by H. W. Brands
Chapter 6
LAKOTA’S LAST STAND
The most obvious geographical consequence of the Civil War was the reattachment of the South to the North, but a result scarcely less significant was the cementing of the West to the East. More than a few Northerners might have bid the South good riddance in 1861 had the South’s departure not threatened to carry away the West as well. Since the eighteenth century American leaders had understood that whoever controlled the lower Mississippi controlled the West. Benjamin Franklin said as much when he rejected a Spanish proposal that would have restricted American use of the lower Mississippi. “A neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street door,” Franklin explained. Thomas Jefferson reiterated this view when he declared, “There is on the globe one single spot the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.” Andrew Jackson acted on the same principle in treating the British attack on New Orleans in the War of 1812 as precisely what it was: the opening thrust of an attempt to sever the American West from the American East. Since then railroads had revised but hadn’t repealed the laws of gravity and precipitation that made the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers highways of commerce. When a relieved Lincoln declared, after Grant took Vicksburg, that “the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” he meant that the West would remain with the Union.1
Besides ensuring the political attachment of the West to the Union—an attachment reinforced, for the Far West, by the Pacific railroad—the Northern victory removed a principal hindrance to Western development. For four decades every effort to organize a Western territory or admit a Western state had run afoul of the slavery controversy. From the political fight over Missouri in the 1810s to the guerrilla war in Kansas in the 1850s, potential settlers had had to ask themselves whether, in addition to the normal hazards of life on the frontier, they wished to take on the slavery dispute. After the Civil War they didn’t have to.
In American history the West had always been a comparative concept. At the midpoint of the eighteenth century the West began fifty miles from Philadelphia; by the early nineteenth century it started just across the Appalachians. At the end of the Civil War the West consisted, for the most part, of the region beyond the 100th meridian, the line that runs roughly from Laredo to Bismarck.
Distance from the center of population had always characterized the West, and still did; but more salient than the remoteness of the postwar West was its dryness. With the exception of a strip along the Pacific, where ocean breezes moderated the regional drought, and the crests of the highest interior ranges, which caught what little moisture escaped the Cascades and Sierra Nevada, the new West was a desert. Nearly everything about preexisting American society and culture (and their European forerunners) had supposed ready access to water. Adjusting to desert life required new techniques and technology, to stretch the limited resource, and a new frame of mind, to stretch the received society and culture.
Settling the new West also required answering the Indian question more definitively than ever. Since the seventeenth century, English and then American policy toward the aboriginal peoples had supposed a relatively empty district to the west of the moving frontier of white settlement, to which the tribes might be lured or driven. By the late nineteenth century, the frontier had reached the Pacific, and there was nowhere left to move the Indians to. Moreover, the supposition had rested on the further premise that the Western territory allowed to the Indians would never attract much white interest. But the capitalist revolution overturned that premise, along with so much else. Railroads opened the plains and mountains of the postwar West to white hunters, miners, ranchers, and farmers. The Indians resisted this latest encroachment, with a desperation born of the knowledge that they were making their last stand. The fighting didn’t end until the Indians lacked the capacity to resist anymore.
The capitalist revolution shaped much else about the new West. To a far greater degree than in the East, settlement in the West reflected the influence of corporations and other institutions of capitalism. Eastern farms had rarely been self-sufficient; almost from the beginning, American farmers produced for market. But Western farms carried the commercial imperative to an extreme, in many cases becoming outdoor factories, specializing in particular crops with all the single-mindedness of the most highly organized Eastern mill. Eastern towns had been sited by God, as it were, where rivers joined, went over falls, or grew too shallow for oceangoing vessels. Western towns were sited by railroad corporations, along lines where their surveyors said the grading would be easiest and their accountants predicted the operation would be most profitable. Westerners were rugged individualists chiefly in their dreams (and the dreams of their Eastern and foreign admirers); in real life they were likely to draw paychecks for digging in corporate mines, plowing corporate fields, or chasing corporate cattle.
The settlement of the postwar West brought the frontier experience in America to an end. To those who applauded this latest conquest of nature and indigenous peoples, it seemed a triumph of American values. And so it was. But the values that mattered most by the waning years of the nineteenth century, and that figured most prominently on this final frontier, were the same capitalist values that were conquering the rest of the country.
