Chapter Excerpt

Again, we come to the great law of right. The white race stood upon this undeveloped continent ready and willing to execute the Divine injunction, to replenish the earth and subdue it. . . . The Indian races were in the wrongful possession of a continent required by the superior right of the white man.

Philip Henry Sheridan, tough, fearless, and tenacious, like the bulldog he resembled, faced a thorny problem in the fall of 1875—several thousand of them, actually.¹ A small contingent of Plains Indians, roaming the same lands they had occupied for generations, refused to bow to the manifest destiny of the nation he had so devoutly served for more than twenty years.

Sheridan's dilemma was a multifaceted one. From his headquarters in Chicago, he commanded the Division of the Missouri, by far the largest and most problematic military region in the country. It comprised the Great Plains and more—indeed, almost half the nation's territory, from the Canadian border to the tip of Texas, from Chicago to the Rockies. That expanse included most of the western states, five territories, a growing number of whites, and approximately 175,000 Indians of many different tribes. Over the past half century, most of those Indians had been herded onto reservations set aside for their use, both to keep them away from the westering whites and to facilitate the effort to make them, as much as possible, white people. The problems stemming from these relocations were monumental, though they were perceived by most whites as more humane, and considerably less expensive, than the alternative: war.

The U.S. government soon found out that it was one thing to assign tribes to reservations and quite another to keep them there—especially when the food rations and supplies promised them by treaty were delayed, stolen, inedible, or simply never delivered. What had been presented as a policy designed to prevent bloodshed soon became yet another rationale for it.

Sheridan's dilemma was shared by his immediate superior, General of the Army William Tecumseh Sherman, President Ulysses S. Grant, and several high- ranking members of Grant's administration. For years the two Generals had advocated all- out war on the Indians, with Sheridan, who had branded the uncooperative elements of the Plains tribes "hostiles," especially single- minded on the subject. But certain legal and moral niceties, which Sheridan found supremely irritating, precluded such belligerence. Grant's infernal "Peace Policy," which stressed humanitarian reforms before military intervention, was one. Treaties made with various Indian tribes were another. A third (and particularly galling) obstacle was that weakkneed portion of the eastern intelligentsia whose naive, romantic view of "Lo the poor Indian" (a phrase from a poem by Alexander Pope, which led to the use of "Lo," with heavy frontier wit, as the generic name for the Indian) was formed by such unrealistic sources as the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

But that November, at a high- level meeting at the White House, a bold solution to the Indian problem would be revealed.

Until a few years previous, the Plains tribes had roamed at will. During the warmer months, they followed the buffalo, or bison, their source of food, clothing, shelter, and virtually every other material (and spiritual) need. Before the unforgiving winter swept down, they gathered up their stores of meat and then holed up in sheltered valleys along moving water to wait out the weather, as close to hibernation as a people could get. Until the new grass appeared in the spring, their ponies grew considerably thinner, surviving on the bark of riparian cottonwoods. The Indians, too, were vulnerable in winter, but they knew the wasichus (whites) were reluctant to launch any extended large- scale campaign then. A plains winter could turn deadly in a matter of hours, and heavy supply trains to feed men and mounts slowed a column even in the best of weather. The white soldiers had waged winter war once or twice, but that kind of campaign was difficult to muster and coordinate.

As emigrant travel through the heart of Sioux country increased, the monumental job of protecting incoming miners, farmers, ranchers, tradesmen, stockmen, railroad surveyors, lawmen, barbers, saloon owners, and others in an area of more than a million square miles fell to Sheridan, who commanded almost a third of the shrunken remnants of the victorious Federal army. More than two million men had served the Union during the Civil War, but more than half had mustered out a year after its end, and the regular army had gradually been trimmed to 25,000 enlisted men by the early 1870s. The nation was understandably tired of war, and a southern- controlled Congress found the idea of a large standing army distasteful. Undermanned, underpaid, undersupplied, undertrained, and underfed (a decade after Appomattox, Civil War-era hardtack was still being issued to frontier troops), the army Sheridan served faced a warrior culture that trained males from early childhood to fight, ride, and survive better than anyone else in the world. These people knew every hill and valley and water source in their wide land and eluded their pursuers with ease.

The job, Sheridan knew, had been easier, or at least simpler, a half century earlier. All that was necessary then was to push the Indians west, beyond "The Line"—wherever it was at the time.

The Line, which had existed almost since the white man had begun to penetrate the vastness to the west, was the result of more than three centuries of clashes between Europeans and the native population. Spanish conquistadors had clashed constantly with the native inhabitants of Florida during their many expeditions in search of gold and other treasures. In the epic Battle of Mabila in 1540, in the area later known as Alabama, Hernando de Soto and several hundred Spaniards had destroyed an entire army of thousands of Indians to the last man. To the north, in the swampy Tidewater region of Virginia, the two- hundred- village- strong Powhatan Confederacy had aided the ill- prepared English settlers at Jamestown since their arrival in 1607. The generous Indians had brought food to the starving colonists, given freely of their considerable agricultural knowledge, and generally made it possible for the English to survive the first few years of the settlement's existence. (They also taught the whites how to cultivate a cash crop called tobacco, which would enable the foundation and rapid rise of several more southern colonies.) Their generosity was not repaid in kind. The settlers were soon told by their superiors—who were, after all, directors of a for- profit joint- stock company—to do whatever it took to acquire all the land they could. Indian tempers grew short after a series of humiliations and attacks (no doubt aided and abetted by the Spaniards to the south), and fifteen years later they mounted a large- scale surprise assault on the colony that resulted in 347 English deaths in a matter of a few hours. The surviving colonists vowed revenge, and fifty years of almost constant eye- for- an- eye warfare followed. By 1671 the Virginia governor could report to London that "the Indians, our neighbours, are absolutely subjected, so that there is no fear in them"²—in no small part because there were only a few thousand of them left in the face of 40,000 Englishmen.

