826 THE GHOST-DANCE RELIGION 



[ETH. ANN. 14 



The white population in the Black hills had rapidly increased, and 

 it had become desirable to open communication between eastern 

 and western Dakota. To accomplish this, it was proposed to cutout 

 the heart of the Sioux reservation, and in 188:2, only six years after the 

 Black hills had been seized, the Sioux were called on to surrender 

 more territory. A commission was sent out to treat with them, but the 

 price offered— only about 8 cents per acre— was so absurdly small, and 

 the methods used so palpably unjust, that friends of the Indians inter- 

 posed and succeeded in defeating the measure in Congress. Another 

 agreement was prepared, but experience had made the Indians sus- 

 picious, and it was not until a third commission went out, under the 

 chairmanship of General Crook, known to the Indians as a brave 

 soldier and an honorable man, that the Sioux consented to treat. 

 (Welsh, 1.) The result, after much effort on the part of the commis- 

 sion and determined opposition by the conservatives, was another 

 agreement, in 1889, by which the Sioux surrendered one half (about 

 11,0(10,0(1(1 acres) of their remaining territory, and the great reservation 

 was cut up into five smaller ones, the northern and southern reserva- 

 tions being separated by a strip 00 miles wide. 



Then came a swift accumulation of miseries. Dakota is an arid 

 country with thin soil and short seasons. Although well adapted to 

 grazing it is not suited to agriculture, as is sufficiently proven by the 

 fact that the white settlers in that and the adjoining state of Nebraska 

 have several times been obliged to call for state or federal assistance 

 on account of failure of crops. To wild Indians hardly in from the 

 warpath the problem was much more serious. x \.s General Miles 

 points out in his official report, thousands of white settlers after years 

 of successive failures had given up the struggle and left the country, 

 but the Indians, confined to reservations, were unable to emigrate, and 

 were also as a rule unable to And employment, as the whites might, by 

 which they could earn a subsistence. The buffalo was gone. They 

 must depend on their cattle, their crops, and the government rations 

 issued in return for the lands they had surrendered. If these failed, 

 they must starve. The highest official authorities concur in the state- 

 ment that all of these did fail, and that the Indians were driven to 

 outbreak by starvation. (See appendix to this chapter.) 



In 1888 their cattle had been diminished by disease. In 1889 their 

 crops were a failure, owing largely to the fact that the Indians had been 

 called into the agency in the middle of the farming season and kept 

 there to treat witli the commission, going back afterward to find their 

 fields trampled and torn up by stock during their absence. Then fol- 

 lowed epidemics of measles, grippe, and whooping cough, in rapid 

 succession ami with terribly fatal results. Anyone who understands 

 the Indian character needs not the testimony of witnesses to know the 

 mental effect thus produced. Sullenness and gloom, amounting almost 

 to despair, settled down on the Sioux, especially among the wilder 



