Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Fools Gold
The Powder River Basin of northern Wyoming and southern Montana is bounded by the Big Horn Mountains to the west, the Black Hills to the east, and the Yellowstone River to the north. Within this area today are Devils Tower National Monument (Bears Lodge), and the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. The Powder, the Tongue, and the Little Big Horn rivers that flow through these grasslands from the Bighorns to the Yellowstone wash over the sites of some of the fiercest battles between the U.S. Army and the nations of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho as the War Department and Department of the Interior between the 1850s and 1870s completed the ethnic cleansing of the Great Plains.
The impetus for the scorched earth campaign by Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, and Custer was initially to remove the Indians from the rich grasslands where they hunted buffalo and antelope to replace them with white ranchers, but in the end it was the yellow gold of the Black Hills that forced the final solution on the Plains Indians and sacrificed the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn.
Today, the sacred Black Hills that lie just across the Bad Lands from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and the Powder River Basin that still echoes with the names of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse is again under attack by the United States--this time for fools gold.
The impetus for the scorched earth campaign by Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, and Custer was initially to remove the Indians from the rich grasslands where they hunted buffalo and antelope to replace them with white ranchers, but in the end it was the yellow gold of the Black Hills that forced the final solution on the Plains Indians and sacrificed the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn.
Today, the sacred Black Hills that lie just across the Bad Lands from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and the Powder River Basin that still echoes with the names of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse is again under attack by the United States--this time for fools gold.
