by David Treuer
It would be another seventy-five years after Vancouver’s expedition of 1791–1795 for the region to be settled in an aggressive manner. In the meantime the British were keen to buy furs and trade with coastal tribes. In exchange they offloaded smallpox and measles and other diseases. Diseases for which the tribes had no immunity spread quickly in the communal longhouses and through the densely settled villages. By the time Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s Corps of Discovery reached the coast and set up shop near the Tillamook and other tribes around Tillamook Bay, their numbers were greatly reduced. The Corps of Discovery introduced a host of new diseases, including chlamydia and syphilis (though these may already have been present—an example of unintended Russian, British, and American epidemiological potluck). Coastal populations that were around two hundred thousand in 1774 had been reduced to fewer than forty thousand a century later.
With the arrival of the Americans came a new struggle for power between the United States and England. During the War of 1812, the English occupied Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River when it was clear the Americans wouldn’t be able to reinforce it. After the war, the Americans sold their holdings to the English-owned Northwest Company, but after 1818 the two countries agreed to administer the region jointly. In 1853 the first plans were drawn up for the city of Seattle, at the expense of the Duwamish, who lived there. And, as happened in the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions, after the furs played out, the timber industry rose in its place. Tribal control of land was further eroded, yet never fully extinguished, by the orgy of treaty making that occurred between 1840 and 1870.
In 1836 two American missionaries—Marcus and Narcissa Whitman—set up shop near present-day Walla Walla. They established a mission, built a gristmill and a school, and introduced the concept of irrigation—all of this for the benefit of the Cayuse people, who had had no need for Jesus, grain cultivation, American-style education, or water. In 1842, Marcus traveled east in order to obtain funding from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. They agreed to help fund and staff the mission, and he returned in 1843 with more than a thousand settlers and prospectors. The settlers roamed freely over Cayuse territory, plowed up the ground, and harvested the food (salmon, game, and berries) on which the Cayuse depended. The Cayuse were stunned that anyone could think the settlers had the right to use their land. Tensions rose. In 1847 a measles epidemic unleashed by the settlers killed more than half the Cayuse. Some sources claim that the disease was attributed by the Cayuse to the “dark magic” of Marcus and Narcissa’s god. That’s unlikely. The Cayuse blamed Marcus personally for treating settlers (some of whom were also sick) but not the Indians. After hundreds of years of disease and epidemic, everyone (especially those who understood the rhythms of the natural world so well) knew that disease spread by physical contact.
Already upset by encroachment, theft, and settlement, the Cayuse sought to eradicate the source of the plague. They attacked the mission, destroying it and killing the Whitmans and some dozen other settlers. This sparked a war that raged for seven years in the region between the Cascades and the Rocky Mountains. The Oregon Territory raised a number of militias (since no colonial power had control over the region) and did battle with the Cayuse from 1847 to 1850, with neither the militia nor the Cayuse able to get the upper hand. At last, disease, exhaustion, and starvation did the work the militia could not. In order to reach a settlement the Cayuse gave up five of their number to stand trial for the murder of the Whitmans. They were tried by a military commission, found guilty, and hanged. But it was dirty work. One of the men, Kimasumpkin, protested his innocence at length before the trapdoor opened below him, claiming that he had not been present for the attack and had only been told by his chief to come tell what he knew about it. His testimony is painful and sincere: “I was not present at the murder, nor was I any way concerned in it. I am innocent. It hurts me to talk about dying for nothing. . . . The priest says I must die to-morrow. . . . This is the last time that I may speak.”
The hasty hanging might have mollified Oregon Territory, but it did nothing to help the Cayuse or their cause. And so the war dragged on for another five years, by which time the Cayuse were all but done in. They agreed to a punitive treaty in 1855, creating the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. The Cayuse War had created new paths, however, even as it erased others. Among other things, it forced the government to realize it could not afford to make war with tribes across the West; it was cheaper to make paper in the form of treaties and let the tide of settlers settle the rest by force of numbers.
