American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  A romantic mythology centering on Chief Joseph arose in the wake of the long chase. Following his capture in 1877 Chief Joseph told Miles, “From where the sun now stands I will fight no more.” The matter-of-fact statement underwent a culturally induced conversion, emerging in the poetic lexicon of the noble savage as, “I shall fight no more forever.” Like Pontiac, Tecumseh, Black Hawk, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Cochise, among others, Joseph—described as a “light colored Indian” and a “red Napoleon”—came to embody the brave and tragic but also inevitable submission of the proud Indian to a more advanced civilization. “The story of native peoples was distilled into an account about one leader selected by Anglo-Americans to serve as the tragic figure of the noble savage attempting to hold onto ‘primitive’ ways of life and native land,” Robert McCoy explains. The tragic epic offered drama, pathos—and the inevitability of the triumph of civilization over the Vanishing American. In 1879 Chief Joseph did say something profound, however, when he observed, “Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we shall have no more wars.”93

  Reminiscent of the Navaho, Chief Joseph never gave up on returning to his homeland. The famous chief shrewdly played into the ambivalent American sentiment when he declared, likely falsely, that he had converted to Christianity. This declaration, along with his acceptance of the mantle of noble savage chieftain, enabled “Joseph” to negotiate in 1885 his return along with 268 followers from Kansas to a reservation in Idaho.94

  Like the Nez Perce, the Modoc Indians of extreme southern Oregon violently resisted settler colonialism. Led by Captain Jack (Kintpuash), the Modoc were an offshoot of the Klamath tribe that had been forced to sign over some 21 million acres of prime land in Oregon in an 1864 treaty. The Modoc, too, had consented to give up their land in the Lost River Valley but that treaty lay dormant in Washington D.C. With the issue thus unresolved, high tensions, Indian raids as well as killings of settlers, and the determination of Americans to remove them brought on the war. Some 50 Modoc dug in to a series of naturally fortified lava beds across the border in California and fended off a much larger invasion force of Army regulars and volunteers. The Modoc killed more than 80 Americans while suffering few casualties of their own. “That was the most terrible night ever experienced by me,” recalled a US cavalryman.95

  The Modoc agreed to a peace parley but when the Americans arrived on April 11, 1873, Captain Jack perfidiously executed General Edward Canby on the spot. Following the murder of the unarmed US Army general along with a Methodist minister, both under a flag of truce, the Army drove the Indians out and executed Captain Jack, among others. The Army removed other Modoc to Oklahoma, which by then was the well-established “dumping ground for unwanted Indians.”96

  The US Army removed indigenous survivors of the cleansing campaigns in the Pacific Northwest, but they found little hope for meaningful life on the undesirable reservation land. Moreover, “Soldiers continued the rape and abuse of Native women that had been perpetrated by colonials before removal of the Indians.” The Klamath received a reservation within the range of their former homelands in the 1864 treaty, but they and other tribes lost the bulk of their reservations in subsequent land seizures by settlers.97 In 1878 when hundreds of Bannocks and Paiutes broke out of their treaty lands in Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada, the Army tracked them down and killed scores of Indians. Armed sweeps across the Northwest pursued the “renegade” and “mongrel” Indians, but the so-called Sheepeaters, actually Bannocks, Shoshone, and Weiser, held out in the high mountains that could only be accessed by invaders during a few months of the year. In the summer of 1879, the army tracked down these Indians as well and forced them onto reservations.98

  To the east in the Montana territory, the Blackfeet Indians gained a reputation for indiscriminate violence, but this was mainly in response to provocations by the American trappers. They exaggerated Blackfeet violence in an effort “to induce the federal government to intervene militarily to make the region safe for American trappers and traders.” By mid-century, the Blackfeet suffered from disease, relentless American in-migration, and widespread addiction to “the white man’s water.”99

