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The Indian wars in the West marked the last resistance of a Native American population devastated by disease and demoralized by the federal government’s reservation policy. The Dakota Sioux in Minnesota went to war in 1862. For years, under the leadership of Chief Little Crow, the Dakota—also known as the Santee—had pursued a policy of accommodation, ceding land in return for the promise of annuities. But with his people on the verge of starvation (the local Indian agent told the hungry Dakota, “Go and eat grass”), Little Crow led his angry warriors in a desperate campaign against the intruders, killing more than 1,000 settlers. American troops quelled the Great Sioux Uprising (also called the Santee Uprising) and marched 1,700 Sioux to Fort Snelling, where 400 Indians were put on trial for murder and 38 died in the largest mass execution in American history.

Further west, the great Indian empire of Comanchería had once stretched from the Canadian plains to Mexico. By 1865, after two decades of what one historian has labeled “ethnic cleansing,” fewer than five thousand Comanches remained in west Texas and Oklahoma. Through decades of dealings with the Spanish and French, the Comanche had built a complex empire based on trade in horses, hides, guns, and captives. Expert riders, the Comanche waged war in the saddle, giving the U.S. Cavalry reason to hate and fear them.

After the Civil War, President Ulysses S. Grant faced the prospect of protracted Indian war. Reluctant to spend more money and sacrifice more lives, Grant adopted a “peace policy” designed to segregate and control the Indians while opening up land to white settlers. This policy won the support of both friends of the Indians and those who coveted the Indians’ land. The army herded the Indians onto reservations (see Map 17.1), where the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs hired agents who, in the words of Paiute Sarah Winnemucca, did “nothing but fill their pockets.” In 1871, Congress determined to no longer deal with Indians as sovereign nations but to eliminate treaties and treat Indians as wards of the state. Grant’s peace policy in the West gave way to all-out warfare as the U.S. Army dispatched 3,000 soldiers to wipe out the remains of Comanchería. Raiding parties of Comanche virtually obliterated white settlements in west Texas. To defeat the Indians, the army adopted the practice of burning and destroying everything in its path, using the tactics that General William Tecumseh Sherman had perfected in his march through Georgia during the Civil War. At the decisive battle of Palo Duro Canyon in 1874, only three Comanche warriors died in battle, but U.S. soldiers took the Indians’ camp; burned more than 200 tepees, hundreds of robes and blankets, and thousands of pounds of winter supplies; and shot more than 1,000 horses. Coupled with the decimation of the bison, the army’s scorched-earth policy led to the final collapse of the Comanche people. The surviving Indians of Comanchería, now numbering fewer than 1,500, reluctantly retreated to the reservation at Fort Sill.