Over the next century, until the American Revolution, white men wrested North American territory from the Indians by treaty, sale, or sheer force—sometimes, truth be told, in concert with tribes seeking an advantage in Indian vs. Indian warfare.³ From the very beginning, the Europeans, with few exceptions, had perceived America's native inhabitants as no more than savages—romantic, perhaps, in their primitiveness, and occasionally charming, or worthy of pity, but savages nonetheless. Whites had little respect for Indian cultures, their ways of life, or their concepts of government and landownership—the latter being particularly antithetical to white views. Indians did not develop the land, nor did they measure and mark what they owned; they simply did not understand land as private property. One could no more own the earth than the sky, the Indians reasoned. Rather, their land was commonly owned and used. To the ceaselessly toiling New World colonists, whose way of life was rooted in property ownership, this outlook was positively sacrilegious. This difference, more than anything else, would lead to the struggles between the two peoples.⁴

For the British, the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 resulted in huge additions of contested western territories ceded by the defeated French. But the excitement on the part of the colonials—who felt somewhat justifiably that they, not their distant British landlords, had "won" the new lands and should have the right to develop them—was dampened by George III's Royal Proclamation of 1763. The new law forbade settlement on "any Lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and Northwest," including the verdant Ohio Valley and all of the territory from the Ohio to the Mississippi rivers—roughly anything west of the Appalachians, from the southern limits of the province of Quebec in the north to Florida in the south. This area was referred to as "Indian territory," and all Englishmen were directed to abandon it immediately, regardless of title changes ("great Frauds and Abuses have been committed in purchasing Lands of the Indians . . . to the great Dissatisfaction of the said Indians"). All Indian peoples were declared to be under the protection of the King, and provisions for royal posts along the boundary were made.

The motivations behind the King's proclamation were more practical than humanitarian. Relations between the Indians and the colonists were already poor. Most of the Indian tribes had sided with the French during the war, and by placating the natives, the proclamation would, it was hoped, reduce the costs of defending the frontier. The boundary and the Indian preserve it established were meant to be temporary, the first step in a controlled, deliberate settle ment plan. Five years later, after considerable colonist lobbying, the Indian Boundary Line was established farther to the west and formally agreed to in treaties with the Indians. But later that same year, due to a change in the British ministry, the Crown discontinued maintenance of the plan.⁵ The increasingly restive colonists believed that the edict had another purpose: to keep them close to the eastern seaboard and easier to control—and away from the lucrative fur trade farther west.

The Proclamation of 1763 represented the last time that Indian sovereignty in the interior of the new land was considered important to the causes of peace and trade. Settlers and land speculators alike ignored the decree⁶ and worked to open the western frontier and claim the Indian lands. Thirteen years later, two of the many grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence addressed the Crown's protection of "the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions" and royal resistance to "new Appropriations of Lands." (A year earlier, at the dawn of the American Revolution, the Continental Congress had instituted an Indian policy, largely to maintain peaceful relations during the ensuing war, though most eastern Indian tribes predictably sided with the British.) Once independence was established, however, the young Republic's first President, George Washington, sought to apply solid moral precepts to all dealings with the Indians: "The basis of our proceedings with the Indian nations," he said, "has been, and shall be justice."⁷ The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 pledged goodwill and respect for the Indians' property, rights, and liberty. One of Washington's first acts as president was to issue the Proclamation of 1790, which forbade state or private- sector encroachments on all Indian lands guaranteed by treaty with the new country.⁸ But while Washington believed in the sovereignty of Indian nations and tried hard to prevent outright confiscation, states and individuals alike ignored the federal law in order to satisfy the enormous demand for land dictated by an everincreasing number of immigrants. As the new nation set to work exploring and settling beyond that short- lived Proclamation Line, land was acquired through bloodshed, treaty, crooked deals, or a mix of all three, and the absence of European powers meant that the Indians could not play one colonial interest against another.

The new century saw The Line move west quite a distance. After the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, when General Anthony Wayne crushed Little Turtle's previously invincible Miami Indians,⁹ the Ohio Valley was opened to settlers. Around 1803 President Thomas Jefferson decided to relocate all eastern tribes beyond a Permanent Indian Frontier, extending from Minnesota to Louisiana west of the ninety- fifth meridian—a scheme made viable with the Louisiana Purchase that year—to an "Indian Country" of their own, far away from civilization. Reports from the explorations of Lewis and Clark (1804-1806) and Zebulon Pike (1806-1807) portrayed the lands beyond the Mississippi as mostly desert and "incapable of cultivation," unfit for white people. The idea of the "Great American Desert" was reinforced by Major Stephen H. Long's 1823 report, which first used that phrase and characterized the Great Plains as "almost wholly unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence."¹⁰ Just two years later, in 1825, President James Monroe began forcing tribes west of the Mississippi to this designated Permanent Indian Country.

