The region which comprises western Dakota was a part of the Great Sioux Reservation recognized as such by the Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868. In the late nineteenth century the tide of white settlement had been steadily pushing westward. By an agreement on September 26, 1876, later formalized by U.S. Statute, the Black Hills region was opened to white settlement. An Act of Congress approved on March 2, 1889 (the same year South Dakota became a state), and proclaimed by President Harrison on February 10, 1890, restored to public domain the area between the White and Cheyenne Rivers. This included the present area of Badlands National Monument.[51] On December 24, 1890, after escaping from military surveillance at Camp Cheyenne on the Cheyenne River, Chief Big Foot and his band of Miniconjous Sioux fled through what is now Big Foot Pass in Badlands National Monument to the White River where they camped. When the Indians reached Pine Creek on December 28, they were intercepted by the army. In attempting to disarm them the next day, the military precipitated the infamous “Wounded Knee Massacre” of December 29, 1890, when more than 150 Indians and 39 whites were killed. This was the last major clash between Indians and the United States Army.[52] The famous western artist Frederic Remington was attached to a scouting party which went into the Badlands in search of Big Foot and his band. The first camp Remington made with the soldiers was on Christmas night with the thermometer well below zero. In an article written for Harper’s Weekly, January 21, 1891, he described his trip into the region: It was twelve miles through the defiles of the Bad Lands to the blue ridge of the high mesa where the hostiles had lived. The trail was strewn with dead cattle, some of them having never been touched with a knife. Here and there a dead pony, ridden to a stand-still and left nerveless on the trail. No words of mine can describe these Bad Lands. They are somewhat as Dore pictured hell. One set of buttes, with cones and minarets, gives place in the next mile to natural freaks of a different variety, never dreamed of by mortal man. It is the action of water on clay; there are ashes or what looks like them. The painter’s whole palette is in one bluff.[53] THE SETTLERS COME White settlement of the Badlands region was slow. Suited for grazing, the region in the 1890’s was primarily the domain of cattlemen and sheepmen. At that time the region was surveyed by the Government.[54] [Illustration: Figure 8 OLD INTERIOR, 1906 Settled in about 1881, the town was known as Black until the name was changed around 1895. It was located about two miles southeast of the present town of Interior. In 1907, old Interior was abandoned in favor of the present townsite when the Milwaukee Road was built.[55]]