US Army colonel James Carleton formed the Volunteer Army of the Pacific in 1861, based in California. In Nevada and Utah, a California businessman, Colonel Patrick Connor, commanded a militia of a thousand California volunteers that spent the war years massacring hundreds of unarmed Shoshone, Bannock, and Ute people in their encampments. Carleton led another contingent of militias to Arizona to suppress the Apaches, who were resisting colonization under the great leader Cochise. At the time, Cochise observed:
When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it that the Apaches wait to die—that they carry their lives on their finger nails? … The Apaches were once a great nation; they are now but few.… Many have been killed in battle.10
Following a scorched-earth campaign against the Apaches, Carleton was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and placed in command of the Department of New Mexico. He brought in the now-seasoned killing machine of Colorado Volunteers to attack the Navajos, on whom he declared total war. He enlisted as his principal commander in the field the ubiquitous Indian killer Kit Carson.11 With unlimited authority and answering to no one, Carleton spent the entire Civil War in the Southwest engaged in a series of search-and-destroy missions against the Navajos. The campaign culminated in March 1864 in a three-hundred-mile forced march of eight thousand Navajo civilians to a military concentration camp at Bosque Redondo in the southeastern New Mexico desert, at the army base at Fort Sumner, an ordeal recalled in Navajo oral history as the “Long Walk.” One Navajo named Herrero said,
Some of the soldiers do not treat us well. When at work, if we stop a little they kick us or do something else.… We do not mind if an officer punishes us, but do not like to be treated badly by the soldiers. Our women sometimes come to the tents outside the fort and make contracts with the soldiers to stay with them for a night, and give them five dollars or something else. But in the morning they take away what they gave them and kick them off. This happens most every day.12
At least a fourth of the incarcerated died of starvation. Not until 1868 were the Navajos released and allowed to return to their homeland in what is today the Four Corners area. This permission to return was not based on the deadly conditions of the camp, rather that Congress determined that the incarceration was too expensive to maintain.13 For these noble deeds, Carleton was appointed a major general in the US Army in 1865. Now he led the Fourth Cavalry in scorched-earth forays against Plains Indians.
These military campaigns against Indigenous nations constituted foreign wars fought during the US Civil War, but the end of the Civil War did not end them. They carried on unabated to the end of the century, with added killing technology and more seasoned killers, including African American cavalry units. Demobilized officers and soldiers often could not find jobs, and along with a new generation of young settlers—otherwise unemployed and often seeking violent adventure—they joined the army of the West, some of the officers accepting lower ranks in order to get career army assignments. Given that war was centered in the West and that military achievement had come to foster prestige, wealth, and political power, every West Point graduate sought to further his career by volunteering in the army. Some of their diaries echo those of combat troops in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, who later were troubled by the atrocities they witnessed or committed. But most soldiers persevered in their ambition to succeed.
Prominent Civil War generals led the army of the West, among them Generals William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan (to whom is ascribed the statement “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”), George Armstrong Custer, and Nelson A. Miles. The army would make effective use after 1865 of innovations made during the Civil War. The rapid-fire Gatling gun, first used in battle in 1862, would be employed during the rest of the century against Indigenous civilians. Non-technological innovations were perhaps even more important, the Civil War having fostered an extreme patriotic ideology in the Union Army that carried over into the Indian wars. Now more centralized under presidential command, US forces relied less on state contributions and were thus less subject to their control. The prestige of the Department of War rose within the federal government, so that it had far more leeway to send troops to steamroll over Indigenous peoples who challenged US dominion.
The Union Army victory over the Confederate Army transformed the South into a quasi-captive nation, a region that remains the poorest of the United States well over a century later. The situation was similar to that in South Africa two decades later when the British defeated the Boers (descendants of the original seventeenth-century Dutch settlers). As the British would later do with the Boers, the US government eventually allowed the defeated southern elite to return to their locally powerful positions, and both US southerners and Boers soon gained national political power. The powerful white supremacist southern ruling class helped further militarize the United States, the army practically becoming a southern institution. Following the effective Reconstruction experiment to empower former slaves, the US occupying army was withdrawn, and African Americans were returned to quasi-bondage and disenfranchisement through Jim Crow laws, forming a colonized population in the South.