The movement picked up full steam after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, passed soon after Andrew Jackson became President. The War of 1812 hero had caused an international incident when he had pursued Seminole Indians into Spanish Florida in 1818, and he still thought little of Indian sovereignty, referring to "the farce of treating with Indian tribes."¹¹ Jackson envisioned a confederacy of formerly southern Indians in the West that would one day take its place in the Union—after they became fully civilized, of course.¹² Some tribes went quietly, but others, chiefly the Seminoles in Florida and the Sauks and Foxes of Illinois, resisted mightily but futilely against the relentless whites. The pressure came from all directions. It mattered not a whit, for example, that the U.S. Supreme Court found the acts of the State of Georgia against the Cherokee nation unconstitutional and in violation of legally binding treaties; Jackson simply refused to support the decision.¹³ The forced eviction of the Cherokees from their native Georgia and their march west to Indian Territory ( present- day Oklahoma)—which reduced their population by more than 30 percent—came to be known as the Trail of Tears.¹⁴ They and the rest of the so- called Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles) lost all their land throughout the South and ended up on reservations in Indian Territory, as did many other vanquished tribes.

"Indian Country" had been officially defined by the Indian Intercourse Act of 1834 as "all that part of the United States west of the Mississippi; and not within the states of Missouri and Louisiana, or the territory of Arkansas."¹⁵ Congress decreed that white men were forbidden to travel beyond The Line without a license (though this and similar provisions in subsequent treaties were rarely, if ever, enforced),¹⁶ and a line of forts was constructed to prevent whites from passing to the west and Indians from attacking to the east. In 1835 Jackson promised the Indians that their new lands would be forever "secured and guaranteed to them."¹⁷ By 1840 Indian removal was largely complete.

Shortly thereafter, several nearly simultaneous events combined dramatically to change the situation. The first wagon train carrying white emigrants reached the Platte River in modern- day Nebraska in 1841, along what later became known as the Oregon Trail.¹⁸ Many more followed, straight through the heart of the Lakotas' favorite hunting grounds. These first migrants over the Great Plains were greeted with more curiosity than hostility. The Indians allowed them through and traded with them for goods that the tribes quickly became dependent on; the Indians sometimes even guided and aided the migrants. Until the mid- 1840s, there was only one reported death involving the overland migrants, and that was an Indian. But the number of annual emigrants rapidly increased more than tenfold, from 5,000 in 1845 to 55,000 in 1850. The wagon trains, and the settlers and miners they carried, drove away the buffalo and depleted the wood and grass along the way. The constant stream of invading whites also spread epidemic diseases such as cholera, smallpox, measles, and venereal diseases to the Indians, who had developed no immunity to these illnesses. Some tribes, particularly the Cheyennes and the friendly Mandans and Arikaras along the Missouri River, were decimated. The epidemics were viewed by some Plains Indians as the white man's black magic, and in response, depredations against the invaders began to occur more frequently.

The Mexican War of 1846-48 added most of the West and Southwest to the United States, and the settlement of the Oregon Territory boundary dispute with England clarified the country's holdings in the Northwest. In little more than fifty years, the original thirteen colonies hugging the Atlantic coast had become one of the largest nations on earth, stretching to the far Pacific in a wide swath from Canada to the Rio Grande. Settlement was already increasing when gold was found at Sutter's Mill in 1848, just after California had been acquired from Mexico. The rush toward the Pacific over the next few years triggered a boom in westward expansion, and the cry of manifest destiny—Americans' belief that they had a divine right to the undeveloped lands to the west, first enunciated in a New York newspaper, the Democratic Review, in 1845—provided a handy, Creator- approved rationalization for seizing Indian territories.¹⁹ The Indian question became the Indian problem, and despite attempts by various interest groups to prevent widespread subjugation, one tribe after another was conquered: the Apaches and Navajos in the West, the Comanches, Kiowas, and Southern Cheyennes on the southern plains, and many smaller groups such as the Pitt River Indians and Yumas in California.

In the Northwest, stronger tribes such as the Yakimas and their allies put up a stiffer fight. The Yakima and Rogue River wars of 1854-1856 resulted in U.S. troops being rushed to the Oregon and Washington territories to stamp out resistance. Not until 1858 did forces led by General George Wright eradicate the threat through an unbeatable combination of superior firepower and widespread hangings of suspicious parties. Among his soldiers was a young Lieutenant fresh from West Point named Philip Sheridan.

The darkly handsome native of Ireland spent six years helping to tame the Cascade and Yakima Indians, and even learned the Chinook language, no doubt assisted by the pretty young Indian woman who kept his house, cooked for him, and shared his bed, a common arrangement at the time. The dashing dragoon courted several young white women in the area, but for about five years he lived with Sidnayoh, known to the whites as Frances.²⁰ She was the daughter of Chief Quately of the Klickitat tribe, allies of the Yakimas. But when Sheridan left in 1861 to defend the Union and make his name, he never returned to the Northwest. After the war, Sidnayoh, her brother, and two friends visited him in Washington. He never acknowledged or spoke of her, and in 1875 he married another woman, the daughter of a U.S. Army General.²¹ Sheridan called the natives in the Northwest "miserable wretches" and seemed to care little that their sad plight was due to white malfeasance.²² The man who would one day utter the phrase, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead"—later modified to become the harder- hitting "The only good Indian is a dead Indian"—would espouse total war, and even extermination, against Sidnayoh's people.²³

During the gold rush, fortune- seeking miners, settlers, and recently discharged soldiers with an itch for adventure surged west, and it was soon clear that The Line was not an effective solution to the Indian problem. As the 1850s dawned, an idea that had been implemented on a small scale in the East became U.S. government policy. Reservations—well- defined "colonies" of land set aside for the different Indian tribes, where they could learn how to farm, adapt to the ways of the whites, and, most important, keep out of the settlers' way—were established. The next two decades witnessed a frenzy of treaties as the government methodically seized—sometimes via forced agreements, other times via force alone—virtually all of the land it wanted. Treaties had been made almost since the first white colonists had disembarked in the East, but rarely of the scope and frequency seen from the 1850s on. In 1851 alone, treaties involving 139 tribes and bands were concluded.²⁴