In Washington Territory to the north, another war dovetailed with the Cayuse War. Beginning in 1855, Isaac Stevens, governor of Washington Territory, entered into a series of treaties with tribes there, principally the Yakama, guaranteeing them half of the fish in the territory in perpetuity, a large tract of land closed to white settlement, money, and supplies. In exchange the tribes gave up access to and control over the majority of the territory. But treaties could (and can) be ratified only by the U.S. Senate. While the treaty worked its way through Congress, gold was discovered in Yakama territory, and prospectors flooded into the region. Already distressed at this encroachment, Yakama men killed two prospectors after they discovered the men had raped a Yakama woman. Hostilities erupted all over the territory. The agent from the Office of Indian Affairs, Andrew Bolon, was assassinated. All-out war ensued. The Nisqually chief Leschi, who had been forced to sign the treaty in the first place (if, in fact, it was signed at all—the matter is in dispute), now saw that even its disgraceful terms were not to be honored. He was further humiliated and disempowered when the territorial militia tried to arrest him in Olympia, where he had traveled to protest the treaty. He remained at large for a year, fighting the colonists, until he was captured in 1856. His half brother Quiemuth turned himself in shortly thereafter but was found murdered by unknown assailants in Governor Stevens’s office while awaiting transport. Leschi was tried twice and convicted of the murder of a colonel, although he denied having done it. He was hanged in hastily erected gallows near Lake Steilacoom, a site that is now a housing development, the travesty of his life marked only by a small plaque next to a strip mall in Lakewood, Washington. The Yakama War eventually ground to a halt in 1858 when Colonel George Wright inflicted a serious defeat on the remaining Indians near Latah Creek, resulting in a “peace” treaty that moved the remaining Indians to reservations scattered throughout the territory.
The Great Basin
Map of the Great Basin region
The Great Basin—the area stretching from the Wasatch Range in the east, to the Colorado Plateau in the south, to the eastern edge of the Sierras in the west, and to the Columbia Plateau in the north, encompassing most of Nevada and parts of Utah, Oregon, Idaho, and California—is one of the largest endorheic watersheds (flowing nowhere, with no outlet) in the world, and certainly one of the most rugged, beautiful, and strange. From the creosote and Joshua tree–dotted hot deserts to the south and the high, cold deserts of Oregon to the north, from the arid depths of Death Valley to the juniper-clad slopes of the Wasatch near Salt Lake (and including the Great Salt Lake itself), the Great Basin is varied and gorgeous. Pronghorn, mountain lions, and mule deer traverse its range, and it is home to jackrabbits and cottontails as well as rattlesnakes, gopher snakes, lizards, curlews, pelicans, ravens, crows, and a host of other birds and animals.
Humans, too, have made this land their home for about ten thousand years. Paleo-Indians of the basin seem to have come from the south and spoke languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. These early inhabitants clustered around waterways and lakes, where they killed camels (the last of the North American camels died out around this time), horses, mammoths, and bison along with migrating waterfowl. The Indians made nets for land and water and even constructed decoys to draw the birds closer. They also used digging sticks to unearth tubers and seem to have rel
ied heavily on grass seed, which they collected, roasted, and crushed into a meal using metates. They were highly nomadic people and didn’t develop large systems, settlements, or structures like the protocultures of the Southwest. They adopted the bow and arrow around 500 BCE, began living in pit houses (but never year-round), and in some places cultivated maize, which came up from Mexico. As they colonized the region, they split and split again, becoming the Shoshone, Ute, Mono, and Northern Paiute tribes we know today. Some of these offshoots traveled east over the Rockies, changing along the way into the Comanche and other Plains tribes.
Just as the basin was endorheic, so, too, was the culture: it flowed nowhere. More interestingly, this is the one region in North America for which it is hard to find evidence of a violent past: the Paleo-Indians of the basin seemed not to have fought one another. They had such a large range, they were so few, and food was so scarce that there must have been too few to fight over too little. One Shoshone creation legend has it (in the reverse of most tribal mythology) that all animals were once men, and after a series of misdeeds—having mostly to do with stealing pine nuts—they were turned into animals.
