The transcontinental railroad had been completed, but the economy was contracting.

The prospect of gold fields in the Black Hills — of a new rush that might inject money into a struggling economy and resolve the perpetual political problem of the Sioux, who were receiving expensive government rations under the treaty terms — was appealing to politicians who had found the treaty inconvenient from the moment it was signed.

The gold reports produced an immediate response.

Prospectors began making their way to the Hills in increasing numbers, some individually and some in organized parties.

The army attempted, halfheartedly and unsuccessfully, to keep them out.

By 1875, the effort to exclude miners from the Hills had effectively been abandoned, and the government’s posture shifted from enforcing the treaty to finding a way to legally acquire the land the treaty protected.