This index to the Letters Sent to the Office of Indian Affairs by the Pine Ridge Agency, 1875-1914, collection provides the description of what each reel covers. Government Information MAY NOT hold all of these reels. The record in the library catalog describes the extent of our holdings. For help, or to make an appointment to view a reel, email rad@colorado.edu
This microfilm publication reproduces on 52 rolls the correspondence and reports sent to the Office of Indian Affairs by the official in charge of the Pine Ridge Indian Agency from August 11, 1875, through June 30, 1914. The official had the title of "agent" until December 1908, when it was changed to "superintendent." These letters are part of the Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group (RG) 75.
BACKGROUND
The Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) was established within the War Department in 1824 by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. Congress, in an act of 1832 (4 Stat. 564), confirmed the OIA as the agency responsible for managing all Federal relations with American Indians and authorized the appointment of a commissioner of Indian Affairs to head the Office under the direction of the Secretary of War.1 In 1849 the OIA was transferred to the newly created Department of the Interior; in 1947 the Office was officially designated the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Indian agents were appointed to carry out OIA responsibilities in the field. Early agents acted, in effect, as ambassadors to Indian tribes, many of which maintained a onsiderable degree of autonomy and controlled large amounts of territory that they had not ceded or otherwise transferred to a State or to the U.S. Government. Generally it was not until the period between 1870 and 1890 that the role of agents on the Great Plains completely shifted from that of an ambassador to that of an administrator of both a duly surveyed and marked plot of territory—the reservation—and of the lives of the Indians living thereon. On April 28, 1865, Col. Vital Jarrott was appointed to serve as agent for the "Indians of the Upper Platte," which included the Oglala Sioux and other Teton Sioux bands as well as the Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho. Jarrott was succeeded on September 18, 1866, by M. T. Patrick, who was still the agent in 1868 when the Treaty of Fort Laramie (15 Stat. 635) established the huge Great Sioux Reservation. This reservation consisted of approximately the land that is now the half of the State of South Dakota west of the Missouri River, plus several enclaves east of the river and a strip of what is now southwestern North Dakota. An "un-ceded area" was to the west of the reservation. Under provisions of the treaty, the Sioux were expected to confine their activities to the reservation and the un-ceded area to the west, and individual tribes or bands were expected to reside at or near agencies to be established.
On February 15, 1871, John W. Wham was named as the first agent responsible only for Red Cloud's Oglala Sioux.3 The agency was known as the Red Cloud Agency, after the Oglala Sioux chief's name. In 1878 the agency's name was changed to the Pine Ridge Agency, although in correspondence with the OIA the old name usually continued to be used into 1880. At the time of its creation, the Red Cloud Agency was responsible for carrying out the commitments of the Government to the Oglala Sioux under the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty and for ensuring that the Oglala fulfilled their treaty obligations, as interpreted by the Government. One of the main commitments on the part of the Oglala, in the view of the Government, was to settle around an agency headquarters, which the treaty had stipulated should be located "at some place on the Missouri River" near the center of the Great Sioux Reservation. Therefore, a primary duty of M. T. Patrick and his successors was to persuade or coerce the Oglala to establish a permanent encampment on the Missouri River—a move stoutly resisted by many of the Indians.
The initial location of the Red Cloud Agency was on the North Platte River near Fort Laramie, wyo. In 1873 the agency site was moved to the White River, near Camp Robinson, in northwestern Nebraska. Following the final annihilation of Sioux military resistance to the Government after the 1876 defeat of Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the agency was nominally located in 1877 on a Missouri River site at the mouth of Medicine Creek, in what is now South Dakota. In 1878, after continued reluctance on the part of the Oglala to go to the river location, the agency was finally settled at its present location on White Clay Creek in Dakota Territory, just north of the Nebraska border. Agency headquarters was situated in Pine Ridge town, named after one of the distinctive topographical features of the area. At the same time, the name of the agency was changed to the Pine Ridge Agency.