Those who stayed in the basin stayed close to their roots: when Europeans came through in the early nineteenth century, the Indians of the basin were living much as their ancestors had for millennia. Jedediah Smith was the first American to cross the Great Basin. He did it twice—from east to west, and then again in 1827 from west to east. He was followed by Peter Ogden and later by Benjamin Bonneville in 1832. A series of treaties first with Spain, then Britain and Mexico, brought the entire region under American control by 1848. It was around this time that the first permanent settlement was created at Salt Lake. But it was the Mormons (rather than the American government) who would settle the area with force and with consequence.
The Mormons had their beginnings in New York under the guidance of Joseph Smith, who claimed to have dug up the golden tablets of the Book of Mormon and translated them for his people. In 1831 the Church followed the word it was spreading west and fetched up in Kirtland, Ohio. But they were met with strong anti-Mormon sentiment. They were expelled and wandered in the desert of goodwill from place to place until they made it to Far West, Missouri. When tensions between the Mormons and the Missouri settlers erupted into the Mormon War, they were ejected from Missouri and headed back east to Illinois. Trouble seemed to follow the religion wherever it went, however. There was another anti-Mormon uprising in 1844, and Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Brigham Young won the war of succession for the Mormon throne and led his flock farther west into Utah. There, far away from the society that had treated them so poorly they set about creating a kingdom in a wilderness.
But Utah wasn’t far enough away to insulate the Mormons from the control of the United States, which was deeply concerned about the theocracy growing in the Great Basin and by its now open policy of polygamy. James Buchanan sent an army to Utah to bring the Mormons to heel in 1857. At the same time a wagon train left from Arkansas headed to California. The Baker-Fancher party, as it was known, contained around two hundred fairly well-off settlers. They made it to Salt Lake in early 1857 but they were turned away without being allowed to purchase provisions or resupply; Brigham Young was concerned that the wagon train was in some way connected or related to Buchanan’s troops. The Baker-Fancher party rolled away from Salt Lake and spent the better part of the summer trying to get up strength, feed its cattle, and attend to itself in order to cross the mountains into California. However, spurred on by rumor and paranoia, the Mormons decided not to let them go.
On September 7, 1857, Mormon militiamen dressed as Indians attacked them at Mountain Meadows. The settlers literally circled the wagons and dug shallow fortifications. They were besieged. The initial attack resulted in the deaths of seven or so settlers, with fourteen wounded. The siege wore on for days, with the settlers running low on water and ammunition and food. The attacking Mormons became afraid that the settlers had recognized them through their thin disguises. Surely word of the attack would get out. On September 11, members of the militia approached the battle lines waving white flags. They were accompanied by the Indian agent and militiaman John Lee. The settlers were told that the attacking Paiute had agreed to let the settlers go in the care of the Mormons as long as they left all their cattle and supplies. The exhausted settlers agreed. The adult men were separated from the women and children and left under militia escort. Once they were a safe way away, all of the men were murdered by the Mormons. The women and children were then ambushed by more Mormon militia hiding in the brush and ravines. They were killed as well—120 men, women, and children in all. Children deemed too young to remember the incident were “adopted” into Mormon families. The Mormons took all the cattle and supplies. These were sold and auctioned off in Salt Lake City and Cedar City. It was agreed that the whole incident would be blamed on the Paiute.
Brigham Young himself led an investigation into the massacre, which concluded in a report sent to the commissioner of Indian affairs that the attack had been perpetrated by Indians. The government, not quite believing Young’s tale, sent its own investigators. But the Civil War intervened, and it wasn’t until 1877 that John Lee was charged and convicted and shot for the crimes of the massacre. But not before the Mormons were more deeply embedded, ticklike, in Paiute land. Despite the fact that the Mormon colony had perpetrated a horrible crime, it was the Paiute who had to pay and who continue to pay by way of dispossession.
