Beef Issue at Spotted Tail's Agency, Nebraska

HOWARD

Beef Issue at Spotted Tail's Agency, Nebraska

ca. 1877

Many U.S. treaties with American Indians included promises of food and clothing because the tribes were often prohibited from entering their traditional hunting grounds. This photograph shows members of the Sioux Nation collecting beef rations at an agency on the Great Sioux Reservation (now South Dakota and Nebraska), which was created by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. However, the U.S. government did not own the land it ceded to the Sioux. The Ponca Indians occupied a section, having signed a treaty in 1865 to ensure their continued possession of it. The Ponca were removed to the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), and their former agency, pictured here, was renamed. The mistreatment of the Ponca exposed widespread corruption within the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, but Congress's eventual efforts to reform the system and facilitate assimilation led to the loss of millions of reservation acres to white settlers.

Albumen print

Princeton Collections of Western Americana, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Gift of Thomas Baird, Class of 1945, GS 1950.