by David Treuer
In 1817 a St. Louis entrepreneur opened a fur trading post called Fort Pierre in South Dakota, among the first of a wave of posts and traders who began moving into the area, squeezing the last furs out of an industry that, after two hundred years, was in its death throes. But this kind of relatively peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial arrangement (furs for guns and axes and knives and kettles and blankets) didn’t last.
Settlers bound for California had been trekking across the Great Plains in steady if not extravagant numbers from the 1820s through 1850, but the California Gold Rush changed all that: beginning in 1849, the northern Plains would see traffic in the tens and eventually hundreds of thousands as the great migration to the gold fields began. Whatever the stance of the northern tribes had been toward the Americans, the Gold Rush made them apprehensive. Wagon trains tore up the ground and disrupted the buffalo. With each new wave of travelers came another wave of disease. The travelers had nothing to offer the tribes. Tribes began attacking them. Even this was a primarily economic rather than militaristic action: raiding had long been a cultural norm for the tribes, a way to redistribute wealth. Intertribal raiding generally left a low body count and was seen by many Plains tribes as a quasi-spiritual activity wherein boys grew into men: raiding was, for some, ceremonial activity vested in masculinity and coming-of-age. So by attacking wagon trains and stealing horses, flour, iron, gunpowder, lead, and other hard-to-obtain items, the Plains tribes were simply responding to unwelcome pressure and continuing a way of life that was fairly stable.
The government, however, didn’t see the practice that way and wanted an end to it: violence on the trail was bad for American business. But the government lacked the strength to take on the tens of thousands of efficient and mounted warriors on the Plains. The U.S. Army would certainly lose. Instead they resorted to treaty making. In 1851 the Cheyenne, Lakota, Arapaho, Assiniboine, Crow, Mandan, Gros Ventre, Shoshone, Arikara, and Hidatsa signed the first Treaty of Fort Laramie. The provisions were, on paper, good for both sides. The United States was assured settlers would be able to pass through the Indian homelands unmolested, and they would be able to build forts and supply depots to provision and re-provision the travelers. In return, the tribes’ title to the land itself was affirmed and they were guaranteed $50,000 in annuities per year for the right of way.
Farther west, the Blackfoot Confederacy (a loose alliance of three major Blackfeet bands) had come to dominate the region. Before the horse, they had been a confederation of small bands of hunter-gatherers. So, too, were the Shoshone, who pushed the Blackfeet around and back and took over much of present-day Montana before 1730. But then the Blackfeet got the horse and all hell broke loose. They consolidated power and began warring with neighboring tribes. They attacked and raided the Shoshone, Lakota, Cree, Assiniboine, and their archenemies the Crow regularly and effectively. They expanded their stock of horses and, with greater access to buffalo, controlled a vast portion of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Between 1790 and 1850 the Blackfeet were the absolutely dominant force in the northwestern Plains. They brooked no encroachment by other tribes or the tribe of white explorers and trappers who were showing up in their country in increasing numbers.
In 1808, John Colter, a member of the Corps of Discovery, returned to the region to trap furs by canoe. He and his trapping partner were surrounded by hundreds of Blackfeet warriors. His partner refused to surrender and was killed. Colter saw the wisdom in submission. But the Blackfeet stripped him of all his gear and clothes and told him to run away naked; they would give him a head start. He ran, with the Blackfeet in disdainful pursuit, for five miles before hiding in a river under some driftwood. He hid there all night and the next day began a 250-mile journey to “civilization,” naked and afraid. And yet the Blackfeet welcomed traders who could help them by tying them into trading networks that provided them with the goods that would allow them to maintain their way of life. And it was this openness that ultimately did them in. In 1837 a packet operated by the American Fur Company in the Blackfeet homeland knowingly sent a smaller boat with traders who had smallpox deep into Blackfeet country. Between ten thousand and fifteen thousand Blackfeet died of the disease, thereby ending their dominance. At that time a vaccine for smallpox had been readily available for at least forty years, but the trading companies didn’t require their employees to be vaccinated. Nor was it made available to Indians. So it was not merely the Indians’ lack of immunity that allowed disease to decimate them.
In any event, neither vaccines nor treaties stopped the white settlement of the Plains. Travelers continued to cross the Plains, and settlers began to move in, especially with the Gold Rush and regardless of the Treaties of Fort Laramie or the Treaties of Fort Benton or the many others signed in good faith by Plains tribes but violated immediately by the government and the citizens of the United States. The result: war.
Beginning in 1850 but escalating in the 1860s and 1870s, the Plains Indian Wars drew in almost every single Plains tribe and involved settlers, militia, and the U.S. Army. It is estimated that at least twenty thousand Indians and eight thousand Anglo settlers and soldiers died in twenty-five years of warfare, although the figure for Indian deaths, based on U.S. Army records, should almost certainly be higher. Most of the fighting began in the east, in what is now Minnesota, where in 1862 the Dakota who had remained behind after most of their tribe was pushed out onto the Plains by the Ojibwe rose up in protest over their treatment by the U.S. government and its representatives in the Minnesota River valley. The lands there had been largely set aside for the eastern Dakota by treaty, but the tribe watched (as Indians all over the Plains watched) as settlers moved in, broke the soil, and began farming. Adding injury to injury, the annuity payments and food promised by treaty and on which the Dakota depended were rarely delivered, or were late and of substandard quality. The government’s policy had also been to deliver the annuity payments to traders in the territory rather than directly to the Dakota. The traders would skim, falsify records, and otherwise garnish the annuities until there was nothing left.
