Page:A Brief History of South Dakota.djvu/148

142 These first Dakota pioneers also were plagued with invasions of grasshoppers which came in great clouds and ate up their scanty crops. This occurred in five different years: 1863, 1864, 1867, 1874, and 1876. Since then the grasshoppers have made no ravages in the Dakota country.

The Indians behaved very well, after the close of the Red Cloud War, until, in violation of the treaty, the surveyors for the Northern Pacific Railroad began to extend the survey for that line through the reservation, along the south bank of the Yellowstone, and the government sent soldiers to protect the surveyors in their work. The Uncpapa Sioux were the wildest of the nation and as yet had come very little under reservation or agency influence, but chiefly roamed back in the buffalo country on the Powder and Rosebud rivers. They were much alarmed by the approach of the surveyors, and organized under Gall and Sitting Bull to resist the encroachments upon their land. There were several sharp encounters along the Yellowstone River, with a loss of but few men on either side.

In 1874 General George A. Custer was sent out from Fort Abraham Lincoln, on the Missouri River opposite Bismarck, with a force of twelve hundred soldiers, to make an examination of the Black Hills region. Custer did this without encountering any Indians until he reached the Custer Park in the Black Hills, when he came upon a small band who were there stripping lodge poles. These Indians were greatly alarmed at the approach of Custer's army in the heart of their reservation,