After the Indian Wars, White people in the West seem to have found a number of ways to harass and kill Native people. In 1895, a posse of non-Indians, mostly outfitters, attacked a peaceful band of Bannocks hunting elk south of Jackson Hole; two native people died.
In 1906, a large band of Utes left their reservation in Utah and crossed Wyoming, hunting and drying meat as they went—and causing great alarm among civil officials, the general public and especially in the newspapers. Eventually the Utes were met in southern Montana by 1,000 U.S. troops, persuaded to go to South Dakota for a while and after 18 months to return home.
Three years earlier, on Lightning Creek northeast of Douglas, Wyo., in 1903, a sheriff’s posse attacked a peaceful group of Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; two posse members and five Sioux were killed. The Oglalas had come to Wyoming to gather herbs, roots and berries, and may have been hunting antelope as well.
In about 1936, a group of Oglala men from the Pine Ridge Reservation performed the astonishing feat of finding the graves of their dead on the site, going by an account dating from the time of the burials. But by the late 1920s, White ranchers had already moved the skull and bones of Black Kettle, a member of the band, to the Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum on the grounds of the Wyoming State Fair in Douglas.