Across the plains and the West, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, different Indigenous leaders made different choices about how to respond to American expansion.

Some chose armed resistance from the beginning.

Some, like Black Kettle, chose diplomacy and treaty negotiation.

Some, like the Crow leadership that eventually allied with the U.S. military against the Lakota, made still different calculations about where strategic interest lay.

The peace chiefs — as a category — have sometimes been dismissed in popular history as weak, as accommodationists, as people who failed to understand the stakes of what they were agreeing to.

This dismissal is incorrect on multiple levels.