one of the military commander's official reports says, “The hostile body was largely re-enforced by accessions from the various agencies, where the malcontents were, doubtless, in many cases, driven to desperation by starvation and the heartless frauds perpetrated on them;” and that the Interior Department is obliged to confess that, “Such desertions were largely due to the uneasiness which the Indians had long felt on account of the infraction of treaty stipulations by the white invasion of the Black Hills, seriously aggravated at the most critical period by irregular and insufficient issues of rations, necessitated by inadequate and delayed appropriations.”
It was at this time that Sitting Bull made his famous reply: “Tell them at Washington if they have one man who speaks the truth to send him to me, and I will listen to what he has to say.”
The story of the military campaign against these hostile Sioux in 1876 and 1877 is to be read in the official records of the War Department, so far as statistics can tell it. Another history, which can never be read, is written in the hearts of widowed women in the Sioux nation and in the nation of the United States.
Before midsummer the Sioux war was over. The indomitable Sitting Bull had escaped to Canada—that sanctuary of refuge for the Indian as well as for the slave. Here he was visited in the autumn by a commission from the United States, empowered by the President to invite him with his people to return, and be “assigned to agencies,” and treated “in as friendly a spirit as other Indians had been who had surrendered.” It was explained to him that every one of the Indians who had surrendered had “been treated in the same manner as those of your nation who, during all the past troubles, remained peaceably at their agencies.” As a great part of those who had fled from these same agencies to join Sitting Bull had done so because they were starving, and the Government knew this (had