The Dakota asked the government to pay the agent directly and then have the agent pay them. The government refused. Sensing weakness—with the federal government in the midst of fighting the Confederacy, many troops had been pulled back east—the Dakota (and some Ojibwe allies to the north) rose up. They attacked and burned farms and killed settlers, driving the rest into Fort Snelling in a panic. The whole territory was thick with smoke. Hundreds of settlers and soldiers were killed.
Eventually, the tide turned against the Dakota and their allies. Most of the Dakota warriors surrendered in late September 1862. A few hundred were charged with murder, but President Lincoln reviewed the cases and whittled the number down to thirty-eight. These were tried, and although the charges were not explained, and the accused did not have representation, they were convicted and executed on December 26, 1862, in what is still the largest mass hanging in U.S. history—of members of a sovereign nation who had risen up to expel foreign invaders from their homeland. The corpses were buried in a mass grave in Mankato, Minnesota, after the execution, and many of the bodies were dug up and used to practice autopsies. William Mayo (one of the founders of the Mayo Clinic) acquired the body of Mahpiya Akan Nažin (Stands on Clouds), dissected it before an audience, boiled and cleaned the bones, shellacked them, and kept them on display in his office for many years afterward.
The violence in Minnesota—on both sides—rippled westward from there. Driven by distrust and fear, militia in Colorado began shooting Indians on sight. Indians retaliated. Many of the bands and tribes were able to reach a peace with the U.S. and territorial authorities. The violence seemed to be dying down. But in November 1864, Colonel John Chivington and members of the Colorado and New Mexico militia attacked a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho in southeastern Colorado. These bands had taken no part in any of the hostilities of the preceding years. Chivington’s men att
acked when most of the Native men were gone from the village hunting, even though an American flag and a white flag of truce were flying over the village at Sand Creek. Women, children, and elders were mowed down.
A kind of blood lust took over Chivington’s men, well documented by the media at the time. One eyewitness said he “saw one squaw lying on the bank, whose leg had been broken. A soldier came up to her with a drawn sabre. She raised her arm to protect herself; he struck, breaking her arm. She rolled over, and raised her other arm; he struck, breaking that, and then left her without killing her. I saw one squaw cut open, with an unborn child lying by her side.” Major Scott Anthony, who was present at the massacre, remembered “one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind, following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, travelling in the sand. I saw one man get off his horse at a distance of about seventy-five yards and draw up his rifle and fire. He missed the child. Another man came up and said, ‘Let me try the son of a b—. I can hit him.’ He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.”
Peaceful Blackfeet were massacred, probably numbering in the hundreds, on the Marais River in 1870. Every time the Indians fought back against clear violations of the treaties they had signed in good faith, a reign of terror was unleashed upon them. America did not conquer the West through superior technology, nor did it demonstrate the advantages of democracy. America “won” the West by blood, brutality, and terror.
Red Cloud, an Oglala Lakota war chief, achieved a lot of success against the United States from 1866 and beyond in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming. In a series of brilliantly staged attacks and battles, he pushed the U.S. Army back hundreds of miles, forcing them to abandon forts, trading posts, and supply lines. The defeats Red Cloud heaped on the U.S. Army forced it to abandon all of its forts in the region and to sign the second Treaty of Fort Laramie, which created the Great Sioux Reservation, in 1868.
The Lakota were also guaranteed the right to hunt in the unceded territory as far as the Sandhills of Nebraska. But the arrangement was too good to last. Trespass continued unabated and only increased after gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874. Miners and prospectors, encouraged by the U.S. government, which wanted gold more than it wanted peace with Indians, flooded in. Harassment and murder of Indians continued unabated, and so did Anglo predation of bison herds the Lakota considered theirs. Lieutenant Colonel Custer—he was ranked a general only temporarily during the Civil War—led punitive winter campaigns against the Lakota. Outmaneuvered on the battlefield, Custer began attacking and destroying Indian villages in the winters of 1874 and 1875.
Lakota and other tribal leaders saw that they would have to deliver a resounding defeat to the army before it gave up its present course. So they sent runners, reforged old alliances, strengthened friendships, and plotted. They even went so far as to send messengers to the Dakota and Ojibwe of Minnesota asking for their help. They were refused. The Blackfeet refused them, too. Nonetheless, they built a formidable army of Lakota, northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho and cemented their plans during the annual Sun Dance at Rosebud Agency in June 1876. “Agency” Indians from all over the Great Sioux Reservation had been slipping away already, arming and horsing themselves, and more joined them after the dance. Meanwhile the U.S. Army was conducting a summer campaign to round up any and all Indians who had so far refused to settle on the Great Sioux Reservation.