  On January 23, 1870, as President Grant trumpeted his “peace policy” back in Washington, D.C., the US Army carried out the “Massacre on the Marias,” attacking a peaceful village and killing 173 Blackfeet, including 90 women and 50 children under the age of 12. The soldiers also slaughtered more than 300 horses. A New York Times account condemned the “wholesale slaughter of women and children,” as only 15 of the dead were fighting aged men of ages 12–37. But as John Ewers notes, “The white settlers in Montana, who had called repeatedly for military aid to put an end to Blackfoot depredations, vigorously approved the army’s action.” Sherman and Sheridan authorized and defended the massacre, which they later blamed on the victims even though the Blackfeet had been peacefully encamped and not hostile. “If a village is attacked, and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldier,” Sheridan explained, “but with the people whose crimes necessitate the attack.”100

  The Great Sioux Wars

  One of the most formidable of the Western Indian tribes, the bands collectively lumped as the Sioux, carried out a series of trauma-inducing attacks on the Americans before they could be subdued. During the antebellum era in Minnesota (where the Sioux had been driven by the Ojibwa), Little Crow (Thaoyate Duta), leader of the Santee Sioux, strove for accommodation with the in-flooding settlers. By the Civil War, however, the Santee bitterly resented their dispossession and depressed living conditions on their Minnesota reservation. With their game depleted, the Indians neared starvation as the Americans devoted their resources to the Civil War rather than meeting their treaty obligations to provide for the reservation Indians.

  In August 1862, the Santee launched a Nat Turner-like bloody assault, as the Indians went farm-to-farm slaughtering mostly German immigrant families in what became the largest Indian massacre of settlers in American history. Before the Army could rein in the rampage, 400–600 settlers and some 140 soldiers had been killed. In the wake of the traumatic massacre, even prominent Minnesota women and other former advocates of benevolence toward Indians now insisted on their removal or extermination. With the enraged Minnesotans demanding vengeance, authorities sentenced 303 Indians to death for the uprising. After conducting a review of the proceedings Lincoln reduced the number to 38 executions, including Little Crow despite his initial opposition to the genocidal assaults. On the day after Christmas in 1862, the Army hanged the indigenes in the largest mass execution in US history.101 US military expeditions “rampaged across the northern plains in the wake of the 1862 Minnesota Sioux uprising” as “soldiers and eager volunteers” carried out “indiscriminate actions” and drove the northern Missouri tribes further west.102

  The western Sioux flourished on the upper Great Plains, often at the expense of other tribes upon whom they ruthlessly predated, including the Pawnee, Crow, and Kiowa. Tensions between the Sioux and the Americans surfaced from the outset, as in 1804 Meriwether Lewis informed the Sioux—the “vilest miscreants of the savage race”—that their great father in Washington meant to “distroy” them if they resisted eventual US rule. By the 1840s, American settlers flowing across the Oregon Trail complained of aggressive Sioux bands demanding tolls for passing through colonial space. The Sioux proved willing to conduct diplomacy, however, and signed on to the pivotal Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 in which several tribes promised safety to migrants in return for annuities.103

  Relentless settler colonial migration, fort, road, and railroad building, gold mining, and squatting doomed diplomacy with the Sioux and led to war on the upper Plains. In August 1854, a Sioux band killed 30 men at a trading post near Fort Laramie after being confronted by John L. Grattan, “a hotheaded young lieutenant” who had vowed to rid the Plains of Indians. This clash kicked off the so-called First Sioux War, which culminated in the slaughter in 1855 of at least
86 Sioux, more than half women and children, at Blue Water Creek near the Platte River in contemporary Nebraska. Some 70 women and children were taken captive after the Army assault led by General William S. Harney, who had been campaigning against Indians since the Black Hawk War in 1832.104

  The Army began to surround the Sioux with forts, precipitating another clash in December 1866 when Captain William Fetterman led a force of 80 men out of Fort Phil Kearney in the Powder River country. They fell directly into a trap set by the young militant Oglala Sioux Crazy Horse (Tashunka Witko), whose relatives had been killed by Americans. The Indians proceeded to wipe out and mutilate the entire US force in the “Fetterman Massacre.” Demonizing ambivalent “Indian lovers” for their peaceful approach to the tribes, a livid Sherman demanded a war waged with “vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” Despite this characteristic explosion of rage from Sherman, Indian agent William Armstrong acknowledged, “There is no doubt that the whites have committed greater depredations on those Indians than the Indians have on the whites.”105

