Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The Yellowstone bill passed Congress in early 1872 and was signed into law by President Grant. Immediately the local interests Jay Cooke had worried about began complaining. The Rocky Mountain Gazette, of Helena, Montana, condemned the Washington-knows-best attitude of Congress and the park advocates. “The effect of this measure will be to keep the country a wilderness, and shut out, for many years, the travel that would seek that curious region if good roads were opened through it and hotels built therein,” the paper said.

  But Easterners applauded. The New York Herald praised the new park, and the park movement generally. “Why should we go to Switzerland to see mountains, or to Iceland for geysers?” the Herald inquired. “Thirty years ago the attraction of America to the foreign mind was Niagara Falls. Now we have attractions which diminish Niagara into an ordinary exhibition. The Yosemite, which the nation has made a park, the Rocky mountains and their singular parks, the canyons of the Colorado, the Dalles of the Columbia, the giant trees, the lake country of Minnesota, the country of the Yellowstone, with their beauty, their splendor, their extraordinary and sometimes terrible manifestations of nature, form a series of attractions possessed by no other nation in the world.”

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  MORE LIKE US

  YET NATIONAL PARKS WERE THE RARE EXCEPTION; privatization remained the rule. The West was filling in, but it was hardly filling up. Six new states were formed in 1889 and 1890: South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming. That left Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona in federal hands, as well as Utah, where Mormon hands were at least as powerful. People were still scarce in the West, and the public domain seemed almost endless.

  In American history it has been common to think of the frontier as moving steadily westward. This was accurate enough from the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. Settlement crept inland from the Atlantic, then crested the Appalachian chain and spilled over into the Ohio Valley. In some places the edge of settlement moved more rapidly than in others, but on the whole the advance took place along a broad front.

  Things changed when Americans hit the Great Plains. The frontier stalled, blocked by the barrier of aridity John Wesley Powell described. Some maps denoted the plains as the Great American Desert. Indians roamed the plains longer than elsewhere, partly because the Sioux and the Comanches were formidable warriors, but mostly because white Americans saw little of value there. Instead they looked beyond the plains and mountains to Oregon, and then to California. The emigrants to the Willamette Valley and then the argonauts to California caused the frontier to leapfrog to the Pacific coast.

  During the following decades the frontier backfilled as miners developed the Comstock Lode in Nevada, the deposits around Denver, and finally the Black Hills of Dakota.

  Sections of the Middle Border, as the Great Plains were sometimes called, were among the last to be settled. Farmers crept out onto the eastern part of the plains in Kansas and Nebraska, where the climate was only marginally drier than farther east. They turned the prairie sod with improved steel plows and planted winter wheat, which squeezed moisture out of winter’s snows to go with spring’s rains. On the western plains, cattlemen like Theodore Roosevelt and his more persistent colleagues carved a niche where the buffalo had been.

  One big chunk of the plains remained off limits to most white settlement. In the 1880s Oklahoma was what remained of the Indian Territory, Arkansas having been peeled off to form a state decades earlier. Oklahoma was where the government sent the hardest cases of Indian resistance, including Geronimo, the last of the holdouts. Geronimo had lived on an Arizona reservation for a time, but he had become unwilling to stand the confinement. In 1881 he led a band of his Chiricahua Apaches off the reservation and into the wilderness along the border between the United States and Mexico. After a few years of raiding settlements in both countries, Geronimo was talked back onto the reservation, but he broke away again. He was chased; he agreed to return; he changed his mind; the chase resumed.

  Among his pursuers were members of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, a special unit established at the end of the Civil War. During that conflict some two hundred thousand African Americans, many of them escaped and emancipated slaves, served in the Union military; upon the war’s end, the government decided to employ some of them and other blacks who chose to enlist in new regiments on the Western frontier. The deployment was in the nature of an experiment, for though the black soldiers had shown they could fight, they were hardly loved by all in the army. And they were loved least by white Southerners, who had formed a large part of the U.S. army before the Civil War and were expected to do so after. The rank-and-file of the regiments were black, the officers mostly white. This model reflected prejudice in the military but also the fact that many of the enlisted men were illiterate, having been barred as slaves from being taught to read and write.

  The experiment commenced with the creation of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments, which were complemented by four infantry regiments. In the first years the black soldiers guarded the construction crews of the Union Pacific; before long they were engaged in the war of attrition against the various Plains tribes. “We destroyed everything in their village,” a black sergeant reported after a raid against one band in northwestern Texas. “They had many guns, mostly citizens’ rifles, and a good supply of ammunition besides bows, arrows, quivers, lances, etc. These we destroyed. We found a vast amount of buffalo robes, of which each man made choice of the best—the rest were destroyed. Their tents were made of poles over which hides were stretched, and these were all burned.”

  The more responsibility they were given, the better the black troops typically performed. Frances Roe was the wife of an officer of the 10th; she followed her husband from fort to fort on the plains and wrote letters to friends in the East. “The officers say that the negroes make good soldiers and fight like fiends,” she said. She added, “The Indians call them ‘buffalo soldiers,’ because their woolly heads are so much like the matted cushion that is between the horns of the buffalo.”

