Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868)

General William T. Sherman (third from left) and Commissioners in council with chiefs and headmen, Fort Laramie, 1868
Signed	April 29  – November 6, 1868[a]
Location	Fort Laramie, Wyoming
Negotiators	Indian Peace Commission
Signatories	United States Brulé Oglala Arapaho Miniconjou Yanktonai
Ratifiers	US Senate
Language	English
Full text
Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 at Wikisource

The Treaty of Fort Laramie (also the Sioux Treaty of 1868^[b]) is an agreement between the United States and the Oglala, Miniconjou, and Brulé bands of Lakota people, Yanktonai Dakota, and Arapaho Nation, following the failure of the first Fort Laramie treaty, signed in 1851.

The treaty is divided into 17 articles. It established the Great Sioux Reservation including ownership of the Black Hills, and set aside additional lands as "unceded Indian territory" in the areas of South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and possibly Montana.^[c] It established that the US government would hold authority to punish not only white settlers who committed crimes against the tribes but also tribe members who committed crimes and were to be delivered to the government, rather than to face charges in tribal courts. It stipulated that the government would abandon forts along the Bozeman Trail and included a number of provisions designed to encourage a transition to farming and to move the tribes "closer to the white man's way of life." The treaty protected specified rights of third parties not partaking in the negotiations and effectively ended Red Cloud's War. That provision did not include the Ponca, who were not a party to the treaty and so had no opportunity to object when the American treaty negotiators "inadvertently" broke a separate treaty with the Ponca by unlawfully selling the entirety of the Ponca Reservation to the Lakota, pursuant to Article II of this treaty.^[3] The United States never intervened to return the Ponca land. Instead, the Lakota claimed the Ponca land as their own and set about attacking and demanding tribute from the Ponca until 1876, when US President Ulysses S. Grant chose to resolve the situation by unilaterally ordering the Ponca removed to the Indian Territory. The removal, known as the Ponca Trail of Tears, was carried out by force the following year and resulted in over 200 deaths.

The treaty was negotiated by members of the government-appointed Indian Peace Commission and signed between April and November 1868 at and near Fort Laramie, in the Wyoming Territory, with the final signatories being Red Cloud himself and others who accompanied him. Animosities over the agreement arose quickly, with open war breaking out again in 1876, and in 1877 the US government unilaterally annexed native land protected under the treaty.

The treaty formed the basis of the 1980 Supreme Court case, United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, in which the court ruled that tribal lands covered under the treaty had been taken illegally by the US government, and the tribe was owed compensation plus interest. As of 2018 this amounted to more than $1 billion. The Sioux refused the payment, having demanded instead the return of their land which would not be possible to contest if the monetary compensation was accepted.

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