At Fort Larned, wrote Henry Stanley, “we were joined by an army of special agents, special bosses, special caterers, special bummers, each sent on special business by the Government.” After a day there, the assemblage set off on the sixty-mile journey to Medicine Lodge, a huge cavalcade stretching five miles as it threaded its way across the plains. Satanta rode in the lead wagon with General Harney. Behind them trailed the other commissioners, two (later increased to four) companies of the Seventh Cavalry, a battery of artillery equipped with Gatling guns; soldiers and the regimental band of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry; news correspondents, Indians, and an entourage of aides, bureaucrats, camp attendants, teamsters, cooks, interpreters, and other camp followers: a column of 600 people, at least 165 (and perhaps as many as 211) wagons and ambulances, and 1,250 horses and mules.29 The Seventh Cavalry was temporarily without its commander—Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer had been suspended for leaving his troops to visit his wife without authorization—and Major Joel Elliott was the officer in command. En route, the caravan encountered a buffalo herd and many in the party took the opportunity to join a hastily organized hunt. The fact that they took only the tongues from the fallen animals infuriated Satanta. “Has the white man become a child, that he should kill the buffalo for sport?” he demanded. “An unprejudiced man could not blame him for his language,” one of the reporters admitted.30
The Peace Commission reached Medicine Lodge on October 14. Thousands of Indian ponies grazed the nearby hills and five different camp circles were already there. As the commissioners entered the valley at its northwestern end, the nearest encampment was that of the Arapahos, consisting of 171 lodges; across the stream were 250 Cheyenne lodges. The Plains Apaches were farther down the creek, with 85 lodges on the same side as the Arapahos. The Comanches were encamped in 100 lodges across the creek from the Apaches, and the 150 Kiowa lodges were at the far end. In total, about five thousand Indians eventually congregated in the area.31
A group of chiefs came to welcome the commissioners. One of them was Black Kettle. In October 1867, he was the only prominent Cheyenne chief advocating peace. In the wake of Sand Creek and Hancock’s campaign, the Dog Soldiers and Roman Nose were calling the shots for most Cheyennes. Roman Nose stayed away from Medicine Lodge. Nervous enough about being amid so many Indians, the commissioners were especially apprehensive about the proximity, a day’s ride to the south, of a large Cheyenne encampment forty miles away on the Cimarron River, who they feared might disrupt the council. Black Kettle seems to have been apprehensive about them, too (at one point, Dog Soldiers threatened to kill his horses). When the Dog Soldier chief Bull Bear visited camp, newspaper reporters recognized him as “the man of the Cheyennes.” The Cheyennes were also apprehensive about the commissioners and their large entourage. “For two weeks they kept themselves at a distance, sending in small parties to discover if possible our true intentions.”32 In fact, the Cheyennes were gathered at the Cimarron for the renewal of the Sacred Arrows, their most important ceremony, which the whole tribe was summoned to attend. (Black Kettle’s absence may have triggered the threats against him.)33
Preliminary talks began on October 15. The commissioners had set up two hospital tents, facing one another with flysheets between them and, shielded from the sun, they sat waiting for the Indians to assemble.34 Senator Henderson was in a hurry to get down to business but Commissioner Taylor insisted on doing things according to Indian protocol, which meant being patient. The Comanches made a point of keeping everyone waiting. Taylor gave a short welcome and the various chiefs reciprocated. But intertribal rivalries threatened to end the meeting before it began. The Kiowas and Arapahos wanted to start talks immediately and threatened to leave because the Cheyennes had asked that the talks be postponed for eight days. The other tribes were suspicious that some separate agreement had been made with the Cheyennes. The chiefs assembled in a semicircle around the commissioners, who lined up at the front of the tent. The dark suits and army uniforms of the commissioners contrasted with the colorful trade blankets, breechcloths, leggings, moccasins, eagle feathers, beads, trade silver, soldier’s coats, and occasional hats of the Indians. Satanta, Black Eagle, Kicking Bird, and Fishermore represented the Kiowas. Fishermore was the senior counselor; Stanley described him as “a stout Indian of ponderous proportions, and [he] speaks five languages. He is a favorite with all the tribes.” Ten Bears, the Yamparika Comanche chief, scoffed: “What I say is law for the Comanches, but it takes half a dozen to speak for