In 1822 President Monroe appointed Clark to be the superintendent of Indian affairs in St. Louis, with responsibility for a vast array of tribes on the upper Mississippi and Missouri. At the Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825, Clark and Lewis Cass, an arch-advocate of Indian removal, negotiated over sixteen days with one thousand Sioux, Sauk and Fox, Menominee, Iowa, Winnebago, and some Ottawa, Potawotami, and Ojibwe Indians to safeguard trade and settlement in the region west of the Great Lakes by reducing conflict and establishing boundaries between the tribes. Clark and Cass associated intertribal warfare with a lack of well-defined territorial boundaries, but peace in Indian country depended on maintaining or mending relationships between people rather than drawing lines to separate them.23 Meanwhile, Brigadier General Henry Atkinson and Clark’s Indian agent, Benjamin Fallon, accompanied by almost five hundred troops as a demonstration of American power, retraced the route followed by Lewis and Clark in order to establish treaty relations with the nations of the upper Missouri. In the summer and fall of 1825 they met with the Arikaras, Mandans, various bands of Sioux, Cheyennes, Crows, Otos and Missouris, Pawnees, and Omahas. They presented them with identical prewritten treaties in which the tribes acknowledged the sovereignty of the United States, placed themselves under American protection and criminal jurisdiction, and agreed to American trade regulations. The Indians took the trade goods Atkinson and Fallon offered and signed the treaties.24
Increasingly, as Americans intensified the pressures on Indian peoples to remove from their coveted homelands in the East, Clark applied his expertise and experience to supervising the exodus of displaced peoples and negotiating a string of treaties with the Osages (again), Kansas, Pawnees, Poncas, and other prairie tribes, acquiring title to their lands in preparation for the influx of exiles. In some cases, he negotiated removal treaties with tribes who had removed before. He presided over the transfer of millions of acres of Indian lands and signed thirty-seven separate treaties with Indian nations, about one-tenth of all the Indian treaties the United States had made. “No government official signed more treaties than Clark,” concludes one scholar of his Indian diplomacy.25
Clark’s diplomacy had faltered when he encountered the Brulé Sioux in 1804, but he learned well the business of doing business in Indian country. In 1829, he and Cass drew up regulations and guidelines for dealing with Natives. “When they assemble to deliberate upon their public affairs, they are pure democracies, in which every one claims an equal right to speak and vote,” they noted. “The public deliberations, however, are usually conducted by the elderly men, but the young men or warriors exercise the real controlling influence. No measure can safely be adopted, without their concurrence.” That was the reason, said Cass and Clark, “why so many signatures are usually appended to our Indian treaties.”26
Confronted with the invasion of Indians from the East and the increasing presence of Americans, Indians on the prairies and Plains implemented new diplomatic initiatives and adjusted their foreign policies as they jostled for position and competed for trade networks and hunting territories in contests for diminishing resources. The Crows, increasingly besieged in their southern Montana homelands by more powerful enemies, generally maintained amicable relations with the Nez Perces and Flatheads to their west, who supplied them with horses, but they found their major ally in the new and growing power on the Plains. For Atkinson and Fallon, the treaty they made with the Crows in 1825 established American supremacy; for the Crows, it initiated an alliance that would help them survive their struggles against the Lakotas and Cheyennes.27
The Cheyennes, too, forged new alliances. They allied with the Arapahos and the Lakotas but Cheyennes who migrated south of the Platte River clashed increasingly with Comanches, Kiowas, and Plains Apaches who dominated the southern Plains and sometimes ranged north of the Arkansas River to hunt. But pressed by eastern Indians and Texans in the south, the Kiowas and Comanches did not need to be fighting Cheyennes in the Arkansas Valley. After some tentative peace feelers between the tribes, the Cheyennes and Arapahos and the Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches agreed to meet on the Arkansas River near Bent’s Fort. “There we will make a strong friendship which shall last forever,” declared the Kiowa chief Little Mountain. “We will give you horses, and you shall give us presents.” The Cheyennes camped north of the river, and the Kiowas stayed on the south bank. They agreed to share the upper Arkansas Valley and engaged in an elaborate ritual exchange of gifts that not only signaled and confirmed the peace but also established the trade in desired items that made the new alliance economically beneficial to both parties. The horse-rich Kiowas gave horses; the Kiowa chief Satank was said to give away 250 head. The Cheyennes, middlemen between the central Plains and the great trade rendezvous at the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara villages on the upper Missouri, gave guns and manufactured goods. The Cheyennes needed more horses, both for themselves and for trade for more goods. They called the site of the peace agreement “Giving Presents to One Another Across the River.” As Little Mountain had foretold, the Great Peace of 1840 lasted forever.28
