Street roots., June 05, 2015, Page 7, Image 7

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Commentary
There was gold in them thar Black Hills
Author
explains
economics,
politics
behind
Custer’s
1874
expedition
BY KATHERINE LUCK
often than not, settlement followed the
miners.”
ust two years before his infamous “Last
But there was a roadblock. In 1868, the
Stand, Brevet Maj. Gen. George
Black Hills legally became the property of
Armstrong Custer set off on a secretive
the Sioux through a treaty negotiated with
the U.S. government.
edition deep into the Black Hills region
of what today is South Dakota, Officially, he “The Sioux were the strongest of the
and the 1,000 armed troops he led were
Plains tribes, and they actively sought to
scouting a site for a military fort that would
"extend their territory and hunting grounds,”
Mort explains. “They were fiercely
protect white settlers from Native American
tribes.
protective of their territory.”
But is that really why he was there?
Custer seemed the natural choice to lead
In “Thieves’ Road: The Black Hills
an expedition across the Sioux’s land. In the
Betrayal and Custer’s Path to Little
years following the Civil War, he had gained
Bighorn,” historian Terry Mort digs beneath a reputation as a pitiless “Indian fighter.”
the surface of Custer’s seemingly
He was fiercely ambitious and no stranger
straightforward 1874 expedition and makes
to the hardships of frontier life. Nor was he
under any illusions about the troops under
a startling discovery: There was gold in
his command.
them thar hills, and Custer aimed to find it.
Bolstered by meticulous research, Mort
“Poorly trained, most were unemployed
paints a vivid picture of the economic and
men who could find no other work in the
political environment in which Custer’s
depression-ravaged economy,” Custer said.
Black Hills expedition took place. In the
“Morale was low, too, because of harsh
years following the Civil War, the United
discipline, poor living conditions, low pay,
States became mired in the worst economic
and the remoteness of so many frontier
posts.”
depression it had ever experienced The
influence of private interests - most notably
Mort painstakingly details Custer’s trek
the railroads - was at an all-time high. And
across the vast plains and the calamities he
the country was flooded with immigrants
and his soldiers faced. And his description
from Europe who were fleeing even greater
of what Custer and his troops found when
economic hardships abroad.
they finally reached the Black Hills is
riveting. Custer’s aggressive attitude and
An influx of gold into the economy
pugilistic tendencies, which eventually led to
seemed like a cure-all to the. struggling
his downfall at age 36 at the hands of the
nation’s woes. Experts suspected that the
Sioux, are made clear, as are the pitfalls in
remote, unexplored Black Hills might
the Manifest Destiny mythos that drove
conceal a cache of precious metal. All they
him.
had to do was discover it and the gold rush
And yet, even more intriguing than
would be on, simultaneously pulling the
Mort’s deconstruction of the origin story of
economy out of the depression, providing
the Wild West is the ethical conundrum that
homes and jobs for thousands of
unemployed immigrants and satisfying
he presents when he questions just who the
railroad companies’ demands for
Black Hills truly belonged to.
government aid in their westward
While it is indisputable that the U.S.
expansion.
government eventually seized the land from
the Sioux in violation of its own treaties,
“Much of the settlement of the West
started with the discovery of gold. It wasn’t
“the Sioux got that same land in much the
the sodbusters and cowboys who started the same way — and without payment or
westward movement,” Mort notes. “More
negotiation,” Mort writes. “The Sioux
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
i
believed in the right of conquest more
fervently than the Americans who were now
encroaching upon them. They didn’t need a
treaty or international law to make it so;
they only needed victories and enemy scalps
... at the turn of the 19th century the Sioux
attacked and evicted the Cheyenne, thé
Kiowa, and the Crow from the Black Hills.”
According to Mort, the bad faith with
which the U.S. entered into its treaty with
the Sioux was irrelevant. Within the Sioux’s
worldview at the time, the land was forfeited
to the U.S. government by the same “right
of conquest” that had made it the Sioux’s
property years earlier.
“Treachery and trickery were
acknowledged and celebrated tactics against
enemies. If the Sioux were again deceived
in negotiations with the government, they
could hardly claim foul, at least tactically....
The Sioux are not innocent victims.”
This is an uncomfortable notion to
consider, but Mort presents it as crucial to
understanding the violence with which both
cultures reacted to what they saw as
encroachments on “their” land.
“None of the parties, red or white,
emerges blameless. In that sense, the
(Black) Hills are a metaphor for the
settlement of the west. There was more
than enough cruelty, violence, and guilt to
go around,” Mort writps. |
.
 çentury after the fact, the Ù.S.
' I
government acknowledged that the Black
Hills were illegally appropriated and set
aside compensation that today is worth over
$1 billion.
However, members of the Sioux tribes
have consistently refused to accept the
funds, arguing that they never offered the
Black Hills for sale. The conflict that drove
all the players in “Thieves’ Road”— the
desire for land versus the undeniable value
of gold — shows no sign of ending soon.
THIEVES’ ROAD
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“Thieves’ Road:
The Black Hills
Betrayal and
Custer’s Path to
Little Bighorn’’
by Terry Mort
Reprinted from Real Change News, Seattle.
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