Broken Treaties: United States and Canadian Relations with the Lakotas and the Plains Cree, 1868-1885

1. Separate Pasts

1 The peoples who came together on the Northern Plains and Prairies to negotiate terms in 1867–1868 and 1876 brought with them to the bargaining table assumptions and attitudes shaped by different historical experiences and distinct cultural traditions. Treaty terms, especially when reduced to a written text, were by nature prosaic and directed to specilc and often immediate ends. This sometimes worked to obscure the larger questions and issues at play as a consequence of these separate pasts. The meaning of the treaty relationship in the eyes of each party is thus discernible only with an appreciation for the unique historical and cultural contexts from which the United States and Canada, as well as the Lakotas and the Plains Cree, emerged. The United States and the Lakotas The territorial expansion of the United States between 1783 and 1854 was breathtaking in pace and scope, advancing westward from the crest of the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacilc Ocean and spanning the continent between the Rio Grande River on the south to the forty-ninth parallel in the north. The extension of U.S. political jurisdiction came largely at the expense of European nations—among them France, Britain, and Spain (later Mexico)—that claimed title to different territories. It was achieved by purchase, as in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803; negotiation, exempliled in the Oregon boundary settlement of 1846, which secured the Pacilc Northwest; and conquest, the Southwest and California coming under U.S. jurisdiction as a result of victory in the Mexican War of 1846–1848. 1 Separate Pasts 2 Separate Pasts The establishment of political oversight was only one facet of territorial expansion; a second phase encompassed the physical occupation and settlement of these lands. This process took most of the nineteenth century, famously declared complete with the announcement by the superintendent of the census in 1890 of the closing of the frontier. U.S. development of the trans-Mississippi West and beyond was directed, and to some extent circumscribed, by two signilcant factors: internal political concerns and the presence of substantial indigenous populations in these territories, particularly across the Great Plains. Of the two, the exigencies of U.S. national and sectional politics were the more inmuential. Western expansion was inextricably bound up in the antebellum era with slavery, an issue that had prompted the establishment of formal procedures for expansion under the Missouri Compromise of 1819. That arrangement required the admission of new states into the Union in pairs so as to maintain the delicate balance in the U.S. Senate between slave and non-slave states. It also established the Compromise Line, forbidding the expansion of slavery north of 36º30⬘ in the territory acquired under the Louisiana Purchase. These terms impeded settlement of the Great Plains west of the Missouri River as there was no equivalent territory to accommodate simultaneous southern expansion. In the 1840s, there was some limited but steady through-traflc of immigrants to the Oregon Country and of Mormons to Utah but no oflcial expansion opportunities. The 1848 acquisition of the Southwest under the Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo , ending the war with Mexico, promised to resolve the territorial imbalance of slave versus non-slave territories. But the expansion logjam dissolved more precipitously with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California that same year. The lure of gold trumped sectional concerns over slavery and led to the admission of California to the Union as a free state in 1850, the lne political balance in the U.S. Senate a casualty of the gold rush. The torrents of aspiring miners mooding westward in 1849 and in subsequent years were oblivious to concerns not only for na- Separate Pasts 3 tional unity but also for the rights and interests of the indigenous peoples of the Central Plains. The movement of tens of thousands along the Oregon and California Trails put an immense pressure on the lnite grass, wood, and game resources on which Indian livelihoods depended and obliged U.S. authorities to establish a military presence in the region to defend against Indian actions in defense of their own interests. The rush to the California gold lelds and its disruptive and destructive side effects formed a pattern replicated across the West over the next generation. These population movements were facilitated by political developments in the older states. Over the winter of 1860–1861, the long-smoldering crisis over slavery came to...