A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
Page 68
The Indians’ Next-to-the-Last Stand
Since colonial times, interactions between whites and Indians had followed a remarkably similar pattern, regardless of the region in which those interactions took place. Upon first contact Indians and non-Indians were often peaceful toward one another and made many important cross-cultural exchanges—food, language, religion, medicine, military techniques, and material culture (tools, weapons, clothing, and so forth). However, this initial peace was always followed by conflict over land, which would lead to a land treaty and then more misunderstanding and anger, and eventually a war, which always ended in Indian defeat. This, in turn, resulted in either the extermination or expulsion (farther West) of native Indian peoples. By the time of the Civil War, nearly all Indians east of the Mississippi were either dead, buttoned up on small reservations, or pushed westward, where this same cycle of relations had started anew.
Indians of the trans-Mississippi West were diverse regional groups inhabiting the Plains, Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific coast. Relocated tribes—eastern Indians such as the Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Shawnee, and Miami—occupied tracts of land directly west of the Mississippi or in the Oklahoma Indian Territory. Along the Pacific shore, from Alaska to northern California, coastal Indians (Puyallup, Makah, Tlingit, Nisqualli, Chinook, and so on) lived in abundance and created sophisticated art, architecture, religion, and material culture. In the southwestern mountains, Hopi and Navajo herded livestock and farmed corn; neighboring Apache hunted and gathered on horseback like the vast majority of Columbia Plateau (Yakama, Spokane, and Nez Percé) and Great Plains Indians. The Great Plains Indians—located in between the relocated Indians and West Coast, Plateau, and mountain tribes—constituted the most formidable barrier to white settlement.
At one time, Plains Indians had been farmers. Introduction of the horse by Europeans literally transformed the world of the Plains tribes. Once they had the horse, hunting buffalo became much easier, turning the Indians into nomads who roamed the prairie in search of the herds.37 These herds, by any assessment, were vast at the time the first whites encountered them. Colonel Richard Dodge wrote in 1871 that “the whole country appeared one mass of buffalo,” an observation similar to that by Thomas Farnham in 1839 on the Santa Fe Trail, when he watched a single herd cross his line of sight for three days.38 To say that the animals covered the interior of America is not much of an exaggeration. They did not last long, however.
Even before the introduction of the horse, Indians had hunted bison, though not nearly as effectively. They tracked herds on foot, often setting fire to the grasslands in a massive box, surrounding a herd, except for a small opening through which the panicked animals ran—and were slaughtered by the hundreds.
Frequently, though not universally, Indians destroyed entire herds, using fire or running them off cliffs. One Indian spiritual belief held that if a single animal escaped, it would warn all other animals in the region; and other Indian concepts of animals viewed the animal population as essentially infinite, supplied by the gods.39 Ecohistorians agree that although hunting by the Plains Indians alone did not threaten the bison with extinction, when combined with other natural factors, including fire and predators, Indian hunting may have put the buffalo on the road to extinction over time, regardless of the subsequent devastating impact of white hunters.40
The fatal weakness of the Plains nomads regarding the buffalo was expressed by traveler John McDougall when he wrote of the Blackfeet in 1865, “Without the buffalo they would be helpless, and yet the whole nation did not own one.”41 The crucial point is that the Indians did not herd and breed the very animal they depended on. No system of surplus accumulation existed. Since the entire source of wealth could rot and degrade, none could exist for long. Moreover, the nomadic life made it impossible to haul much baggage, and therefore personal property could not be accumulated. This led fur trader Edwin Denig to conclude that this deficiency prevented the Plains nomads from storing provisions and made them utterly dependent on European trade goods.42
A great ecomyth has appeared, however, about the Indians and their relationship with the buffalo, wherein Indians were portrayed as the first true ecologists and environmentalists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Traveler after traveler reported seeing herds of rotting carcasses in the sun, often with only a hump or tongue gone. While the bison was, as Tom McHugh claimed, “a tribal department store,” with horns used for arrows, intestines for containers, skins and hides for teepee coverings and shields, and muscle for ropes, it is misleading to suggest that Indians did not wantonly slaughter buffalo at times.43 Father Pierre De Smet observed an Assiniboin hunt in which two thousand to three thousand Indians surrounded an entire herd of six hundred bison and killed every one. Aside from their own deprivation—which they could only notice when it was too late to prevent—the Indians had no way of estimating or tracking the size and health of the herds, and even if they could, nomadic lifestyle “made it difficult to enforce the mandates against waste.”44