In 1851 at Fort Laramie in southeast Wyoming Territory, 10,000 Plains Indians representing nine major tribes, some of them mortal enemies, gathered at the behest of an honorable Indian agent, a former mountain man named Thomas Fitzpatrick. He had convinced Congress that funding such a conference was worthwhile, particularly if the resulting treaty could ensure the safety of emigrants traveling through the Indians' lands. The meeting constituted the greatest assemblage of Indians ever seen on the continent. Somehow, government negotiators convinced representatives of each tribe present to sign a treaty that set boundaries for their various hunting areas, established the right of the U.S. government to construct roads and forts in their territories, and set up a system of annuities to last fifty years. Using a shameful ploy that would be repeated in years to come, the U.S. Senate reduced the time span to ten years, without telling the Indians, before ratifying the treaty.

The Fort Laramie peace would be destroyed three years later in August 1854 by an incident involving a hotheaded young army Lieutenant named Grattan. When an emigrant wagon train outside the fort complained that a cow had been stolen and slaughtered by Indians (the animal was probably lame and may have been abandoned), Grattan set out with thirty men to arrest the culprit, hoping for a confrontation. He found the Indian camp and demanded that the Lakota warrior be turned over.

These Lakota Sioux (Sioux being a bastardized French word that they despised) were smart, fearless, and wealthy by the standards of the Plains tribes—rich with horses, buffalo skins, and even guns and ammunition. They had originated in the woodlands of Minnesota. ²⁵ Their move westward had begun in the second half of the 1700s, abetted in no small part by the introduction at the dawn of that century of guns and horses. Both had been given to the Indians by whites—horses by the Spanish conquistadors and guns soon after by trappers and explorers. Horses increased the Indians' hunting range dramatically; guns did the same for their firepower. As the creeping tide of whites pushed eastern tribes, particularly the Chippewas, westward onto traditional Lakota hunting grounds, the Lakotas ranged steadily west, onto the Great Plains, beyond the Missouri River, in pursuit of buffalo, which were also leaving the eastern plains. Over the next century, this happy confluence of events made these latecomers to the plains rich and powerful, as they roamed north to Canada, land of the Great White Mother, and west almost to the Rockies. Along the way, they developed a warrior culture in which male status derived from war honors, and a society that revolved around the hunt and battle against neighboring peoples. The Lakotas fought every tribe they encountered and pushed most of them out of their ancestral lands, establishing a hegemony on the northern plains that would be challenged but not rivaled. Only the ferocious Cheyennes, after some initial clashes, became their allies sometime around 1826.

The Lakotas refused Lieutenant Grattan's demands after offering to pay for the cow, and the detail fired a volley into a group of Lakotas. Hundreds of nearby warriors observing the parley fell upon the detachment, and in the battle that followed, all of the soldiers were killed, including Grattan.

The punitive columns sent out in response to the killings put an end to the Fort Laramie peace. But many of the tribes, unwilling or unable to understand the abstract legal boundaries that prevented them from traveling where they pleased, had returned to intertribal warring even before that.²⁶ A year after Grattan's death, an army column led by General William S. Harney, dubbed "the Butcher" for the harsh way in which he dealt with the Indians, destroyed a Brulé camp and killed eighty- six men, women, and children. Harney's revenge delivered a message that the bluecoats were a force to be reckoned with.

Under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, organized in 1824 as part of the War Department and transferred to the new Department of the Interior in 1849, the treaties proved highly effective in gaining for the United States dubiously legal claims. Government officials became increasingly skilled at the bait and switch, the obfuscating explanation, the manipulation of pliable Indian chiefs partial to their cause—anything to gain the ostensibly legal cession of lands.

At Fort Wise, Kansas, in 1861, Cheyenne Indians met with federal commissioners to discuss their territorial boundaries. The Cheyennes were not nearly as populous as the Lakotas—cholera and smallpox had ravaged them—but they made up for their small numbers with an unequaled fearlessness, ferocity, and pride. They warred with almost as many tribes as the Lakotas, though they had formed truces with some, such as the Kiowas and Comanches to the south. They also got along well with the sedentary, agricultural river tribes of the Missouri—the Arikaras, Mandans, and Hidatsas. But their only long- term allies were the Arapahos, a smaller, more peaceful tribe that nevertheless fought alongside the Cheyennes in many battles. The two had camped together and supported each other for at least a century, and there was much intermarriage between them.

Like the Lakotas, the Cheyennes were recent immigrants to the plains, having lived along the Missouri for many years and in Minnesota long before that. They, too, had followed the buffalo out onto the vast expanses of the plains soon after acquiring horses and guns. Their lands lay between the Platte and Arkansas rivers, all the way to the Rockies. Several large- scale attacks by the U.S. Army had reduced their numbers but hardened their resolve.

The Cheyennes agreed to a reservation south of the Arkansas River but in the process gave up virtually all the lands recognized as theirs in 1851. Shockingly, only six of the forty- four Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho chiefs took part in the talks. Many of their brethren were furious with them for having "touched the pen" and refused to be bound by the treaty.

