Despite the friction on the board, Grant’s first attempts at instituting his new policy inspired confidence—at least among the reformers. There was no talk of savages. There was much less talk of extermination. But the policy was more improvisational than fixed; it groped toward a solution rather than specifying one. And if the road to peace was paved with good intentions, there was controversy about who should regulate Indian affairs: the House and Senate were competing for control over it, and the executive branch was divided over whether the Department of the Interior or the War Department should have jurisdiction over the board and Indian affairs generally. Parker favored transferring Indian affairs to the War Department, assuming that it could and would operate much like the Freedmen’s Bureau. Sherman too wanted Indian affairs kept at the War Department; men who had to fight were more motivated to keep the peace, he thought, and certainly would be more motivated than the crooked traders and Indian agents who, under the umbrella of the Department of the Interior, supplied Indians with whiskey and Winchester repeating rifles, indifferent to how they might be used. Muzzle-loading muskets bartered for buffalo robes had killed soldiers such as Captain Fetterman, whiskey helped no one, and those seamy transactions disgusted Sherman, who argued that Indians toting American firearms undercut his power to police the frontier.
Yet while the military considered all Indians not rustled onto reservations as hostile—many of them were, in fact, hostile, particularly those in the northern plains—the reformers leaned in the other direction and failed to understand the anger of young warriors such as Crazy Horse, who loathed the reservation system and had no intention of giving up his or his people’s freedom. Neither did the brilliant Sitting Bull, a medicine man and the chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux. Sitting Bull scorned “agency Indians,” as those who had gone to the reservations were called. Better to have his skin pierced with bullet holes, he said, than to starve like them. “You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hardtack, and a little sugar and coffee.”
With bands of Indians continuing to attack settlers and travelers, the army was striking back hard—and indiscriminately. In January 1870, just as President Grant was beginning to implement the new peace policy, Colonel Eugene Baker of the 2nd Cavalry, along with two companies of mounted infantry, launched a surprise attack in Montana Territory, near the Marias River, against Piegan Indians, a band of the Blackfoot tribe. Baker and his men killed 173 of them, most of them women and children.
The story subsequently reported in the East about the Piegan massacre was all too familiar to reformers: Chief Heavy Runner had waved a piece of paper certifying him as a peaceful Indian and been gunned down in cold blood; of all the Indians killed, only fifteen were men; the rest were children under twelve, women, and old people; soldiers had fired into the lodges, where women and children were quietly sleeping; soldiers torched tipis, trapping the occupants inside as they screamed and burned; and when they realized that their captives were infected with smallpox, they abandoned them on the trail in forty-degree-below-zero temperatures without blankets or food. The captives froze or starved to death. It was worse than a massacre; it was a humanitarian disaster.
Still, it was part of Sheridan’s overall strategy to terrify Indians, although, in his zeal, Colonel Baker had attacked the wrong village and in any case had been already ordered to leave Heavy Runner and his people alone. All those facts enraged Congress and the reformers, many of whom wrote editorials or poems or remonstrated at public meetings. Lydia Maria Child compared what was happening to the Indians to what had happened to the slaves: “the whip was more efficient than wages to get work out of the black man; and now the approved method of teaching red men not to commit murder is to slaughter their wives and children!” In Boston, at the first meeting of the New-England Labor Reform League (which had replaced the American Anti-Slavery Society) Wendell Phillips again said that Indians should have the ballot. All men were created equal—all men, whether the Chinese immigrant or the black man, the white man, or (as he was known) the red man. Savages? The only savages, he said, were Colonel Baker, General Custer, and General Sheridan.
Indian affairs would certainly not be transferred to the War Department.
