Thieves' Road: The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer's Path to Little Bighorn

by Terry Mort

Overview

In the summer of 1874, Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer led an expedition of some 1000 troops and more than one hundred wagons into the Black Hills of South Dakota. This fascinating work of narrative history tells the little-known story of this exploratory mission and reveals how it set the stage for the climactic Battle of the Little Bighorn two years later. What is the significance of this obscure foray into the Black Hills? The short answer, as the author explains, is that Custer found gold. This discovery in the context of the worst economic depression the country had yet experienced spurred a gold rush that brought hordes of white prospectors to the Sioux's sacred grounds. The result was the trampling of an 1868 treaty that had granted the Black Hills to the Sioux and their inevitable retaliation against the white invasion. The author brings the era of the Grant administration to life, with its "peace policy" of settling the Indians on reservations, corrupt federal Indian Bureau, Gilded Age excesses, the building of the western railroads, the white settlements that followed the tracks, the Crash of 1873, mining ventures, and the clash of white and Indian cultures with diametrically opposed values. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills was the beginning of the end of Sioux territorial independence. By the end of the book it is clear why the Sioux leader Fast Bear called the trail cut by Custer to the Black Hills "thieves' road."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616149604
Publisher:	Prometheus Books
Publication date:	02/10/2015
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 4.20(d)

About the Author

Terry Mort is the author of The Wrath of Cochise, The Hemingway Patrols, a book on fly fishing, and edited anthologies of Mark Twain, Jack London, and Zane Grey.

Read an Excerpt

From the Introduction
(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Thieves' Road"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Terry Mort.
Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Introduction 7

Chapter 1 War, Taxes, Debt, and the Resultant Lure of Gold 21

Chapter 2 Gold in Montana, Disaster in Wyoming 43

Chapter 3 The Adversaries 61

Chapter 4 The Gilded Age 97

Chapter 5 Politics, Philanthropy, and Corruption 111

Chapter 6 The Northern Pacific Railroad 131

Chapter 7 Custer Agonistes 143

Chapter 8 The Yellowstone Expedition 155

Chapter 9 The Yellowstone Battles 171

Chapter 10 Anatomy of a Crash 185

Chapter 11 Build-Up 201

Chapter 12 Soldiers, Scouts, and Scientists 215

Chapter 13 Alkali and Comets, Grass and Stars 229

Chapter 14 In the Moon of Black Cherries 249

Chapter 15 Homeward Bound 263

Chapter 16 Invasion 279

Epilogue 291

Notes 305

Bibliography 323

Index 325

Editorial Reviews

12/15/2014
Though much has been written about the legendary confrontation between the Lakota Sioux and Gen. George Custer’s U.S. cavalry at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, Mort (The Wrath of Cochise) examines Custer’s less well-known 1874 expedition to South Dakota’s Black Hills, in this dense work of narrative history. Custer’s goal was to discover if this region, little known to white Americans, held extensive gold deposits, and though he was careful not to exaggerate how much gold he found, word soon spread, drawing prospectors from across the nation. In Mort’s view, Custer’s discovery of gold made it inevitable that the federal government would try to gain control of the Black Hills by any means necessary, a decision that spelled the end of the Lakota Sioux’s way of life. Although Mort’s book suffers from occasional overwriting, it is a lively and impressively researched account not only of the collision between two very different ways of life, but between ideas about the ownership and use of land—a collision whose outcome would have long-lasting significance for both the victors and the vanquished, far beyond the remote hills of South Dakota. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media Group. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"An absorbing account of the expedition…. An exceptional study of both Custer’s mission and the variety of forces that led to it.. . .  An excellent history of both the Black Hills Expedition and the times in which it occurred.” —On Point: The Journal of Army History  “A comprehensive, discerning, carefully researched, and readable account. .. . Indispensable reading.”         —Michigan War Studies Review  “Mort’s delightful prose will entice readers of history, geography, Native American studies and sociology. All will revel in the feeling of being in the Dakotas at the end of the 19th century.”            —Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

From the Publisher

01/01/2015
Historian Mort (The Wrath of Cochise: The Bascom Affair and the Origins of the Apache Wars) turns his eye to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's 1874 expedition through the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota and Wyoming. Unlike Ernest Grafe and Paul Horsted's guidebook Exploring with Custer: The 1874 Black Hills Expedition, Mort concentrates on Custer's gold-seeking mission on the Great Sioux Reservation; lands that had been formally protected by the Treaty of Fort Laramie as being closed to gold prospectors. However, Custer's mission was a thinly veiled reconnaissance to find a suitable location for a new military fort. The author documents 19th-century American lust for the Black Hills as an encouraging factor in Custer's personal quest, and how Custer's reports of finding abundant gold served to turn public opinion further in his favor. Mort provides a legitimate historic viewpoint sympathetic to Native Americans, in which Custer is the spear point toward the Great Sioux War of 1876 (also called the Black Hills War) and its prominent action, the Battle of the Little Bighorn. VERDICT This highly readable and insightful work is recommended as an essential backstory to Custer's subsequent downfall at the aforementioned battle.—Nathan Bender, Albany Cty. P.L., Laramie, WY

Library Journal

★ 2014-11-06
The history of Gen. George Custer's 1,000-man exploration across 300 miles of Dakota Plains in search of gold.Mort's (The Wrath of Cochise, 2013, etc.) enlightening works about Native Americans are remarkable not only for their depth, but also for the poetic beauty of his descriptions of their lives, religions and cultures. The Sioux had no concept of private property. The land was theirs by right of conquest—of the Kiowa, Cheyenne and Crow—and due to the fact that they occupied it. The white man defined ownership as working the land—e.g., farming, which was work that male Indians felt was only for squaws. President Ulysses Grant's peace plan involved containing the tribes on reservations, training them in agriculture and taking their children into missionary schools. That was the best way to extinguish the Native American way of life, and the Sioux knew it was so. The stated objective of Custer's expedition in 1874 was to find a site for a permanent military installation, but the implicit goal was to find gold. It was hoped that the finding of gold in the Black Hills would help offset the country's massive Civil War debt. It would also bolster the stock and bonds tied to the Northern Pacific Railroad, an important project for the general. The Sioux called Custer's trail the Thieves' Road since it stole into their territory and foretold the end of their freedom and way of life. They had already dealt with incursion before, during the Red Cloud War, when Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe joined to destroy the Bozeman Trail. The 1868 Treaty of Laramie closed forts along that trail and ceded a million acres with hunting rights outside the reservation. Mort's delightful prose will entice readers of history, geography, Native American studies and sociology. All will revel in the feeling of being in the Dakotas at the end of the 19th century.

Kirkus Reviews