This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  Ross also appealed to the legislators’ sense of moral obligation. Any action that violated the government’s pledges of support and protection, he argued, would be “a repudiation of national obligations—[a] repudiation doubly infamous from the fact that the parties whose claims were thus annulled are too weak to enforce their just rights and were enjoying the . . . guardianship and protection of this government.”52 Ross argued that federal officials should fulfill the responsibilities expected of legal guardians. Such guardianship required the United States to recognize the rights and prerogatives of tribal governments. Ross explained: “The jurisdiction of the United States over the Cherokee Nation is a qualified one. It does not destroy her existence as a body politic in the rightful exercise of those attributes and franchises which have not been surrendered, but which have been guaranteed to her by treaties with the United States.”53

  Ross made dozens of speeches on behalf of the Cherokee Nation, but these fundamental principles remained central in all of them. His arguments were cast as ideal principles of national policy, but they grew out of his practical concerns as a tribal politician and rested on the foundation laid by his predecessors in the removal era.54 His invocation of San Marino in his 1874 speech at Vinita occurred in the midst of this defense of tribal autonomy in Indian Territory. The image of the Italian principality, illuminated by the “pure glow of patriotism,” enabled the Cherokee leader to set his tribe’s appeal in the broadest possible context. Not only did he make the point that democracies could contain a variety of political units, but he also made it clear that the Cherokees had carefully studied the fate of other tribes. Wherever tribes or tiny nations lived, Ross observed, they should be allowed to choose their own form of government and their own system of land tenure. When systems were imposed upon them from the outside, whether from Washington or from Rome, the results were always disastrous: “Like the footprints of the exiles to Siberia or of those in the lion’s den, [they] all point in one way.”55

  The compelling image of an autonomous San Marino and Ross’s insistence on the prerogatives of tribes to choose their own forms of government emphasized the significance he and other leaders attached to the maintenance of firm borders to guard Indian Territory against an expanding American nation-state. During the 1870s, the maintenance of those borders became the Cherokees’ central preoccupation. Referring to the various territorial bills before Congress, Ross noted that “the sum and substance, the alpha and omega of the whole matter, is to blot out all distinctions between this country and other portions of the United States. . . . I regard the whole of them,” he concluded, “thoroughly unjust in their provisions towards the Indian people.” He told his Vinita audience that destroying the tribal governments and dissolving the tribal homelands in Indian Territory would destroy the Indians’ world, returning them to the very beginning of their history and forcing them to wander abroad, “as your fathers went forth from their native land, or as Milton sent forth Adam and Eve from Eden, when ‘the world was all before them, where to choose their place of rest and providence their guide.’”56

  Little occurred during the remainder of Ross’s life to soften this desperate imagery. He was defeated by Oochalata (Charles Thompson) in the 1875 election for chief, and he failed to secure the National Party nomination for that office four years later, thereby ending his career as a Cherokee national leader. Nevertheless, he continued to represent the tribe in Washington—he was among a small group that met privately with President Grant in 1876—and spoke out frequently in the local press. Grant indicated later in 1876 that he intended to appoint William Potter Ross the federal agent for the five major tribes in the eastern half of Indian Territory, but the president never formally submitted the nomination.57 In later years Ross served in the Cherokee senate and in other appointive offices, but he grew increasingly concerned about the deteriorating quality of life in the tribal homeland. Despite the railroads’ failure to secure land grants in Indian Territory, their traffic brought hundreds of people into what had until recently been a restricted area. Texas cattlemen and their cowboy employees regularly crossed Indian landholdings as they drove herds north to Kansas, and prosperous Cherokees and other Indians used a loosely administered permit system to bring white sharecroppers and other laborers into the territory to work their farms and ranches. Crime, whiskey peddling, thefts of Indian timber and coal, and general lawlessness increased, while federal authorities did little to protect or assist the embattled tribal police.

  By 1880 deteriorating conditions in Indian Territory and the increasing presence of non-Indians within the communities there had persuaded policy makers in Washington and among the tribes that creating a San Marino on the southern plains would require assertions of tribal and federal authority that they could not sustain. None of the territory’s Indian governments had the financial resources or the organizational authority to mount major law-and-order campaigns against the gangs of criminals and unauthorized cattlemen that routinely circulated among them. For its part, the Indian Office was preoccupied with administering reservations across a vast western landscape while fending off congressional critics who argued that their support for Indian communities, as inadequate as it was, was misguided and too expensive. At the same time, budget cutters in Congress had little interest in sending federal troops to prevent squatters from trespassing on tribal land or subsidizing tribal courts seeking to bring white lawbreakers to justice. The Indians’ “friends” in the missionary and reform communities were steadily retreating from Ross’s view that treaties represented “pledges . . . [that] exist today, and are as binding now upon all the departments of government and upon the people of the United States as they were when they were made.” They were being persuaded that dividing all Indian homelands into individual plots of land, assigning them to Indian families, and setting those families “free” to fend for themselves, a policy called allotment, made more sense as a national strategy. Allotment promised to be cheap, and the size of the Native population indicated that once the Indian estate was doled out to individual families, there would be millions of acres of surplus land left over to be claimed by white settlers.