  Mrs. Roe’s 1872 letter seems to be the first recorded use of the term “buffalo soldier.” It was seconded in an article that appeared in The Nation the following year. The magazine’s correspondent was writing from Fort Sill, Indian Territory. “This is the best arranged and most complete military post I have yet seen,” he said. “The barracks, officers’ quarters, and quartermaster’s buildings are built of limestone around a square parade-ground of near ten acres area. Hard by are a fine hospital and guard-house. All are kept in fine order by a garrison of (just now) five companies of colored cavalry of the Tenth Regiment, and two companies (colored) and one (white) of infantry. The colored troops (called by the Comanches the ‘buffalo soldiers,’ because, like the buffalo, they are woolly) are in excellent drill and condition. The Indians at first treated them with utter contempt, and when they chanced to kill one would not take his scalp. After a while, when they had had a taste of their fighting qualities, they began to respect them, and to show their respect by scalping a few that they have managed to kill.” The correspondent, who had observed many soldiers, was impressed by the quality of the black troops. “These ‘buffalo soldiers’ are active, intelligent, and resolute men; are perfectly willing to fight the Indians whenever they may be called upon to do so, and appear to me to be rather superior to the average of white men recruited in time of peace. Their officers explain this by saying that the best colored young men can be recruited in time of peace, while, under the same condition, only indifferent or inferior whites can in general be induced to enlist.”

  The black troops, though better behaved than the many of the white troops, weren’t uniformly virtuous. Racial friction sometimes caused trouble, as did the overall strain of service on the frontier. Deserters included the black man killed by the buffalo hunters in the battle of Adobe Walls. This soldier evidently concluded he’d fare better with the Indians than with his white commanders and black comrades-in-arms.
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br />   On the whole the army was pleased with its experiment. Most of the trouble was minor, and much of the performance was truly meritorious. Sergeant Emanuel Stance was leading a small command on a “scout,” or reconnaissance, when he spied a band of Indians stealing government horses. Though badly outnumbered, he leapt into action. “I immediately attacked them by charging them,” he reported afterward. “They tried hard to make a stand to get their herd of horses off, but I set the Spencers”—his men’s rifles—“to talking and whistling about their ears so lively they broke in confusion and fled to the hills, leaving us their herd.” They eventually regrouped and decided to retrieve their booty. “They skirmished along my left flank to the eight mile water hole, evidently being determined to take the stock. I turned my little command loose on them at this place, and after a few volleys they left me to continue my march in peace.”

  Sergeant Stance was too modest in his account of the action. After the details were relayed to Washington, he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

  GERONIMO EVENTUALLY SURRENDERED TO NELSON MILES, the captor of Crazy Horse and Joseph, in 1886. He was sent first to Florida and then to Oklahoma. What made Oklahoma different from the other federal territories was that while they contained Indian reservations, Oklahoma was an Indian reservation. And the essence of reservation status was that Indians on reservations had their own governments. They were, as John Marshall had put it in the defining Supreme Court case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, “domestic dependent nations.” But there was another option for the Indians, held out by the executive branch and articulated by Andrew Jackson. In calling on Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which mandated the removal of the Cherokees, Chickasaws and other southeastern tribes across the Mississippi to the Indian Territory, Jackson said the Indians could stay where they were, only not as autonomous tribes. “If they remain within the limits of the states they must be subject to their laws.”

  The question of autonomy or assimilation persisted. Many Indians assimilated informally, by the expedient of leaving their reservations and living in the larger non-Indian community. This was seldom easy, but it was least problematic for Indians who married whites or were the children of such unions. Assimilation was the goal of the missionaries to the Indians. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman sought to teach the Indians not merely the religion of the whites but the way of living of the whites. Americans of the nineteenth century almost unanimously considered farming superior, as a way of life, to hunting and gathering. If the Indians would settle down and become farmers, the missionaries and other reformers said, they might enjoy the blessings all Americans enjoyed.

  Such was the philosophy behind the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Supporters of the law concluded that the reservation system wasn’t working. Reservation Indians, under tribal government and typically on the dole of the U.S. government, had little incentive or opportunity to better their lot. Land was owned in common, preventing hardworking individual Indians from enjoying the full benefits of their labors. The key to improvement, the law’s supporters said, was individual ownership of land. The Dawes Act, named for Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, would provide individual ownership by apportioning reservation lands among the individuals of the various tribes. Each head of family received 160 acres, with an additional 40 acres for each child. Each single person eighteen years of age or older got 80 acres, as did each orphan under eighteen. When the apportioning of lands was completed, the reservations would be dissolved and the tribes disbanded, and the Indians would become citizens with the same rights and responsibilities as other citizens.

  The Dawes Act mirrored the Homestead Act in transferring land to individuals. It was hailed by its supporters as an emancipation proclamation for Indians, freeing them from bondage to tribal collectivism. Philanthropists hoped it would stir the Indians into the melting pot of America and allow them to achieve what other groups, immigrants primarily, had achieved.

