THE GRATTAN MASSACRE

Perhaps the most important confrontation with the native tribes occurred near Ft. Laramie in 1854, and became known as the Grattan Massacre. It began innocently enough- a single cow wandered away from an emigrant wagon trail. When the cow showed up at the nearby Sioux Village, the tribe promptly ate it. An aggressive Lt. Grattan and 28 men then left Fort Laramie with a single objective- punish the Sioux. The Sioux recognized their error and offered a horse in return for the cow, but Grattan was uninterested. He ordered his men to fire on the tribe. The Sioux chief told his warriors to withhold retaliation. Grattan fired again and killed the chief. Strikes and counter strikes escalated into a all out war.

MASSACRE ROCKS
For years, the Hudson Bay Company had been a stabilizing force on the Native Americans who lived near the Snake River- but when the British for trading company pulled out in the early 1850's, attacks on emigrants increased substantially. The best known incident napped near Massacre Rocks in what is now Southern Idaho. On august 9th, 1862 the attack came without warning. After hearing about this battle (and several others) many wagon trails took an alternate route- the Goodale Cutoff- which steered clear of any "agitated" Native Americans.
 
 

Massacre at Wounded Knee

By the early 1860s, many felt a need to punish the tribes along the Trail. Col. Patrick Conner, stationed in Salt Lake City, was among those who wanted to teach the Native Americans a lesson. In
 January of 1863 Conner and his California Volunteers marched north
    to the Bear River. There, Conner's men brutally killed 400 Shoshoni
  men, women and children. More Native Americans died at Bear River
 than any other battle in western history.
This grotesque attempt at genocide did have its intended effect. The
  Trail was safe for the emigrants--for a while. But word of the Bear Rive
  Massacre, and a similar event in Sand Creek Colorado, soon spread
to tribes across the west. Native Americans had had enough--and
  they were about to begin fighting back.
 
 
 
 

FORCED REMOVAL

The "Indian Removal" policy was implemented to "clear" land for white settlers. Removal was
more than another assault on American Indians' land titles. Insatiable greed for land remained a
primary consideration, but many people now believed that the removal was the only way of
saving American Indians from extermination. As long as the American Indians lived in close
proximity to non-Native American communities, they would be decimated by disease, alcohol,
and poverty. The Indian Removal Act began in 1830. Forced marches at bayonet-point to
relocation settlements resulted in high mortality rates. The infamous removal of the Five
Civilized Tribes -- the Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles -- is a dismal
page in United States history. By the 1820's the Cherokees, who had established a written
constitution modeled after the United States Constitution, a newspaper, schools, and industries
in their settlements, resisted removal. In 1938 the federal troops evicted the Cherokees.
Approximately four thousand Cherokees died during the removal process because of poor
planning by the United States Government. This exodus to Indian Territory is known as the Trail
of Tears. More than one hundred thousand American Indians eventually crossed the Mississippi
River under the authority of the Indian Removal Act.
 
 
 
 

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