It is also meaningless to employ terms like ecological imperialism to describe the interaction of the Europeans and the Indians. People of different races and ethnic backgrounds had come into contact with each other globally for centuries, from the Chinese in Southeast Asia to the Mongols in Europe to the Arabs in Africa. Seeds, germs, animals, viruses—all have interacted incessantly around the world for eons. (Even the European honeybee had settled as far west as St. Louis by the early 1700s.) To invoke such language is an attempt to reattach blame to Columbus and capitalism after anthropologists and historians have discovered that North American Indians had choices in how their world was shaped, and made no greater share of right—or wrong—choices than the new arrivals from Europe.45
Still, it is unarguable that once a market for buffalo hides, bones, and other parts developed, it paid white hunters to shoot every buffalo in sight, which they tended to do. By 1900 fewer than a couple of thousand buffalo remained, at which point the government sought to protect them on federal lands, such as Yellowstone National Park, one of the first main refuges.
Whatever the numbers, the elimination of the buffalo not only nearly exterminated a species, but it also further diminished the Plains Indians’ ability to sustain themselves and pushed them into a lifestyle that made them much more likely to come into conflict with whites. Having become nomads following the herds—as opposed to landowners working farms—whatever concepts of property rights they had held vanished. So too disappeared any need for them to respect white property rights, no matter how questionably gained. After the nomadic culture overtook Plains Indian life, a new culture of hunting with an emphasis on weapons naturally infused their society.
Ironically, the nomadic lifestyle at the same time protected the Plains tribes from diseases that ravaged more stationary eastern Indian tribes, although a few, such as the Assiniboin, picked up smallpox and other diseases in neighboring villages and carried them home. It took several encounters with European diseases before the Indians discovered that humans transmitted them. But by about 1800, the “village” Indians had been decimated by diseases, whereas the nomadic tribes were relatively untouched. Thus, not only had the transformation of Indian society by bison hunting actually saved many of the Indians from an early death, but some of the techniques they practiced on the buffalo—riding and shooting, maneuvering, teamwork—also proved valuable in a challenge of a different sort: their wars against the American soldiers.
In battle, these Plains Indians could be fierce warriors. They fought while galloping at full speed, dropping and rising at will and using their horses as shields. This combination of phenomenal horsemanship and skilled marksmanship (with bow, spear, and repeating carbine rifle) proved deadly. Ultimately, the U.S. government would expend incredible resources—$1 million and 25 U.S. soldiers—for each one of these fierce, courageous people killed, merely exposing the complex and often contradictory problems inherent in federal Indian policy.46
Philosophically, American policy makers were divided into camps of preservationists, exterminationists, and assimilationists, with the latter two dominating policy debates. Preservationists such as Helen Hunt Jackson, author of Century of Dishonor (1885), were idealists who proposed simply leaving the Indians alone and free to roam the Plains and continue their hunting and gathering lifestyle.47 Such romantics, of course, ignored violent Indian conquest and the documented expansion of such empires as the Lakota Sioux, who brutally smashed all opposition on the Great Plains.48
Equally unrealistic and less humane, intolerant exterminationists argued that preservation and assimilation were both impossible. Indians could never adjust to modernity, said exterminationists; they had to stand aside for progress because their day was done. According to this essentially racist view, any Indians who violently resisted reservation confinement should be killed, a sentiment that supposedly originated with General Philip Sheridan, who had allegedly said, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” In fact, Sheridan, as commander of the Division of the Missouri, supervised many reservations, and thought it important to the protection of the Indians to keep them on the agency lands, lest the whites kill them.49 Reality was that the closer one got to the frontier, the more likely one was to see such sentiments expressed. Cleanse the Plains, roared the Nebraska City Press, and “exterminate the whole fraternity of redskins,” whereas the Montana Post called notions of “civilizing” the Indians “sickly sentimentalism [that] should be consigned to novel writers….”50 If the hostiles did not end their barbarities immediately, “wipe them out,” the paper intoned.