This was not an entirely uncommon phenomenon. The U.S. government never seemed to understand that the "chiefs" who put pen to paper rarely represented their tribes completely, in the way of traditional white representatives. Indians who did not sign a particular treaty felt no compunction to follow the treaty's dictates, much as the government expected them to. Since the government needed someone to sign each treaty, in some cases government representatives anointed a chief if one did not exist, which usually resulted in tribal strife. And treaty chiefs often misunderstood what they had signed, further complicating compliance. Faulty interpreters also ensured failure.²⁷

Compounding the U.S. government's deceitful tactics was the fact that its adherence to the treaties was arbitrary, even when the agreements were changed to the benefit of the whites after the tribal representatives had signed them. Along with the treaties, a system of annuities was developed, guaranteeing regular (usually annual) payments of money, food, and supplies, including arms and ammunition, designed to discourage the buffalo- hunting lifestyle and result in the purchase of additional Indian land over a period of years. Traders and agents hired to control annuity payments were seldom incorrupt. They took advantage of the Indians in many ways, from charging them with made- up debts for extended credit and delivering inferior goods to shorting them during the distribution of supplies— sometimes with the help of equally corrupt chiefs. The fact that these men were appointed by members of Congress initiated a widespread patronage- for- payment arrangement that further ensured an under- the- table and unfair distribution of funds. With regard to the Santee, or Dakota, Sioux, for example, little of the money promised to them by the terms of the 1851 treaty was ever paid. Most of the Plains Indians took poorly to their new farming life, if they took to it at all. The sedentary agricultural life seemed unnatural to them, and to make matters worse, many of the agency lands were not well suited for agriculture. The only alternative to starvation was to leave the reservation to hunt for game, which they did in great numbers.

Most treaties were violated almost immediately, on both sides. But for the most part, the situation was tolerable, as long as the Indians were powerful enough to respect and major warfare was avoided. Thomas Fitzpatrick, the principled Indian agent, decried the system as "the legalized murder of a whole nation"²⁸ as early as 1853, but it was already too late. The treaties had accomplished their main goals: the seizure of Indian lands under quasi- legal agreements, the avoidance of widespread bloodshed, and the removal of the Indians to modest- size reservations as far away from emigrant routes as possible. Subsequently, via steamboats up the Missouri and other waterways, and railroads and wagons along regular routes and trails across the plains, a never- ending flow of settlers penetrated the land of every tribe in the West.

One Sunday in August 1862, in the frontier state of Minnesota, four young Dakota Sioux warriors returning home from a hunting trip worked themselves into a fury in an argument over some hen's eggs spotted on a white man's farm. The Dakotas were starving; that year's annuities were overdue—again—although the agency warehouses were full of food and other supplies. The Dakotas had already suffered through a decade of disruption, having ceded 24 million acres of their ancestral hunting grounds for $1.6 million and the promise of cash annuities. One unsympathetic storekeeper, Andrew Myrick, summarized the feelings of many whites when he advised the Indians to eat grass or their own dung.²⁹

The warriors shot and killed the farmer, his wife, his daughter, and two neighbors. When they returned to their village and confessed what they had done, the Dakota chiefs decided after a long night's deliberation to proceed with an all- out, preemptive war and pressured Little Crow, an elderly peace chief—who regularly attended a nearby Episcopal church and wore white men's clothes— to lead them. A surprise attack on a nearby settlement at dawn the next morning ignited a frenzy of massacres in the area. By the end of the day, four hundred settlers had been brutally murdered. Before the uprising was over, more than eight hundred lay dead. Myrick's lifeless body was later found outside his store, his bloody mouth stuffed with grass.

The Minnesota Massacre, as it was called, was the first sign of large- scale, organized resistance to the relentless white incursions into the Indians' lands and the indignities heaped upon them under the reservation system. State and national authorities responded immediately. General John Pope, in charge of the Department of the Missouri, vowed, "It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. . . . They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts." (In later years, Pope's views toward the Indians would soften, but his words were an accurate reflection of the views of most whites along the frontier.) A month later, General Henry Sibley and 1,500 troops defeated the Santees at Wood Lake. The most recalcitrant among the Indians escaped to the west into Dakota Territory and north into Canada, but 2,000 were captured, and 38 of them were hanged the day after Christmas in 1862. (The death toll would have been much higher—307 had been sentenced to death—had President Abraham Lincoln not intervened and commuted all the sentences except for those of proven rapists and murderers.) In addition, the Dakotas paid for their actions with the loss of their strip of land on the Minnesota River, and they were moved to another reservation farther west, on the Missouri River.

But the seed had been sown. Sioux resistance spread westward with the fleeing Dakota warriors, and the next few years saw a steady increase in hostilities and depredations throughout the Great Plains. The endless stream of emigrants (300,000 during the Civil War alone)³⁰ up the Missouri River and along the main trails west— the Oregon, Bozeman, Bridger, and Santa Fe—angered the Sioux, who fought back the only way they knew how, with scattered raids throughout the area.

During the Civil War, army regulars on the frontier were moved to theaters of war back east, and volunteer militia took their place. These westerners were personally motivated to wreak revenge, and at dawn on November 29, 1864, they got their chance. Led by a former Methodist minister, Colonel John M. Chivington, the Third Colorado Cavalry militia regiment surrounded and fell upon peace chief Black Kettle's sleeping Cheyenne village of about one hundred lodges on Sand Creek, 175 miles southeast of Denver in Colorado Territory. The fanatical Chivington had ordered women and children destroyed—"Nits make lice," he pointed out—and his seven hundred volunteers enthusiastically obeyed orders, chasing down, killing, and then carving up the Cheyennes, who had believed themselves to be under army protection. By day's end, some two hundred Indians, most of them women and children, were dead, many of them hideously mutilated. Chivington's men later marched triumphantly through the streets of Denver, proudly displaying Cheyenne body parts.

