The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, signed with the United States by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne leaders following Red Cloud's War, had set aside a portion of the Lakota territory as the Great Sioux Reservation.
This includes the Black Hills region for their exclusive use.
It also provided for unceded territory for Cheyenne and Lakota hunting grounds.
The growing number of miners and settlers encroaching in the Dakota Territory, however, has rapidly nullified the protections.
The US government could not keep settlers out.
By 1872, territorial officials were considering harvesting the rich timber resources of the Black Hills, to be floated down the Cheyenne River to the Missouri, where new plains settlements need lumber.
The geographic uplift area suggested the potential for mineral resources.
When a commission approached the Red Cloud Agency about the possibility of the Lakota's signing away the Black Hills, Colonel John E. Smith noted that this was "the only portion [of their reservation] worth anything to them".
He concluded that "nothing short of their annihilation will get it from them". (Smith to Gen. Ord, June 27, 1873, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, National Archives. Colonel (brevet Brigadier General) Smith was commander of the 14th Infantry, headquartered at Fort Laramie, who had extensive experience with the Lakota.)
The government had dispatched the Custer Expedition in 1874 to examine the Black Hills, alarming the Lakota.
Before Custer's column had returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln, news of their discovery of gold had been telegraphed nationally.
The presence of valuable mineral resources had been confirmed the following year by the Newton-Jenney Geological Expedition.
Prospectors, motivated by the economic panic of 1873, had soon begun to trickle into the Black Hills in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty.
This trickle has turned into a flood as thousands of miners invaded the Hills, with organized groups coming from states as far away as New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
The United States Army had struggled initially to keep miners out of the region.
In December 1874, for example, a group of miners led by John Gordon from Sioux City, Iowa, had managed to evade Army patrols and reached the Black Hills, but the Army ejected them three months later.
Such evictions, however, have increased political pressure on the Grant Administration to secure the Black Hills from the Lakota.
Sioux delegations headed by Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, and Lone Horn had traveled to Washington, D.C., in May 1875 in an eleventh-hour attempt to persuade President Ulysses S. Grant to honor existing treaties and stem the flow of miners into their territories.
They had met with Grant, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward Smith.
The US leaders had said that the Congress wanted to pay the tribes twenty-five thousand for the land and have them relocate to Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma).
The delegates had refused to sign a new treaty with these stipulations.
Spotted Tail said, "You speak of another country, but it is not my country; it does not concern me, and I want nothing to do with it. I was not born there ... If it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there and let us alone."
Although the chiefs had been unsuccessful in finding a peaceful solution, they will not join Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull in the warfare that is to come.
A US commission had been sent in autumn 1875 to each of the Indian agencies to hold councils with the Lakota in hopes of gaining the people's approval and thereby bringing pressure on the Lakota leaders to sign a new treaty, but the government fails in its attempt to secure the Black Hills.
While the Black Hills are at the center of the growing crisis, Lakota resentment is growing over expanding US interests in other portions of Lakota territory.
For instance, the government had proposed that the route of the Northern Pacific Railway cross through the last of the great buffalo hunting grounds.
In addition, the US Army had carried out several devastating attacks on Cheyenne camps before 1876.
