American Settler Colonialism: A History
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By the end of the Civil War, some 20,000 US troops were serving in the West, thereby enhancing “the state’s capacity to police as well as punish Indians.” US Army officers reflected the ambivalence of the broader US society, as many sympathized with Indians and believed that settlers and the government had treated the tribes unfairly. At the same time, however, the officers viewed the indigenes as primordial savages and typically proved willing to fight fiercely against them.24
The Civil War empowered a handful of generals skilled in the conduct of relentless irregular warfare and backed by thousands of combat veterans. Generals Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip H. Sheridan, “the great triumvirate of the Union Civil War effort formulated and enacted military Indian policy.” They sought to remove Indians to facilitate the transcontinental railroad as the spearhead of the capitalist development of the West.
As they had done in subduing the Confederacy, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan would authorize indiscriminate warfare and collective punishment to crush the national enemy. The three generals thus “applied their shared ruthlessness, born of their Civil War experiences, against a people all three despised, in the name of civilization and progress.”25 The subsequent removal campaigns or Indians Wars underscore the continuity of the American way or war.
While violent ethnic cleansing ultimately would comprise the essence of Western Indian removal, ambivalent discourse pertaining to Indian policy grew powerful in the postbellum years. The antebellum antislavery movement followed by abolition left a legacy of humanitarian sentiment that influenced the debate over Indian policy in the post–Civil War era. The violence of the Civil War traumatized many Americans who now condemned the application of mass violence against the tribes. They viewed Indian removal as inevitable and appropriate but insisted the savages should be educated, taught to farm, and graced with Christianity.
For the Western settlers and the vast majority of Army officers, ambivalent attitudes toward Indians posed a threat to the settlers and delayed the inevitable. Like most Army officers, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan chafed over the relocation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from the War Department to the Department of Interior upon its creation in 1849.26 In 1883 Colonel Frank Triplett expressed a common view in colorful language, as he condemned “junketing peace commissions, composed of low-brow, thick-lipped, bottle-nosed humanitarians” who were “the inferiors of the savages in every manly trait.”27
After ascending to the White House in 1869, Grant announced a new “Peace Policy” toward Indians to appease mostly eastern critics of violent Indian removal. Grant named his wartime aide Ely Parker, a Seneca, as the first indigenous commissioner of Indian affairs. Grant also appointed Quakers to head Indian agencies across the country. In 1873, alluding to ambivalent expressions of guilt within the society, Grant called for “good faith” effort at uplifting Indians in order “to stand better before the civilized nations of the earth and in our own consciences.”
Despite such discourse, the “peace policy” demanded unconditional surrender of Indian homelands and hunting grounds and relocation onto reservations. In 1871 Congress terminated treaty making with Indians, who henceforth would be approached exclusively as a subjugated minority population. The “peace policy” and the subsequent movement for Indian assimilation signaled an effort to institute internal colonial rule once Indians had been militarily subdued.
Reminiscent of the Indian Removal Act, indigenes were “voluntarily” to remove to reservations where they became dependent on the unreliable Americans for food and sustenance. The palpable impulse to exterminate lurked just beneath the surface of the “peace policy.” As Grant warned, “Those who do not accept this policy will find the new administration ready for a sharp and severe war policy.” As thousands of Indians would prove unwilling to acquiesce to cultural genocide, the “peace policy” in actuality assured the continuation of mass violence.28
Although he acknowledged, “No doubt our people have committed grievous wrong to the Indians,” Sherman longed for a violent resolution of the conflict. He reasoned, much as the Nazis would do with respect to Jews and other untermenschen, that the Indian problem “will exist as long as the Indians exist.” This was an ominous discourse given that in 1865 the War Department gave Sherman command over a vast area of colonial space from his headquarters in St. Louis to the Continental Divide, an area he meant to clear of “free roaming” Indians. Sherman bitterly resented Indians’ ability to conduct raids and return to the sanctity of the reservation, all the while being depicted as victims by the naïve eastern humanitarians. Sherman’s preferred approach was “extermination if need be; displacement for certain,” biographer Michael Fellman explains. “Without any doubt Sherman’s overall policy was never accommodation and compromise, but vigorous war against the Indians.”
