On the northern Plains, in the so-called Red Cloud War, the Lakotas, Northern Cheyennes, and Arapahos fought to close the Bozeman Trail that crossed their hunting grounds en route to the Montana gold fields. In December 1866 they inflicted a stunning defeat on the US army, annihilating Captain William Fetterman’s eighty-man command.
In the spring of 1867, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding the Department of the Missouri, led an expedition to restore peace in the Smoky Hill country. With 1,500 men, including the Seventh Cavalry led by George Armstrong Custer, he marched up the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas River, burned an abandoned Cheyenne village, and aggravated the state of affairs. The army’s failure to pacify the Plains fueled a growing demand for a peaceful solution to the “Indian problem.”10
Even before Hancock’s expedition, a Joint Special Committee of Congress headed by Senator James R. Doolittle completed a two-year investigation into the causes of the Indian wars. The Doolittle report placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of whites, and this fueled growing demands for a reform of Indian policy that would implement reservation life as an urgent necessity. Congress responded in July 1867 by establishing the Indian Peace Commission, a select group of soldiers and civilians with particular interest and expertise in Indian affairs, who would conduct negotiations and implement the new policies. As the historian Jill St. Germain notes, the very creation of the commission was somewhat “irregular,” in that Congress “authorized” the president to appoint a commission, an authorization he did not need because treaty making was the president’s constitutional responsibility.11
The Peace Commission faced a formidable task and had broad authority: to assemble the chiefs of the warring tribes, to ascertain the causes of hostility, and to negotiate treaties that would “remove the causes of war; secure the frontier settlements and railroad construction; and establish a system for civilizing the tribes.” The commissioners were committed to advancing American settlement but they saw clearly that unregulated expansion spawned violence and spelled doom for the Indians: “If the savage resists, civilization, with the ten commandments in one hand and the sword in the other, demands his immediate extinction.” The current war against the Indians was not only expensive and ineffective but “it was dishonorable to the nation, and disgraceful to those who had originated it.”12 In the face of opposition from Indian agents, traders, settlers, speculators, and contractors who stood to lose a lucrative business if troops were withdrawn, and newspapers that inflated the rate and extent of “Indian depredations,”13 the Peace Commission sought to achieve an Indian policy of expansion with honor that had eluded the United States since the days of the founding fathers. “We have spent two hundred years in creating the present state of things,” the commissioners said in their report to President Johnson. “If we can civilize in twenty-five years it will be a vast improvement on the operations of the past.”14
The twin goal was to establish the kind of peace that “will most likely insure civilization for the Indians and peace and safety for the whites.” On both counts, that meant getting the Indians onto reservations. The commissioners intended to remove the Indians from the vicinity of the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific railroads that were being built across their hunting territories and concentrate them in two large reservations. The Sioux and affiliated bands would be allocated land north of Nebraska; the Kiowas, Comanches, Southern Cheyennes, Southern Arapahos, and Plains Apaches would be confined to an area south of Kansas, on lands acquired from other tribes then living within the Indian Territory. “The goals of the commission could not have been clearer,” says St. Germain, “nor could they have been any broader. They encompassed most of the concerns that plagued American Indian policy on the Plains—war and peace, settler and railroad security, and the compulsion to ‘civilize’ the Indians.” Could the commission secure peace, secure American expansion, and secure a future for the Indians? If it failed to achieve peace, the United States would resort again to military action—“a sop to those in Congress and in the West who would have preferred an all-out war of extermination instead.” The commissioners were given little concrete direction as to how they should achieve these goals and no fiscal restrictions or guidelines. Because conflict over footing the bill for the Peace Commission’s treaties brought the treaty system to an end in 1871, this was, as St. Germain notes, “a significant oversight indeed.”15
Watching the Peace Commissioners (figure 6.1) discuss “the long mooted and most detested Indian question,” the newspaper reporter Henry Morton Stanley felt confident that if the peace effort failed it would not be for want of honest endeavor on their part: “Like philosophers, like astute geometricians do these gentlemen look the question in the face patiently and kindly,” he informed his readers. Nathaniel G. Taylor chaired the commission. A rather hefty former Methodist minister and Princeton graduate, “a man of large brain, full of philanthropic ideas relative to the poor Indian,” Taylor was considered “soft” on Indians in some quarters. Senator John B. Henderson was “never forgetful of Western interests; a cool head, courteous in deportment, affable to all.” He frequently acted as the group’s spokesman, its principal draftsman, and its liaison with the press. Samuel F. Tappan, “a gentle man of few words” and a former officer in the Colorado militia, had headed the investigation into the Sand Creek massacre. John B. Sanborn, a Civil War veteran who had attended the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, was “a garrulous, good natured and jovial gentleman, fond of good living and good company,” and “pretty thoroughly posted on Indian matters.”
