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The Great Plains Wars
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For centuries, the Great Plains stretched wide and open—home to millions of buffalo and the Native nations who followed them. But by the mid-1800s, wagon trains, railroads, and soldiers poured in, bringing conflict that would last for decades. What started with a skirmish over a single cow in 1854 spiraled into battles, uprisings, and massacres.
Lakota leaders like Conquering Bear, Little Crow, and Big Foot tried to defend their people and their way of life against overwhelming odds. By the time the last shots rang out at Wounded Knee in 1890, the world of the Plains Indians had been shattered, replaced by reservations and broken promises. This is the story of how the Indian Wars began, raged, and came to a bloody end.
The war against Native Americans on the Great Plains lasted for about 40 years, making it America's longest war, more than double the time the U.S. spent in Vietnam.
The Grattan Massacre
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The first shots of the Indian Wars were fired over a dead cow. In the summer of 1854, a Mormon pioneer heading west along the Oregon Trail lodged a complaint with the officials at Fort Laramie that one of the Indians camped nearby had killed his cow. The Indians, mostly Lakota, were camped nearby to receive their annual payments of food and goods promised to to them by treaty in exchange for allowing settlers to pass through Lakota lands. Normally such a trivial matter would be handled by the Indian Bureau agent-- but he was out that day. Chief Conquering Bear refused to pay the excessive $25 price that the Mormon settler was demanding and instead counter-offered with $10. Tempers flared as neither side could reach a compromise. Then just when things couldn't get much worse, the interpreter showed up drunk and taunted the Lakota warriors by calling them 'women'.
But the situation was about to get even worse. In charge was a young hot head who has little respect for the Indians. The hothead in question was Second Lieutenant J.L. Grattan who decided that with only 27 calvary, 2 howitzers, (plus a drunk interpreter) he could teach the 4,000 Lakota encamped nearby a lesson. No one is sure who fired the first shot but once the smoke cleared Conquering Bear was dead along with all 30 of the white soldiers. When word reached back east, outraged Americans demanded revenge for the 'Grattan Massacre'. The U.S. army got it a few months later by attacking a Lakota village killing 100 men women and children. The forty year conflict known as the Indian Wars had officially begun.
Conflict between native peoples and settlers had been going on since Columbus. But the period known as the Indian Wars lasted only thirty years from 1860-1890.
The native peoples who called the Great Plains home, were divided into dozens of tribal groups. Each with their own unique language, culture, and beliefs.
The Dakota Uprising
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In March 1862, in Minnesota, a story eerily similar to what happened at Fort Laramie a decade earlier was about to unfold—this time with much bloodier results. The Dakota were fighting for their homeland against a flood of white settlers who ignored U.S. treaties.
Year after year, the Dakota watched their hunting grounds carved into townships, forests plowed under for wheat and corn, and buffalo driven off by railroads and wagon trains. Forced onto small reservations, life grew harder. Hunting could no longer sustain them, as buffalo and antelope were overhunted by both whites and Indians. Survival now depended on government food shipments—deliveries that were often late or too small.
When hunger hit hard in the summer of 1862, Indian agent Andrew Myrick sneered, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.” Desperation turned violent. Raiders first broke into a warehouse, then a quarrel over stolen eggs ended in a farmer and his family being murdered. Within days, warriors attacked two agencies—Myrick was found dead with grass stuffed in his mouth—raided farms killing 25 settlers, and launched larger assaults. Three thousand Dakota attacked Fort Ridgley but were repelled by cannon fire. At New Ulm, 500 warriors burned most of the town and killed 26 defenders before a thunderstorm stopped them.
Minnesota’s governor, Alexander Ramsey, responded by declaring that the Dakota “must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” Across the Plains, similar clashes turned the region into a killing ground.
"The siege of New Ulm, Minnesota" by Henry August Schwabe
Refugees from The Dakota Uprising
Refugees fleeing the violence of the Dakota Uprising.
Geronimo and the Fight Against Reservations
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While the Lakota and Cheyenne were fighting on the northern Plains, another battle was raging far to the south. In the deserts of Arizona and northern Mexico, a Chiricahua Apache leader named Geronimo refused to be confined to reservations. Born in 1829, Geronimo had already lost his family in a massacre carried out by Mexican soldiers, and from then on he dedicated his life to resisting both Mexican and U.S. control.
The U.S. government tried to force the Apache onto reservations where they were promised food and safety, but Geronimo saw only broken promises and starvation. Again and again, he and his band slipped away, raiding ranches, ambushing soldiers, and vanishing back into the mountains. His ability to evade capture became legendary—newspapers made him a household name, and to settlers on the frontier, Geronimo was the face of Apache resistance.
