Where this was said
Gold Rush, Illegal Settlements, and the Ultimatum
At 14:03 · chapter starts 12:40
Word of gold set off a massive rush that the US government could not stop. Thousands of miners poured into the hills, creating illegal settlements that form the backbone of western South Dakota today — Rapid City, Keystone, Custer, Deadwood. These are all gold-rush towns founded in defiance of a treaty signed just six years earlier. Faced with this unstoppable influx, the US government dropped any pretence of honouring the Fort Laramie Treaty and issued the Lakota a stark ultimatum: be on government-run reservations by the beginning of 1876 or, in Davis's words, be 'quote-unquote hunted down.' The stage was set for one of the most famous confrontations in American military history.
At Little Bighorn in June 1876, Custer attacked a massive Lakota and Cheyenne encampment without reinforcements and was nearly completely wiped out — a decisive Lakota military victory. But it was a Pyrrhic win: the news enraged a centennial-celebrating America, painted Custer as a martyr, and ended any US interest in diplomacy with the Lakota, accelerating the seizure of the Black Hills.