The military members, appointed by the president, were the commander of the Division of the Missouri, General William Tecumseh Sherman; retired General William S. Harney; and Major General Alfred H. Terry, commander of the Department of Dakota. Sherman was recalled to Washington and did not go to Medicine Lodge; Major General Christopher C. Augur, commander of the Department of the Platte, substituted for him and then became a regular member of the commission. Augur, said Stanley, was “a courtly gentleman of the old school” and “a man of rare ability.” He had distinguished himself during the Civil War, was seriously wounded at Cedar Mountain, and had fought Indians in Utah and New Mexico. Harney had joined the army nearly fifty years before; in the 1830s he fought in the war against Black Hawk and the Sauks and against the Seminoles; in 1846–48 he fought in the War against Mexico, and in 1855 he attacked a Brulé Sioux village at Ash Hollow in retaliation for the so-called Grattan massacre. He had come out of retirement to serve on peace commissions. Tall and white-bearded, Harney cut an impressive figure. “When he stands erect he towers above all like Saul the chosen of Israel,” Stanley wrote, and then, with less hyperbole: “Really, a goodly man, a tried soldier and a gentleman.” The Lakotas remembered him rather differently from Ash Hollow and called him Winyan Wicakte, “Woman Killer.” Harney and Henderson did not get along and had frequent disagreements during the course of the negotiations. Harney could be pretty irascible. According to his biographer he could be impulsive and obstinate and had a “contentious and quarrelsome nature.”16
FIGURE 6.1 Members of the Peace Commission pose with an unidentified Indian woman. From left to right: Generals Terry, Harney, and Sherman; Commissioner Taylor; Samuel Tappan; and General Augur. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives)
The six-foot-two Terry, on the other hand, was a thoughtful and likeable fellow; “gallant and genial,” said Stanley. Born in Connecticut to an old New England family, Terry had graduated from Yale Law School in 1848 and served with distinction in the Civil War. After a tour of Reconstruction duty in the South he was assigned to the Plains. In 1867 Terry was still a newcomer to the Indian West, but he was to play a key role making treaties and making war for the next ten years. Examining the orders Terry gave the flamboyant and headstrong George Custer in 1876, Nathaniel Philbrick holds him largely responsible for the disaster at the Little Bighorn. He had, writes Philbrick, “a lawyer’
s talent for crafting documents that appeared to say one thing but were couched in language that could allow for an entirely different interpretation should circumstances require it.”17 Whether Terry developed or applied this talent as a member of the Peace Commission, the treaty documents the commission produced fit the description. Governor Samuel Crawford and Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas joined the commissioners prior to the negotiations at Medicine Lodge.
A press corps accompanied the Peace Commission, forerunners of twentieth-century “embedded” journalists. This was history in the making, and the nation’s newspapers dispatched reporters to cover the story. Henry Morton Stanley represented the Missouri Democrat in St. Louis, and he also wrote for other papers. Born John Rowlands in Wales in 1841, Stanley had a childhood that “was Dickensian in its hardships.” His parents were unmarried and his birth certificate recorded him as a “bastard.” His father died and his mother abandoned him. Raised by his maternal grandfather until he was five, he was sent to a workhouse for the poor when the old man died. He managed to secure an elementary education and at seventeen or eighteen took a ship to the United States as a cabin boy. In New Orleans he found work and, according to his autobiography, a cotton merchant named Henry Morton Stanley adopted him, and he took his benefactor’s name. He joined the Confederacy during the Civil War and was at the Battle of Shiloh, but after being imprisoned he joined the US Navy. Soon after the war, he began a career as a newspaper reporter and traveled to Turkey, where he found himself in jail again, though he apparently talked his way out of the predicament. Returning to St. Louis, he was assigned by the Missouri Democrat to accompany General Hancock’s expedition in the spring of 1867; he covered the treaty councils on the Platte and continued to report for the paper until November 1867.18
Milton Reynolds, a small man with a goatee, had lived on the Kansas frontier since 1862 and had established a daily newspaper in Lawrence called the State Journal; he now covered the story for the Chicago Times and also dispatched stories to the New York Herald. A seasoned reporter, he provided the most comprehensive account of the Kiowa-Comanche treaty and was not afraid to take on Kansas politicians in his columns. S. F. Hall, reporting for the Chicago Tribune, showed interest in and empathy for the Indians. George Brown of the Cincinnati Commercial and H. J. Budd of the Cincinnati Gazette did not; they had little good to say about either the commissioners or the Indians. William Fayel reported for the St. Louis Missouri Republican; he spent a lot of time walking through the Indian camps, demonstrated an interest in Plains Indian life and culture, and produced the most complete account of the Cheyenne-Arapaho negotiations. A New York Herald reporter named Solomon T. Bulkley had covered the Civil War for the paper and had been held as a prisoner of war in Virginia for seven months. James E. Taylor was the artist for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper; John Howland, Harper’s Weekly artist, had traveled in the Southwest, wore fringed buckskin leggings, carried a Navy Colt revolver, and “told funny stories.” He spoke Spanish and signed on as an official member of the commission as a shorthand stenographer. The newspapermen each had their own styles, opinions, and biases, but Stanley thought them all “good souls.” The reports they dispatched made Medicine Lodge one of the most thoroughly covered Indian treaties.19
The commissioners held their first meeting in St. Louis in August. They agreed to send runners to the tribes north and south of the Platte River to assemble at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in September and at Fort Larned, Kansas, in October.20 Then they traveled by steamer to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they held interviews with General Hancock, the renowned Jesuit missionary Father Pierre De Smet, and Governor Samuel Crawford. Heading up the Missouri to Omaha, they set out across the High Plains toward Fort Laramie. In September 1867, the commission met with Oglala, Brulé, and Northern Cheyenne delegates in North Platte, Nebraska, but nothing was settled and negotiations were suspended, both sides agreeing to meet again at Fort Laramie in the spring. Returning to Omaha, the commissioners turned their attention to the southern Plains. They boarded the Union Pacific for Fort Harker and then traveled by military ambulance to Fort Larned.
