NOVEMBER 26:

1869 Ottawa Ontario - John Alexander Macdonald 1815-1891 refuses to take over Rupert's Land December 1 as agreed, due to the Metis occupation of Fort Garry and the Red River Insurrection. He orders Sir John Rose, Canadian representative in London, not to pay the £300,000 owing until the HBC can guarantee peaceful possession. 

Black Kettle:
November 26, 1864:  Today, trader John Smith will get permission to visit Black Kettle's people on Sand Creek to trade for buffalo hides. Major Scott Anthony will let Smith go, along with an Army Private, in hopes that this might lull Black Kettle into a false sense of security while Chivington prepares for battle. When Chivington attacks on the 29th, Smith, called "Gray Blanket" by the Arapaho, and Private David Louderback will be in the village, and barely avoid being killed in the fighting.

November 26, 1867:  Fearing another Sand Creek massacre, Black Kettle has traveled 100 miles to Fort Cobb, in central Indian Territory (Oklahoma), to ask General William Hazen if he could move his tribe to the fort so they would be safe. Hazen will deny this request, telling Black Kettle that if his people did not break the treaties, or the law, they would have not problems from the soldiers. Today, Black Kettle returns to his village. He will warn his people to watch for angry soldiers.

November 26, 1868:  General George Custer's scout come across the trail of a war party, identified as from Black Kettle's Cheyenne, and other Arapaho. The war party, according to Army reports, had killed mail carriers between Forts Dodge and Larned, in southwestern Kansas, an old hunter near Dodge, and two couriers from General Sheridan. Custer corraled his wagons, and his main force followed the fresh trail through the snow until dark.

November 26, 1831: David Folsom, and 593 of his Choctaw (sic) followers, arrive by boat at the Arkansas Post, today. The post now has 2500 Choctaws, with 1000 horses. Many of the clans are at odds with each other, causing tense times.
 

BACKGROUND:

From http://www.axel-jacob.de/chiefs10.html
 

c. 1800-1868. Born in the Black Hills, Black Kettle became a leading chief of the Southern Cheyennes before his people were massacred at Sand Creek in 1864. Four years later, he was killed in the Washita massacre by George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalty. The Southern Cheyennes and white settlers in the Denver area got along rather peacefully during their early years of contact. A village of Arapahoes camped in the heart of Denver around 1860. In 1861, Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne treaty chiefs were pressured into signing an agreement with the federal government without consulting their nations as a whole.

Resentment rose among the Indians as more settlers and gold seekers moved in, further encroaching on hunting lands. During spring 1864, Reverend J. M. Chivington, an officer of the Colorado volunteer militia, reported that Cheyennes had stolen a number of cattle. The report may have been faked as an excuse to retaliate - which he did, attacking Cheyenne camps and indiscriminately killing women and children as well as warriors. The governor of Colorado then persuaded the Cheyennes to settle at Sand Creek. On November 29, 1864, again acting on his own volition, Chivington raised between six hundred and one thousand men, mostly volunteers seething to drive the Indians out, and mounted a surprise attack on the village. Chivington shouted, " Kill and scalp all the big and little;nits make for lice." As Black Kettle, the ranking chief in the village, hoisted a white flag and a U.S. flag, Chivington's men tore the Indians apart with sadistic enthusiasm. Black Kettle's wife was shot nine times but somehow survived, while he escaped.

Another leader of the village, White Antelope, stood in front of his lodge and sang his death song, which included the often quoted passage "Nothing lives long, except the earth and the mountains." The elderly White Antelope was unceremoniously shot down, along with at least three hundred other native men, women, and children. Chivington's detachment never accurately counted the casualties. The Volunteers severed several Indians' limbs and heads, took them to Denver, and charged people admission to a theater for a glimpseof the bloody body parts. The behavior of Chivington and his volunteers was so reprehensible to famed scout Kit Carson that he called Chivington's men cowardly dogs. The Cheyennes retaliated with fire and fury, killing several hundred settlers during the next three years and capturing dozens more. Four years after Chivington's attack, a federal commission concluded that he and his men had acted with a degree of barbarism that even the most brutal of Indians could not match. The Sand Creek massacre sparked a war on the plains which cost the government $30 million.

Black Kettle tried to restore the peace again, figuring that his people would not survive any other way. In summer 1868, he and the survivors of the Sand Creek massacre moved west to the Washita Valley. On November 27, 1868, they were attacked again by the Seventh Cavalry troops with orders to raze the village, hang all the men, and take women and children captive. These troops were under the command of General George Armstrong Custer, in his first campaign of the Indian wars. Between 40 and 110 Indians were killed, some in a very gruesome fashion. Though Arapahoes, Comanches, and Kiowas came to the rescue of the Cheyennes, forcing Custer and his troops to withdraw before they had fully carried out the assigned extermination, it was too late for Black Kettle, who was found among the dead.
 