COLONIAL POLICY PRECEDES MILITARY IMPLEMENTATION
In the midst of war, Lincoln did not forget his free-soiler settler constituency that had raised him to the presidency. During the Civil War, with the southern states unrepresented, Congress at Lincoln’s behest passed the Homestead Act in 1862, as well as the Morrill Act, the latter transferring large tracts of Indigenous land to the states to establish land grant universities. The Pacific Railroad Act provided private companies with nearly two hundred million acres of Indigenous land.14 With these land grabs, the US government broke multiple treaties with Indigenous nations. Most of the western territories, including Colorado, North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, were delayed in achieving statehood, because Indigenous nations resisted appropriation of their lands and outnumbered settlers. So the colonization plan for the West established during the Civil War was carried out over the following three decades of war and land grabs. Under the Homestead Act, 1.5 million homesteads were granted to settlers west of the Mississippi, comprising nearly three hundred million acres (a half-million square miles) taken from the Indigenous collective estates and privatized for the market.15 This dispersal of landless settler populations from east of the Mississippi served as an “escape valve,” lessening the likelihood of class conflict as the industrial revolution accelerated the use of cheap immigrant labor.
Little of the land appropriated under the Homestead Acts was distributed to actual single-family homesteaders. It was passed instead to large operators or land speculators. The land laws appeared to have been created for that result. An individual could acquire 1,120 or even more acres of land, even though homestead and preemption (legalized squatting) claims were limited to 160 acres.16 A claimant could obtain a homestead and secure title after five years or pay cash within six months. Then he could acquire another 160 acres under preemption by living on another piece of land for six months and paying $1.25 per acre. While acquiring these titles, he could also be fulfilling requirements for a timber culture claim of 160 acres and a desert land claim of 640 acres, neither of which required occupancy for title. Other men within a family or other partners in an enterprise could take out additional desert land claims to increase their holdings even more. As industrialization quickened, land as a commodity, “real estate,” remained the basis of the US economy and capital accumulation.17 The federal land grants to the railroad barons, carved out of Indigenous territories, were not limited to the width of the railroad tracks, but rather formed a checkerboard of square-mile sections stretching for dozens of miles on both sides of the right of way. This was land the railroads were free to sell in parcels for their own profit. The 1863–64 federal banking
acts mandated a national currency, chartered banks, and permitted the government to guarantee bonds. As war profiteers, financiers, and industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan used these laws to amass wealth in the East, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker in the West grew rich from building railroads with eastern capital on land granted by the US government.18
Indigenous nations, as well as Hispanos, resisted the arrival of railroads crisscrossing their farms, hunting grounds, and homelands, bringing settlers, cattle, barbed wire fencing, and mercenary buffalo hunters in their wake. In what proved a prelude to the genocidal decades to follow, the Andrew Johnson administration in 1867–68 sent army and diplomatic representatives to negotiate peace treaties with dozens of Indigenous nations. The 371 treaties between Indigenous nations and the United States were all promulgated during the first century of US existence.19 Congress halted formal treaty making in 1871, attaching a rider to the Indian Appropriation Act of that year stipulating “that hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty. Provided, further, that nothing herein contained shall be construed to invalidate or impair the obligation of any treaty heretofore lawfully made and ratified with any such Indian nation or tribe.”20 This measure meant that Congress and the president could now make laws affecting an Indigenous nation with or without negotiations or consent. Nevertheless, the provision reaffirmed the sovereign legal status of those Indigenous nations that had treaties. During the period of US-Indigenous treaty making, approximately two million square miles of land passed from Indigenous nations to the United States, some of it through treaty agreements and some through breach of standing treaties.
In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy the basic economic base of the Plains Nations—the buffalo. The buffalo were killed to near extinction, tens of millions dead within a few decades and only a few hundred left by the 1880s. Commercial hunters wanted only the skins, so left the rest of the animal to rot. Bones would be gathered and shipped to the East for various uses. Mainly it was the army that helped realize slaughter of the herds.21 Old Lady Horse of the Kiowa Nation could have been speaking for all the buffalo nations in her lament of the loss:
Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo.… Most of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion. A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above.
So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.
There was war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could, but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them back.
Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting sometimes as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track.
