, arguments among Sand Creek participants over the massacre, and the mid-nineteenth century Indian wars themselves. Rather than proceed chronologically, the study moves around in time, while always eventually returning to the campaign to develop...

Sioux War Dispatches: Reports from the Field, 1876–1877. By Marc H. Abrams . Foreword by Douglas W. Ellison . ( Chicago : Westholme , 2012 . xvi + 429 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 .)

Journal Article Sioux War Dispatches: Reports from the Field, 1876–1877 Get access Sioux War Dispatches: Reports from the Field, 1876–1877. By Abrams Marc H.. Foreword by Douglas W. Ellison. (Chicago: Westholme, 2012. xvi + 429 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.) Thomas R. Buecker Thomas R. Buecker Nebraska State Historical Society Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, Issue 3, Autumn 2013, Pages 347–348, https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.44.3.0347 Published: 01 August 2013

Performance on the Plains: Staging the Great Sioux War in Buffalo Bill's Red Right Hand , 1876

Performance on the Plains: Staging the Great Sioux War in Buffalo Bill's Red Right Hand , 1876

American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance (review)

Reviewed by: American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance Robert J. Vrtis American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance. By John Bell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. 292. $95.00 cloth. Peter Schumann, the director and founding member of Bread and Puppet Theater, believes that puppeteers like himself have traditionally occupied an outsider’s place with respect to “high” art in Western theatre tradition. In American Puppet Modernism, John Bell notes that Schumann has reveled in the “low” and even “ridiculous” position that his work occupies, since the puppeteer can use it as strategic footing for political critique. While this status has benefited companies like Bread and Puppet, it has also fostered conceptions of puppet theatre as an insignificant performance genre—silly children’s entertainment at best. Bell’s book complicates the idea of what a puppet is and how it speaks about the culture in which it performs, thus providing an opportunity for the reader to reconsider puppet theatre’s significance by seriously considering what Frank Proschan termed “performing objects” (a term encompassing all things that take part in a storytelling process or that represent ideas). This critical exploration into American object performance yields many insights into the way material objects speak about and work within our increasingly materialistic culture. Bell examines several compelling moments of material performance. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century with traveling panoramas, he then delves into several incarnations of object performance in the twentieth century. The book ends with a discussion of the implications of nascent motion-capture technology in the twenty-first century. These analyses are incisive and provocative investigations into the ways that objects tell stories about the culture that produces them, an intriguing and accessible read for artists and scholars interested in a historical perspective of the material world in performance. Bell begins by expanding his definition of “puppet” to encompass a spectrum of “performing objects,” which allows him to consider such material objects as marionettes, hand-and-rod–style puppets, cars, televisions, and computer-generated animation. Having established a broad horizon of possible material, he focuses on particular practitioners in specific historical moments. Through close examination of the methods and materials used in their performing objects, Bell reveals how the performance of objects reflects, enhances, or subverts the cultural narratives shaping modern American identity. In this spirit, an early essay places John Stevens’s The Sioux War Panorama, which toured Midwestern towns during the 1860s and ’70s, within the mythic history of American expansionism. Showing a succession of painted images (including depictions of westward-bound settlers, Abraham Lincoln with his cabinet, Sioux leaders, conflicts between Native peoples and troops under the command of Colonel Silbey, and the mass hanging of Sioux prisoners), the panorama and Stevens’s accompanying narration told a story of the inevitable taming of the American West. Bell describes how the panorama invoked recognizable American figures in a way that elevated them to hero status, while at the same time reinforcing a conception of Native Americans as dangerous “savages” in need of civilizing, through bloody enforcement if necessary. By framing, confirming, and glorifying the violent process of westward expansion, so that the spectators felt that they were part of a larger American myth, the panorama edified the settlements it visited. Any investigation of object performance must include Edward Gordon Craig’s provocative “The Actor and the Über-marionette,” and indeed Bell expertly disabuses the common misconception that Craig’s theories demand erasure of the living actor in favor of nonhuman actors. He also traces Craig’s influence on emerging puppet modernism in America, beginning with the Little Theatre Movement. As Bell explains, Craig inspired many artists in the Movement who wanted to explore the possibilities of masks, puppets, and other performing objects in contexts of serious artistic exploration: puppet theatre for an adult audience. The example of Remo Bufano, a puppeteer who came out of the Little Theatre Movement hoping to make space for puppets in performance, helps Bell to allay misgivings about [End Page 131] what may appear on first glance to be a call for an actor-free theatre. “In Bufano’s vision, puppets and actors will share...

American puppet modernism: essays on the material world in performance

Introductions The Sioux War Panorama and American Mythic History Masks and Shalako Puppets: Anthropology meets Indigenous Mask and Puppet Theater The Little Theater Movement and the Birth of the American Puppeteer Jane Heap and the International Theater Exhibition of 1926 Puppets and Propaganda Identity: Gertrude Stein's Puppet Show From Sorcery to Science: Remo Bufano and the 1939 World's Fair American Puppets and Television Kustom Kulture and Detroit Industrials: Cars as Performing Objects Landscape and Teeth Masks ACT-UP and the Puppetista Movement: Reinventing Activist Performance as Object Theater Mass Media and Motion Capture

Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: The Life and Times of a Career Army Officer

Few soldiers saw more of the late-nineteenth-century West and its peoples or made more friends and acquaintances, civilian and military, than the energetic and sociable Col. Richard Irving Dodge. In this first biography of the soldier-author, Wayne R. Kime describes Dodge's early years, experiences as a writer, and forty-three-year career as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army, setting his life story in a rich historical context.Between 1848 and 1891 Dodge participated in the Great Sioux War, explored the Black Hills, commanded infantry regiments, and served as an aide-de-camp to General William Tecumseh Sherman. He was personally engaged in the ongoing power struggle between the army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs over how best to solve the country's so-called Indian problem. Dodge was a paradox. He admired Plains Indians and lamented the end of their way of life brought on by confinement on reservations and the slaughter of buffalo. Yet he also considered Indians to be savages who could be civilized only by threat of force. As Kime reveals, the contradictions in Dodge's life and thought mirrored the ambivalence that many Americans felt about Indian policy and westward expansion.