Like his predecessor at the Division of the Missouri, General William Tecumseh Sherman, Sheridan had no qualms about ruthlessly punishing Indians who strayed off the reservation to commit atrocities, and he renewed efforts to enforce confinement of tribes on reservations.51 Certainly many soldiers, who had lost comrades in battles with the Sioux or Cheyenne, had no mercy for the Indian: “They must be hunted like wolves,” Brigadier General Patrick Conner told Major General Grenville Dodge.52
The third group, the assimilationists, however, had a realistic view that industrialization and progress made the preservationist ideal impossible, but any effort to exterminate the natives was not only uncivilized and un-Christian, but also unconstitutional. Assimilationists argued that Indians must be put on reservations and cured of their nomadic ways for their own protection. The tribes had to learn English, embrace Christianity, and adopt the farming and ranching techniques of whites in the hope that they or their children might one day become working men and women in mainstream American civilization. This reservation system was the only “alternative to extinction,” but it destroyed Indian culture as effectively as any military campaign, as critics rightly charged.53 A glaring weakness in the assimilationist position lay in the fact that many of the so-called civilized tribes had already been forced off their lands anyway, regardless of their level of civilization.
While the assimilationist views finally prevailed, exterminationist voices remained loud in the halls of Congress, and at times federal strategy for dealing with the Indians incorporated all three viewpoints. Almost everyone, Indian and white alike, would have agreed that the approach to the Indians was confusing and contradictory. “Our whole Indian policy,” wrote the editor of The Nation magazine in 1865, “is a system of mismanagement, and in many parts one of gigantic abuse.”54 In many ways, that policy only reflected the irreconcilable differences among these three strategies for dealing with the Native Americans. And although the task of moving nomadic, warlike Indian people onto reservations without incident was, in retrospect, nearly impossible, the government nevertheless commited avoidable errors.
At the root of the problems with establishing any coherent Indian policy lay a conflict of interest between the two federal agencies authorized to deal with the tribes—the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the U.S. Army. The BIA reported to Congress, drafted Indian policy, and staffed the Indian reservation bureaucracy; the BIA planned for, governed, fed, clothed, medicated, and educated the nomads of the Plains. Created in 1824 as the Indian Bureau of the Department of War, Congress moved the agency to the newly created Interior Department in 1849. Civilian departments, which relied far less on merit than the military, by their nature spawned a thoroughgoing corruption. Christian denominations administered some agencies under the Grant Administration (and certainly they were not free from corruption either), but many other reservations landed in the hands of political hacks with get-rich-quick schemes to defraud the natives. The illegal sale of supplies, blankets, and food designated for the Indians not only deprived the tribes of necessities, but also provoked them to aggression that otherwise might have been prevented.