Peace with tribes to their north freed the Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches to escalate their incursions south of the Rio Grande. Their attacks drove away settlers, left whole areas devastated, generated political instability, and rendered Mexico’s northern provinces ripe for conquest by American armies in the war of 1846–48.29 The Kiowas and Comanches had waged a life-and-death struggle with Texans since Governor Mirabeau B. Lamar initiated a policy of Indian extermination in the late 1830s.30 But after New Mexico and Texas were incorporated into the United States in the 1840s, the US government determined to stamp out attacks on what were now American citizens and American property.
At the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States took from Mexico more than half a million square miles of territory, including present-day California, most of Arizona and New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and part of Colorado, and it secured Mexican recognition of the independence and annexation of Texas. Invoking their Manifest Destiny (a term coined in 1845) to occupy the continent, Americans were determined to extend the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the inferior races inhabiting the West.31 That meant dispossessing and radically changing the lifestyles of thousands of Natives over huge stretches of the continent. According to the historian Francis Paul Prucha, “the government conceived of no way to deal with the new problems except by the traditional method of formal treaties.”32
Removal treaties promised Indian exiles new homes in the West that would be theirs forever. The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 designated “Indian country” as a permanent reserve stretching the length of the eastern Plains from the headwaters of the Missouri River to the Red River in Texas, where indigenous and immigrant Indian peoples would inhabit lands American settlers did not yet need and where traders and other non-Indians could enter only with government permission. But the government’s idea of a safe haven where Indians could lead better lives was illusory from the start and inhabitants of Indian country were immediately under pressure. The acquisition of valuable new territories in the Far West sent emigrants teeming to the gold fields of California and the rich valleys of Oregon, and the government needed to ensure their safe passage and to establish transportation links across Indian lands. The old policy of removing Indians before an advancing tide of white settlement and maintaining a boundary separating Indians and whites was no longer feasible; curbing westward migration was neither feasible nor desirable. Instead of constituting “a permanent Indian frontier,” Indian country in the West was to be broken up into a series of separate reservations. Indian people would relocate to reservations to minimize conflict with whites and undergo the transformation to a new way of life that was their only alternative to extinction.33
The Indian Office, later known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was established in 1824 to consolidate the administration of Indian relations. In 1832, Congress authorized the president to appoint, with Senate approval, a
commissioner of Indian affairs who operated under the direction of the secretary of war. To deal with the increase in Indian relations that came with the massive increase in territory, President Polk asked Congress for more Indian agents. Congress did not grant the request but in 1849 it transferred the management of Indian affairs from the War Department to the newly created Department of the Interior, on the assumption that the civilian branch would do better than the military in promoting the work of civilizing Indians. The Indian Office exercised growing influence in shaping Indian policy and administering the reservations. The United States continued to make treaties—more than one hundred between 1850 and 1868—but the outcome of those treaties was never in doubt. Power trumped protocol as American commissioners secured agreements that established boundaries, removed obstacles to American expansion, and opened Indian lands to logging, mining, farming, and ranching. Treaties whose sole purpose was to take away Indian land and eradicate Indian ways of life bore little resemblance to colonial-era councils that had begun with Natives and Europeans negotiating cultural thickets and building alliances through ritual exchange and kinship ties.