  With an extirpative war on the horizon, the Oglala under Red Cloud (Makhpiyaluta) called for a diplomatic solution. In April 1868, with the “peace policy” forces mobilizing in Washington, the United States agreed to a second Fort Laramie Treaty under which it guaranteed the Sioux that they could keep in perpetuity the western half of present-day state of South Dakota, including the sacred Black Hills, as the Great Sioux Reservation. The Indians would also be allowed to roam and hunt in “un-ceded Indian territory” in the Powder River region further to the west, which was to be closed to Americans. The ongoing settler colonialism, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, and the US desire to construct the Northern Pacific Railroad across the Sioux land soon made a mockery of the second Fort Laramie accord. As the United States reneged on its treaty obligations, Sheridan in 1874 dispatched Custer with a huge expeditionary force to confirm the existence of the gold and consider a site for another fort.106

  Assisting Custer were the Crow Indians, well known for their “tireless devotion to martial glory” and “warrior societies.” This service would help the Crow to hang onto a reservation in the eastern Montana flatlands, though the Army did remove them from their homelands in the mountain valleys of western Montana. For decades, conflict “over access to the buffalo herds, rivalries over trade and simple revenge fueled round after round of attack and counterattack” among the Crow and Sioux as well as the Blackfeet, Shoshone, Assiniboine, and Cree. The Crow had a special loathing for the Sioux, who had over the years attacked and killed masses of Crow and destroyed their lodges. Though willing to serve in a martial capacity, especially against the Sioux, efforts to “civilize” the Crow failed completely. The Crows “hate the white man’s language and the white man’s mode of life,” Armstrong reported.107

  Some of the Crows tried to warn Custer about the trap awaiting him, but while the dashing Civil War hero would not listen. He viewed the savages as superb horsemen adept at hit-and-run raids, he judged them ultimately lacking in the discipline and cohesion needed to field an effective army in battle. Conventional wisdom held that primitive Indians were incapable of organizing large enough fighting forces to defeat a US Army contingent of any size. Even after the Lakota chief Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake) had shown his “strong medicine” by defeating Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud in mid-June 1876, Americans could not conceive that a disaster like the Greasy Grass (Little Big Horn) was even a remote possibility.108 The popular and self-promoting Custer, well known for his long blond hair, heroics at Gettysburg, as well as the Washita attack, had a reputation for aggressiveness in battle. Ignoring the warnings of his Crow scouts, Custer divided his forces and plunged into the fatal battle. On June 25 the amassed army of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors overwhelmed the Seventh Cavalry, killing 268 in all and wounding 55 more. The Indians took scalps and mutilated the bodies before leaving the field in complete triumph.109

  As with the Indians’ decisive victory over General St. Clair in 1791, it was only a matter of time until the Americans—traumatized by the defeat that marred the Centennial celebration—regrouped with a boomerang of violent retribution. Miles adopted a strategy of relentless pursuit and harassment to wear down the Sioux. “Keep them constantly on the move … allow them no rest,” he advised, hence the Indians would be unable to hunt or provide for themselves. Over time even the most militant Sioux succumbed to “the army’s potential to inflict catastrophic damage combined with unreliable food supplies.”110

  Crazy Horse, who had joined Sitting Bull in defeating the Seventh Cavalry, would not turn himself in until he received a promise of being granted his own reservation on the Tongue River. Crook described Crazy Horse as “fascinating … the finest looking Indian I ever saw … his face and figure were as clear-cut and classical as a bronze statue of a Greek god. When he moved, he was as lithe and graceful as a panther, and on the warpath, he was as bold as a lion, and as cruel and bloodthirsty as a Bengal tiger.” Awe-inspiring sentiments notwithstanding, Crook broke his promise of providing reservation land to Crazy Horse, who was then stabbed to death when he attempted to leave confinement.111

