Will everyone please desist from posting pictures of the Boy Emperor's face all over the boards? I can't stand seeing it anymore. And the dude hasn't even been inaugurated yet.

At Thanksgiving my daughter asked if the Sioux owned the land where the pipeline is being built. I know they claim to own part of the route based on an 1851 treaty that granted them millions of acres in present-day Montana, Wyoming and he Dakotas, but my daughter got me thinking about how title to that land was transferred out of Sioux ownership. Did they sell it to someone? What happened? I consulted Wikipedia and mainly a book by Mari Sandoz titled "Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas."

In a nut shell, as best I can tell, what happened is that in 1874 gold was discovered in the Black Hills. The United States decided to take most of the Sioux land, disarm them and take their horses and confine them to much smaller reservations. Most of the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies refused the offer so in June of 1876 the United States sent three armies to attack the Sioux and Cheyenne -- one from the West, one from the South and one from the East. The army from the West never materialized, but from the South came Gen. George Crook commanding about 1,000 cavalry and infantry, armed with the latest repeating rifles, and several hundred Crow and Shoshone scouts.

A force of about 1,000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors under the Sioux Chief Crazy Horse rode out to meet them, armed with a few hundred rifles but mainly bows and arrows, lances and clubs. On June 17th they attacked Crook's column on the banks of Rosebud Creek in present-day Montana. Crazy Horse had devised new tactics to fight the soldiers and the new tactics worked splendidly. While Crook stayed in the background surrounded by his body guards and watched the action with a telescope, Crazy Horse personally led his warriors into battle. The battle lasted about six hours and, at one point, the soldiers shot the horse out from under a Cheyenne chief. He was surrounded and fighting for his life when all of a sudden his sister charged through the soldiers and enabled the chief to jump onto her horse. As Sandoz described the event, "With him on behind her she zigzagged back through the soldiers, bullets flying, the warriors making a great chanting for this brave thing done."

Inspired by her heroism, the warriors intensified their attacks and sent Crook's army into retreat. It was one of the greatest Native American victories in American history, even bigger than the victory a few days later at the Little Bighorn. Back at the war department in Washington the brass was shocked. Not only was one of their armies routed and the other massacred, they had been humiliated by what the generals considered to be stone age savages.

Unable to defeat the Sioux and Cheyenne on the battlefield, they sent thousands of reinforcements to conduct a winter campaign against the Indians in the mountains where they had been safe winters before. The Indians were unable to use their horses much in the winter but the U.S. tried something new. Cavalry horses were fitted with special iron shoes designed to provide sure footing on ice and snow. The cavalry was able to sneak up on the Indian camps and mount brutal attacks at dawn killing many men, women and children. In the spring of 1877 Crazy Horse decided to give up and took those of his people who survived the winter onto a reservation. (Sitting Bull and his band escaped to Canada).

Government agents made a huge effort to persuade the confined Sioux and Cheyenne to deed away their 1851 lands using whiskey and threats of starvation but, at least as far as I could tell, none of the major chiefs and no where near enough of the rank and file signed away their homeland to make it official. So, what happened is that the U.S. government took the land at gun point. That's the beginning of the chain of title for land taken for the Dakota Access Pipe Line. Will it hold up in court?

By the way, Mari Sandoz wrote another book about Native American heroism titled "Cheyenne Autumn."