In the 1860s and 1870s the Shoshone and Ute and Paiute engaged in a series of wars—the Bannock, Snake, and Sheepeater Wars—with similar results to those obtained elsewhere: exhaustion and defeat and confinement to reservations. Yet they, like Indians of other tribes and regions, held on.
The Southern Great Plains: Texas and Oklahoma
The Great Plains region—the region of short-grass prairie, steppe, and grassland between the tall-grass prairie of the Mississippi basin and the barrier of the Rocky Mountains—has captured the American imagination and entered the mythology of the country like no other landscape. Covering more than 1.3 million square miles, roughly five hundred miles wide and two thousand miles long, the Great Plains stretch over ten states (or rather, ten states were laid over the range): Wyoming, Texas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, Colorado, eastern New Mexico, and Oklahoma. It is a massive landscape, mostly flat but varied, with a climate that ranges from the humid subtropical zone of Oklahoma and parts of Texas to the cold steppe of North Dakota. What holds it all together (in reality and the mind) is grass, buffalo, and Indians.
Buffalo grass, blue grama, and big bluestem grass dominated the landscape since the last ice age and encouraged a dizzying variety and density of life. Antelope, mule deer, white-tail deer, moose, coyotes, wolves, bears, bobcats, mountain lions, and jaguars flourished there, along with rabbits, gophers, squirrels, lizards, snakes, and thousands of species of birds. But bison were the species that defined the place. Before 1800, it is estimated, more than 60 million bison roamed the Plains. By 1900 only 541 existed on the earth. The change and loss and yet the life—of grasslands, bison, and homelands—can be seen nowhere better than in the contrast between the fate of Indians in Texas and the fate of those in Oklahoma.
In prehistoric times, the Texas area was, like the Southwest, home to three prototribal groups: the Mound Builders in the east, Mesoamerican cultures in central-south Texas, and proto-Pueblan peoples, the Násaazí, of the western Rio Grande. As we have seen, these cultures ebbed and flowed, breaking apart and coming back together as the tribes grappled with both the changing environment and the social systems they had wrought. By 1500 CE, as elsewhere, these prehistoric cultures had—at least in the east, west, and south—become agriculturalists more than hunter-gatherers. To the east, the Caddo and Wichita (descended from the Mound Builders) lived in sedentary villages, having been pushed to the westernmost par
t of their range by Siouan people like the Kaw, Osage, and Ponca, who in turn had fled from Iroquois lands in the Ohio River valley. The Caddo grew corn, sunflowers, and pumpkins, domesticated wild turkeys, and hunted large game in the river lowlands. To the northeast of the Rio Grande, the Pueblo people lived much as their counterparts did in New Mexico. Only in central and southern Texas were Indian tribes like the Tonkawa and Coahuiltecan truly hunter-gatherers. They lived in highly amorphous small tribal groups, each probably some version of an extended family. They plied the lowlands of south and central Texas and harvested mesquite beans, maguey root, prickly pear, pecans, and acorns.
The first Europeans to travel through Texas in the sixteenth century were, of course, the Spanish. Alonso Álvarez de Pineda mapped the Gulf Coast in 1519. Almost a decade later, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca washed up there after he was shipwrecked and promptly began exploring the interior of Texas. He described how the Indians used fire to manipulate the range and behavior of bison. He also noted that half the natives he met soon died from stomach ailments, probably influenza. Two tribes he mentioned in particular—the Teya and the Querecho—are described as nomadic enemies of each other, traveling about attacking bison herds and moving their belongings on travois lashed to the backs of dogs. Who their tribal descendants might be is something of a guess, but most researchers agree that they probably were Athabascan-speaking proto-Apaches. The Spanish wouldn’t come back to Texas in force until the late seventeenth century. But by then, as always, new winds were sweeping the Plains.
