The commissioners consisted of four civilians and four military men, including General Sherman, who together tried to convince the Indians to resettle on assigned reservations and to reassure them and the public that the Indian agents appointed to oversee Indian affairs would be honest. In fact, that had already been the plan for decades, so this new commission appeased eastern reformers, who had been complaining about a nefarious Indian Ring made up of unnamed agents, politicians, contractors, and double dealers who presumably bribed, bamboozled, intimidated and cheated both the Indian and the public. (Sherman’s solution was for the military to take over all Indian affairs, but that wasn’t going to happen.)
In October the commissioners met with a delegation of Kiowa, Arapaho, Southern Cheyenne, Plains Apache, and Comanche at Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas to work out a new set of agreements. Known as the Medicine Lodge Treaty, it stipulated that the Indians would leave the Pacific railroads in peace and abandon their claim to the land between the Platte River and the Arkansas. For its part, the government promised to resettle the southern plains tribes on reservations, either north of the Red River or in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), although the Indians would be able to hunt south of the Arkansas River as long as water ran and grass grew, the treaty promised. The southern plains Indians were also to receive an annual annuity payment, provisions, and army protection from unfriendly settlers.
By the first of the year 1868, the commissioners also produced a report that pulled no punches in its condemnation of white behavior. It pointed out that the government had made promises it had not kept, signed bogus treaties, stolen land, and dispatched corrupt agents to the reservations. No wonder the Indian had fought back. “If the lands of the white man are taken,” the report explained, “civilization justifies him in resisting the invader. Civilization does more than this: it brands him [the white man] as a coward and a slave if he submits to the wrong.” When the Indian protests, the report starkly continued, “civilization with the ten commandments in one hand and the sword in the other, demands his immediate extermination.”
A few months later, in April, at Fort Laramie (in present-day Wyoming), the Fort Laramie Treaty was signed, and the peace commissioners seemed to succeed again. Eventually endorsed even by the wary Red Cloud and a number of other Sioux leaders, the treaty ostensibly gave the Sioux what they wanted: a pledge to take down the forts built along the Bozeman Trail. (Of course, since the railroad would soon offer a different and faster way west, the federal government’s agreeing to close the forts wasn’t much of a victory for the Indians or much of a sacrifice for the whites.) The government also promised the Sioux a large reservation, the Great Sioux Reservation in the Black Hills, to be held in perpetuity, west of the Missouri in what today are the western half and southern parts of South Dakota. Whites would not be permitted to settle there, nor would they be allowed to cross into the territory along the Yellowstone River. Finally, the government recognized the Indians’ right to hunt buffalo in the area of the North Platte—an easy concession for the government as it felt that the buffalo would soon disappear anyway.
As far as Sherman was concerned, a sustained war against the Indian would be “a sort of predatory war for years,” he declared with typical amoral clarity. “The country is so large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances and clean out Indians as we encounter them.”
“Clean out Indians”: the phrase is startling but not limited to Sherman. That is, neither the army nor the Interior Department was willing, nor perhaps able, to distinguish hostile from friendly Indians, never mind one tribe and its culture from another, because Indian tribes and their way of life were not for a moment respected. All Indians were savages or barbarians, capable of improvement but not by much; “The red man,” said Francis Amasa Walker, is “the most commonplace person imaginable, of very simple nature, limited aspirations, and enormous appetites.” Walker served as commissioner in the government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1871–1872; he was also a well-known economist and eugenicist and later the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said he spoke from experience: “The Indian is unfortunately disposed to submit himself to the lower and baser elements of civilized society, and to acquire the vices and not the virtues of the whites.”
The matter of race: there it was again. “The great poison of the age is race hatred,” Wendell Phillips declared. For the war against slavery was now ironically being waged against the Indians in rhetorical terms—and with rifles and knives. It’s hard not to suppose that Indians served as substitute black (another “inferior race”) against whom people afraid of change were raging, people afraid of people who looked, prayed, dressed, and buried their dead differently than they did—or even smelled different. “Most Indians have a personal exhalation, a sort of characteristic halo of atmosphere,” said one soldier, “entirely unlike that which marks a negro, but in it was just as strong, though less offensive, and which a government mule will tremblingly detect at a great distance.”