In California, beginning in 1850, US commissioners negotiated eighteen almost identical treaties, setting aside an estimated 11,700 square miles for reservations, mostly in the foothills. In January 1851, the treaty commissioners published an address to the people of California in the Daily Alta California newspaper. With Indian people being pushed to extinction, the commissioners advocated a policy of moderation:
As there is now no further west to which they can be removed, the General Government and the people of California appear to have left but one alternative in relation to these remnants of once numerous and powerful tribes. viz: extermination or domestication. As the latter includes all proper measures for their protection and gradual improvement, and secures to the people of the State an element greatly needed in the development of its resources, viz: cheap labor—it is the one which we deem the part of wisdom to adopt.34
But the state legislature opposed reserving potentially valuable lands for the exclusive occupancy of Indians and removing Americans who were already settled on those lands. President Fillmore submitted the treaties to the Senate in 1852, but the Senate refused to ratify any of them. The senators held their debate and vote in executive session and imposed an injunction of secrecy on the original documents that was not removed until 1905, so their arguments do not appear in a published Senate document and if a transcript of the executive session was made it seems not to have survived, but the costs of establishing the reservations and the value of the lands in question were clearly major concerns that killed the treaties. It is difficult to argue with the assessment of archaeologist and professor of anthropology Robert Heizer more than forty years ago that the whole thing was “a farce, from beginning to end.” In other parts of the country, the president stated in his annual message to Congress in December, the government set apart particular lands for the exclusive occupation of the Indians and they acknowledged and respected their rights to those lands. But in California the government did not recognize the exclusive right of the Indians to any part of the country. “They are, therefore, mere tenants at sufferance, and liable to be driven from place to place at the pleasure of the whites.” Not until several decades later did the government establish small reservations (rancherías) for California Indians who survived the gold rush and the genocidal Indian policies that followed in its wake.35
Indians attacked wagon trains in twentieth-century Hollywood, but rarely on the nineteenth-century Great Plains.36 Nevertheless, migrants on the overland trails to California and Oregon generated tensions and in 1849 they brought cholera. To head off conflicts the government attempted to assemble the southern Plains tribes in the spring of 1850 for a treaty to ensure the safety of the emigrant roads, but Comanche medicine men told their people to stay away from the whites until the cholera epidemic died out, and the negotiations were postponed until 1851 at Fort Laramie and 1853 at Fort Atkinson.37
In its treaties with the Dakota or Eastern Sioux at Traverse des Sioux and Mendota in 1851, the United States required the Sisseton, Wahpeton, Mdwekanton, and Wahpekute bands to “cede, sell, and relinquish” their lands in the state of Iowa and the Territory of Minnesota, in all about twenty-four million acres.38 But out on the Plains what the United States wanted that year was to establish peace and to secure free passage for its westward-moving citizens. Once again, it tried to do so by imposing boundary lines on a complex intertribal landscape where relationships overlapped, alliances fluctuated, and borderlands were shared as well as contested. At the government’s request, the Indian agent and former mountain man Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick convened more than ten thousand Plains Indians in a huge multitribal tepee encampment at Horse Creek near Fort Laramie, Wyoming, a post established to safeguard the California and Oregon trails. The famous mountain man Jim Bridger brought a Shoshoni delegation. The Crows made a dramatic arrival “in a solid column, singing their national melody” and impressing one news reporter as “much the finest delegation of Indians we have yet seen.” Many of the tribes had long histories of conflict but for three weeks in September they met, smoked, talked, socialized, and held dances and horse races. Fitzpatrick and David D. Mitchell, the superintendent of Indian affairs at St. Louis, met the Indians in council, adhered to Native custom by smoking the pipe, and drew up a map delineating tribal territories, while the Belgian Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet, well known among the tribes, worked to promote goodwill. With representatives from the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Crows, Shoshonis, Gros Ventres, Assiniboines, Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras, the conference involved western Algonquian, Siouan, Shoshonean, Caddoan, English, and Plains sign