Same Years, Different Ground: Roosevelt and Native Nations

Two Stories, One Country

When Theodore Roosevelt ranched in the Badlands, the Standing Rock Agency lay about 150 miles to the east. His years in Dakota, his climb to the presidency and the decisions he made in office unfolded alongside some of the hardest years in the history of Native nations, on the northern Plains and beyond.

This timeline sets the two stories side by side. Read across a row and the same year looks very different depending on where you stood.

Studio portrait of Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota leader, seated

Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota leader whose people defeated Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Roosevelt's writings cast Native resistance as doomed opposition to an inevitable white conquest. (David F. Barry, c. 1883, Wikimedia Commons)

The Dakota Years, 1876–1887

Roosevelt

  • 1876. Enters Harvard College.
  • September 8, 1883. Steps off the train at the Little Missouri station to hunt bison. Before he leaves, he buys into the Maltese Cross ranch.
  • 1884. After his wife and his mother die on the same day in February, he returns to Dakota and starts the Elkhorn Ranch.
  • 1885. Publishes Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.
  • Winter 1886–87. Storms kill much of his herd and help end the open-range era.

Native Nations

  • June 25, 1876. Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors defeat Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn.
  • 1877. Congress takes the Black Hills, which the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty had guaranteed to the Lakota.
  • July 1881. Sitting Bull surrenders at Fort Buford, Dakota Territory.
  • May 1883. The Army moves Sitting Bull to the Standing Rock Agency.
  • Fall 1883. Sitting Bull leads about a thousand Standing Rock hunters in the last great hunt of the northern buffalo herd.
  • 1884. A hide buyer later recalled shipping the last carload of buffalo robes east from Dickinson that year.
  • February 8, 1887. The Dawes Act begins breaking reservations into individual allotments.

Allotment and Wounded Knee, 1887–1900

Roosevelt

  • 1887. Founds the Boone and Crockett Club with fellow hunters.
  • 1889. Becomes a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner and publishes the first volumes of The Winning of the West.
  • 1892. Tours Indian agencies and schools in South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. His report, published in 1893, attacks patronage in the Indian Service.
  • 1898. Leads the Rough Riders in Cuba and is elected Governor of New York.

Native Nations

  • 1889. An act of Congress breaks the Great Sioux Reservation into smaller reservations and opens millions of acres to settlers. North and South Dakota become states that November.
  • December 15, 1890. Sitting Bull is killed by Indian police sent to arrest him at his home on the Grand River, on the Standing Rock Reservation.
  • December 29, 1890. At Wounded Knee Creek, U.S. soldiers kill more than 250 Lakota men, women and children.
  • 1894. Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apache prisoners of war are moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

The Presidency, 1901–1909

Roosevelt

  • September 14, 1901. Becomes President after William McKinley’s death.
  • December 3, 1901. Calls the General Allotment Act “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass” in his First Annual Message.
  • 1904. Proclaims the opening of part of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.
  • 1905. Names Francis Leupp Commissioner of Indian Affairs and hunts on the Comanche reserve in Oklahoma that April.
  • 1906. Signs the Burke Act and the Antiquities Act, names Devils Tower the first national monument, and proclaims openings of Crow and Wind River lands.
  • 1908. Proclaims a second Rosebud opening and signs the act opening parts of the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock reservations.

Native Nations

  • 1901. Kiowa leader Lone Wolf sues to stop the sale of Kiowa, Comanche and Apache lands.
  • January 5, 1903. The Supreme Court rules against him in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, holding that Congress can override treaty terms.
  • 1903. Dakota physician Charles Eastman begins revising the Sioux allotment rolls for the government.
  • March 1905. Six Native leaders ride in the inaugural parade. Days later Geronimo asks to go home to Arizona and is refused.
  • December 1906. The Big Pasture, about 488,000 acres of Kiowa-Comanche-Apache land, is sold by sealed bid.
  • February 17, 1909. Geronimo dies at Fort Sill, still a prisoner of war.

After the White House, 1909–1975

Roosevelt

  • March 4, 1909. Leaves office.
  • 1912. Runs for President on the Progressive “Bull Moose” ticket.
  • January 6, 1919. Dies at Sagamore Hill.

Native Nations

  • 1909. Parts of the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock reservations are opened to settlers.
  • February 23, 1911. Quanah Parker dies at his home near Cache, Oklahoma.
  • 1913. The surviving Chiricahua Apache prisoners of war are freed.
  • June 2, 1924. The Indian Citizenship Act makes all Native people born in the United States citizens.
  • 1934. The Indian Reorganization Act ends allotment.
  • January 4, 1975. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act begins returning control of programs and schools to tribal nations.