the Kiowas.” Ten Bears said the Comanches were willing to talk when the Kiowas did. Poor Bear, speaking for the Apaches, said he would wait only four more days for the talks to begin. Eventually, the commissioners agreed to start the talks in five days. The council adjourned and rations of flour, coffee, and sugar were distributed to each tribe. Ten Bears had been to Washington and met President Lincoln: “You laid out the road once before and we traveled it,” he told the commissioners.35 Commissioner Taylor knew from Jesse Leavenworth that Ten Bears “is a very good man, and is doing more than any other to preserve peace between the Red and white man.”36 Now a worn, gray-haired old man, possibly around seventy, Ten Bears peered at the commissioners through gold-rimmed spectacles (see figure 6.4). But he was quick-witted, understood the issues at stake and, noted the historian Douglas Jones, was the only man at the council who ever managed to get Satanta to stop talking!37
While the preliminary talks were going on, reported Stanley, “the honorable gentlemen” of the Peace Commission occupied themselves in different ways. Harney, “with head erect,” watched the faces of the Indians. Sanborn “picked his teeth and laughed jollily.” Tappan read reports about Hancock’s destruction of the Indian village at Pawnee Creek. Henderson, “with eyeglass in hand, seemed buried in deep study.” Terry “busied himself in printing alphabetical letters, and Augur whittled away with energy.” Agent Leavenworth “made by-signals to old Satank.” The newspaper correspondents “sat à la Turque on the ground, their pencils flying over the paper.”38
At dusk, about eighty Cheyenne warriors arrived from the Cimarron. Painted, armed, and chanting, they rode their ponies across Medicine Lodge Creek to the edge of the commissioners’ camp. Two Dog Soldier chiefs, Gray Head and Tall Bull, dismounted and shook hands with General Harney whom they had met before, but most of the warriors remained sitting on their ponies while their chiefs conversed with the general in his tent. When they emerged, Gray Head said his men were hungry after their ride from the Cimarron and they went to Black Kettle’s camp to share the rations there. Late that night, they rode back to the Cimarron.39 Two evenings later, Gray Head and Tall Bull returned to talk with the commissioners, this time minus the escort of chanting warriors. Gray Head said his people were not hostile but after Sand Creek and Hancock’s attack on the Pawnee Fork village he could not speak for other Cheyennes.40
FIGURE 6.4 Ten Bears. Photograph by Alexander Gardner. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives)
In the days before the formal talks began, the commissioners took depositions on the causes of the warfare on the Plains. Wynkoop blamed the Sand Creek massacre and General Hancock’s campaign. Major Henry Douglass, a former commandant at Fort Dodge, blamed Satanta.41 The news reporters and some of the officers visited the Indian camps and some recorded descriptions of Indian life. Some of them attended a dance in the Arapaho camp.42
The tribes at Medicine Lodge had their own histories, rivalries, and foreign policies. The Comanches had pushed most Apache groups off the Plains in the eighteenth century. The Kiowas were longtime allies of the Comanches, and both were enemies of the Cheyennes and Arapahos until 1840 when they fashioned a peace of mutual benefit. The Indians at Medicine Lodge spoke several languages. Most spoke Comanche, a Shoshonean language that had developed into the lingua franca of the southern Plains as a result of Comanche dominance and trade networks. Few spoke Kiowa, a Tanoan language quite unlike others spoken on the Plains. An
army officer who had heard Kiowa in the 1840s described it as “an entirely different language” from Comanche, “being much more deep and guttural, striking upon the ear like the sound of falling water.” Cheyenne and Arapaho are related Algonquian languages but are not mutually intelligible. The Indians also used sign language. Three interpreters—George Bent, Philip McCusker, and A. A. Whitaker—signed the treaties as witnesses but there were more. They had their work cut out for them. McCusker, a former army scout with a Comanche wife, was the busiest because the speeches were often translated first into Comanche, and then from Comanche into other languages. Satanta occasionally switched from Kiowa to Comanche. McCusker may also have had a smattering of Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache, although Kiowas told the anthropologist James Mooney in the 1890s that McCusker spoke only Comanche and that a Kiowa called Bao (Cat), or Having Horns, translated his words. Richard Henry Pratt, who used McCusker as an interpreter during the Red River War, said he was “a most capable Comanche linguist” and proficient in sign language but had difficulty understanding Kiowa. McCusker earned more than the other interpreters at Medicine Lodge—$583.65—although that was not all that he asked for: General Sherman rejected his voucher for $1,565 ($5 per day for 313 days) as unreasonable.43