The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer.22
Another aspect of US economic development that affected the Indigenous nations of the West was merchant domination. All over the world, in European colonies distant from their ruling centers, mercantile capitalists flourished alongside industrial capitalists and militaries, and together they determined the mode of colonization. Mercantile houses, usually family-owned, were organized to carry goods over long stretches of water or sparsely populated lands to their destinations. The merchants’ sources of commodities in remote regions were the nearby small farmers, loggers, trappers, and specialists such as woodworkers and metalsmiths. The commodities were then sent to industrial centers for credit against which money could be drawn. Thus, in the absence of a system of indirect credit, merchants could acquire scarce currency for the purchase of foreign goods. The merchant, thereby, became the dominant source of credit for the small operator as well as for the local capitalist. Mercantile capitalism thrived in colonial areas, with many of the first merchant houses originating in the Levant among Syrians (Lebanese) and Jews. Even as mercantile capitalism waned in the twentieth century, it left its mark on Native reservations where the people relied on trading posts for credit, a market for their products, and commodities of all kinds—an opportunity for super-exploitation. Merchants and traders, often by intermarrying Indigenous women, also came to dominate Native governance on some reservations.23
As noted above, at the end of the Civil War the US Army hardly missed a beat before the war “to win the West” began in full force. As a far more advanced killing machine and with seasoned troops, the army began the slaughter of people, buffalo, and the land itself, destroying the natural tall grasses of the plains and planting short grasses for cattle, eventually leading to the loss of the topsoil four decades later. William Tecumseh Sherman came out of the Civil War a major general and soon commanded the US Army, replacing war hero Ulysses S. Grant when Grant became president in 1869. As commanding general through 1883, Sherman was responsible for the genocidal wars against the resistant Indigenous nations of the West.
Sherman’s family was among the first generation of settlers who rushed to the Ohio Valley region after the total war that drove the people of the Shawnee Nation out of their homes, towns, and farms. Sherman’s father gave his son the trophy name Tecumseh after the Shawnee leader who was killed by the US Army. The general had been a successful lawyer and banker in San Francisco and New York before he turned to a military career. During the Civil War, most famously in the siege of Atlanta, he made his mark as a proponent and practitioner of total war, scorched-earth campaigns against civilians, particularly targeting their food supplies. This had long been the colonial and US American way of war against the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi. Sherman sent an army commission to England to study English colonial campaigns worldwide, looking to employ successful English tactics for the US wars against Indigenous peoples. In Washington, Sherman had to contend with the upper echelons of the military that were under the sway of Carl von Clausewitz’s book On War, which dealt with conflict between European nation-states with standing armies. This dichotomy of training the US military for standard European warfare but also training it in colonial counterinsurgency methods continues in the twenty-first century. Although a man of war, Sherman, like most in the US ruling class, was an entrepreneur at heart, and his mandate as head of the army and his passion were to protect the Anglo conquest of the West. Sherman regarded railroads a top priority. In a letter to Grant in 1867 he wrote, “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop the progress of [the railroads].”24
An alliance of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Nations was blocking the “Bozeman Trail,” over which thousands of crazed gold seekers crashed through Indigenous territories in the Dakotas and Wyoming in 1866 to reach newly discovered goldfields in Montana. The army arrived to protect them, and in preparation for constructing Fort Phil Kearny, Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman led eighty soldiers out to clear the trail in December 1866. The Indigenous alliance defeated them in battle. Strangely, this being war, the defeat of the US Army in the battle has come down in historical annals as “the Fetterman Massacre.” Following this event, General
Sherman wrote to Grant, who was still army commander: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” Sherman made it clear that “during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”25
In adopting total war in the West, Sherman brought in its most notorious avatar, George Armstrong Custer, who proved his mettle right away by leading an attack on unarmed civilians on November 27, 1868, at the Southern Cheyenne reservation at Washita Creek in Indian Territory. Earlier, at the Colorado Volunteers’ 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, the Cheyenne leader Black Kettle had escaped death. He and other Cheyenne survivors were then forced to leave Colorado Territory for a reservation in Indian Territory. Some young Cheyenne men, determined to resist reservation confinement and hunger, decided to hunt and to fight back with guerrilla tactics. Since the army was rarely able to capture them, Custer resorted to total war, murdering the incarcerated mothers, wives, children, and elders. When Black Kettle received word from Indigenous spies within the army ranks that the mounted troops of the Seventh Cavalry were leaving their fort and headed for the Washita reservation, he and his wife rode out at dawn in a snowstorm, unarmed, to attempt to talk with Custer and assure him that no resisters were present on the reservation. Upon Black Kettle’s approaching the troops with a hoisted white flag, Custer ordered the soldiers to fire, and a moment later Black Kettle and his wife lay dead. All told, the Seventh Cavalry murdered over a hundred Cheyenne women and children that day, taking ghoulish trophies afterward.26
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Page 17
