During the late 1800s, miners, traders, and homesteaders rushed west, pushing Northern Plains tribes into ever smaller remnants of their homelands as treaties with the U.S. government were made and broken and tensions rose between Native Americans and newcomers. Tribes answered the wave of Euro-American immigration with increasingly violent attempts to defend their homes and cultures. For the Santee Lakota Sioux, tensions peaked in August 1865, and their uprising in Minnesota Territory left 450-800 settlers and soldiers dead. Brig. Gen. Henry Sibley was sent with 1,400 soldiers to suppress the uprising; many Santee were captured, while others fled west to join other Lakota bands. Sibley and Brig. Gen. Alfred Sully pursued the Santee into Dakota Territory, where Sibley fought several battles in July and August 1863, and Sully attacked a Sioux village at Whitestone Hill in September in the fiercest battle ever fought in North Dakota. In June 1864, Sully led the first military expedition into the badlands to further punish the Sioux and establish new military posts, fighting at Killdeer Mountain on July 28 and then in the two-day running Battle of the Badlands, which ended at Square Butte with the Sioux in retreat. From 1871 to 1873, Northern Pacific Railroad survey parties crossed the Dakota badlands under military escort as conflict over westward railroad expansion and the destruction of bison herds heightened tensions with the Sioux; the expeditions led by Major Joseph Whistler and Colonel David Stanley saw only a few skirmishes and no major confrontations. In 1876, after the U.S. government sought to force the Lakota Sioux to cede the Black Hills despite an 1868 treaty, Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry and Custer's 7th Cavalry marched west from Fort Abraham Lincoln through the badlands toward the Battle of Little Bighorn, where Custer and more of his men died, after which Terry's troops returned through the badlands; Brig. Gen. George Crook also moved through the badlands before fighting the Sioux at Slim Buttes. Between 1864 and 1876, five military expeditions crossed this country, and although only a few skirmishes occurred in the badlands, they became part of the broader history of the Great Sioux War.