In May, the philanthropist Peter Cooper, the industrialist entrepreneur for whom Cooper Institute in New York City had been named, called together a meeting of his own organization, the United States Indian Commission. (The terms are still confusing. Peter Cooper’s group sounds like the Board of Indian Commissioners, which in turn sounds like the peace commission, and it was neither; Cooper’s commission had been founded two years earlier by himself and a group of private philanthropists and radicals who were bent on defending the Indians from predatory settlers.) His long, kindly face surrounded by a fringe of white beard that made him look like a Dutch burgher, if only he had been plumper, Cooper read from his prepared remarks about the way the white man had been nothing but illegal, immoral freebooters to an audience that included William Lloyd Garrison and representatives from the Board of Indian Commissioners as well as from the Cherokee and the Creek. Secretary of the Interior Jacob Cox sent Cooper’s organization a letter in which he said he hoped the Indian Bureau could be another benevolent group, as effective as the Sanitary Commission. General Sherman, who had been invited to the gathering, sent the group a letter in which he declared that meetings like this “accomplish little or no good.” Hold the meetings out West, where the Indians were, he advised. It wasn’t stupid advice.
As a matter of fact, a number of Indians were coming to them. Temporarily joining Chief Spotted Tail of the Brulé, Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala arrived in Washington in June. A good negotiator, Red Cloud was protesting, among other things, the building of Fort Fetterman in Sioux territory. He demanded that whites leave the Powder River country. Accompanied by other chiefs and several women from his tribe, he met with the “Great Father,” Grant himself, with Interior Secretary Cox, and with Ely Parker, and he told those bald, gray men, as he called them, that “the Great Spirit did not tell us we are slaves,” he said. “We have been driven far enough; we want what we ask for.” Patiently explaining himself, as if he were talking to children, Red Cloud said that treaties had been broken, promises not kept, Indians deceived, and that he’d never received a brass pin for letting the railroad pass through his country. “The Great Father may be good and kind, but I can’t see it,” he continued. “Our nation is melting away like the snow on the sides of the hills where the sun is warm; while your people are like the blades of grass in the Spring when the summer is coming.”
Despite his determination and diplomatic panache, Red Cloud did not achieve much except in the way of a publicity tour, for what that was worth. As Sherman had pointed out, nothing could be done anyway. The Indians weren’t meeting with Congress. And Red Cloud, who could plainly see that he had gotten nowhere, wanted to go home; he’d had enough of the gray men who had hustled him onto a train bound for New York, where he had not wanted to go. He had been duped and disrespected yet again.
If anyone had thought about who and what Red Cloud was, they would have realized that he would not be impressed by the lights of Broadway, the black-hatted bustle of Wall Street, or the long, bright dresses that fashionable women wore on the crooked streets of lower Manhattan. “I came from where the sun sets,” he told the New York delegation sent to meet him. “You were raised on chairs.” Yet the chief dutifully appeared (in a starched white shirt) at Cooper Union—after, that is, Peter Cooper promised to donate to Red Cloud the seventeen horses President Grant had failed to give him.
Lining Fifth Avenue, thousands of men and women swarmed the sidewalks to catch a glimpse of the exotic Indians on their way to Cooper Union, where Red Cloud graciously accepted a tall silk hat before he and the other chiefs, along with their interpreters, mounted the stage on which Abraham Lincoln had forcefully spoken a decade earlier. It was a huge crowd pressed together, expectant and momentarily hushed. The auditorium was hot.
Red Cloud refused to take a chair at center stage. He and the other Sioux chiefs preferred to sit near the end of the platform, which surprised his hosts. For them, being the center of attention was an achievement in itself.
To great applause, Red Cloud rose. Grave, dignified, and indifferent to the clapping and cheering, he called himself a representative of the original American race—the first people of the continent—and said that the white man had deceived the Indian with treaties misrepresented by the commissioners who asked the Indian to sign then. He and his people could not trust agents or traders. “I don’t want any more such men sent out there, who are so poor that when they come out there their first thoughts are how to fill their own pockets,” he declared. “We want honest men and we want you to help to keep us in the lands that belong to us so that we may not be a prey to those who are viciously disposed.”
