ESPANSIONI DI TESTO

MODULE D - The Indian Wars (p. 183)

TASK
a. Highlight all the words referring to people and places relating to the Indian Wars.
b. Write ten questions using these words with different question words.

For more than thirty years the Native Americans and the US army fought each other on the Plains. Many treaties were signed but they were always broken by the Government.
In 1865 a treaty was signed which gave the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and related tribes all of the land between the Rocky Mountains, the Black Hills and the Yellowstone River. This was called the Powder River Country, and was the best buffalo-hunting ground on the plains. In addition, the Black Hills were sacred to some of the tribes as the home of their gods.
But before a year had gone by, gold was discovered in Idaho and Montana, and white prospectors were pouring into the Indian Territory. And now the government in Washington attempted to negotiate a new treaty that would give the whites the right to build a trail and a series of forts through the Powder River Country. The Indian chiefs refused indignantly. But the Army proceeded with the project anyway. Chief Red Cloud, of the Sioux, warned Col. Henry B. Carrington, the U.S. Commander, that "now it must be either peace or war."
For the next seven or eight years, the white man's fight for control of the Plains raged on. Tribe by tribe, the Indians were pushed out of the way. Army detachments attacked dozens of peaceful Indian encampments, killing thousands in the process. One by one, the tribes were forced to "walk the white man's road".
Then, in 1874, large gold deposits were discovered in the Black Hills. By the thousands, fortune hunters began to pour into the sacred hunting grounds, which, up to now, had been worthless to the whites. But the presence of gold made a difference. It was time to break the Powder River Treaty. The government sent word to all of the chiefs that if they did not come in to the reservations, they would be considered 'hostile' and would be dealt with as such by the army.
Some of the chiefs, realizing that it was hopeless to fight against the white man's guns, came in quietly. But Sitting Bull, Chief and Big Medicine Man of the Hunkpapa Sioux, called a council of war and the assembled chiefs decided to fight.
In the summer of 1876, a force of more than three thousand soldiers under General George Crook moved into the hills to find Sitting Bull's warriors and destroy them. One of Crook's officers was Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, Commander of the famed Seventh Cavalry. As the army approached Indian country, Crook ordered Custer to take the Seventh Cavalry ahead on a scouting expedition to locate Sitting Bull's villages and on no account to attack until the balance of the soldiers came up. But when Custer located Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn River, he saw this as his great opportunity. He sent a trooper back to report to Crook, then he attacked!
But before he could get across the river to the Indian camp, Sitting Bull's braves, led by Rain-in-the-Face, swarmed over the Seventh Cavalry from every side. In half an hour, Custer and his two hundred and fifty men were dead. It was perhaps the worst military disaster in the annals of the U.S. Army.
However, Sitting Bull realized that this defeat would provoke the United States into a full-scale war that the Sioux could never win. Acting not from cowardice but from the desire to protect his people, he led them across the border to safety in Canada.
In the following years the army sent more and more soldiers into the Plains country and the Indians lost battle after battle. The last major battle of the Indian Wars took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890, where a whole tribe of more than 200 Sioux, men, women and children were massacred by white soldiers. Wounded Knee was the last resistance of the western Indians. Their long tragic road, at last, had come to an end.

(Abridged from North American Indians, Wonder Books, New York 1965.)