A Terrible Glory, Page 2

  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 settlement 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 ever-increasing 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.