The men and women defending the Indian against the incursion of whites were abolitionists of a new order, or so it seemed. “Wendell Phillips’ new nigger is the ‘noble red man,’ ” the New York Herald contemptuously declared. “To talk of the rights of the Indian today requires the same nerve and moral courage and conscientiousness it did twenty years ago to talk of the rights of the slave,” said another, less patronizing journalist, “and the man who asserts them is considered just as mad, foolish and visionary as were the Abolitionists of 1840 or 1850.”
Wendell Phillips did not consider himself mad or foolish. He simply wanted to know why citizenship wasn’t conferred on the Indian as well as the black man. What about the Fourteenth Amendment? he asked. Why weren’t civil rights extended to Indians? Other reformers replied that the Indians should be “civilized” first; then citizenship could follow. But he again said that the issue was plain: “All the great points of the epoch have arisen out of this hatred between the races.”
Race was, had been, and would continue to be the issue dividing the United States. “We shall never be able to be just to other races, or reap the full benefit of their neighborhood,” he continued, “till we ‘unlearn contempt.’ ”
Unlearning contempt was not going to happen. Neither was citizenship; maybe that was for the better, he reasoned. “Heaven forbid that we should betray the Indian to such protection as ‘citizenship’ gives to the Georgia negro and loyalist,” Phillips scoffed. “No, we are thankful the Indian has one defense that the negro never had. He is no citizen and has the right to make war.”
ALL OF THOSE negotiations had taken place during the administration of Andrew Johnson. Plagued more by the South than the West and exasperated by Philip Sheridan’s commitment to enfranchising black men in Louisiana, Johnson had peremptorily reassigned Sheridan to the Department of Missouri, where he could battle Indians instead of unreconstructed whites. Johnson had thus hoped to solve the Indian problem and be rid of Sheridan in the bargain.
In March 1868 Sheridan took up his new post with a vengeance. There had been raids in violation of the Medicine Lodge Treaty. Many of the Indian signatories had had no authorization to sign in the first place, or so several warriors believed, and when appropriations for annuities and rations were hamstrung in Congress, a group of irate Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, fed up with false assurances and furious that buffalo were being killed or driven away, raided settlers in northwestern Kansas and Colorado. Indians were ransacking freight trains and mail stations, they were stealing horses and robbing stagecoaches, they were capturing women and children. Regarding those actions as a declaration of war, Sherman ordered the army to strike at the Indians without hesitation—if it was war the Indians wanted, he said, “I propose to give them enough of it to satisfy them to their hearts’ content.”
Sheridan did just that, taking a page from the campaign he had wag
ed in the Shenandoah Valley: make the Indians, all of them, experience war in its full, unremitting, indiscriminate horror. “I hope to do much damage to the Indians before I get through,” he told the governor of Kansas, “and have ordered the destruction of their ponies, lodges, and men, so that the border may never again be in danger.”
“What I want now, and what the people of your State want,” he continued, “is to chastise the Indians so that they will not again be troubled with murders and marauding. This can only be accomplished by killing as many as we can, by destroying their stock, hanging the ring-leaders, and by making them poor.”
“The only good Indians I know,” Sheridan would say, “are dead.” (The inelegant phrase came to be quoted as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”) But to his commander, General Sherman, an Indian war was an inglorious war; there was no honor in it. Though disheartened, his face furrowed with deep lines, William Tecumseh Sherman was a man of iron will. The military had not wanted to wage war, he had made that clear—and despite his own brass and bluster, he didn’t really want another war either. He had thought he could just wait and let the railroads take care of the Indians. But he would do what he had to do. He told Sheridan he would back him to the hilt.
GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER was partial to bright white sombrerolike hats and velvet shirts, and though he perfumed his long golden hair with cinnamon oil, he had not lost his fondness for a fight. Vain and in some ways talented, he believed in himself, but he hadn’t been handling the broad, treeless West very well.
Discharged from the volunteer army at the end of the war, the man formerly known as the Boy General in the regular army could claim only the rank of captain. Fortunately, Sheridan was Custer’s friend—he’d even gone so far as to give Custer’s wife, Elizabeth “Libbie,” the table on which Grant and Lee had signed their peace agreement. Sheridan managed Custer’s promotion to lieutenant colonel of the 7th Cavalry. Yet despite those tokens of confidence, Custer seemed to have lost his footing. In the West, there was little glamour for the likes of him. Soldiers traveled from one forsaken outpost to another. They drank too much, they mutilated corpses, they seemed bored and without purpose, and they were not swelled by a noble cause; often they were wanderers, veterans, or derelicts who just liked to kill.
In the summer of 1867 Custer wasn’t finding any Sioux or Cheyenne, and he was behaving strangely. He was sullen and mean. He would ride off, leaving his men, to take his dogs out for a run, and on one such occasion he chased a buffalo and instead of killing it managed to shoot his own horse in the head, an achievement that left him alone on the plain, without a horse, and in full view of the buffalo, which fortunately for Custer decided not to charge. He humiliated his men, ordering their heads shaved when they bought supplies at Fort Hays without permission. His men began to desert in droves, sometimes in broad daylight. He marched his troops into Colorado, and when more of his men sneaked off, he ordered them rounded up and shot on sight. Three were found, shot, and wounded; one died. That July he’d also forced seventy-six of his soldiers, already exhausted, to travel east, all the way across Kansas to Fort Harker; they covered 150 miles in just four days—and he wasn’t even looking for Indians. He had become so intent on seeing Libbie at Fort Riley that he pushed aside whatever or whoever might get in his way. Several of his men went on a scouting expedition, and when word came back that two of them had been killed by Indians, Custer refused to retrieve them or pursue the Indians.
Arrested by his commanding officer, Custer was charged with displaying conduct unbecoming an officer, leaving his post, using the army for his own private ends, and ordering deserters shot as well as abandoning the two men who had been killed. Found guilty on all counts that October, the Boy General was deprived of his rank, his command, and his pay for a full year.
Sherman certainly thought Custer irresponsible, but when Sheridan pleaded on Custer’s behalf, Sherman said all right, Custer is a fighter; he needed fighters in the West, especially since Sheridan was bent on hitting Indian villages from several directions in the dead of winter in order to terrorize them. Custer was perfect for that. For Sherman had warned the Indians that if they did not go to the reservations, where, he said, they would be fed and protected, he would wage war. (But when more than 8,000 Indians arrived at Fort Cobb, which was under the command of General William B. Hazen, Hazen could barely feed or clothe the lot of them.)
Before his probation ended, Custer went back into the army, and on November 27, 1868, almost four years to the day since the Sand Creek Massacre, he was again astride his horse. At dawn, he and the 7th Cavalry attacked the village of Black Kettle, the same Black Kettle who had escaped from Sand Creek and was now camped near the Washita River for the winter. But Custer didn’t know and couldn’t have cared who those Indians were, and he didn’t know that Black Kettle had already informed Hazen that the Indians rampaging north of the Arkansas River were not his people. Instead, after ordering the regimental band to strike up the jolly tune “Garry Owen,” Custer and eight hundred soldiers obliterated the sleeping village, slaughtering men, women, and children, including Black Kettle and his wife, who were shot in the back as they tried to run. More than a hundred Cheyenne died. Custer’s men set the tipis on fire and threw into the flames food, clothing, weapons, buffalo robes, anything they could find.
