Black Hills in the context of "Cheyenne"

Black Kettle (Cheyenne: Mo'ohtavetoo'o) (c. 1803 – November 27, 1868) was a leader of the Southern Cheyenne during the American Indian Wars. Born to the Northern Só'taeo'o / Só'taétaneo'o band of the Northern Cheyenne in the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota, he later married into the Wotápio / Wutapai band (one mixed Cheyenne-Kiowa band with Lakota Sioux origin) of the Southern Cheyenne.

Black Kettle is often remembered as a peacemaker who accepted treaties with the U.S. government to protect his people. On November 27, 1868, while attempting to escape the Battle of Washita River with his wife, he was shot and killed by soldiers of the U.S. 7th Cavalry.

A pegmatite is an igneous rock showing a very coarse texture, with large interlocking crystals usually greater in size than 1 cm (0.4 in) and sometimes greater than 1 meter (3 ft). Most pegmatites are composed of quartz, feldspar, and mica, having a similar silicic composition to granite. However, rarer intermediate composition and mafic pegmatites are known.

Many of the world's largest crystals are found within pegmatites. These include crystals of microcline, quartz, mica, spodumene, beryl, and tourmaline. Some individual crystals are over 10 m (33 ft) long.

Picea glauca, the white spruce, is a species of spruce native to the northern temperate and boreal forests in Canada and United States, North America.

Picea glauca is native from central Alaska all through the east, across western and southern/central Canada to the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, Quebec, Ontario and south to Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Upstate New York and Vermont, along with the mountainous and immediate coastal portions of New Hampshire and Maine, where temperatures are just barely cool and moist enough to support it. There is also an isolated population in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. It is also known as Canadian spruce, skunk spruce, cat spruce, Black Hills spruce, western white spruce, Alberta white spruce, and Porsild spruce.

The Treaty of Fort Laramie (also the Sioux Treaty of 1868) is an agreement between the United States and the Oglala, Miniconjou, and Brulé bands of Lakota people, Yanktonai Dakota, and Arapaho Nation. The first Fort Laramie treaty, signed in 1851, had been a resounding failure. The United States had almost immediately violated it, with American miners and settlers immigrating into Indian territory. The United States Army had further broken the 1851 treaty when it initiated an armed invasion that resulted in the Grattan massacre in 1854, which sparked the first Sioux War. The 1868 treaty negotiations were thus initiated to replace the 1851 treaty, which had proven entirely ineffective.

The treaty is divided into 17 articles. It established the Great Sioux Reservation including ownership of the Black Hills, and set aside additional lands as "unceded Indian territory" in the areas of South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and possibly Montana. It established that the US government would hold authority to punish not only white settlers who committed crimes against the tribes but also tribe members who committed crimes and were to be delivered to the government, rather than to face charges in tribal courts. It stipulated that the government would abandon forts along the Bozeman Trail and included a number of provisions designed to encourage a transition to farming and to move the tribes "closer to the white man's way of life." The treaty protected specified rights of third parties not partaking in the negotiations and effectively ended Red Cloud's War. That provision did not include the Ponca, who were not a party to the treaty and so had no opportunity to object when the American treaty negotiators "inadvertently" broke a separate treaty with the Ponca by unlawfully selling the entirety of the Ponca Reservation to the Lakota, pursuant to Article II of this treaty. The United States never intervened to return the Ponca land. Instead, the Lakota claimed the Ponca land as their own and set about attacking and demanding tribute from the Ponca until 1876, when US President Ulysses S. Grant chose to resolve the situation by unilaterally ordering the Ponca removed to the Indian Territory. The removal, known as the Ponca Trail of Tears, was carried out by force the following year and resulted in over 200 deaths.

Leucogranite is a light-colored, granitic, igneous rock containing almost no dark minerals.

Leucogranites have been reported from a variety of orogenies involving continental collisions. Examples include the Black Hills (Trans-Hudson orogeny of Proterozoic age), the Blue Ridge basement complex (Grenville orogeny of Proterozoic age), the Paleozoic Appalachian orogeny in Maine, and the currently active Himalayan orogeny. The leucogranite magmas are interpreted to have been derived by partial melting of pelitic rocks in the upper portions of thickened crust. These melts result following deformation and metamorphism, but the heat source is uncertain. Shear-heating associated with large shear zones in the crust has been proposed as the mechanism.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, known to the Lakota and other Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. It took place on June 25–26, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River in the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana Territory. The battle, which resulted in the defeat of U.S. forces, was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876.

Most battles in the Great Sioux War, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn, were on lands those natives had taken from other tribes since 1851. The Lakotas were there without consent from the local Crow tribe, which had a treaty claim on the area. Already in 1873, Crow chief Blackfoot had called for U.S. military actions against the native intruders. The steady Lakota incursions into treaty areas belonging to the smaller tribes were a direct result of their displacement by the United States in and around Fort Laramie, as well as in reaction to white encroachment into the Black Hills, which the Lakota consider sacred. This pre-existing Indian conflict provided a useful wedge for colonization and ensured the United States a firm Indian alliance with the Arikaras and the Crows during the Lakota Wars.

The Powder River Country is the Powder River Basin area of the Great Plains in northeastern Wyoming, United States. The area is loosely defined as that between the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills, in the upper drainage areas of the Powder, Tongue, and Little Bighorn rivers.

During the late 1860s, the area was the scene of Red Cloud's War, fought between the Lakota peoples and the United States. The Lakota victory in the war resulted in the continuation of their control of the area for the next decade.

The Pacific wren (Troglodytes pacificus) is a very small North American bird and a member of the mainly New World wren family Troglodytidae. It was once lumped with Troglodytes hiemalis of eastern North America and Troglodytes troglodytes of Eurasia as the winter wren.

It breeds along the Pacific coast from Alaska to California and inland as far as Wyoming and the Black Hills of South Dakota. It migrates through and winters across the western half of the United States and Canada.