Jesse Chisholm, the part-Cherokee trader, guide, and cattle rancher, and the ubiquitous Delaware scout Black Beaver also served as interpreters. William Bent and three of his children, George, Charley, and Julia, interpreted for the Cheyennes. Charley wore a red trade blanket much like others in the Cheyenne delegation, but George dressed for the occasion and for his intermediary role, wearing a broadcloth suit, vest, cravat, and moccasins. George’s wife, Magpie, gave birth to a daughter on October 19, the opening day of the council. Also present were John Simpson Smith and Ed Guerrier, who was the son of a white father and a Cheyenne mother and had attended St. Louis University. Guerrier married Julia Bent. Like the Bent brothers, Smith and Guerrier had been in the Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek, where Smith’s son Jack had been murdered.44
The interpreter who attracted the most attention was the thirty-three-year-old daughter of a Kentucky-born trader and an Arapaho mother named Margaret or Walking Woman. She was the daughter of the trader John Poisal or Pizelle (who interpreted at the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851) and Snake Woman (who had been taken captive from the Blackfeet as a small child and was the adopted sister of an Arapaho chief named Left Hand). In 1849, Margaret married Thomas Fitzpatrick, the first US agent to the Arapahos. They had two children. After Fitzpatrick died in 1854, leaving her well provided for, Margaret married an American from Ohio named L. J. Wilmarth or Wilmott, with whom she lived in Denver and Leavenworth, Kansas. By the time of the Medicine Lodge treaty, she had married a third time and was now Mrs. Margaret Adams. She accompanied Little Raven as the Arapaho interpreter. She caused a sensation when she showed up wearing “crimson petticoat, black cloth cloak, and a small coquettish velvet hat, decorated with a white ostrich feather.”45 According to one reporter, she usually showed up drunk. The Plains Apaches spoke an Athapaskan language. Bulkley said an Apache-speaking Arapaho translated the Apaches’ speeches into Arapaho, and then Mrs. Adams translated them into English. The Indian speakers often had to pause after each sentence while their words were translated into three languages. It was a precarious chain of communication by which to convey philosophies and worldviews central to the way of life they were trying to preserve.
“I want to live and die as I was brought up”
The great council finally got under way on October 19 at ten o’clock in the morning. In a grove of elms and cottonwoods, the commissioners sat under a brush arbor facing a huge half circle of four hundred chiefs. The principal chiefs sat on logs in the front row of the half circle. The Kiowas were on the left. Satanta sat in front on an army campstool, wearing an army coat given to him by General Hancock. Immediately behind Satanta sat Satank and Kicking Bird.46
Unlike Satanta, Satank (Sitting Bear) was an old man of slender build. But he was a formidable presence. Satank was one of the architects of the Great Peace made with the Cheyennes in 1840 and was “the foremost warrior in a nation of warriors.” As head of the Koietsenko society, he wore a broad elk-skin sash across his chest from his left shoulder and he carried a ceremonial arrow. The lower end of the sash trailed the ground; when the Kiowas went into battle the sash wearer dismounted in front of the warriors and thrust the arrow through a hole in the sash, pinning himself to the ground. He could only retreat if freed by his warriors. Like Satanta, Satank had a fearsome reputation as a killer of whites, but on this occasion he wore a peace medal bearing a likeness of President Buchanan.47 Unlike Satanta, he remained quiet throughout most of the talks. Kicking Bird represented the peace faction of the Kiowas. Satanta was in a power struggle with Kicking Bird’s peace faction and also with Lone Wolf for control of the war faction.
FIGURE 6.5 American depiction of the Medicine Lodge treaty. Medicine Lodge Council, 1867. Sketched by John Howland for Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1867, p. 724. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives)
The Comanches sat to the left of the Kiowas, with Ten Bears at their head and McCusker in front of them. Black Kettle and Gray Head, with the Bents sitting behind them, represented the Cheyennes. Mrs. Adams, “in a new crimson gown, specially worn for this important occasion,” sat in a folding chair near Little Raven, whom Stanley characterized as a good-natured, “fat, short, asthmatic fellow.” Poor Bear and the Plains Apaches were on the far right. Fishermore, “the lusty crier of the Kiowa nation,” opened the council, calling in the tribes “to do right above all things”48 (figures 6.5 and 6.6).