White settlers in the area applauded and made Chivington a hero. Meanwhile, the Indian survivors made their way to other Cheyenne camps, and word of the massacre spread quickly across the plains. Over the next few months, enraged Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors raided towns, stage stations, ranches, and wagon trains, burning, looting, and killing wherever they could. Then, in late winter, they moved north to join their kinsmen in the Powder River country—that area between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains which the Lakota considered theirs, though in fact they had wrested it from the Crows only a few decades before.

The end of the Civil War saw thousands more volunteer troops shifted to the frontier and the debacle known as the Powder River campaign of 1865, a largely fruitless effort to clean out the marauding Indians. That foray into the Sioux homeland by 6,000 soldiers in three columns stirred up the entire Lakota nation for good—particularly a tall, charismatic Oglala chief named Red Cloud, who had earned his reputation by collecting more than eighty coups from the time he was sixteen. (A warrior counted coup when he touched an opponent with his hand or a coup stick. Such bold acts were a measure of one's bravery and were tallied carefully.)

Over the next few years, the cunning and unrelenting Red Cloud rained havoc on any whites foolish enough to enter the Powder River country. Through the heart of this country ran the Bozeman Trail, the best route to the Montana gold mines. An attempted parley at Fort Laramie in June 1866 fell flat when the whites' talk of peace was revealed to be just that—talk. In the middle of the parley, a battalion of regular U.S. Army infantry marched into the post on their way to build more forts on the Bozeman. Red Cloud and almost all the Sioux promptly decided to leave after warning the whites to stay off the trail. Only the Brulé Sioux, led by the opportunistic Spotted Tail, and some minor chiefs signed the treaty, which was good enough for the government—any signature or mark was deemed legally binding. But the document was effectively meaningless, since the signees had no stake in the Powder River lands.

As the soldiers began building three forts along the Bozeman, they were constantly harassed by Red Cloud's warriors. In December 1866, a large force of Oglalas, Minneconjous, Cheyennes, Hunkpapas, and even two friendly Crows³¹ bore down on Fort Phil Kearny. On December 21, they lured William J. Fetterman, a young Captain with little regard for the Indians' fighting ability, out of the fort with an eighty- man detail made up mostly of raw recruits. The soldiers charged over a long hill in pursuit of a small band of Indians led by an audacious young warrior. At the most opportune moment, the warrior let out a war whoop, and hundreds of braves hidden in the gullies and woods along the trail swarmed upon the stunned bluecoats. In less than an hour, it was all over. Few of the Indians had guns; most of them relied on bows and arrows, lances, stone clubs, and knives, and most of the fighting was at close range. The Sioux lost twelve warriors,³² but Fetterman and every one of his men were killed. Earlier, Fetterman had been heard boasting, "Give me eighty men and I would ride through the whole Sioux nation."³³

The daring young war chief who led Fetterman to his death was named Crazy Horse. One writer would later call him "the strange man of the Oglalas." It was an appropriate description, for Crazy Horse went his own way.

This warrior- mystic was born in the late fall of 1840 near Bear Butte, outside modern- day Sturgis, South Dakota, on the northern edge of the Black Hills.³⁴ His father, also named Crazy Horse, was an Oglala holy man; his mother, Rattle Blanket Woman, a Minneconjou. ³⁵ His actual birth name was Light Hair, for his fine, sandy brown locks. His light hair, combined with his light complexion and sharp features, caused more than one settler to mistake him for a white child. An uncle died when the boy was about four, and his mother, grief- stricken, committed suicide. More than most Lakotas, Crazy Horse's life would be colored by the loss of those close to him.

When Crazy Horse was a boy, he went by the name of Curly, and he was known for his shy personality. Like all young Lakota males, he was regaled with stories and songs that celebrated the cult of the warrior and progressed from paternal instruction and childhood games that emphasized war skills to buffalo hunts and war parties, during which older boys assisted seasoned fighters with relatively safe duties such as tending the packhorses and equipment. Curly became an expert with horses at an early age, and as an adolescent he began a close relationship with a renowned warrior named Hump, who may have been an uncle. Hump became Curly's mentor, and soon the two were nearly inseparable.

As a young man, Curly was introverted and somewhat antisocial, to the point that others in his tribe considered him peculiar. Almost all Lakotas danced and sang socially, but Curly never would. "He never spoke in council," said a longtime friend, He Dog. "He was a very quiet man except when there was fighting."³⁶ He took to the life of a warrior naturally. When he came of age and displayed conspicuous bravery in a fight with an enemy tribe, his father passed on his own name, Crazy Horse, to his son and took the name Worm for himself.

When fully grown, Crazy Horse was five feet seven inches tall,³⁷ slight, and wiry. He had a narrow face, a straight nose, and "black eyes that hardly ever looked straight at a man," according to a close friend.³⁸ When the wife of a white scout encountered him in 1877, she thought him "a very handsome young man,"³⁹ despite a noticeable scar on his left cheek.

Throughout the late 1850s and early 1860s, in dozens of raids and fights against enemy tribes such as the Crows and the Shoshones in and around the Powder River country, Crazy Horse proved his worth as a warrior. His reputation was so secure that sometimes he would drop back and allow others to count coup; once he did this for his younger brother, Little Hawk. He always led his men from the front, and unlike most Lakotas, he dismounted to fire his rifle. He used good judgment and planned soundly. In battle he eschewed ostentatious dress. Instead, he wore a simple eagle feather upside down on the back of his head, a cotton shirt and breechcloth, and moccasins. His waist-length hair was braided down both sides. With one finger, he would draw a zigzag streak of red earth down the center of his face. As a good-luck talisman, he wore a small white stone in a bag under his left arm. Whether due to this amulet or not, Crazy Horse was rarely injured, though nine horses were shot out from under him in battle. Only once was he badly wounded, in the leg, and that was before he began carrying the stone.

