The event most often cited as the start of the modern dispute over the Black Hills was an army expedition sent to confirm a rumour, not a war.
The 1874 expedition
An 1868 treaty had recognised the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, closed to non-Native settlement. In 1874 Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a military expedition into the hills that confirmed gold deposits there, and the resulting publicity brought a rush of prospectors onto treaty-protected land within the year, a violation the United States did not meaningfully prevent and later moved to formalise by seizing the hills outright in 1877.
A site within the site
Beyond the well-known peaks, specific locations across the Black Hills carry their own significance, including Pe'Sla, a large open meadow tied to Lakota origin narratives. Part of Pe'Sla was purchased at public auction in 2012 by a coalition of Lakota, Nakota and Dakota nations working with conservation partners, a rare direct land buyback aimed at securing at least one specific sacred site within the larger disputed territory.
Compensation offered, and refused
The taking led eventually to the 1980 Supreme Court award covered elsewhere in this entry's companion article; the buyback at Pe'Sla reflects the same underlying position acted out differently, land recovered directly rather than compensation accepted in place of it.