Progress on the nation’s second transcontinental railroad slowed in 1873. The Northern Pacific’s proposed middle—the 250 miles between present Billings and Glendive, Montana—had yet to be surveyed, an
When General Winfield Scott Hancock led a military expedition across Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska in 1867, his purpose was a show of force that would curtail Indian raiding sparked by the Sand Cre
Of all the U.S. Army posts in the West, none witnessed more history than Fort Laramie, positioned where the northern Great Plains join the Rocky Mountains. From its beginnings as a trading post in 183
By 1870, only one group of American Indians in the 300,000 square miles of the Dakota and Montana Territories still held firm against being placed on reservations: a few thousand Teton Sioux and North
Hoping to complete its transcontinental route, the Northern Pacific Railroad set out in 1872 to survey the Yellowstone Valley. An emissary from the Lakota chief Sitting Bull had warned the two surveyi
Hardorff's third and final annotated volume of Indian testimony about the Battle of the Little Bighorn contains the observations of 29 Sioux and nine Cheyenne eyewitnesses extracted from letters, news
In the aftermath of the December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, U.S. Army troops braced for retaliation from Lakota Sioux Indians, who had just suffered the devastating loss of at least two hundred me