Most of the warfare Crazy Horse participated in during this time was intertribal, but that changed in the mid- 1860s. The opening of the Bozeman Trail and the army's three forts made it clear to Crazy Horse and several thousand other Lakotas that they would never walk the white man's road. For most of the decade, any soldiers or travelers along the Bozeman ran the risk of attack by a Lakota war party.

When the news of Fetterman's defeat reached the East, there was an immediate clamor for retaliation, particularly in the army. General William T. Sherman, Civil War hero and now commander of all military forces on the Great Plains, called for total extermination, if necessary. But a burgeoning peace movement, which had gained full steam after the Sand Creek Massacre and which comprised many humanitarians who had campaigned against slavery and were now turning their attention to the plight of the Indians, lobbied for a less bellicose solution. Their efforts, combined with the realization of the precarious positions of the three isolated forts and the fact that hostilities had reduced the traffic on the Bozeman to almost nothing, paid off. After much saber rattling and throat clearing in Congress, and an abortive campaign on the plains, President Andrew Johnson called for a peace commission to convene in the fall of 1867 at Medicine Lodge Creek, Kansas (with the southern Plains tribes), and in April 1868 at Fort Laramie (with the northern Plains tribes). Sherman was one of three generals named to the commission.

The discussions at Medicine Lodge led to the permanent establishment of many reservations in Indian Territory, as, for the first time, the idea of one big Indian reservation was abandoned. Plans also were made for the education and assimilation of the Indians into white culture via agency schools, the encouragement of farming and Christianity, and eventually individual landownership. At Fort Laramie, the government bowed to the dictates of the resolute Red Cloud, agreeing to abandon the three forts along the Bozeman and to concede the country to the Powder River tribes. Only when the soldiers had left and the forts were put to the torch did Red Cloud put pen to paper. The trail itself was closed, and no whites were allowed in this territory.

Red Cloud's was the only war with the United States that western Indians ever won. Even then, the victory proved illusory. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 established the Great Sioux Reservation west of the Missouri in Dakota Territory, and Red Cloud and most of his followers soon became, in effect, reservation Indians. Now the government could more easily control them, which was the point. An "unceded territory" outside the reservation, where nonreservation Indians could hunt "so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers to justify the chase," had been granted to the Sioux, but in classic treaty double- talk, another article dictated that the Indians were not allowed to "occupy" those lands. (Sherman was reassured by his fellow commissioners that the buffalo would not last long enough for the clause to be a problem.)⁴⁰ Thus, the very territory that Red Cloud and his countrymen had fought so hard to defend—the hunting grounds along the Powder and Bighorn rivers—would only momentarily remain theirs.

The U.S. government pledged to provide supplies and annuities while the tribes adjusted to their new homes. The treaty also allowed the construction of a railroad to the Pacific—and virtually anything else the government decided was necessary—through the heart of Lakota country. Some of the treaty's terms were vague, confusing, and somewhat contradictory, and only a few Indians at best understood them.⁴¹ In a few years, the unceded territory especially would prove to be a sticking point for the U.S. government, when the rights of tribes there—particularly the nonreservation bands who lived and hunted there year- round and had never signed any agreements—clashed with the inexorable white tide working its way west. And the treaty's essential ineffectiveness was underlined less than four months after its proclamation by a general order from Sheridan, at Sherman's direction, that any Sioux found outside the reservation would be considered "hostile."⁴² (Sherman, after returning east, wrote to his brother with chilling clarity: "The Indian war on the plains need simply amount to this. We have now select ed and provided reservations for all, off the great roads. All who cling to their old hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off.")⁴³

For a few years, a shaky peace held sway over the northern plains. At the same time, a stunning cavalry victory on the Washita River and the subsequent roundup of most of the warring Cheyennes largely eliminated hostilities to the south. The peace- seeking atmosphere in the East was augmented by the election of General Ulysses S. Grant, the architect of the Union victory in the Civil War. Grant felt sympathy for the Indians' plight. He told a friend that "as a young lieutenant, he had been much thrown among the Indians, and had seen the unjust treatment they had received at the hands of the white men."⁴⁴ In 1853 he had written, "The whole race would be harmless and peacable if they were not put upon by the whites."⁴⁵ Soon after taking office in 1869, he halted the army's offensives against the Indians and implemented his own Peace Policy.

Grant's policy consisted chiefly of moving all of the nomadic tribes onto reservations away from white expansion and attempting to civilize them. The difference was that now the government would attempt to do so nicely—"conquer with kindness," as officials phrased it—without resorting to the brute force usually used. In an attempt to eliminate the rampant corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Grant's administration hired churchmen, mostly Quakers, as Indian agents.⁴⁶

The War Department disagreed vociferously with Grant's plan and proposed keeping the peace by instilling fear in the Indians. They wanted to wage war at the first sign of hostilities, since dead Indians would require no annuities—and thus no crooked traders and contractors.⁴⁷ For a while, the two policies worked well in tandem, at least on the southern plains. Indeed, the combination of humane treatment of reservation Indians and hard war on recalcitrants had tamed most of the southern tribes.⁴⁸In the north, however, it was a different story.