Another tribal chief, Red Dog of the Hunkpapa, told the audience he was so fat because he was stuffed with lies. There were more clapping and cheers, for the audience thought him very witty, and at least in the East and at least for a time, public opinion wafted to the side of the Indian.
RELUCTANT TO SHED more blood, Grant attempted to steer a middle course between the humanitarian reformers and the military and between the easterners and the westerners. Westerners often jeered at easterners as “Indian lovers” who imagined Indians as springing from the (wooden) pages of James Fenimore Cooper, who had given them Chingachgook, an Indian with the good grace to disappear in the vanishing wilderness. To westerners, though, as one Nebraska paper put it, the Indian was a “red savage,” a “barbarian monster,” a “blood-washed animal.” In Montana, local residents felt justified in killing the Indians who had unsuccessfully attacked a trading post; they then cut off their heads, boiled them, and carved on the skulls such mottos as “I am on the Reservation at Last.” Representative Thomas Fitch of Nevada, an otherwise tolerant man, nonetheless wanted to kill all such hostile tribes as the Apache. “Extinction,” he demanded. “And I say that with a full sense of the meaning conveyed by that word.” Republican representative Edward Degener of Texas reminded Congress of the forward march of civilization: “He who resists gets crushed. That is the history of the wild Indian.” As for a more humane Quaker policy toward the “savage fiends” (not, he added, the Cherokee, the Chippewa, or other “tame tribes”), he contemptuously turned to the representative from Massachusetts, Henry Dawes. “The curse under which our frontier is now groaning was planted into our system years ago by the peaceful men of Massachusetts,” he contended. “You were the cause, we suffer the effect.”
Summing up the eastern and western views of the Indian, the Missouri-born Mark Twain craftily branded himself an “Indian worshipper”—until he encountered the (fictional) Goshoot Indians, he said, who “set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been overestimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance.” Clarence King had written with mellow moonshine of the Indian, with his “spare, bronze face, upon which was written the burden of a hundred dark and gloomy superstitions,” although, as he walked away, King remembered with relief the “liberating power of modern culture,” which was to say white culture. White culture was the future; with it came progress. The Indian way of life was a thing of the past, romantic and unmodern, and, as Twain suggested, all the romance and moonshine was the flip side of wanting to “go shoot” Indians.
With that kind of anticipatory nostalgia, the Board of Indian Commissioners set about Christianizing and civilizing whatever tribes they could. The one-armed general Oliver Otis Howard, fresh from the Freedmen’s Bureau, rode into Arizona and successfully negotiated, for a time, with the Apache chief, Cochise, while Red Cloud successfully negotiated for a reservation for the Oglala in northwestern Nebraska, near the Great Sioux Reservation, and one for the Brulé. But the peace policy was soon entangled in red tape and the chronic squabbles of Capitol Hill, especially because of the acrid charges of corruption that so often fouled Grant’s administration and anything it hoped to accomplish. William Welsh resigned as the head of the Indian Bureau after serving for only one month and accused Ely Parker of being part of the “Indian Ring.” Pleading innocent, Parker nonetheless left his job in 1871, suspected of having purchased cattle and supplies without advertising for bids, and Interior Secretary Cox, a civil service reformer who disapproved of the spoilsmen lurking around the White House, also resigned. Cox’s replacement, Columbus Delano, was soon accused of selling inferior goods to the Indians, and he resigned in 1875. Then Secretary of War William W. Belknap was impeached by the House of Representatives for influence peddling in the West.
Bureaucracy, dishonesty, and empty promises: the Modoc chief, Kintpuash, known by whites as Captain Jack, had had enough. An 1864 treaty with his tribe had not been ratified by Congress for five years, and when it was, Captain Jack protested that it was not the one he had originally signed. Besides, not only had the Modoc been put into a cramped reservation with scant rations, shoddy clothes, tattered blankets, and with the money promised by the government not forthcoming, they had to share the reservation with their enemies the Klamath, who harassed them even after the Modoc were moved to yet another location. Infuriated, the Modoc sequestered themselves in the lava beds near Tule Lake, their former home, and, by refusing to return to the reservation, openly forced the U.S. Army into another war.
