A Lame Cow Started the Plains Wars That Ended the Native Way of Life

In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that there was no discernable frontier between American settlements. The frontier was officially closed, and the cost was more than monetary. Native Americans fought the settlers and the U.S. Army in a decades-long fight for survival that began in earnest with hungry tribesmen and a lame cow. 

Fighting between the Army and the Natives who inhabited the erstwhile wilderness that is today the United States began long before settlers started manifesting destiny. States and territories that saw significant population growth among white settlers—California, Texas, Utah, and New Mexico, to name a few—had seen bloodshed since white settlers landed in the New World. In the years before the Civil War, settlers pushed tribes into the Great Plains and into conflict with the settlers, who eventually began moving there, too. 

In 1854, a drought effectively killed the population of bison on the plains, leading to mass starvation among the tribes there, especially the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux. In August 1854, some 4,000 Brule Sioux were camped outside of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and were in the same condition: starving. That's when a lame cow ambled into their camp.

The tribesmen did what any starving person with a gun might do when confronted with a lone, lame cow: they shot it and then ate it. 

Unfortunately, then, as now, even lame cows were a big deal to settlers and ranchers. The cow had come from a group of Mormon settlers moving along the Oregon Trail. Officially, the settlers wrote that they were happy to let the natives eat the meat. But apparently, a Sioux (named High Forehead) had shot a second, healthy cow, which wandered back to its owners. 

U.S. Army Lt. Hugh Fleming rode out to the Sioux to negotiate a restitution with a Chief, Conquering Bear, and resolve the dispute. Conquering Bear offered to replace the cow with one of their horses, but the cow's owner wouldn't have it and demanded the Natives pay him $25 instead (more than $923 in today's dollars). Barring that, the Army demanded the arrest of the man who shot the cow. Conquering Bear couldn't force the man to give himself up. Since they also had no money, so the negotiation ended in a stalemate. 

Two days later, a contingent of soldiers rode to the Sioux encampment, led by recent West Point graduate Lt. John L. Grattan, to arrest the man by force, if necessary. The truth was, Grattan was ready for a fight despite having only 31 men to the Native's 1,200 warriors. His translator, a Frenchman, was drunk and didn't actually know the dialect of Sioux, so he needed to talk to the Natives. He told the Sioux the Army had come to kill them all. It was a tense situation.

When Grattan realized he was terribly outnumbered, he asked the owner of the local trading post, Lucien Bordeaux, what to do. Bordeaux told him to talk to Conquering Bear and negotiate. But first, he went to High Forehead's lodge and demanded his surrender. 

Only when High Forehead exclaimed he would die first did Grattan talk to Conquering Bear? The Chief again told the Army he couldn't force High Forehead to surrender and again offered a horse in exchange. Bordeaux offered to translate. As the Natives began to take flanking positions around the soldiers, he knew a fight he couldn't defuse was coming. 

But it almost didn't come at all. Grattan was calmly walking back to his horse as a nervous soldier fired into the Natives. Arrows and gunshots began to fly. Grattan and 11 of his men (including his drunken interpreter) were killed. Conquering Bear was the only Sioux to die of his wounds. As the rest of the soldiers tried to escape, they were cut off and killed by a band of warriors led by Oglala Chief Red Cloud. 

Back East, the press called the incident the "Grattan Massacre," and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis began devising a plan to punish the Sioux for it. Brig. Gen. William S. Harney would fight the Brule Sioux in Nebraska the following year, which resulted in a rout for the Natives and a temporary, uneasy truce. But that wasn't the end of the Plains Wars. The Cheyenne, Utes, Comanches, and other tribes would fight sporadically and even piecemeal until the last battle – in 1918.