IN 1865 the Sioux nation was somewhat more than a century into its own economic and social revolution, one triggered by the arrival of the horse. The western Sioux had split off from their eastern cousins, who occupied the forests of Minnesota, sometime before the beginning of the eighteenth century, largely in response to pressure from the neighboring Ojibwa, who in turn felt pressure from their own eastern neighbors and from whites. The western Sioux, also called Lakota, were a pedestrian people when they emerged onto the plains of the upper Missouri River. They traveled on foot and hunted on foot, devising elaborate strategies for killing the largest animal species they encountered, the bison, or buffalo. A favorite strategy entailed setting fire to the grassland behind a herd and then channeling the resulting stampede toward a cliff. Most of the herd would stop short, but a few beasts would fall or be pushed over the edge by those behind. Some of these would break their legs, and the Sioux hunters would dispatch them with arrows and spears.2
The Sioux encountered the horse about the time they reached the plains. The Spanish had reintroduced the horse to the Americas in the early sixteenth century (equines had roamed the Americas before the last Ice Age). Some escaped or were stolen; the descendants of these made their way north in the company of various Indians and on their own. The initial impact of the horse on the Sioux was modest. The horse increased their semi-nomadic range, but not till the mid-eighteenth century did they become an equestrian people.
The slow adoption of the horse resulted in part from the friction that attends any cultural transformation. Besides acquiring the animals, the Sioux had to learn how to train them, breed them, and care for them. All this took time. But the long lag probably also reflected an understanding that, in adopting horses, the Sioux were giving up other things. The Cheyennes told a story about their own adoption of horses, from the Comanches, and though the myth was peculiar to them, the lesson must have applied more broadly. According to this story, the Cheyennes’ god spoke to them through the oldest priest of the tribe:
If you have horses, everything will be changed for you forever. You will have to move around a lot to find pasture for your horses. You will have to give up gardening and live by hunting and gathering, like the Comanches. And you will have to come out of your earth houses and live in tents.… You will have to have fights with other tribes, who will want your pasture land or the places where you hunt. You will have to have real soldiers, who can protect the people. Think, before you decide.
Almost certainly the Cheyenne story showed the wisdom of hindsight, which may or may not have helped the Sioux appreciate what they were getting into. In any case the Sioux were riding seriously by the 1750s, when their own census records counted horse-borne warriors among t
heir men of military age.3
At that point the Sioux might have become full nomads, following the buffalo herds for most of the year. But something else slowed the transition. From before the arrival of Europeans and Euro-Americans, the Sioux, like every other people in North America, were tied into various trade networks. Trade carried dried salmon from the Pacific Northwest across the mountains to the interior of the continent; trade brought turquoise from Mexico and flint from the Ozarks. And trade brought the first aspects of European civilization to the Sioux: horses from the Spanish lands to the south; knives, tobacco, and guns from the French and English to the east.
To pay for what they imported, the Sioux trapped beaver, which the Europeans and Americans coveted. The beaver trade employed the Sioux for generations after they acquired horses; as late as the 1790s a French trader saw the Sioux as trappers first of all. “The Sioux tribes are those who hunt most for the beaver and other good peltries of the Upper Missouri,” he said. “They scour all the rivers and streams.… They carry away every springtime … a great number of them, which they exchange with the other Sioux situated on the St. Peter’s”—Minnesota—“and Des Moines Rivers.”4
But the beaver declined from overtrapping, and the Sioux shifted more and more to the buffalo. The buffalo furnished meat for food, robes for clothing, hides for shelter, tendons for bowstrings, and horns for containers. Yet the buffalo was never solely an item of subsistence; it was also a commodity for commerce. The Sioux traded buffalo robes, buffalo pemmican, and buffalo tongues to their Indian neighbors and later to white merchants at the trade fairs that formed a regular feature of life on the plains from the eighteenth century till the middle of the nineteenth. In the spring of 1832 at Fort Pierre on the upper Missouri, George Catlin encountered a band of Sioux who unceremoniously dumped fourteen hundred fresh tongues on the ground of the fort, taking in exchange several gallons of whiskey, which they immediately consumed.5
The buffalo trade was competitive, and the Sioux and the other tribes didn’t confine themselves to competing on price and quality. From the late eighteenth century well into the nineteenth, the Sioux engaged their neighbors in a long series of conflicts that were, at their heart, economic wars. The Sioux sought to expand production by monopolizing the best hunting grounds; they tried to protect their markets by physically driving their rivals away from the trade fairs.
They achieved a success that would have made any robber baron proud. During the first half of the nineteenth century the Sioux established their dominance over the large region from the Minnesota River in the east to the head of the Yellowstone in the west, and from the Missouri in the north to the Republican River in the south.6
Their success owed to their ruthlessness—they destroyed entire villages of their enemies and made vassals of the survivors—and their mastery of the horse, but it also reflected an element of chance. As the Europeans and Euro-Americans did everywhere else in the Western Hemisphere starting in the fifteenth century, they unintentionally introduced exotic diseases among the indigenes of the North American interior. Smallpox, in particular, ravaged one community after another. In some cases the casualties were almost total; epidemics in the 1780s and 1790s killed almost 90 percent of the Arikaras and roughly the same proportion of Mandans and Hidatsas.