But Grant really did want peace. There was a parley in the spring of 1873, a meeting between Captain Jack and General Edward R. S. Canby. During it, Captain Jack, under pressure from rival leaders, signaled to his men, who opened fire on Canby, killing him and the Methodist preacher Reverend Eleazer Thomas. Three other peace commissioners were also hit.
It was just this kind of treachery that justified exterminating the Indians, exclaimed George Templeton Strong, a New Yorker not of the peace persuasion. To him, all talk of peace had become just “the rosewater Quaker philanthrope policy.”
“Our noble savages can be ‘improved,’ I think,” he declared, “only by removal to a better world.”
In the West, the editor of a Wyoming paper cried, “Let sniveling quakers give place to bluff soldiers.”
Sherman, tolerant at first, could not have agreed more. “Treachery is inherent in the Indian character,” he said. Even the liberal-minded Harper’s New Monthly Magazine began to label the Indian with the same epithets used on the freed blacks of the South: “It is evident they are idle and shiftless, and unable to take care of themselves.”
Captured in June, Captain Jack was tried by a military commission; he had no lawyer and no interpreter. In October he was hanged in Oregon, his head cut off and transported to Washington, while the rest of the captured Modoc—those not executed, that is, for Grant commuted two sentences—were shipped off to a reservation in Indian Territory.
THE POSTWAR BOOM went bust. In the fall of 1873, a panic on Wall Street sparked a dire financial crisis the likes of which the country hadn’t seen since before the war. Banks failed, trade in securities companies was suspended, and then the invincible Jay Cooke & Co. collapsed; that was the house that had largely financed the war and was underwriting another transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific, headed straight toward the Indian Territory. Railroad men had overbuilt, farmers had overproduced, industrial manufacturers were overextended. In the next few years, railroad construction halted, and various roads went bankrupt. As many as 18,000 businesses folded—textile factories, iron mills, and small companies—and men took to the streets in protest as unemployment ran to 14 percent and destroyed the high hopes of the million new immigrants who had flocked into the country. Poverty swept through the nation like a cholera epidemic, while in the West, swarming grasshoppers descended like a plague and chewed through anything, it was said, that looked green.
A labor movement was forming, and Wendell Phillips had already become part of it. Finance robs labor, he said; it gorges capital. And though “labor, the creator of wealth, is e
ntitled to all it creates,” the Republican Party, the party of the Gilded Age, with its oligarchies and monopolies, makes “the rich richer, and the poor poorer, and turns a republic into an aristocracy of capital.”
There was no money for the Indian, for sure, and certainly not for the South or even the white man—until, that is, there was talk of glittering gold in the dark Black Hills of Indian country. That put a gleam in the government’s eye.
THEIR RIFLES GLINTING in the western sun, soldiers in blue had come to the Black Hills to make war on the Sioux, whose rich lands looked good to them.
The Indians would not cede what had been promised in the Fort Laramie Treaty even if the U.S. government was willing to renege and pretend that the army galloping into the hills was doing nothing more than making maps.
In the summer of 1874, heading a huge column of about a thousand men, a hundred wagons, cannon, three Gatling guns, a host of scouts, scientists, two miners, and newspapermen—all good for the publicity he was sure to exploit—Custer with the yellow hair (now shorn) was after gold, and gold was the word bouncing from west to east. “From the grass roots down,” said one journalist, “it was ‘pay dirt.’ ”
Though Grant had ordered the Black Hills closed to white settlers, he was soon offering to buy the hills, which were sacred to the Sioux, for $6 million. That is, though the hills were off limits to whites (by treaty, actually), the army was there, pressuring the Indians; the back-and-forth demonstrates an inconsistent, unclear definition of ownership and possession, which was at the core of the peace policy, for in the final analysis, to the government, the Indian really owned nothing.
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