This chapter records an important passage in the history of the West as tension between the Indians and the whites continued to mount. The U.S. Government began making treaties with the Sioux in 1851, but in 1871 Congress stopped recognizing the Indian tribes as sovereign nations with treaty-making prerogatives. The treaty of 1851, between Red Cloud and the U.S. government, recognized the Black Hills as Indian territory. But that land became too valuable for American empire-builders to ignore. With the help of Martha Jane Canary, commonly known as Calamity Jane, General George Armstrong Custer led the Black Hills Gold Discovery Expedition in 1874. (Custer's personal vanity prompted him to wear his blonde hair longer than most men did at the time, hence the name Long Hair.) His discovery of gold brought many adventurers and settlers to the area. The Sioux did not especially value gold and the whites' obsession with it bemused them. They soon realized, however, that the whites' greed for gold and for land would mean the end of their own freedom. The Transcontinental Railroad also meant the appropriation of Indian land.
Economic motives combined with misguided humanitarian and missionary efforts to civilize the Indians. The U.S. government began to establish agencies to manage the Indian population. They built houses for the Indians, taking away the power of the circular tepee, and began to confine the nomadic Indians to areas that would be known as reservations (Rosebud, Pine Ridge, and so on). Some Indians are far more cooperative than others and do not resist the efforts of the whites to contain them. Red Cloud was such an "agency chief" who tried to reconcile his fellow Indians to their new life. Red Cloud's efforts appear to be pragmatic, trying to guarantee his people food and shelter as the whites took more and more of their land, but some Indians saw him as a collaborator with the whites and a traitor to the Indian cause. Many times throughout his story, Black Elk stops to reflect on how the greed of the white man has displaced the Indians. The dead Lakota, lost while searching for his relatives, seems like something of an omen to Black Elk and foreshadows the numerous deaths that will occur among the increasingly displaced Sioux tribe.