languages, and the interpreters—Bridger, De Smet, Robert Meldrum for the Crows, former mountain man and frontier guide John Simpson Smith for the Cheyennes, C. Campbell for the Sioux, H. Culbertson for the Assiniboines and Gros Ventres, François L’Etalie for the Arikaras, and John Pizelle for the Arapahos—were kept busy. The Sioux resented efforts to impose boundaries –“You have split the country and I do not like it,” said an Oglala chief named Black Hawk—and resisted the idea of creating chiefs with whom the government could deal, but they consented to “touch the pen” along with the other tribes. The Treaty of Fort Laramie defined the territorial boundaries of the various tribes, who agreed to live in peace with the United States and each other and recognized the right of the United States to build roads and posts in their country. In return, the commissioners distributed a wagon train full of presents and the United States pledged to protect the Indians from depredations by whites and to pay the tribes $50,000 per year for fifty years in “provisions, merchandise, domestic animals, and agricultural implements.”39 The government requested no land at Fort Laramie, but the boundaries established there could be redrawn in subsequent treaties, thereby breaking up the Indian reserve into separate and ever-diminishing individual reservations. As the historian Jeffrey Ostler concludes, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was “merely a temporary convenience of a relentlessly expansionist nation-state.”40
After the treaty, Fitzpatrick, Mitchell, De Smet, and John Simpson Smith accompanied a delegation of chiefs down the Missouri by steamboat to St. Louis and then to Washington where they met President Fillmore.41 But the good feelings from Horse Creek soon evaporated. The Miniconjou Sioux chief Lone Horn, who as a young man had been instrumental in making peace with the Cheyennes in 1840, now worked hard to maintain this peace with the Crows and the truce held for half a dozen years. “Given the volatile politics of a Sioux camp,” comments the historian Kingsley Bray, “Lone Horn’s achievement in engineering and maintaining the Crow peace between peoples who had been implacable enemies for generations evinces a political acumen, a breadth of vision, and diplomatic skill rare among any people in any age.” But the northern bands—the Hunkpapa and Blackfoot Sioux—would have nothing to do with the peace and their war parties were soon pressing hard
again into Crow country.42 Congress altered the terms of the treaty, reducing the government’s commitment to pay the signatory tribes $50,000 a year from fifty years to ten, with an additional five years to be paid at the discretion of the president. In 1854, in a bungled dispute over a stray or stolen cow, a rash lieutenant named John Grattan and his men were killed in a Brulé village. Conquering Bear (a.k.a. Frightening Bear), whom Mitchell had selected at Fort Laramie as a chief to represent the Sioux, died in the melee.43 General William Harney destroyed another Brulé village at Ash Hollow, Nebraska, in retaliation.
In 1853, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois called for the removal of “the Indian barrier” and the extension of territorial governments as the necessary first step in protecting American possessions along the Pacific Coast, prompting a debate that led to passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 that opened the territories to settlement. It also reopened the divisive and ultimately explosive issue of slavery in the territories, effectively nullifying the Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 and leaving the inhabitants to decide for themselves whether the territories should be free or slaveholding. Between 1854 and 1860, more than one hundred thousand non-Indians entered Kansas Territory.44
On the southern Plains, at the Treaty of Fort Atkinson in 1853, the Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches agreed to peace among themselves and with the United States and to allow Americans free passage and across their territories. The Treaty of Fort Wise in 1861 restricted the Cheyennes and Arapahos to the plains of eastern Colorado, south of the Arkansas River. In 1863, Samuel Colley, an agent on the Upper Arkansas, took a delegation of fourteen southern Plains chiefs (and two women) to Washington, D.C. Several of the delegates—Lone Wolf of the Kiowas, Paruasemena or Ten Bears of the Yamparika band of Comanches, and Poor Bear of the Plains Apaches, as well as interpreter John Simpson Smith—would figure prominently in the Treaty of Medicine Lodge four years later. The Indians toured the capital, attended a play, and met President Lincoln in the East Room of the White House, where the throng of onlookers included the secretaries of state, treasury, navy, and interior, as well as visiting ministers from England, France, Prussia, and Brazil. Lincoln assured the Indians of his government’s peaceful intentions but reminded them with a smile that no father could get his children to do exactly as he wished.45
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