Sherman could reflect calmly on the Indian problem on occasion but whenever the tribes offered violent resistance, “his never very subdued rage would break out, and his genocidal urges would pour forth.” In order to eliminate the problem altogether, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan pursued an aggressive war against the Plains Indians. The three generals “would work in perfect accord on this issue.”29
The third member of the Indian war triumvirate, Sheridan, had during his posting in the Northwest lived in an intimate relationship with an Indian woman named Sidnayoh of the Klickitat tribe. He departed the northwest when the Civil War broke out and never acknowledged her publically, though she did visit him in Washington years later. His own intimate relationship notwithstanding, Sheridan called the Northwest Indians “miserable wretches” and eventually called for their extermination. The Irishman dismissed the peace policy, explaining contemptuously that when a white man murders someone, “we hang him or send him to the penitentiary. If an Indian does the same, we have been in the habit of giving him more blankets.” During the winter campaign of 1868–1869, Sheridan took the surrender of a Comanche chief, Tosawi, who professed his peaceful intentions. “Why am I and my people being tormented by you?” he asked Sheridan. “I am a good Indian.” Sheridan famously replied in front of a witness: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Whether a quip or a Freudian slip, the expression was not far removed from Sheridan’s actual sentiments.30
The Cheyenne Massacres
One of the more infamous atrocities in American history, at Sand Creek in 1864, illustrates how massacres functioned not as isolated and episodic events but rather as engines of the larger genocidal removal project. Beginning in 1859, as the Colorado gold rush brought Americans pouring into the Rocky Mountain region, the indigenous people of the area faced an increasingly precarious existence. As miners built camps, the army built forts, capitalists built railroads, and hunters slaughtered bison, Indian land and hunting grounds withered away.
The settler colonial influx brought an end to decades of ambivalent relations and multiethnic coexistence as symbolized by Bent’s Fort, the trading post established on the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado. Since the early 1830s, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other Indians had exchanged goods peacefully with American trappers and traders at the adobe fort. Founder William Bent and his brothers forged kinship ties, as they had married Indian women. Their mixed blood and multilingual children evolved hybrid personae, as they drifted between both the Indian and American worlds. As late as 1858, “many Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne … had been uniformly friendly,” Elliott West points out, “but the gold rush and its many repercussions were transforming the central plains.” Ambivalence gave way as American adventurers and settlers poured into the country, shattering the indigenous cultures in the process. Bent spoke of “the failure of food, the encircling encroachment of the white population, and the exasperating sense of decay and impending extinction with which they are surrounded.”31
Under immense pressures from unprecedented and unforeseen forces, Indians divided within their own bands over how best to respond. Younger warriors such as the Cheyenne “dog soldiers
” were eager to prove their manhood by standing up to the whites. They wanted to continue raiding and fighting while older chiefs such as Black Kettle, concluding that resistance would prove futile against the endless mass of settlers, sought out paths of accommodation instead. Black Kettle would find, however, that accommodation would prove equally futile with the Americans. These debates echoed discussions within tribes and among Indian confederations throughout the course of Euro-American history, as discussed in earlier chapters.
While the Yankees and Confederates killed each other in the east, a race war between Indians and Americans erupted in Colorado. The dog soldiers of the southern Cheyenne went beyond raids and began to conduct “an indiscriminate war on all whites.” When a settler family only 25 miles southeast of Denver was found dead on their farmstead in June 1864, residents placed their scalped and mutilated bodies on a wagon in the city, posing an infant son and four-year-old daughter between their dead parents. While Colorado’s inflamed population cried out for an exterminatory response, Black Kettle pleaded for accommodation and kinship. The chieftain called for “peace with the whites. We want to hold you by the hand. You are our father.”32
Despite Black Kettle’s ambivalent plea, Coloradans responded with a perfidious massacre at Sand Creek. Insisting that they had no desire to kill peaceful Indians, Colorado officials authorized Black Kettle and some 600 Cheyenne followers to encamp at the isolated spot on the eastern Colorado plains along the creek. Colorado’s territorial governor John Evans, a physician from Chicago with no experience in Indian affairs, and Methodist minister John Chivington, who had organized Denver’s first Sunday school, shared responsibility for the subsequent massacre.