  Red Cloud came to regret his ambivalence and the willingness he had displayed, often in the face of sharp criticism from other Indians, to conduct diplomacy with the Americans. “They made us many promises,” Red Cloud acknowledged, “more than I can remember, but they never kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.”112

  Genocidal “Reform” Efforts in the Nineteenth Century

  Ambivalent reform efforts throughout the nineteenth century were fundamentally ethnocentric and genocidal, as they functioned to destroy the Indian way of life. Reformers perceiving themselves as humanitarians sought to “civilize” Indians through assimilation, education, and conversion to Christianity. However, there was nothing humanitarian about the means to the end of civilization, as the dispossession, child removal, and assimilation programs used compulsion and the threat of starvation to force compliance.113

  Often driven by evangelical Protestantism, many Americans lamented the “passing” of the Indian and the cruel treatment to which indigenous people had been subjected. Helen Hunt Jackson emphasized the broken treaties and broken promises toward Indian peoples amounting to a “century of dishonor,” as she entitled her 1881 bestseller. Others condemned widespread corruption and inefficiency in the government’s administration of Indian affairs. In 1878, an investigation ordered by Secretary of the Interior Karl Schurz concluded that the Indian Bureau functioned as “simply a license to cheat and swindle the Indian in the name of the United States.” General Miles, a national hero in “winning the West,” agreed that the time had come to “raise them from the darkness of barbarism to the light of civilization.”114

  Such humanitarian sentiments and lamentations failed to redirect the fundamental policies of dispossession and cultural genocide. The Seneca Ely Parker pursued a cautiously limited agenda as Grant’s commissioner of Indian affairs, one focused on treaty enforcement and a methodical approach to assimilation. He achieved neither. The genuinely reformist Indian Rights Association also failed to sway Gilded Age policymakers.115

  The US Congress, responsive to the settlers, often failed to ratify treaties and to authorize funds for payment of promised annuities. The Congress was often at odds with the executive or otherwise divided in the postbellum era but, moreover, “They saw appropriations not as payments for massive land cessions,” Jacki Rand points out, “but as handouts to a broken people they no longer needed to fear or respect.” Rather than the incremental program suggested by Parker, “a policy agenda founded upon Indian confinement moved forward with brash intensity.” The Office of Indian Affairs pursued “a program of coercive assimilation coupled with dispossession” until the Indian New Deal of the 1930s.116

  Throughout American history myriad treaties with Indians contained provisions fo
r education to instill “civilization,” provisions that assuaged guilt and disavowed the colonizing act. Missionaries took the forefront of ethnocentric efforts to Christianize and acculturate Indians. Established in 1810, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions promoted Christianizing and civilizing efforts. From 1837 to 1893, the Presbyterian Church’s Board of Foreign Missions sent more than 450 missionaries to live among 19 tribes. In 1819, Congress passed the Indian Civilization Act to promote Indian education to help prevent their “decline and final extinction” while “introducing among them the habits and arts and civilization.”117

  As in colonial Australia, the United States forcibly removed Indian children from their homes and communities and placed them in reeducation camps. Like massacres and warfare, child removal advanced the settler colonial project. “Indigenous child removal,” Margaret Jacobs explains, “constituted another crucial way to eliminate indigenous people, both in a cultural and a biological sense.”118 Missionaries in the trans-Mississippi West advocated removing children who would otherwise be “constantly under the supervision of their Heathen parents,” as one put it. Compulsory Indian education became an important tool for Schurz, charged by President Rutherford B. Hayes to reform the Indian Bureau in the wake of the corruption scandals of the Grant Administration. These proselytizing Christians received support from Hayes, who avowed, “The children being removed from the idle and corrupting habits of savage homes are more easily led to adopt the customs of civilized life.”

  The federal government sometimes withheld rations and annuities to force compliance with the child removal program. When the Hopi resisted sending their children to a boarding school in Arizona, the government enforced a quota system on the tribe. By 1890, some 12,000 children from the trans-Mississippi tribes were undergoing forced reeducation.119