  SPEAKING TO THE INDIANS

  In March 1874, The Cherokee Advocate carried a letter from a reader describing William Potter Ross’s most recent appearance before the House Committee on Territories. The correspondent (who signed himself “the Raven”) reported that Ross’s presentation had occupied two hours and that it was “unquestionably unanswerable and clear.” The correspondent then added: “There were present beside the Cherokee delegation, the Choctaw delegate, Col. P. Pitchlynn . . . Col. McIntosh and associates, and other Indians who happened to be in the city and who considered it to be a piece of very good fortune to be able to be one of the audience.”58 The image drawn by the Raven is intriguing. James McDonald’s boyhood friend Peter Pitchlynn was now sixty-eight and had recently stepped down as the chief of the Choctaws in order to devote himself full-time to pursuing the Choctaws’ legal claims against the United States for damages inflicted during the removal era. It is hard to imagine that he did not think, at least for a moment, about his old comrade as he listened to the testimony presented by the Cherokee chief. “McIntosh” was likely Colonel Daniel McIntosh, a former Confederate officer whose uncle Roly McIntosh had shared the chairmanship of the 1843 international council in Tahlequah with William Potter Ross’s uncle John Ross. The younger McIntosh might have considered how Ross’s words resonated with the elder Ross’s invitation, issued thirty years earlier to tribal leaders to join him in reviving “the ancient talk of our forefathers.”

  William Potter Ross was certainly speaking in the spirit of that “ancient talk” as he addressed the legislators, but it was not clear that any of the city’s powerful figures were willing to listen. The “other Indians who happened to be in the city” are of course impossible to identify. Nevertheless, the extension of rail lines across the West had generated a steady
flow of Indian delegations to the nation’s capital. Not knowing the “other Indians” present in the hearing room and lacking information about their command of English, we cannot know exactly which aspects of Ross’s two-hour presentation his Native listeners would have understood. But we can be certain that the opportunity to hear a Princeton-educated Cherokee chief lecture white lawmakers about their legal and moral obligations to the Indians would likely have seemed an extraordinary piece of “very good fortune” for any visiting tribal leaders. His arguments were surely relevant to their own situations, regardless of where they lived.

  The Raven did not mention non-Indians, but we can be reasonably certain that Chief Ross’s audience also included lawyers working for the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks. These tribes called on Washington attorneys to assist them at moments such as this as well as when they filed petitions with federal agencies or launched complaints before the U.S. Court of Claims. The Cherokees’ attorneys were frequently members of Congress, such as the Indiana Democrat Daniel Voorhees, but they also included William Penn Adair, a tribal member who had practiced law in Indian Territory before the Civil War and who had since become a prominent tribal politician and frequent delegate to Washington. This group of Washington lawyers would have listened to Ross with rapt attention; a few of them may even have sacrificed some of their professional dignity and taken notes.

  From the Raven’s account we can know only a few members of the audience that listened to Ross’s elegant 1874 testimony, but we know from subsequent events that in the decades following the Cherokee leader’s appearance, Indian protests before Congress multiplied and intensified. The first wave of these emanated from Indian Territory, but they were soon joined by petitions and delegates from Native communities in every corner of the United States. Even without knowing the precise membership of Ross’s audience, then, we can be confident that the community of tribal leaders, lawyers, and “Indians who happened to be in the city” grew significantly in the coming years. Despite the tragedy surrounding the eventual dissolution of Indian Territory in the 1890s and its forced absorption into the state of Oklahoma in 1907, the community of Indian activists drew on Ross’s ideas and strategies. They expanded the arguments he had made on behalf of tribal autonomy and kept alive the idea of a Native San Marino existing peacefully within the boundaries of the United States.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE WINNEMUCCA RULES

  Sarah Winnemucca, Paiute

  In the decades following the American Civil War, many of the same actors who disrupted and undermined tribal governments in Indian Territory devastated Native communities across the West. Homesteaders, cattlemen, railroad promoters, real estate boosters, and political opportunists descended on territories that previously had been bypassed by American pioneers. They now “settled” these territories in a riot of violence and dispossession. The Paiute author and activist Sarah Winnemucca witnessed this devastation firsthand. During the 1870s and 1880s, she reported on the consequences of westward expansion into her tribal homeland on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. Her lectures and writing described the proliferating crises this process created for Native communities like hers. She exposed the violence and injustice that accompanied the “winning” of the West and provided the public with a dramatic substitute for the white male voices that previously had dominated discussions of Indian policy making. Her career formed a bridge connecting tribal politicians like William Potter Ross to Native activists who became involved in a national campaign for Indian rights at the end of the century. Winnemucca’s slashing attacks focused attention on the unpleasant but inescapable fact that the Americans’ rapid domination of the North American continent was achieved at an enormous human cost.