Fort Randall on the Missouri, 1856-1892

Jerome A. Greene, a research historian with the National Park Service in Denver, has written a comprehensive history of Fort Randall, one of the many Missouri River military forts that served the imperial interests of the United States during its continental expansion era. Greene begins by providing context for the establishment of Fort Randall in 1856 through a brief sketch of U.S. expansion into the Great Plains region from the Lewis and Clark expedition into the 1840s and 1850s. From there, the book develops three concerns: to show how the fort's physical layout and condition changed over time; to provide a social history of the soldiers' lives at the fort; and to illuminate the role of the fort in the U.S. conquest and colonization of the region. Though Fort Randall was usually not at the center of events, it provides a useful vantage point from which to view broader developments in the region. Through a history of the fort, Greene provides perspective on the northern Plains during the Civil War, the gold rush to the Black Hills, the Great Sioux War, the settlement of prairie lands east of the river, and the confinement of the region's Indian people to reservations. Although the fort was “effectually circumscribed as a major force in the unfolding drama of the West” by 1880, Fort Randall received a brief moment of attention when Sitting Bull's people, having returned to the United States from Canada in 1881, were confined there for several months before being transferred upriver to the Standing Rock Agency (p. 124). Greene provides a useful appendix containing a complete list of names of those imprisoned as well as a series of valuable photographs of Sitting Bull's people and their living conditions at Fort Randall. Greene chronicles the post's “last days” after that episode until it closed in 1892 (p. 165).

Blue Water Creek and the First Sioux War, 1854-1856

Blue Water Creek and the First Sioux War, 1854-1856

Blue Water Creek and the First Sioux War, 1854-1856 (review)

Blue Water Creek and the First Sioux War, 1854-1856 (review)

The Plains Sioux and U.S. colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee

Introduction: colonialism, agency and power Part I. Conquest: 1. 'Vilest Miscreants of the Savage Race': the Plains Sioux in an empire of liberty 2. 'Futile Efforts to Subjugate Them': failures of conquest 3. 'Doubtless an Unauthorized Promise': the politics of the Great Sioux war 4. 'Force is the Only Thing': the killing of Crazy Horse Part II. Colonialism: 5. 'We Were Raised in This Country': claiming place 6. 'I Work So Much It Makes Me Poor': the reservation economy 7. 'Just as Well with My Hair On': colonial education 8. 'All Men are Different': the politics of religion and culture 9. 'Great Trouble and Bad Feeling': government agents and Sioux leaders 10. 'Enough to Crush Us Down': struggles for Land Part III. Anticolonialism and the State: 11. 'When the Earth Shakes Do Not Be Afraid': the Ghost Dance as an anticolonial movement 12. 'To Bring My People Back into the Hoop': the development of the Lakota Ghost Dance 13. 'The Most Serious Indian War of Our History': the army's invasion 14. 'If He Fights, Destroy Him': the road to Wounded Knee 15. 'A Valley of Death': Wounded Knee Conclusion: after Wounded Knee.

The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations (review)

Sioux history buffs beware: this book was not written for you. In fact, Gibbon wrote it 'for advanced students and readers ... to prod readers into thinking deeply, critically, independently, and diligently about the history of the Sioux.' Despite the plethora of books on the Sioux, this one is unique. It covers Sioux history from 9500 bc to the present day, but it is not intended to serve as a narrative history. Gibbon dispenses with the narrative history in a seven-page summary in chapter 1, and with brief introductory sections in each of the subsequent chronologically arranged chapters. The odd Sioux history buff who picks it up will be as horrified as many scholars will be delighted to find that Gibbon devotes only about half a page to the Sioux war of 1862, and about a page and a half to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Neither does Gibbon defend a central argument. It is something more than a literature review, but at its core it is an attempt to explore some of the debates and questions relating to Sioux history. In each chapter, Gibbon discusses various issues, sometimes to present a conclusion of his own, sometimes to summarize the literature, and sometimes to suggest important unanswered questions for further thought and research. Because of what it is, this useful book will likely occupy a small niche.

Elements of Military Strategy: An Historical Approach.

Preface Introduction Operations Within a Base Area The English Colonists' Warfare against the Native Americans The United States in the Second Seminole War The United States in the Great Sioux War Operations from a remote Base Area The Commerce-Raiding War in the Atlantic, 1940-1945 Air Warfare in Northwestern Europe 1940-1945 The Allied Western Europe Campaign 1944-1945 The United States in the Pacific in World War II The Strategy of the Korean War The Persian Gulf Conflict of 1990-1991 Operations with a Mixture of Base Area Access The United States in Vietnam Some Unifying Elements Political Aspects The Principles of War and Some Related Ideas Some Factors Affecting Strategic Choice and Outcomes Appendix: Weapons and Strategy in the Twentieth Century

The Sioux War Panorama and American Mythic History

The Sioux War Panorama and American Mythic History

A good year to die: the story of the Great Sioux War

A good year to die: the story of the Great Sioux War