Custer's Black Hills Expedition Violates Fort Laramie Treaty, Discovering Gold and Triggering Rush to Sioux Sacred Lands

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer leads a 1,000-man military expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota in direct violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which guaranteed the Sioux Nation “absolute and undisturbed use and occupancy” of all land west of the Missouri River including the sacred Black Hills (Paha Sapa). Operating under U.S. government orders ostensibly to find a location for a military post, Custer’s expedition is accompanied by miners and prospectors—revealing the true purpose of violating Sioux treaty rights to explore for mineral wealth. The Black Hills hold profound spiritual significance for the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota peoples as the sacred center of their world and the birthplace of their nation, making the military intrusion not merely a legal violation but a desecration of the Sioux’s most holy lands. The expedition represents a deliberate choice by the federal government to ignore its treaty obligations when economic interests (gold speculation) and military expansion goals override legal commitments to Indigenous sovereignty, demonstrating the pattern where U.S. treaties with Native nations remain in force only as long as they serve white interests.

On August 2, 1874, prospector Horatio Ross discovers placer gold on French Creek near the site of present-day Custer, South Dakota, fundamentally transforming the Black Hills from protected Sioux territory into a target for white settler invasion. News of the gold discovery ignites the Black Hills Gold Rush, with approximately 800 illegal miners flooding into treaty-protected Sioux territory by 1875, growing to thousands more in subsequent years. The federal government makes no effort to enforce the 1868 treaty by removing the illegal white settlers and miners from Sioux lands—despite the treaty’s explicit protections and the military’s presence in the region. Instead, U.S. military forces that should be protecting Sioux treaty rights actively facilitate white encroachment, providing security for miners and settlers violating federal law and treaty obligations. The government’s response to its own treaty violation follows a predictable pattern: rather than honoring legal commitments to the Sioux, federal officials begin pressuring the Sioux to sell the Black Hills, and when the Sioux refuse to sell their sacred lands, the government prepares to take them by force.

Custer’s expedition and the resulting gold rush lead directly to the Great Sioux War of 1876 and the eventual illegal seizure of the Black Hills through the 1877 Agreement. When the Sioux refuse to sell the Black Hills, the government manufactures a pretext for war by ordering all Sioux to report to reservations by January 31, 1876—an impossible deadline in winter conditions—and declaring those who fail to comply (due to inability rather than defiance) as “hostile.” The resulting military campaign includes Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, which intensifies government determination to punish the Sioux and seize their sacred lands. The 1877 Agreement unilaterally confiscates the Black Hills with signatures from only 10 percent of adult Sioux males—far below the three-fourths threshold required by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty—yet Congress treats this fraudulent consent as legally binding. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in United States v. Sioux Nation that the government illegally took the Black Hills in violation of the Fifth Amendment, but the Court’s remedy of monetary damages (over $1 billion with interest by 2011) cannot restore the sacred lands the Sioux refuse to sell. Custer’s 1874 expedition exemplifies institutional corruption operating through military power serving economic elites: the government deliberately violates its own treaties when mineral wealth is discovered on Indigenous lands, uses military force to facilitate illegal white settlement, manufactures legal pretexts for land seizure when Indigenous peoples refuse to sell, and even a Supreme Court ruling 106 years later acknowledging the illegal taking cannot undo the theft—demonstrating how institutional processes legitimize dispossession rather than provide meaningful justice for Indigenous nations.