Like the settlers who slaughtered Indians at Gnadenhutten, the Coloradans wanted to put an end to ambivalence and to demonstrate that their state was no place for Indians. By driving out the indigenes, Evans would prove that Colorado was safe for settlers, thus increasing migration and hastening the path to statehood. Chivington, the head of Colorado’s militia who had won a decisive battle for the Union at Glorieta Pass in northern New Mexico, now wanted to carry out Jehovah’s fiery wrath on the Indians and “half-breeds,” who represented the sin of miscegenation. “The Sand Creek camp, with its ethnic sloppiness and its tangle of links that bound an older social order, was an intolerable affront,” West explains.33
At sunrise on November 29, 1864, Chivington and a force of 700 volunteers, backed by four howitzers, perpetrated the Sand Creek Massacre. An attack was the last thing anticipated by Black Kettle, who flew an American flag high on a lodge pole in the camp and had been given “no reason to expect anything but a long, dull, hungry winter.” “I heard him call to the people,” George Bent, who was encamped at Sand Creek, recalled. Black Kettle urged the Cheyenne “not to be afraid, that the soldiers would not hurt them: then the troops opened fire from two sides of the camp.” Chivington’s forces slaughtered some 150 peaceful Indians and looted and burned their lodges before withdrawing.34
Rationalizing the genocide, Evans declared, “The benefit to Colorado of that massacre, as they call it, was very great for it ridded the plains of the Indians.” While the Rocky Mountain News praised “the brilliant feats of arms in Indian warfare,” the army condemned the attack and an extensive federal investigation charged Evans and Chivington with responsibility for the “gross and wanton outrages” perpetrated at Sand Creek. “Fleeing women holding up their hands and praying for mercy were brutally shot down; infants were killed and scalped in derision; men were tortured and mutilated,” the federal commission found.35
Outrage over the Sand Creek massacre spurred the US Congress to create the Indian Peace Commission in 1867. The federal government also ratified treaties that were signed that same year at Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas. The signatory bands of Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Apache, and Arapaho received cash payments and pledges of food, clothing, tools, schools for their children, and other services in return for relocating onto reservations from which they would be allowed to go on buffalo hunts south of the Arkansas River. The United States did not, however, provide the promised provisions nor did it uphold its pledge to keep intruders off the designated Indian land. For their part the indigenous bands did not cease their raiding and resistance, hence the peace effort collapsed almost immediately. “Marred by obscure meanings, mutual misconstructions, and uneasy compromises,” Peka Håmålåinen explains, “the final agreement was a typical U.S. Indian treaty.”36
As the Medicine Lodge treaties broke down, Sherman reveled in the prospect of waging the kind of warfare that had made him famous in the North and infamous in the South. “I cannot represent two opposing views, for a man of action must have positive plans,” he explained. “Now this must come to a violent end.” The ruthless army campaign combined with the depletion of the bison—which the Plains Indians had been overhunting before the Americans arrived—meant that the “hunting-based economy rapidly spun into a deep depression from which it would never emerge.” As Americans and their cattle and sheep poured into Colorado and the Wind River range of Wyoming, “Native inhabitants slipped into long-term poverty” while “white residents profited by their losses.”37
As diplomacy collapsed, Sheridan, in command of the army of the West, went on the offensive culminating in a massacre of peacefully encamped Cheyenne on the Washita River just east of the 100th meridian. At dawn on November 26, 1868, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer of the Seventh Cavalry led the assault on the camp, as his regimental band blared a jolly Irish dance tune. The Americans and their Osage scouts killed indiscriminately, 103 Indians in all, burned the camp, and systematically shot and cut the throats of some 700 horses and ponies. This carnage was designed to cripple the Indians by depriving them of food in the winter and mobility in the spring. Among the Indians killed was Black Kettle, whose luck had run out after surviving the Sand Creek massacre. Custer ordered a timely retreat before a large encampment of Indians downstream could respond to the attack. In so doing, he left behind a column of men who would be killed and mutilated.38
The Killing Fields of California
