A Bitter Struggle: The Resistance and Removal of the Sioux Nation On December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee, South Dakota the soldiers of the U.S. 7th cavalry slaughtered unarmed Sioux men, women and children led by Chief Big Foot. The 146 corpses were gathered up and thrown casually into a mass grave. This massacre marked the end of the Sioux resistance and ultimately the Sioux Nation. The battle that had gone on for ten long years before this between the Great Sioux Nation and the United States came to a sad end, but not unnoticed by the rest of the country.The original Sioux tribes were not plains people at all, they were a forest people who occupied the area near the head of the Mississippi. They survived upon berries, fish and game. In the mid-eighteenth century they moved westward from this area due to a scarcity of game in the area. This was result of French fur traders who had moved in from the southeast. They kept moving westward past the Missouri River into the treeless prairies of the Midwest around 1760. Once there, they began to acquire two key gifts from the white man, firearms and the introduction of the horse. With these two new tools the Sioux were now able to hunt the buffalo which became the single most important animal to the Sioux. Every part of the buffalo was used from the hide, for clothing and teepees, to the droppings that were burned for fuel. The Sioux only hunted for necessity, but with the white settlers coming further and further west, the number of buffalo in the area soon decreased dramatically.With the influx of white settlers heading west, the United States government soon was faced with the problem of where to put the Sioux. They began to make treaties with the Sioux, the first of which took place in 1851. The more treaties the Sioux made, the less land they wound up with. The Sioux were allowed to roam from the Upper Missouri to the Arkansas River as the treaty allowed, but now the Sioux h...
