Back in the 1870s my great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather surveyed the railroads through the Dakotahs, probably the Black Hills. My great-grandfather was only 16 at the time and he told my grandmother tales about his adventures in the "wild Indain" lands.
They were working for what ended up being the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad Company. A cousin of my g-g-grandfather got them the job. He later became the president of the company and oversaw much of its western expansion. Part of his planning was that as the railroad was surveyed, towns along the route were laid out. The railroad needed towns as places to provide water and fuel for the trains and the US government gave the railroads the lands for those towns to support the lines.
I grew up hearing about my g-grandfather's adventures and his father's cousin who became an extremely wealthy and influential man but it was not until I began researching the genealogy and history that I put those stories together with the history of broken treaties and horrific treatment of the Indians in those areas. I have to put my feelings about that history in the same box that I do the ownership of slaves from the Southern branches of my family. 
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