The other federal agency—the U.S. Army—was charged with rounding up the Indians, relocating them to their respective reservations, and keeping them there if they tried to leave.55 Thus the army emerged as the enforcement arm of BIA policy, which was a bad arrangement under any circumstance. Frontier military forces were heavy on cavalry and infantry, and light on artillery, as dictated by the fighting style of their enemy. Other nontraditional elements soon characterized the frontier military, including scout units of Crow and other Indians, often dressed in uniform, assigned to every command. Then there were the Buffalo Soldiers, companies of African American troops whom the Indians thought had hair like bison. Stationed with the Tenth Cavalry and other regiments, the black soldiers greatly troubled the Indians, although the most interrogators could learn from Native American captives was that “Buffalo soldier no good, heap bad medicine.”56
Despite its differences from previous armies, the U.S. Army on the frontier still had a simple mission: to engage and destroy any enemies of the United States. Fighting against the Western way of war, the natives could not win. The Native American style of war resembled the failed traditions of the Muslims at Tours or the Egyptians at the Battle of the Pyramids. It featured hit-and-run tactics, individual melee combat, personal courage in order to attain battlefield honor (as opposed to unit cohesion), and largely unsynchronized attacks.
Since most army commanders were in the exterminationist camp and most of the BIA officers espoused assimilation, there was bound to be confusion and violence. Sherman described the disconcerting tension exacted on the Indians by the policies as a “double process of peace within their reservation and war without.”57 Even before the conclusion of the Civil War, this “double process” began to take shape on the Great Plains, and it would conclude with some of the most shocking U.S. Cavalry defeats in the entire frontier period.
Sand Creek and Yellow Hair
Four major Indian wars ended once and for all the cycle of death that had characterized white-Indian contact for more than 250 years. The first, from 1864 to 1865, occurred when Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors fiercely battled U.S. troops in Colorado. During the summer of 1864, Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle led assaults on white miners, farm settlers, and travelers, but, weary of fighting, he surrendered in November. Black Kettle accepted a tribal land outside Pueblo, Colorado, and raised an American flag outside his tent, only to see his men, women, and children massacred by drunken Colorado militiamen (not U.S. regulars) in a sneak attack on November twenty-eighth at Sand Creek. One witness later testified that in this infamous Sand Creek massacre, Indians “were scalped…their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns [and] mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.”58 Fighting resumed until the fall of 1865, when again the Cheyenne agreed to go to a permanent reservation.
Farther north the mighty Lakota Sioux also resisted white incursions. Their struggle began in 1862–63 in Minnesota, a theater of the war that ended when U.S. Army General John Pope achieved victory and hanged 38 Sioux warriors as punishment. Farther west, in 1866, Lieutenant Colonel William J. Fetterman, who had once boasted that he could “ride through the whole Sioux nation
with 80 men,” was leading a detachment of 80 men (ironically) to the relief of a wood-gathering train when a party of Oglala Sioux led by Red Cloud, and including a young warrior named Crazy Horse, annihilated his command in a precursor to the Custer massacre.59 To anyone paying attention, the signs at the Fetterman debacle were ominous: tribes that had scarcely gotten along in the past and that controlled different regions of the Plains—Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho—had simultaneously begun to resist, and to do so over vast expanses of territory. Yet during the twenty-minute Fetterman slaughter, two civilians wielding 16-shot Henry repeaters accounted for dozens of Sioux casualties. Had the Sioux appreciated the lethality of rapid-fire weapons, they would have known that even a moderate advantage in numbers would not be sufficient against similarly armed well-disciplined bluecoats.
Two years after the destruction of the Fetterman party, Sioux attacked engineers constructing a road to Fort Bozeman, in Montana. Red Cloud, by then a leading Sioux warrior, had led the incursions, but army counterattacks and subsequent promises to cease construction of the road persuaded him to retire to a Sioux reservation in the Dakotas. Following further incidents of corruption at the reservation agency, where delay in the delivery of food and supplies further antagonized the Sioux, they again bolted the reservation and renewed hostilities. By that time, a more or less constant state of war existed on the Plains, with one tribe or another constantly menacing, or being menaced by, the army. From 1868 to 1874 in the Southwest, Kiowa, Commanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne all engaged in a series of battles against military units. Despite the number of engagements, Indians still had failed to act in concert on a large scale, allowing the army to achieve tactical superiority and feeding its overconfidence.