‘Achieving great success
in his younger years as a Lakota warrior, Red Cloud became arguably his people’s greatest war leader until the rise of Crazy Horse,’ Paul writes in his introduction. Even people with only a passing interest in frontier history recognize the distinctive names of those two remarkable Oglalas. Yet, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse still must take a back seat in the grand Teton tepee to Sitting Bull, the militant spiritual leader from the Hunkpapa subdivision. Together, those three Lakotas must be the most recognizable Indian trio of the 19th-century West, perhaps rivaled only by the Big Three of the Apaches–Geronimo, Cochise and Mangas Coloradas.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

It might also be argued whether the adjective ‘warlike’ has appeared in print more frequently before ‘Sioux’ or ‘Apaches.’ Surely in the 19th century, the Spanish, Mexicans and Americans of the Southwest would have voted one way, while the pale-skinned folks who lived in or traveled through Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana would have cast a different vote. No question, though, that when it came to history-making large-scale confrontations with the U.S. Army in the West, the Sioux were war bonnets above the Apaches. Such deadly engagements as the Minnesota (Sioux) Uprising, Grattan Massacre, Fetterman Massacre, Wounded Knee Massacre, Wagon Box Fight, Battle of the Rosebud, Battle of Slim Buttes, Battle of Blue Water and Battle of Wolf Mountain immediately come to mind, even while those labels–’massacres,’ ‘fights,’ ‘battles,’ ‘uprisings’–get lost in the fog of semantics. As for the indefatigable Battle of the Little Bighorn, well, it never really leaves the mind–just stays lodged there like a spent 7th Cavalry bullet or a Lakota arrowhead.

What sometimes does slip the mind is the fact that the Sioux were a warlike people even before they began to seriously resist Euro-American expansion into western Minnesota and the northern Plains in the middle of the 19th century. The Omaha hunters attacked by a young Red Cloud were just one of many native peoples who, over the many moons, did not see eye to eye with the Sioux. In fact, the name ‘Sioux’ derives from an Ojibwa (Chippewa) word, nadowe-is-iw, meaning ‘adder’ or ‘enemy,’ that was transformed into something like nadoussioux by French voyageurs. Tribe members most often referred to themselves as Dakota (eastern group), Nakota (central group) or Lakota (western group)–all of which mean ‘alliance of friends’ in the three Siouan dialects of the same names. They also called themselves Oceti Sakowin (’Seven Council Fires’) because of the seven major allied subgroups–Sisseton, Wahpeton, Wahpukute and Mdewakanton (the eastern group, collectively known to whites as the Santee Sioux, speakers of Dakota); Yankton and Yanktonai (central group, the Yankton Sioux, speakers of Dakota and Nakota); and Teton (western group, the Teton Sioux, speakers of Lakota). Today, the Dakota-Nakota-Lakota speakers are often collectively called Sioux, although more and more people seem to prefer ‘Dakotas’ or ‘Lakotas’ as the encompassing term.

In the early 17th century, the Sioux mainly occupied what would become Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin, but Lakota bands began to migrate from the upper Mississippi River valley onto the Great Plains because of costly warfare with the Cree Indians, who were armed with French rifles, and pressure from the Ojibwas to the east. The lure of the great buffalo herds also encouraged the westward expansion and, after horses were acquired around 1750, the moving became a whole lot easier…and so did the fighting.

The Lakotas warred against settled agricultural people such as the Pawnees and Arikaras and also against other mounted nomads such as the Cheyennes, Kiowas, Arapahos and Crows. Upon ‘discovering’ the forested slopes and lush meadows of the Black Hills (Paha Sapa) around 1776, the Lakotas, now well supplied with firearms, proceeded to displace the Cheyennes and Kiowas, who had previously enjoyed the region’s abundant game, timber and water. Defeating the Arikaras in 1792 allowed the Lakotas to expand into the middle Missouri Valley and what would become western South Dakota. In 1814 the Lakotas made peace with the Kiowas, who now formally recognized that their former enemies controlled the Black Hills. In the early 1820s, the Lakotas joined forces with another former enemy, the Cheyennes, to drive the Crows out of what would become eastern Wyoming. Historian Elliott West describes this ‘expansionist burst’ in his award-winning 1998 book The Contested Plains. ‘By the 1830s,’ he writes, ‘the Lakotas were the preeminent power of the northern plains. With the Black Hills as their spiritual and geopolitical center, they ranged west to the Continental Divide, east to the Missouri basin, south to the South Platte and Smoky Hill Rivers, and north to the lands of two powerful rivals, the Crows and the Blackfeet.’

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to