Copyright © 2008 by James Donovan

1. Myers, "Roster of Known Hostile Indians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn," 2; Stewart, Custer's Luck, 82.
2. Utley and Washburn, Indian Wars, 24.
3. Brandon, Indians, 196-98; Utley and Washburn, 23.
4. For a thoughtful discussion of this point, see Brandon, 253-54: "In a word, the Indian world was devoted to living, the European world to getting."
5. Merk, History of the Westward Movement, 67-69.
6. For specific instances, see Hinsdale, "The Western Land Policy of the British Government," 223.
7. Quoted in Capps, The Indians, 157.
8. Ironically, before the Revolutionary War, Washington, the retired officer and Virginia planter, had been in the forefront of those claiming veterans' land warrants (grants of land given in lieu of money). He also bought those of other veterans and helped to found the Mississippi Land Company, a venture into wilderness real estate. By 1770 he had laid claim to 20,000 acres in the West and sent settlers there to hold his claim (Clary, Adopted Son, 31).
9. There is some doubt as to whether Little Turtle was present at Fallen Timbers. The Indian forces were badly directed, unlike the impressively led triumph on the Wabash River in 1791 dubbed St. Clair's Defeat.
10. Stephen H. Long, quoted in Prucha, "Indian Removal and the Great American Desert," 299.
11. Prucha, "Andrew Jackson's Indian Policy," 532.
12. Ibid., 532, 537. Jackson acquired a reputation as an Indian hater, but despite his hard-line stance, that seems a harsh assessment. He once took a year- old Indian orphan about to be killed by Indians into his home to be raised along with his adopted son, Andrew. He named the boy Lincoyer and referred to him as one of "my two sons." He may have initially intended Lincoyer as merely a playmate for Andrew, but Jackson grew to care for the young Indian and even aspired to send him to West Point. Lincoyer died at age sixteen, probably of tuberculosis. That relationship is telling, for Jackson consistently treated Indians as children, to be punished harshly when they were "bad." But chiefs of the Five Civilized Tribes often called on him at his home, the Hermitage, for support in their relations with the government; they considered him harsh but fair and honest. See Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, 211-12, 228; and James, Andrew Jackson: The Border Captain, 311, 357.
13. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 167. In his landmark decision Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) and other cases, Chief Justice John Marshall recognized the right of native possession of land and thus established the basic rule of U.S. jurisprudence in regard to Indian land and landownership.
14. Boyer, The Oxford Companion to United States History, 379.
15. Act of 1834, quoted ibid., 7.
16. "White persons crossed at will over the Indian's lands, killed his game, seized his land, and even entered his reservation to sell him whisky and steal his annuities" (Welty, "The Indian Policy of the Army," 371).
17. Jackson, quoted in Peters, Indian Battles and Skirmishes, 6.
18. Smith, "The Bozeman: Trail to Death and Glory," 35.
19. Journalist John O'Sullivan coined the phrase to justify U.S. expansion into Texas, Oregon, and Mexico. Boyer, 470.
20. Lee, "Lieutenant Phil Sheridan's Romance in Oregon"; Lockley, "Reminiscences of Martha E. Gilliam Collins," 367-68; Cooper, "Benton County Pioneer- Historical Society," 83.
21. It seems likely that Sidnayoh also bore Sheridan a child, a girl named Emma. See Olney, Who Are You and Who Am I? 21-22, and Sheller, The Name Was Olney, 46-47.
22. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 8.
23. Ellis, The History of Our Country from the Discovery of America to the Present Time, 1483. Sheridan was replying to a Comanche chief, Tosawi, who had just surrendered his band of Indians and said, "Tosawi, good Indian."
24. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 52.
25. This description of the Sioux derives chiefly from White, "The Winning of the West," and Hassrick, The Sioux.
26. Lazarus, Black Hills, White Justice, 18.
27. Ibid., 41-46.
28. Thomas Fitzpatrick, quoted ibid., 63.
29. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, vol. 2, 232.
30. Peters, 7.
31. Camp IU Notes, 437.
32. Ibid., 336.
33. See Calitri, "Give Me Eighty Men," for a well-sourced reinterpretation of Fetterman and his ill-fated band.
34. This summary of Crazy Horse's life is based on Sajna's fine Crazy Horse; Hardorff, The Oglala Lakota Crazy Horse; Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks; Hinman, "Oglala Sources on the Life of Crazy Horse"; Joseph C. Porter, "Crazy Horse, Lakota Leadership, and the Fort Laramie Treaty," in Rankin, Legacy; and Eli S. Ricker's interviews in the Ricker Tablets.
35. Carroll, Who Was This Man Ricker? 48.
36. He Dog, quoted in Sajna, 29.
37. Captain Jesse M. Lee wrote that he was not over five feet six inches (Lee to Camp, May 24, 1910, Camp BYU Collection), but others have said he was five feet eight inches.
38. Hinman, 40.
39. Mrs. Charles Tackett, quoted in Sajna, 29.
40. Smits, "The Frontier Army," 322-23.
41. Utley, "Origins of the Great Sioux War," 49.
42. Vestal, Sitting Bull, 110.
43. Thorndike, The Sherman Letters, 321.
44. George H. Stuart, quoted in McFeely, Grant, 239.
45. Ibid., 306.
46. The 1870 army appropriations bill was amended to prohibit military officers from holding civil appointments (largely to regain the advantages of patronage). Grant turned all seventy-three agencies over to church groups, a flagrant violation of the nation's doctrine of church- state separation, which was ignored at the time. Smith, Grant, 528.
47. Welty, 371.
48. Utley, "The Celebrated Peace Policy of General Grant," 130.