With the path wide open for cattle’s entry into Nebraska, three new markets for beef increased demand beyond the needs created by the Civil War.
There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!
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Miners use a flume in Western South Dakota
Source: Nebraska State Historical Society
In 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer of the U.S. Cavalry (who would become infamous in his defeat 2 years later in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, South Dakota) emerged from an expedition into the Black Hills and announced that he had found gold there. Prospectors flooded into the area.
In 1875, there were fewer than a thousand people illegally mining for gold in the Black Hills.
In 1876, there were over ten thousand.
Towns sprang up around the activities of the swarm of miners with entrepreneurs eager to help them spend their new-found wealth. These trespassers onto Native American land unhinged the delicate peace established between the United States government and the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota in the Treaty of 1868.
Earliest known photograph of Camp Robinson, renamed Fort Robinson in 1878
Source: Nebraska State Historical Society
The Military Moves In
These tribes rose to defend their land from the wave of invaders, prompting a military response by the U.S. Soon a permanent military post, Fort Robinson, stood in Nebraska, just south of the Great Sioux Reservation.
Hungry Tribes
Military clashes in 1876 and 1877, coupled with the rapid decline of bison (Native Americans’ main food source), forced the tribes onto new, smaller reservations, ending forever the free-ranging life that they had known, making them unwilling wards of the United States government.
Sitting Bull and his wife
at Fort Randall, Dakota Territory
Source: Nebraska State Historical Society
Native American Reservations in Nebraska & South Dakota
resulting in new Cowtowns in Nebraska, 1870s
With no natural meat resource left, the U.S. government had to supply cattle to the people on the reservations. Cow towns like Valentine, Rushville, Gordon, and Chadron burst onto the scene to service that demand.
Now, nearly overnight, there were new demands for beef to feed hungry miners, the soldiers, and the Indians on the reservations.
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Beef Moves to Nebraska