*****
 

>From http://www.cia-g.com/~rockets/domagala.blackkettle.htm
 

Few biographical details are known about the Southern Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, but his repeated efforts to secure a peace with honor for his people, despite broken promises and attacks on his own life, speak of him as a great leader with an almost unique vision of the possiblity for coexistence between white society and the culture of the plains.

Black Kettle lived on the vast territory in western Kansas and eastern Colorado that had been guaranteed to the Cheyenne under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Within less than a decade, however, the 1859 Pikes Peak gold rush sparked an enormous population boom in Colorado, and this led to extensive white encroachments on Cheyenne land. Even the U.S. Indian Commissioner admitted that "We have substantially taken possession of the country and deprived the Indians of their accustomed means of support."

Rather than evict white settlers, the government sought to resolve the situation by demanding that the Southern Cheyenne sign a new treaty ceding all their lands save the small Sand Creek reservation in southeastern Colorado. Black Kettle, fearing that overwhelming U.S. military power might result in an even less favorable settlement, agreed to the treaty in 1861 and did what he could to see that the Cheyenne obeyed its provisions.

As it turned out, however, the Sand Creek reservation could not sustain the Indians forced to live there. All but unfit for agriculture, the barren tract of land was little more than a breeding ground for epidemic diseases which soon swept through the Cheyenne encampments. By 1862 the nearest herd of buffalo was over two hundred miles away. Many Cheyennes, especially young men, began to leave the reservation to prey upon the livestock and goods of nearby settlers and passing wagon trains. One such raid in the spring of 1864 so angered white Coloradans that they dispatched their militia, which opened fire on the first band of Cheyenne they happened to meet. None of the Indians in this band had participated in the raid, however, and their leader was actually approaching the militia for a parlay when the shooting began.

This incident touched off an uncoordinated Indian uprising across the Great Plains, as Indian peoples from the Comanche in the South to the Lakota in the North took advantage of the army's involvement in the Civil War by striking back at those who had encroached upon their lands. Black Kettle, however, understood white military supremacy too well to support the cause of war. He spoke with the local military commander at Fort Weld in Colorado and believed he had secured a promise of safety in exchange for leading his band back to the Sand Creek reservation.

But Colonel John Chivington, leader of the Third Colorado Volunteers, had no intention of honoring such a promise. His troops had been unsuccessful in finding a Cheyenne band to fight, so when he learned that Black Kettle had returned to Sand Creek, he attacked the unsuspecting encampment at dawn on November 29, 1864. Some two hundred Cheyenne died in the ensuing massacre, many of them women and children, and after the slaughter, Chivington's men sexually mutilated and scalped many of the dead, later exhibiting their trophies to cheering crowds in Denver.

Black Kettle miraculously escaped harm at the Sand Creek Massacre, even when he returned to rescue his seriously injured wife. And perhaps more miraculously, he continued to counsel peace when the Cheyenne attempted to strike back with isolated raids on wagon trains and nearby ranches. By October 1865, he and other Indian leaders had arranged an uneasy truce on the plains, signing a new treaty that exchanged the Sand Creek reservation for reservations in southwestern Kansas but deprived the Cheyenne of access to most of their coveted Kansas hunting grounds.

Only a part of the Southern Cheyenne nation followed Black Kettle and the others to these new reservations. Some instead headed north to join the Northern Cheyenne in Lakota territory. Many simply ignored the treaty and continued to range over their ancestral lands. This latter group, consisting mainly of young warriors allied with a Cheyenne war chief named Roman Nose, angered the government by their refusal to obey a treaty they had not signed, and General William Tecumseh Sherman launched a campaign to force them onto their assigned lands. Roman Nose and his followers struck back furiously, and the resulting standoff halted all traffic across western Kansas for a time.

At this point, government negotiators sought to move the Cheyenne once again, this time onto two smaller reservations in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) where they would receive annual provisions of food and supplies. Black Kettle was again among the chiefs who signed this treaty, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, but after his people had settled on their new reservation, they did not receive the provisions they had been promised, and by year's end, more and more of them were driven to join Roman Nose and his band.

In August 1868, Roman Nose led a series of raids on Kansas farms that provoked another full-scale military response. Under General Philip Sheridan, three columns of troops converged to launch a winter campaign against Cheyenne encampments, with the Seventh Cavalry commanded by George Armstrong Custer selected to take the lead. Setting out in a snowstorm, Custer followed the tracks of a small raiding party to a Cheyenne village on the Washita River, where he ordered an attack at dawn.

It was Black Kettle's village, well within the boundaries of the Cheyenne reservation and with a white flag flying above the chief's own tipi. Nonetheless, on November 27, 1868, nearly four years to the day after Sand Creek, Custer's troops charged, and this time Black Kettle could not escape: "Both the chief and his wife fell at the river bank riddled with bullets," one witness reported, "the soldiers rode right over Black Kettle and his wife and their horse as they lay dead on the ground, and their bodies were all splashed with mud by the charging soldiers." Custer later reported that an Osage guide took Black Kettle's scalp.

On the Washita, the Cheyenne's hopes of sustaining themselves as an independent people died as well; by 1869, they had been driven from the plains and confined to reservations.