Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/568

548 Meanwhile the Government, whatever its plighted faith, also felt that its paramount — saying nothing of its primary — obligations compelled it to stand for the rights and interests of civilization against barbarism, of white men mining instead of red men hunting. Government sent out surveying, exploring, and then military parties to penetrate and examine regions which were then unknown to the whites, which had been surveyed only by longitudinal and latitudinal measurements, and which it had been agreed that the white man should hold as forbidden to him. Of course the Sioux war in Minnesota, and then a general Indian panic and uprising, were the results. By making and breaking successive treaties, the United States first created and fostered in the minds of the Indians the preposterous notion that they held a limitless fee of possession in these enormous reaches of territory; and then after purchasing parts of them, and pledging the remainder to the Indians forever as still theirs, mocked at the Indians for thinking us in earnest, as if we really meant to countenance them in their foolish resistance to the progress of the age. In 1874, that hero in our Civil War, the youthful and lamented General Custer, destined to fall a victim in the war which he helped to open with the Sioux, was sent on an expedition to the Black Hills, and he accomplished it successfully, the Indians of course protesting and complaining, though not at once fighting. Acts of outrage, however, were done by roaming parties, and war was imminent. Major-General Stanley wrote from Dakota that he was “ashamed longer to appear in the presence of the chiefs of the different tribes of the Sioux, who inquire why we do not do as we promised, and in their vigorous language aver that we have lied.” Sitting Bull explained his refusal to come under any treaty relations by this vernacular sentence: “Whenever you have found a white man who will tell the truth, you may return, and I shall be glad to see you.” In 1875, a commission sent to treat for the surrender of the Black