The site and date of the Medicine Lodge council had been fixed three months beforehand. Thomas Murphy, head of the central Indian superintendency, was responsible for the arrangements. Working with Edward Wynkoop, a Cheyenne and Arapaho agent who had been the commander at Fort Lyon prior to the Sand Creek massacre and testified in the subsequent investigations, and with Jesse Leavenworth, an agent for the Kiowas, Comanches, and Southern Cheyennes, Murphy sent out runners during the summer to call the bands together for the peace talks. Most of the runners were Arapahos although the trader William Bent and his sons George and Charley also helped to spread the word among the Cheyennes.21
William Bent had sent his sons to school in Westport, Missouri (present-day Kansas City), and in St. Louis. When the Civil War broke out, the brothers joined the Confederate Army and served under General Sterling Price. George was captured and released on parole and by 1863 he had returned to his mother’s people, just in time to be thrown into the middle of another war. He and his half brother Charley were in the village at Sand Creek when Chivington’s Colorado militia, guided at gunpoint by their brother Robert, attacked. George was wounded and he and Charley fought alongside Cheyenne warriors in vengeance raids. But George married Magpie, a daughter or niece of the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, and at Medicine Lodge, he was trying to bring the bands in to talk peace (figure 6.2).
FIGURE 6.2 George Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Magpie, 1867. Magpie gave birth to a daughter on the opening day of the Medicine Lodge council. (Courtesy of History Colorado, Scan #10025735)
The commissioners arrived at Fort Larned, eighty miles northeast of Medicine Lodge, on October 12. There they were met by several chiefs whom Murphy had asked to escort them to the council site: the Crow, Stumbling Bear, and Satanta of the Kiowas, and Little Raven, Yellow Bear, and Wolf Slave of the Arapahos.
FIGURE 6.3 Satanta. Photograph by W. S. Soule c. 1867. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives)
Satanta, or White Bear (figure 6.3) was a member of an elite warrior society known as the Koietsenko, Katsienko, or Qóichégàu (“the Real/Principal Dogs” or “Sentinel Horses”); as one of only ten sash wearers in the society, he was considered one of the Kiowas’ “greatest and bravest warriors.”22 Contemporaries described him as “a man of magnificent physique, being over six feet tall, well built and finely proportioned.” He also had a reputation for oratory and theatrics, arrogance and boastfulness, characteristics he displayed at Medicine Lodge.23 He had built a record and a reputation as a fierce raider. On one occasion, after driving off horses from Fort Larned, Satanta sent a message to the post commander, complaining about the quality of the horses and expressing his hope that the army would provide better animals for him to steal in the future. On another, dressed in clothes he had been given at a council, he led a raid that stampeded the herd at Fort Dodge. “He had the politeness, however, to raise his plumed hat to the garrison of the fort, though he discourteously shook his coattails at them as he rode away with the captured stock.”24 He was about fifty years old in 1867. His face was painted red, he wore a blanket, and he carried a brass bugle hanging from his waist. He had met Henry Stanley the year before and now greeted him with “a gigantic bear’s hug.” The other members of the press “looked upon him with some awe, having heard so much of his ferocity and boldness. By his defiant and independent bearing he attracted all eyes.” Stanley felt “he would certainly be a formidable enemy to encounter alone on the prairie.” Satanta boasted that he had killed more white men than any other Indian on the Plains.25 He had also declared that he wanted all military posts and troops removed from his country immediately.26
The reporter William Fayel was impressed with Satanta’s “splendid physique” and with his reputation as a terror to frontier whites. He noted: “His head is large and massive, measuring twenty-thre
e inches around the cranium only one inch less than that of Daniel Webster.” Another correspondent reckoned the crania of Satanta and Webster were of equal size. The scenario of newspaper correspondents sitting down the infamous warrior and measuring his head is certainly bizarre, but as the historian Charles Robinson notes, it is “not unlikely considering their curiosity, the nineteenth-century fascination with physiognomy, and Satanta’s vanity.”27 Satanta was loud and effusive, and one correspondent thought he was drunk. At one point he abruptly announced that he wanted to leave because “it stink too much white man here,” but the commissioners informed him he had to remain and escort them to Medicine Lodge. Robinson suggests that Satanta’s “bluster concealed his nervousness” in a situation he could not control. He calmed down after a few drinks.28
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