1862 - Trouble with western Sioux

Sioux warriors


         Several hundred Sioux arrived at Fort Pierre to air their grievances with the new agent, Samuel Latta.  The Indians told him they wanted no presents because Choteau, the previous agent, had been cheating their people "for a long time" and they refused to accept the annuities he was contracted to deliver.

          This was the age old problem that Medill had attempted to correct a decade earlier -- the problem of thievery by the middle men.  The Sioux condemned the Great Father's failure to keep his promises as expressed by Commissioner Mitchell (at Horse Creek), and later, by General Harney, and they served notice that friendly relations with the government were terminated.

Piegan Battling Mountain Men

        The Sioux, Cheyenne and Blackfeet put up a fierce defense of their homelands and the buffalo that roamed there.  Historian Anne Helouise Able asked the question: "When Americans defend their homeland they're called patriotic.  Why is it that Indians, doing the same, are branded as 'savages?'


            The fears caused by Harney's strong threats of 1856 had faded in the intervening years, and the support Mitchell had promised to Frightening Bear in 1851 (and the assistance Harney had pledged to Bear's Rib and other chiefs he had designated at the start of 1856), never amounted to anything.  Frightening Bear was dead, and the other 'paper chiefs' were scattered before the winds.

            Sioux discontent grew as power wielded by the American Fur Company waned.  The Choteau family was forced to sit and listen to his company being publicly criticized without the aid and comfort of his agent, Charles Galpin, who had joined the competition.   Choteau's long domination of the agents assigned by Indian Office to the tribes of the upper Missouri had weakened, and within months, agent Latta would file charges against the AFC for illegal trade in whiskey, a charge he could not have made (or wouldn't have dared to make) thirty years earlier.

         Latta told his superiors that by being beholden to the fur companies for transportation, shelter, interpreters, etc., the agents could neither correct the wrongs built into the system, nor long wear their facades as independents.   Moreover, in the minds of the Indians, the Great Father was inextricably identified with the thieving agents.  

         Latta went on to report: "They (the agents) have involved the government in their speculation and schemes; they have enslaved the Indians, kept them in ignorance, taken from them year after year their pitiful earnings, in robes and furs, without giving them an equivalent."

         S.J. Killoren notes: "The gravity of these charges can hardly be exaggerated."  The entire annuity system was rotten to the core.