Commissioner Taylor called the council to order and Senator Henderson got down to business outlining their goals. There must be peace on the Plains, he said. Indians had attacked railroad construction crews and murdered settlers, but white men were far from blameless. The commissioners wanted to hear the Indians’ side of the story so they could remove their causes of complaint and bring the war to an end. Furthermore, the government intended to civilize the Indians. The commissioners were authorized to set aside some of the “richest agricultural lands” for the Indians and furnish farming implements, cattle, sheep, and hogs; they were authorized to build churches and schools and provide teachers for their children.49
FIGURE 6.6 Indian depiction of the Medicine Lodge treaty. “Treaty Signing at Medicine Lodge” by Howling Wolf from a ledger book done at Fort Marion, Florida, 1876. The Cheyenne warrior-artist Howling Wolf, who was probably in Black Kettle’s village at the time of the treaty, recorded the scene nine years later when he was a prisoner of war in Fort Marion. Indians encamped at the forks of the river watch the council, with the commissioners wearing hats in a grove of elm trees. (Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, PRI0672–11)
Satanta “became uneasy, buried his hands in the ground, and rubbed sand over them.” He then shook hands with everyone and stood in the circle to speak. His heart was glad to see the commissioners and he would hide nothing from them, he said. It was the Cheyennes who had been fighting the Americans, not the Kiowas and Comanches, who had kept the peace. Then he announced: “All the land south of the Arkansas belongs to the Kiowas and Comanches, and I don’t want to give away any of it. I love the land and the buffalo, and will not part with it.” He said the Kiowas did not want to fight and that they had not fought since the Little Arkansas treaty, which was not the case. Indicating the commissioners, he said: “I hear a good deal of talk from these gentlemen, but they never do what they say. I don’t want any of these medicine homes [i.e., churches and schools] built in the country.” He wanted to see his children raised as he was and he had no intention of settling down: “I love to roam over the prairie; I feel free and happy; but when we settle down we get pale and die.” When he traveled to the Arkansas River, he saw soldiers cutting down timber and killing buffalo, “and when I see it my heart feels like burst
ing with sorrow.” “I have told you the truth,” Satanta asserted. “I have no little lies about me; but I don’t know how it is with the Commissioners.” He then sat down and wrapped a crimson blanket around himself. According to Henry Stanley, the commissioners gave Satanta “a rather blank look.”50
Ten Bears echoed Satanta’s sentiments. The Comanches wanted to be left free to live as they had lived and to go where they pleased. They had fought to defend their lands in Texas. “I have no wisdom,” Ten Bears concluded rather tongue in cheek, looking at the commissioners. “I expect to get some from you.” Silver Brooch, a Paneteka Comanche who had accompanied Ten Bears to Washington and had met Lincoln, recited his people’s struggle against the Texans and reminded the commissioners that following the white man’s path had not helped his people much. They had been given many promises but had received little. “My band is dwindling away fast,” he said. “My young men are a scoff and a by-word among the other nations. I shall wait until next spring to see if these things shall be given us; if they are not, I and my young men will return with our wild brothers to live on the prairie,” perhaps a reference to the Kwahadi Comanches out on the Staked Plains who were not represented at the treaty. The old chief Poor Bear promised that his Plains Apaches would listen to the commissioners’ words and “follow the straight road,” but they were anxious to return south. The preliminary speeches took up most of the day. The meeting adjourned until the next morning.51
Before evening the commissioners drafted the treaty they intended to present to the Kiowas and Comanches. The United States had no intention of leaving them to roam the Plains, and the commissioners knew that the buffalo herds on which the tribes based their existence and their future would soon be destroyed. But in order to get them to accept the treaty and make the bitter pill of reservation life more palatable, the commissioners offered to continue the Indians’ hunting rights below the Arkansas River and in the Texas Panhandle, an offer that was almost certain to spawn conflicts with American settlers who were already living in the region. The commissioners were still nervous about the Cheyennes out on the Plains. After dark a dozen Osages turned up, evidently to see what was going on. They complained about their agent, shoddy provisions, and thefts of their horses. The Osages were enemies of the Kiowas but they left without incident.52
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