Preceding the dispossession of the Plains tribes was a genocidal campaign against of the California Indians. In a recent study, Benjamin Madley found “evidence of hundreds of massacres and mass killings perpetrated against California Indians” constituting an “American genocide.” Colonial ambivalence thus found little traction with the American settlers of California. Free of government oversight, they carried out orchestrated campaigns of mass murder.39
As a result of the gold rush, settlers poured into California too fast for the federal government and its treaty-making prerogative to gain traction. Thus Americans dealt with California much like the settlers in Australia, treating the territory as terra nullius (empty or uninhabited land) thus obviating the need for treaties. By the time federal agents arrived, surveyed the situation, and drew up treaties to dispossess the bands in a civilized legal fashion, it was already too late. In 1851–1852, Californians rejected the federal treaties, which they claimed would hand over “the finest farming and mineral lands” to tribes “wholly incapable, by habit or taste, of appreciating its value.”40
Treating California as empty land was brutally ironic insofar as the territory at one time probably had the highest density of indigenous people on the continent. The Indian population, estimated at about 300,000 in 1769 when the Spanish built their first missions on the Pacific coast, had been halved by the time of the 1849 gold rush. Over the next decade, it plummeted another 80 percent, to around 30,000 Indians, as a result of murder, disease, famine, and declining birth rates. By 1900 only about 15,000 Indians remained in California.41
Separated by almost a century, both Hispanic colonialism and American settler colonialism had a shattering impact on indigenous Californians. As the Spanish Franciscan missionaries sought to force labor and conversion on them, the coastal Indians suffered the “brutal effects of mission policies.” Many adapted but most
resisted and stayed away from the missions and presidios. In 1680, the massive Pueblo revolt drove the Spanish out of Santa Fe. In 1775, hundreds of Indians assaulted and burned to the ground the San Diego Mission. Such revolts prompted the Spanish to “put down resistance with shocking brutality, killing, maiming, or enslaving Indians who defied them.”42
Holding their own in an ambivalent colonial setting for some 80 years, Indians in the California interior interacted with Spanish missionaries, mission refugees, Mexicans, and American settlers. Relegated primarily to the coast, neither the Spanish nor the Mexicans successfully colonized the interior tribes of California— only the American settler colonials ultimately would cleanse them from the land. Following the revolt from Spain, Mexican rancheros broke up the mission system and took control of coastal California. The dominant rancheros during the period in which Mexico laid claim to California (1821–1846), men such as Mariano Guadalupe Villejo, “emerged both wealthy and popular after he and his followers attacked and murdered over 200 Wappos in 1834.” Indigenous people on the coast, both men and women, worked for the rancheros while Indians from the interior plagued the Mexicans with raids in which they stole stock, especially horses.43
As in northern Mexico, persistent Indian raids weakened the rancheros and eventually made their land ripe for the American taking in the Mexican War. In 1846, as the United States launched its invasion of the Mexican territory, some Indians joined with the Americans to oust the despised Mexicans. In 1847, the assistance of indigenous allies helped force the Hispanics to surrender Los Angeles. Peace with Americans was not the norm, however, as traders and trappers had gradually infiltrated the interior regions of California, coming into violent conflict with indigenous people.44
The California gold rush brought a surge of settler colonialism followed by waves of indiscriminate killing. In 1851 the first civilian governor of California, Peter Burnett, sanctioned “a war of extermination … until the Indian race becomes extinct.” The “white” population of California catapulted from 92,000 in 1851 to 380,000 by 1860. The gold rush ebbed but California’s bountiful agricultural land lay before the hordes of new migrants like ripened fruit. As a result, “the living space for Indians on the margins of white society steadily eroded.” Settlers labeled the indigenous people “Diggers,” apparently because some of the tribes collected acorns to eat and grind into flour. The pejorative term reflected a perception of the indigenous Californians as animal-like untermenschen—”about the lowest specimens of humanity found on earth,” as one settler put it—thus rationalizing campaigns of extermination.45