Thieves' Road: The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer's Path to Little Bighorn

Thieves' Road: The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer's Path to Little Bighorn by Terry Mort

In the summer of 1874, Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer led an expedition of some one thousand troops and more than one hundred wagons into the Black Hills of South Dakota. This colorful narrative history tells the little-known story of this exploratory mission and reveals how it set the stage for the climactic Battle of the Little Bighorn two years later.

What is the significance of this obscure foray into the Black Hills? The short answer, as author Terry Mort explains, is that Custer found gold. This discovery in the context of the worst economic depression the country had yet experienced spurred a gold rush that brought hordes of white prospectors to the Sioux's sacred grounds. The result was the trampling of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had granted the Black Hills to the Sioux, and the tribe's inevitable retaliation against the white invasion.

At the time of General Custer's exploration of the Black Hills of South Dakota, few such white expeditions had been made; fewer still had returned. The land, cherished hunting ground, and sacred place of the Sioux Indians was a hostile place for western settlers. When Custer traveled there in the summer of 1874, the mission was ostensibly to explore the area and find a suitable location to build a fort against Sioux and Cheyenne attacks. However, Custer had an additional, unspoken objective: to search for gold, the discovery of which would pull the country out of a terrible economic depression.

Although the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had been established to protect Sioux ownership and hunting rights in the Black Hills, the military was exempt from the restrictions against entering reservation land. Lured not only by the possibility of gold but by the abundance of the land, Custer, backed by endorsements from the press and the public, led cavalry, infantry, civilian teamsters, scientists, and seventy-five Indian scouts on what would be a minor success for U.S. interests and the beginning of the end for the Sioux.

With vivid descriptions of personalities, places, and politics, Terry Mort brings the era of the Grant administration to life: the corrupt federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, Gilded Age excesses, the building of the western railroads, the white settlements that followed the tracks, the Panic of 1873, mining ventures, the conflicts among and within Native American tribes, and the clash of white and Indian cultures with diametrically opposed values.

The discovery of gold in the Black Hills spelled doom for Sioux territorial independence. By the end of the book, readers will have a clear idea why the Lakota chief Fast Bear called the trail cut by Custer to the Black Hills "that thieves' road."

Prometheus Books, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2015