At dawn on June 25, Custer and his men spotted a large encampment of Indians near the Little Bighorn River. He thought it was perhaps a band or two, not the thousands of warriors it really was, all ready for battle. He determined to take them on, ignoring the advice of their scouts. Custer attacked that day and was quickly surrounded by attacking Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, as planned by Sitting Bull and the other chiefs. After two days of fighting, Custer’s entire command was wiped out. The Indian fighting force disintegrated into small bands. They spent the Fourth of July—America’s hundredth birthday—feasting and sharing stories of their victory before heading back to their summer camps and agencies.
Seven weeks later, the military mounted retaliatory attacks, but other tactics proved more decisive. The U.S. government refused to send provisions and payments that obtained from the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie to the Lakota until they ceded the Black Hills to the Americans. Soon after, hundreds of buffalo hunters descended on the High Plains and began the systematic slaughter of the great bison herds of North America. Without their traditional food source and deprived of annuities and provisions guaranteed by treaty, the Lakota and their allies were starved into submission, and the reservation period began for these unhappy few as well.
1890
And so by the end of 1890 it must have seemed that everything was over. In four hundred years, Indians had lost control of 100 percent of the United States and remained only in small clusters scattered like freckles over the face of the country. By the 1870s, the federal government had stopped making treaties with Indian nations. By 1890, the frontier was officially closed. The ways of life that tribes from Florida to Washington and Maine to the Mohave had evolved over thousands of years were gone. So were the buffalo. Tribal government had been replaced by the dismal and crushing paternalism of the Office of Indian Affairs. The European colonial powers and later the American government had shown themselves to be feckless, cruel, shortsighted, hypocritical, and shameful in their dealings with the original owners of the country. Indians were gone from the East Coast, and on the other side of the country, they lived as tattered remnants around former mission communities in California. The entire United States had been “settled,” and Indians had been broken, removed, and safely “settled,” too, on reservations where they were expected to either die or become Americans.
And yet: Indians remained. The Seminole still called the swamps and bayous of Florida home and emerged to join the burgeoning ranching trade in the Panhandle. On Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere in New England Indian settlements—Christian but still tribal—were growing. Niagara Falls, Rochester, and Syracuse, New York, sprang up around Iroquois settlements that remained after hundreds of years. Some Iroquois went to church. Many still went to the longhouse. In the Southwest, cultures arose that were a blend of Anglo, Mexican, and Indian. The kivas were still in use, and so were Tewa, Diné, and Apache languages. The buffalo were gone, and that spelled the end to a certain way of life. But the Plains tribes, ever adaptable, adapted to a land without buffalo. The Indians of the Great Lakes, unlike their western neighbors, could still do what they had always done: trap, harvest wild rice, hunt, and ply the waters much as they had done for centuries. The small coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest traveled and traded and became loggers and fishermen.
In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau tabulated that there were fewer than two hundred thousand Indians left alive, of populations that had likely numbered over twenty million. Gone were the times when you could not travel anywhere in the United States without knowing that you were trespassing on Indian land and being reminded of your lack of tenure in that place. But Indians remained in all the corners and original places of the land. Some had held on to their homelands, others had been removed and relocated and made new homelands.
In 1891, the Indians who remained everywhere poked their heads aboveground and surveyed the desolation of their homelands and asked the question Indians had been asking since the beginning: What can we do next to survive?
PART 2
Purgatory: 1891–1934
Kevin Washburn slips off his cowboy boots (he has two pairs in his office) and puts on his running shoes before we engage in a “walk and talk” around the golf course at the University of New Mexico, where he is a professor of law. I wanted to talk to Washburn because he served as the assista
nt secretary of the interior for Indian affairs. And because, as a Chickasaw, he was one of very few Indians to serve Indians and the government in that capacity. I also wanted to talk to him because I’m curious about him.
Kevin has a quick smile and is about the friendliest (former) government official you could hope to meet. He is cheerful and kind and enthusiastically helpful, although under all that cheer is something deep and fierce. Washburn grew up in the Chickasaw Nation and earned his BA in economics with honors from the University of Oklahoma in 1989. “My mom was the key when I was young. I had a powerful, strong-willed mom. She was a single mother for much of my childhood. There were boyfriends and stepdads in the picture now and then, but she was the anchor. I inherited her work ethic. And I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. I was raised by a single mom; my mom was ‘the divorcée’ in a small town in Oklahoma. And I was Indian and had all the baggage that went along with that, too. So I had a chip on my shoulder.” That chip and that mother drove Kevin forward. Somehow his mother made ends meet. “My mom, well, my mom’s a Republican.” He laughs. “She was the first woman to be Chamber of Commerce president in the small town where we lived. At that time she had a children’s clothing store because she thought, ‘Well, if I own a clothing store at least my kids will be clothed well.’” After the divorce from Kevin’s father, she started seeing a man who abused her. When he hit one of the children, she ended the relationship, went to the Small Business Administration, and got a loan to buy a restaurant in a town three and a half hours away. “That was her way of escaping her abuser, thinking once again, ‘If I buy a restaurant at least my kids will eat.’” If it hadn’t been for that government program through the SBA, he points out, “my mother wouldn’t have had a way to escape. She made the most of it. I got my drive and work ethic from her.”