At the time Dakota Territory was divided into the States of North and South Dakota in 1888-89, the Government forced the Sioux to accept an agreement to carve smaller scattered reservations from the Great Sioux Reservation, which had already been reduced in size in 1876 when the Government took the Black Hills and the un-ceded land west of the reservation. One of these smaller reservations was established around the Pine Ridge Agency. Previously, the Pine Ridge Agency had been one of several agencies within the Great Sioux Reservation, with the agent "in charge of" the Indians (mostly Oglala) "attached" to his agency but without exclusive responsibility for any specific territory. With the creation of the Pine Ridge Reservation as a geographic entity in 1888-89, the agent became an administrator of a particular parcel of real estate as well as of people. An Executive order of January 24, 1882, had created the "Executive Addition" to the Great Sioux Reservation. This addition was a strip of land 5 miles by 10 miles in size and was located in Nebraska just south of the Pine Ridge Agency. When the Pine Ridge Reservation was formed in 1888-89, it included the 1882 Executive Addition. An Executive order of January 25, 1904, restored most of the 1882 Executive Addition to the public domain except for an area one mile by three-fourths of a mile, which remained part of the reservation—the only part to protrude across the State line into Nebraska.
The area that now is Bennett County, SD, was legally part of the reservation until the creation and organization of the county in 1909-11. Since that time, the Pine Ridge Reservation has been its present size of approximately 90 miles by 60 miles, located in Shannon County and in what is now the southern half of Jackson County in southwestern South Dakota.
After the establishment of the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1888-89, administrative districts were gradually formed on the reservation. These districts have varied in number and configuration over the years; their names have included Eagle Nest, Grass Creek, Medicine Root, Pass Creek, Porcupine, Wakpamni, White Clay, and Wounded Knee.
The agent in charge of Pine Ridge has always reported directly to the Commissioner except for a few months in 1877-78, when he reported to the Superintendent of the Dakota Superintendency. The Dakota Superintendency was originally established in 1861 , then abolished in 1870. It was reactivated in 1877 with its headquarters at Yankton, Dakota Territory, and was discontinued permanently in 1878. By that year, the system of regional superintendences that had been inherited from the British at the time of U.S. independence was terminated completely. Thereafter, there was no regional administrative structure between the Pine Ridge Agency and OIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., until increased involvement by the OIA in aspects of education, health, irrigation, forestry, and social services gave rise to a maze of regional coordinating offices in the 20th century.
From the time of the establishment of the Red Cloud Agency, the duties of the agent included the distribution of goods and services (such as food and education) called for under the 1868 treaty and subsequent Federal laws that affected the Oglala Sioux. A prime responsibility of the agent was to attempt to teach the Indians the art and skills of husbandry, which was to be a large part of the "civilizing" process. He was also charged with the general supervision of all other agency functions and, after 1889, with the total administration of the land, resources, and Indians of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
OIA agents were often assisted by an official called a "farmer." This title asserts the original hope that the farmer's main responsibility would be to assist the agent in teaching nomadic Indians how to cultivate reservation land. In effect, however, the farmer became a subagent who helped with all administrative duties. By 1883 the Pine Ridge agent had the assistance of one farmer (called an "additional farmer" in agency records). As Pine Ridge Reservation administrative districts were created in the 1890's and the early 20th century, other "additional farmers" were employed by the agent to administer the districts. As district administrators, the "additional farmers" were more and more frequently referred to as "district farmers" in agency records. By 1910 there were six "district farmers," each one in charge of one of the reservation districts.
In 1879, the first year of operation of the Pine Ridge Agency at its permanent site, agent Valentine T. McGillycuddy reported that his agency was "just emerging from the state of chaos, in which it had existed for several years past."5 His predecessor, James Irwin, upon taking over in 1877, had found "no records of the past" in the off ice.6 During the 1880's, the "state of chaos" gradually diminished under the energetic administration of McGillycuddy and his successors as they built up the bureaucracy deemed necessary to feed, “civilize” police, occupy, educate, nurture physically, and enumerate the Indians attached to the agency. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the General Allotment Act ("Dawes Act") of 1887 (24 Stat. 388), the "Sioux Act" of March 2, 1889 (25 Stat. 888), and subsequent Federal legislation made provisions for the payment of rations, annuities, and allotment benefits in cash or in goods and animals to the Oglala Sioux. For a brief period early in the history of the agency, rations--subsistence foodstuffs—were issued by the agent to the chiefs, who then redistributed them as they saw fit. Thereafter, rations were issued directly to families by the agent. Annuities (sometimes called pro rata shares or per capita payments) were provided, usually as compensation for tribal land, to a person who was a member of the tribe or who had been a party to the treaty of 1868. The "Dawes Act" and the "Sioux Act" provided for the allotment of reservation land to individual Indians, but allotments were not made until August 19, 1904, because of Indian resistance to private (rather than tribal) ownership of land.