  Yet philanthropists weren’t the only ones behind the Dawes Act. The total acreage of the allotted lands, determined by the arithmetic of the law, came to only a third of the reservation holdings. The rest would be opened to white ownership. Land speculators and prospective settlers, recognizing the Dawes Act as the latest device for expropriating Indian lands, kept their voices low during the discussion of the bill. But they made ready for the day when the excess lands would be theirs for the taking.

  THAT DAY CAME, IN OKLAHOMA, IN APRIL 1889. THE FEDERAL government sponsored a one-day version of the gold rush, except in land. The land rush was advertised to begin at noon on April 22. William Howard, a reporter, took part, and he explained how it unfolded. “The preparations for the settlement of Oklahoma had been complete, even to the slightest detail, for weeks before the opening day,” he wrote. “The Santa Fe Railway, which runs through Oklahoma north and south, was prepared to take any number of people from its handsome station at Arkansas City, Kansas, and to deposit them in almost any part of Oklahoma as soon as the law allowed.” Other settlers chose different modes of transport. “Thousands of covered wagons were gathered in camps on all sides of the new Territory waiting for the embargo to be lifted.”

  The race for land was unprecedented in American history, and Howard thought it was unprecedented anywhere. “The rush across the border at noon on the opening day must go down in history as one of the most noteworthy events of Western civilization,” he said. Many lives hung on the outcome of the day’s events. “At the time fixed, thousands of hungry home-seekers, who had gathered from all parts of the country, and particularly from Kansas and Missouri, were arranged in line along the border, ready to lash their horses into furious speed in the race for fertile spots in the beautiful land before them.”

  The spring weather on the day of the rush couldn’t have been finer, with bright sun, blue skies and balmy temperatures. As the starting hour approached, the contestants for the Indian lands grew nervously expectant. And then: “The clear, sweet notes of a cavalry bugle rose and hung a moment upon the startled air. It was noon. The last barrier of savagery in the United States was broken down. Moved by the same impulse, each driver lashed his horses furiously; each rider dug his spurs into his willing steed; and each man on foot caught his breath and darted forward. A cloud of dust rose where the home-seekers had stood in line, and when it had drifted away before the gentle breeze, the horses and wagons and men were tearing across the open country like fiends.”

  It wasn’t long, though, before something appeared amiss. “The fleetest of the horsemen found upon reaching their chosen localities that men in wagons and men on foot were there before them.” The only inference that could be drawn was that these men had cheated, sneaking across the line ahead of the official start. William Howard didn’t report any shootings of the cheaters, but he predicted litigation. “It is not to be expected that the man who ran his horse at its utmost speed for ten miles only to find a settler with an ox team in quiet possession of his chosen farm will tamely submit to this plain infringement of the law.”

  Yet, as Howard observed, the race wasn’t always to the swift or the dishonest. A rusher on foot, with a keen sense of where he was going, could do just as well. “One man left the line with the others, carrying on his back a tent, a blanket, some camp dishes, an axe, and provisions for two days,” Howard said. “He ran down the railway track for six miles, and reached his claim in just sixty minutes. Upon arriving on his land he fell down under a tree, unable to speak or see. I am glad to be able to say that his claim is one of the best in Oklahoma.”

  The rushers who raced by train dealt with challenges of their own. “The train left Arkansas City at 8:45 o’clock in the forenoon,” Howard said. “It consisted of an empty baggage car, which was set apart for the use of the newspaper correspondents, eight passenger coaches, and the caboose of a freight train. The coaches were so densely packed with men that not another human being could get on board. So uncomfortably crowded were they that some of the younger boomers climbed to the roofs of t
he cars and clung perilously to the ventilators. An adventurous person secured at great risk a seat on the forward truck of the baggage car.”

  The train was bound for the town of Guthrie, which was being planted this day. Or so the passengers thought. “It was an eager and an exuberantly joyful crowd that rode slowly into Guthrie at twenty minutes past one o’clock on that perfect April afternoon,” Howard wrote. The mood changed abruptly. “Men who had expected to lay out the town site were grievously disappointed at the first glimpse of their proposed scene of operations. The slope east of the railway at Guthrie station was dotted white with tents and sprinkled thick with men running about in all directions.”

  “We’re done for,” declared one of the train-borne town builders. “Some one has gone in ahead of us and laid out the town.”

  “Never mind that,” answered another. “Make a rush and get what you can.”

  This attitude seized them all. “Hardly had the train slackened its speed when the impatient boomers began to leap from the cars and run up the slope,” Howard recorded. “Men jumped from the roofs of the moving cars at the risk of their lives. Some were so stunned by the fall that they could not get up for some minutes. The coaches were so crowded that many men were compelled to squeeze through the windows in order to get a fair start at the head of the crowd. Almost before the train had come to a standstill the cars were emptied. In their haste and eagerness, men fell over each other in heaps; others stumbled and fell headlong, while many ran forward so blindly and impetuously that it was not until they had passed the best of the town lots that they came to a realization of their actions.”