game. They built
fires, and the fires spread and burned the prairie grass on which the
buffalo fed. Also it destroyed the pasturage for the ponies of the
Indians. Soon the friends of the first White Men came and took more
land. Then cities arose and always the White Man's lands were extended
and the Indians pushed farther and farther away from the country that
the Great Father had given them and that had always been theirs.

"When treaties were broken and the Indians trespassed on the rights of
the White Man, my chiefs and I were always here to adjust the White
Man's wrongs.

"When treaties were broken and the Indians' rights were infringed, no
one could find the white chiefs. They were somewhere back toward the
rising sun. There was no one to give us justice. New chiefs of the
White Men came to supplant the old chiefs. They knew nothing of our
wrongs and laughed at us.

"When the Sioux left Minnesota and went beyond the Big Muddy the white
chiefs promised them they would never again be disturbed. Then they
followed us across the river, and when we asked for lands they gave us
each a prairie chicken's flight four ways (a hundred and sixty acres);
this they gave us, who once had all the land there was, and whose habit
is to roam as far as a horse can carry us and then continue our journey
till we have had our fill of wandering.

"We are not as many as the White Man. But we know that this land is our
land. And while we live and can fight, we will fight for it. If the
White Man does not want us to fight, why does he take our land? If we
come and build our lodges on the White Man's land, the White Man drives
us away or kills us. Have we not the same right as the White Man?"

The forfeiture of the Black Hills and unwise reduction of rations kept
alive the Indian discontent. When, in 1889, Congress passed a law
dividing the Sioux reservation into many smaller ones so as to isolate
the different tribes of the Dakota nation a treaty was offered them.
This provided payment for the ponies captured or destroyed in the war
of 1876 and certain other concessions, in return for which the Indians
were to cede about half their land, or eleven million acres, which was
to be opened up for settlement.

The treaty was submitted to the Indians for a vote. They came in from
the woods and the plains to vote on it, and it was carried by a very
narrow majority, many of the Indians insisting that they had been
coerced by their necessities