Custer’s attack on Black Kettle’s camp was a roaring success, or so he thought, and it redeemed him as a fighter and a crack Indian fighter to boot, which was how he was subsequently known. In the East, however, the destruction of the village on the Washita River sounded to many—and not just Wendell Phillips—like pure murder. That’s what Major Wynkoop called it, and, suspecting another Sand Creek, for which he still felt responsible, he tendered his resignation in protest. For Custer, however, the battle near the Washita meant something far different: he seemed to have found himself.
DESPITE HIS REPUTATION as a butcher, President Grant had little taste for killing and less for extermination. The victorious general who had used peace as a campaign slogan brought to the executive mansion an intense desire to prevent a war in the plains, and in his first inaugural address, delivered in March 1869, he vowed to find some sort of vaguely pacific solution to the conflicts. “The proper treatment of the original occupants of this land—the Indians—is one deserving of careful study,” he said. “I will favor any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.” Grant was therefore receptive to the humanitarians who desired a more peaceful Indian policy. For in his younger days, while stationed in Washington Territory, he had seen, as he said, “a once powerful tribe . . . fast wasting away from those blessings of civilization, ‘whisky and Small pox,” and he had told his wife, “It really is my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by whites.”
Shortly after Grant’s inauguration, Congress did pass the Indian Appropriations Act, which authorized the president to create a Board of Indian Commissioners. (The words “commission” and “commissioner” were often and confusingly used; this board, however, is not to be mistaken for the Indian Peace Commission of 1867, authorized by Congress during the Johnson administration.) Rather, Grant’s Board of Indian Commissioners was the offspring of his new policy toward the Indians, which was not really new but rather codified the government practice of steering Indians into reservations and urging their domestication—the substituting of ceremonial paint and headdress with trousers and skirts—and transforming them into Jeffersonian farmers. Grant also wanted to end the treaty making, which had not been working in any case, to disrupt the tribal system at the heart of various Indian cultures and to deny the various Indian groups anything like nationhood. Also, he intended to replace the generally crooked Indian agents, whose jobs were the fruit of the patronage system, with missionaries.
The board would not be a government agency per se but rather a group of ten civilians, mostly philanthropists. Nicknamed “Grant’s Quaker Policy” becau
se the Society of Friends (Quakers) had been urging the government to treat the Indians more fairly, this evangelizing group of men would be selected not just from the Society of Friends but from all Protestant sects and would include Roman Catholics too (no Jews were represented). The missionaries would take religion, reform, agricultural implements, and ultimately assimilation to a specific reservation, and they would serve the government without pay. With the secretary of the interior, they would also oversee the disbursement of funds allotted by the act (including $2 million earmarked for “civilizing,” educating, and Christianizing), and they would tour the West to report back on the conditions of the Indians.
Not one of the commissioners was a westerner or a military man. The only Indian was Ely Parker, Grant’s adviser on Indian affairs. And good-hearted though they were, believers in reform, Christianity, confinement, and—in some cases—citizenship, they did not respect the various cultures, religious practices, or social organization of the Indians. Further, the head of the board, the Episcopalian sugar trader William Welsh, hated Parker for reasons that almost seemed personal.
The son of a Seneca chief who had fought the British during the War of 1812, Ely Parker had been born in 1828. Called Ha-sa-no-an-da (“Leading Name”), he had been educated in a Baptist mission school, had taken the name of its minister, and, as a young multilingual and determined man, had lobbied the government on behalf of his home, the Tonawanda Reservation in western New York. By 1851 he had been elected a Sachem of the Six Nations (or Iroquois) Confederacy and managed to help the Tonawanda Seneca reclaim much of their land. Also, having been a civil engineer, he had first met Grant in Galena, Illinois, where he had been working on the new customhouse, and after he had enlisted in the army, he had joined Grant’s staff as an aide. The stocky, smart, and reliable Parker had been at Grant’s side at Vicksburg, and at Appomattox, it had been Parker who had copied out the terms of surrender that Grant dictated. And since Grant kept the men he trusted close by, he had brought Parker with him to the White House.
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