  Winnemucca incorporated tales of local violence and individual suffering into a broad indictment of U.S. westward expansion. While she testified in some of the same Washington, D.C., committee rooms as Ross and his polished Indian Territory comrades, she also challenged U.S. officials with a fresh set of concerns. She not only demanded that the Americans live up to their own political ideals and promises, a theme her predecessors had often used, but also urged the nation’s leaders to weigh their actions on the universal scales of justice and morality. Winnemucca challenged other Native leaders by presenting herself not as a lobbyist or politician but as an outspoken defender of her cultural values and tribal traditions. Instead of seeking a new treaty or statutory reform, she demanded that the Americans recognize her Indian identity and accept her humanity. Her candid disdain for the social hierarchies of her day disturbed many of her listeners in the worlds of humanitarian reform and tribal politics, but her career introduced a new, uncompromising tone to Indian critiques of the United States, establishing a style of attack others later emulated.

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  WHEN SARAH WINNEMUCCA was born, in 1844, California was a province of Mexico, Oregon was an integral part of the Hudson Bay Company trading empire, and her Great Basin homeland was a distant corner of an American West that was largely unknown to easterners. Over the previous two centuries her Paiute kinsmen had interacted occasionally with Spanish officials and individual American traders, but they had also managed to sustain a hunter-gatherer life rooted in the complex seasonal migration of small family-centered bands and the sophisticated exploitation of arid rangelands ringed by snow-capped mountains and crossed by glacial streams. By maintaining their traditional subsistence patterns, Winnemucca’s kinsmen had also managed to sustain an elaborate set of social and religious rituals. Women played a vital role in Paiute life as food gatherers and processors, while men exercised authority over relationships with outsiders. Religious rituals led by men and women supported both the search for food and the ongoing desire for social harmony.

  As she entered adulthood, Winnemucca witnessed the American conquest of the Southwest, the discovery of gold and silver in California and the nearby Sierra Nevada, and the ensuing tidal wave of American migration that all but destroyed her tribe’s carefully sustained patterns of existence. For Winnemucca, the issues facing Indian people in the 1870s erupted from the violent invasion of her homeland and the continuous assaults the invaders had unleashed on both her individual dignity as a woman and her humanity as an Indian. As a consequence, Sarah Winnemucca’s public career, while it crossed paths with contemporary struggles over treaty rights and government policy, exemplified her view that individual disputes should be understood in the broader context of America’s continental conquest.

  A LIFE OF TALKING BACK

  Called Thocmetony (Shell Flower) by her family, Sarah Winnemucca spent her childhood in the arid country that lay astride the overland trail linking the midwestern United States and California. Thanks to the Mexican War and the onset of the gold rush, Thocmetony’s band of Paiutes came into frequent contact with American travelers. Her grandfather Truckee and her father, Winnemucca, the chief’s son-in-law, served regularly as guides to these groups. Most prominent among them was the explorer John C. Frémont. Truckee guided Frémont through the Sierras in 1846 and afterward remained with him in California. Truckee later joined in the American assault on the Mexican colony and became an advocate of friendship with the Americans.

  Sarah Winnemucca’s family belonged to a flexibly organized band that grew and contracted with the seasons and in response to the availability of food. During parts of the year large groups of Paiutes gathered to process pine nuts or hunt rabbits, while at other times small family bands separated and dispersed to exploit more scattered resources. Winnemucca and her relatives pursued this long-established pattern of hunting and gathering, but while still a child, she began to spend portions of each year in California. Her grandfather’s association with Frémont and other Americans drew her into contact with the newcomers and earned her entrée into the homes of several white settlers.

  Despite her family’s friendly relations with the Americans, however, the young Paiute witnessed a number o
f violent encounters involving travelers, settlers, and her kinsmen. Two uncles were killed by whites during her childhood. As was frequently the case during periods of rapid migration, local government officials exercised little control over settlers and rarely enforced the boundaries separating Indian and public land. Because the tribe also lacked an effective central government, small incidents of theft or misunderstanding often triggered violent retaliation. During those early years of settlement she also saw the impact of cholera and other previously unknown diseases on her community, and she stood by as herds of cattle and horses trampled traditional tribal watering and gathering places into dust.1

  Winnemucca’s first sustained experience with whites occurred in 1857, when she entered the household of Major William Ormsby, a former gold prospector who had settled nearby in Genoa, Nevada. The thirteen-year-old Paiute girl was probably a servant in Ormsby’s household, but during her two-year tenure she learned English and was introduced to books and modern conveniences by the major’s wife, Margaret.2 Following her return to her family, Winnemucca witnessed the onset of silver mining at the nearby Comstock Lode and the accompanying deterioration of relations between whites and Indians.