The Sioux after 1500

Soon after 1500 AD, Sioux people were still living a nomadic life in their homes around the Great Lakes. But by the 1700's the Sioux (you pronounce it SOO), along with the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, had left their home to live on the Great Plains instead, further west (in modern North and South Dakota and Minnesota).

The main reason that the Sioux moved to the Great Plains was that beginning in the early 1600's they were pushed out of the Great Lakes area by the Ojibwe people, who had been pushed out of their own land further east by European settlers. The Ojibwe had guns and used them to win battles against the Sioux. Another important factor was that they got horses. by 1750 AD, horses made it possible for Sioux men to hunt buffalo all over the Great Plains.

But this new system of hunting buffalo with horses also had a bad side. Living so far north, where there were long cold snowy winters, it was hard to find enough food for the horses to eat during the winter. Sioux people found that the horses could survive by eating the bark of cottonwood trees. These trees grew in the valleys alongside rivers, so that's where Sioux people took their horses in the winter.
But that's also where buffalo usually went to spend the winter, protected from the worst of the cold weather and snow. When people and horses were in the valleys, the buffalo were afraid to go there. Many buffalo died from the cold and snow, up on the high plains.
Between the unintended damage to the buffalo herds and the Sioux hunting the buffalo in the summer, by about 1850 AD there were fewer and fewer buffalo around. Also, European people built the first railroad across the Great Plains at this time, which frightened the buffalo and made it hard for them to travel on their usual migration routes. The Sioux began to go hungry.

Now that the train was coming through, a lot of Europeans wanted to take over the Great Plains for themselves, to farm it. They could grow lots of corn there and ship it back to the East Coast cities on the trains. These people realized that if they killed the rest of the buffalo, the Sioux would have to do whatever the European people wanted, in exchange for food. So that's what they did. They killed almost all of the buffalo, just leaving them there to rot, and by the 1860's many Sioux had died and the rest were desperate. After the Civil War ended in 1865, the United States was happy to send a lot of soldiers West to fight the Sioux (and the Navajo), and things began to get even worse. In 1868, the United States army signed a treaty with the Sioux that said that the United States would never let settlers move into the Black Hills. But when explorers found gold in the Black Hills four years later, the United States broke that treaty, There was a big battle over this - the Battle of the Little Big Horn - and the Sioux won, under their great chief Sitting Bull, killing many United States soldiers including General Custer. But winning the battle didn't help - there still weren't enough buffalo, and there were more and more United States soldiers.
In 1889, many of the Sioux turned to a new Christian idea of the Ghost Dance which they thought would protect them against their enemies. But all that happened was that United States soldiers came and killed Sitting Bull. By 1900, all Sioux people were living on reservations, under the control of the United States government.

During the 1900's, most Sioux lived on a large reservation covering about half of South Dakota and large parts of Nebraska, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado. Many Sioux people still spoke their own language. Sioux people began to farm corn and raise cattle, and to work towards a tourist industry.

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