In 1886, after years of pursuit, Geronimo finally surrendered with just 30 men, women, and children left in his band. Even then, the government broke its word. Instead of letting the Chiricahua return to their homeland, they were shipped east as prisoners of war—first to Florida, then Alabama, and finally to Oklahoma. Geronimo lived out the rest of his life far from his desert home, dying in 1909. His story shows how resistance to reservations did not end with the Lakota on the northern Plains, but stretched across the continent as Native nations fought to hold onto their freedom.
Geronimo and a few of his warrior - 1886
The Ghost Dance
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By 1890, the Great Plains had changed forever. The buffalo were gone, Native nations had been forced onto reservations, and the U.S. Army controlled the land. But out of that despair came one last movement that terrified the government—the Ghost Dance.
It began with a Paiute medicine man named Wovoka from Nevada. Orphaned as a child, he grew up learning both Native traditions and Christianity from the white family who raised him. On January 1, 1889—during a solar eclipse—he had a vision. Wovoka saw the dead return, the buffalo back on the plains, and a new savior who would restore the old ways. In that vision, he learned a ritual: the Ghost Dance.
Wovoka shared the dance with visiting tribes, and it spread quickly. Soon, thousands of Native people gathered around fires, joining hands in circles, chanting and swaying for hours. To outsiders, it might have looked like just another ceremony, but to those dancing, it was a powerful prayer. They believed the ritual could connect them with the spirit world and bring protection in a time when everything else was slipping away.
Two Views of the Ghost Dance
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The Ghost Dance is a Religious Movement
The message of a return to “the good old days” before settlers came was irresistible to plains tribes, who had been herded onto reservations. The details of how this return would happen were vague. Some believed it would come like magic, while others thought the Great Spirit would give them protection through a sacred garment called the Ghost Shirt. Made from white cotton, the shirt was said to stop bullets—powerful medicine for a people fighting for their survival.
For Native Americans, the Ghost Dance was a deeply religious movement. To those who knew Lakota culture, it was nothing to fear. Some local settlers even came to watch the dancing. Elaine Goodale-Eastman, a white woman married to a Lakota, wrote that “no one with imagination could fail to see in the rite a genuine religious ceremony, a faith which, illusory as it was, deserved to be treated with respect.”
The Ghost Dance is a Threat
Elsewhere, the Ghost Dance sparked fear and hysteria. Newspapers far from the Plains, desperate to sell copies, published wild exaggerations. On November 20, 1890, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran the headline: “In a State of Terror.” Other papers shouted phrases like “To Wipe Out the Whites” and “Redskins Bloody Work.” Reporters painted images of “savages” dancing with guns, while women and children cowered in fear—stories more fiction than fact.
Government officials grew nervous. D. F. Royer, head of the Pine Ridge Agency, wrote to Washington that “the Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy.” He begged for protection. Soon, authorities began arresting tribal leaders and shipping them to prisons in Arkansas and Florida. Still the dancing continued, and when word spread that Sitting Bull planned to lead a massive Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge, the Army acted. Indian police and cavalry officers moved in to arrest him at Standing Rock. A struggle broke out, and the famous Lakota leader was shot dead.
The Massacre at Wounded Knee
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In December 1890, a band of 350 Hunkpapa Lakota, led by the ailing Lakota chief Big Foot, tried to reach Pine Ridge after days of evading the U.S. Army. Hungry and exhausted, they were forced to camp at Wounded Knee Creek under the watch of Custer’s old unit, the 7th Cavalry. Soldiers surrounded them with rifles and four Hotchkiss cannons positioned on a nearby ridge.
The next morning, the army ordered the Lakota to turn in their weapons. Only two worn-out rifles were handed over, so soldiers began tearing through tents and searching women—some of whom had hidden guns under their blankets. Tempers flared. A shot rang out, likely from a young warrior named Black Coyote, and chaos followed. The cannons opened fire on the camp. Men, women, and children were cut down as they fled toward a ravine.
By the time the shooting stopped, nearly every member of Big Foot’s band was dead. Twenty-five soldiers also lay among the frozen bodies. Infants survived only by being shielded under their mothers’ corpses. Newspapers called it a victory, but others—including General Nelson Miles—condemned it as a massacre. Despite his protests, soldiers were awarded Medals of Honor.
The massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 is often seen as the final major clash of the Indian Wars. Afterward, Native peoples were forced to remain on reservations under strict government control, while millions of acres of their former lands were taken and opened to white settlement.
US soldiers with Hotchkiss guns used at Wounded Knee
“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream...”
― Black Elk
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Why It Matters
The Indian Wars of 1870–1900 weren’t just battles on the frontier—they reshaped the map of the United States and the lives of Native peoples forever. Each battle left Native nations with less land and less power, while federal authority spread across the West.” opening millions of acres to railroads, miners, ranchers, and settlers. For Native nations, the wars meant the loss of ancestral homelands, confinement to reservations, and the destruction of ways of life that had existed for centuries.
Today, there are about 324–326 federally recognized reservations in the United States, a lasting reminder of how the Indian Wars and the assimilation era reshaped Native lands and lives.
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