The Sioux, however, proved less vulnerable. The scattered nature of their camps and villages inhibited the spread of disease, and by the 1830s their American trading partners brought doctors to vaccinate them. As a result, while the population of nearly every other tribe was diminishing, slowly or swiftly, the Sioux numbers actually increased. By some estimates the Sioux population quintupled between 1800 and 1850, albeit to only 25,000.7
Until midcentury, the Sioux expansion had little effect on citizens of the United States. As the effort to vaccinate them indicated, at least some Americans saw the Sioux as allies. Yet others warned that the Sioux were getting too strong. “The day is not far off when the Sioux will possess the whole buffalo region, unless they are checked,” the federal agent to the Pawnees predicted in 1838. As this forecast came true, federal officials attempted to neutralize the growing Sioux power. The mass emigration of gold seekers to California in 1849 and after brought large numbers of Americans to the Sioux country for the first time, and although few attacks on the emigrants took place, the intrusion sufficiently disturbed the politics of the region that American officials felt obliged to call a peace conference at Fort Laramie in 1851.8
It was a grand event. Dozens of tribes sent representatives, and perhaps ten thousand Indians attended; their horses stripped the grass for miles in every direction. But no one, either Indian or white, doubted that the Sioux were the dominant force among the indigenes. The conference produced an exchange of gifts and promises of friendly relations, yet its more important result was to let the Sioux and the Americans take the measure of each other. When the American officials tried to persuade the Sioux to stay north of the Platte—the main emigrant route west—Black Hawk, an Oglala Sioux, refused. His people, he said, had conquered the territory from which the Americans wanted to keep them, as fairly as the Americans had conquered much of the rest of the continent. “Those lands once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we whipped those nations out of them,” Black Hawk said. “In this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians.” The conference broke up peaceably, but neither the Americans nor the Sioux, on parting, doubted that they would be fighting for control of the northern Plains, perhaps soon.9
THE FIGHTING MIGHT have started at once had the Americans not become distracted by their own internal troubles. But though the squabble over slavery in Kansas postponed the conflict over the region farther north and west, the discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858 refocused attention on the lands still held by the Sioux and the other Plains Indians. The Pikes Peak and Denver gold rushes weren’t as large as the rush to California, but they were more threatening to the indigenes, in that while the earlier argonauts had been passing through, these intruders came to stay. In 1861 the federal government created the Territory of Colorado, with a governor and other apparatus of permanent occupation.
The Indians responded to the new invasion variously. The Sioux launched raids against wagon trains, stagecoach roads, and isolated settlements, while the Cheyennes and Arapahos, less confident of their military prowess vis-à-vis the whites, generally acquiesced.
Yet their complaisance won them no protection. The Colorado governor, John Evans, and the commander of Colorado volunteers, Colonel John Chivington, contended that the Indians must be driven from Colorado. This view drew support from many whites, including those who had joined the Colorado volunteers to avoid the draft into the Union army. When the Cheyennes and Arapahos expressed their desire for peace with the whites, Evans balked. “What shall I do with the Third Colorado Regiment if I make peace?” he demanded of an officer who thought the governor ought to accept the Indians’ proposal. “They have been raised to kill Indians, and they must kill Indians.” Chivington was even more emphatic. “Kill all the Indians you come across,” he ordered his soldiers. Nor did he except women and children. “Nits make lice,” he explained to a Denver audience.10
Chivington’s troops carried out his orders in late November 1864 on the banks of Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. After an overnight ride, during which the soldiers fortified themselves against the cold—and evidently against their consciences—with whiskey, the regiment attacked a camp of Cheyennes and Arapahos. The camp comprised mostly women, children, and old men, as the young men were away hunting. This circumstance was perfectly clear to the soldiers, as an eyewitness later explained. “I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter,” he said. “When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy.” But mercy didn’t appear. “The soldiers shot them all.… There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection. They sent out a little girl about six
years old with a white flag on a stick. She had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed.… I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.” Death afforded no protection. “Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side.… I saw one squaw whose privates had been cut out.” Chivington’s own soldiers confirmed the atrocities. “I did not see a body of man, woman, or child but was scalped,” one said, “and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner—men, women, and children’s privates cut out, &c.; I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman’s private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick.… I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.”11
The Sand Creek massacre—or rather the response to it—revealed an abiding theme in American policy and attitudes toward Indians. For generations a sympathy gradient had existed regarding Indians, with greater sympathy emerging the farther one traveled east from the frontier. And so it did now. Many Westerners actively applauded Chivington and his men; the Rocky Mountain News asserted, “Colorado soldiers have again covered themselves with glory.” Other Westerners, with slightly more conscience, were willing to overlook the atrocities the militia committed, as necessary to the advance of civilization. But Easterners grew queasy at the reports and many expressed outrage. Eastern editors decried the massacre; Congress launched an investigation. Yet even the Easterners had a limited attention span for Indian affairs. In the final winter of the Civil War, other matters intruded and the investigation proceeded slowly.12
