17. The Native Americans’ “ultimate undoing”
The army fought a series of smaller wars with other Indian tribes throughout the 1870s. Against the Nez Perces in Idaho, the Utes in Colorado, against the Bannocks, Shoshonis and Paiutes in Nevada and eastern Oregon, but all suffered the same fate as the Sioux. According to historian William T. Hagan, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 “provided the framework for the Indians ultimate undoing.” By consenting to the cession of most of their land for peace, and theoretically if not practically agreeing to begin farming and sending their children to mission schools, Hagan believes that the Native Americans had unwittingly sealed their fate.
The second phase of Indian wars that occurred during the 1870s resulted not only from white encroachment upon lands guaranteed to the Indians by treaties negotiated in the late 1860s but the resistance of certain Indian factions to reservation life. Some, most notably, Sitting Bull, would not accept the right of the government to confine his people to reservations. Indian resistance was met with an even greater determination by the army to enforce the Concentration policy.