Allotment benefits were provided as inducements to accept the allotment of land and as a means of easing the Indians' transition to a settled agricultural way of life. The Pine Ridge agent appointed 50 Indians as policemen in 1879, thus establishing one of the earliest police forces on any reservation. Previously, agents had relied precariously on traditional Indian leaders who could be persuaded to be cooperative, or the Army, as instruments of their authority. The Pine Ridge police force was later assisted in carrying out justice by Indian judges, also named by the agent and, throughout the period covered by this microfilm publication, almost completely controlled by him.
Early in the 1880's, the hauling of freight from off reservation shipping points to the agency became routine, both as the primary means of provisioning the reservation and as a form of irregular employment for the Indians. No railroad was ever built into the reservation, nor is there a navigable river within its borders. By 1885 the supplies were being hauled from the new railroad station at Rushville, Nebr., only 25 miles away.
In 1881 the first four reservation day schools were constructed. The number of OLA day schools at Pine Ridge had reached its maximum of 31 by 1898. In 1883 the Oglala Boarding School was constructed and opened.
The agency employed one physician from the time of its location at Pine Ridge. As late as 1898, his services had been augmented by only one assistant physician. In 1905 a third doctor was added, at the Oglala Boarding School, and by 1914 there was a small hospital attached to the boarding school. Two "field matrons" were appointed in 1892 to instruct the reservation population in "domestic economy" and hygiene.
An act of July 4, 1884 (23 Stat. 98), required Indian agents to take an annual census of the Indians attached to their agency. Before this date, agents counted their charges as local circumstances or specific instructions from Washington dictated. The 1914 OLA census of the Pine Ridge Agency registered about 7,000 Indians on the reservation, an increase over the 4,873 Indians reported by the 1886 count (the first agency census supposedly free of inflated figures).
RECORDS DESCRIPTION
Most of the letters and reports (and occasional telegrams) reproduced in this microfilm publication were copied into 51 letter press copybooks; however, some loose documents were interfiled in some volumes. The loose documents have been filmed as roll 1; the copybooks constitute rolls 2-52. The loose documents are arranged chronologically, as are the copybooks. The time span covered by volume 29 (1896-99) overlaps that of volumes 25-28. Volumes 6 and 7, 12 and 13, 13 and 14, and 24 and 25 overlap each other by several months. Many other volumes overlap each other by a few days or weeks. The Contents following this introduction gives the time span of each volume and roll.
Within each volume, letters are generally in chronological order by date written. Letters out of chronological order (occasionally by several weeks) are usually found near the end of a volume. All of the volumes have a name and subject index except volumes 9, 15-19, 28-30, and 49. Some indexes are incomplete. All numbered pages have been filmed unless otherwise noted in a roll note at the beginning of a roll.
The correspondence is in manuscript through 1889; thereafter it is usually in typescript. Some letters (particularly in the earlier volumes) are difficult to read or are even partly illegible. In most cases, however, legibility ranges from fair to good.
The letters and reports are nearly always addressed specifically to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. The correspondence concerns both general and particular agency policy, agreements with Indian bands or tribes, Indian and non-Indian employees, supplies and equipment, complaints made by Indians, letters or petitions submitted by Indians or others and forwarded by the agent, and financial matters. Lists of Indian or non-Indian employees and other lists of Indians, financial reports, and form replies to depredation claims are occasionally found as enclosures. Volume 16 (1892) includes a census of 4,974 Indians, but some of the pages are so faded that they are illegible or barely legible, and an additional 40 pages of what appear to be census sheets are almost completely illegible. The census provides the name, age, sex, relationship to the head of the family, and census number of each individual. There is also a list of Indians killed by whites and whites killed by Indians, 1873-74.
Among the loose documents is a set of proceedings (June 1, 1879) of a council held between the new agent (Valentine T. McGillycuddy), Lieutenant Chase of the Army, and nine Oglala chiefs. The occasion was the annual sun dance celebration. The brief discussion concerned the Indians' complaints about trespassing and horse stealing and the benign purpose of the sun dance. There is also a pencil draft of the 1890 annual agency report.
Some letters include comments by the agent on his perception of Indian characteristics and on his hopes or expectations regarding the future of the Oglala Sioux.
The spreadsheet attached below contains a reel-by-reel description of the complete collection.