by H. W. Brands
Meanwhile the Indians took matters upon themselves. The Cheyennes and Arapahos joined the Sioux in a general assault on white outposts and settlements in Colorado. In January 1865 the allies attacked the town of Julesburg, killing indiscriminately, scalping the victims, and setting the buildings on fire. They tore out telegraph wires and closed the road to Denver, threatening Colorado’s capital with starvation.13
Leading the Sioux was Red Cloud, a war chief of the Oglala band, who subscribed to a Sioux version of Manifest Destiny. “The Great Spirit raised both the white man and the Indian,” he explained. “I think he raised the Indian first. He raised me in this land and it belongs to me. The white man was raised over the great waters, and his land is over there. Since they crossed the sea, I have given them room. There are now white people all about me. I have but a small spot of land left. The Great Spirit told me to keep it.”
Red Cloud served notice of his vision at a council called by American officials during a lull in the fighting. The Americans hoped to negotiate rights for a road across the Sioux lands to Bozeman in Montana Territory, where gold had been discovered in 1862. Red Cloud attended the council but denounced the road as a pretext for further land grabs. “The white men have crowded the Indians back year by year until we are forced to live in a small country north of the Platte,” he said. “And now our last hunting ground, the home of the People”—the Sioux—“is to be taken from us. Our women and children will starve, but for my part I prefer to die fighting.”14
The whites went ahead with the Bozeman road, building forts along the route. Red Cloud gathered warriors from his fellow Sioux and from the Cheyennes and Arapahos. During the summer and autumn of 1866 Red Cloud’s men harassed federal soldiers who were traveling the road, cutting trees for construction, and provisioning the forts.
Red Cloud’s most active lieutenant was a young Oglala named Crazy Horse, who delighted in taunting the whites and drawing the unwary into ambushes. In late December Red Cloud and Crazy Horse laid a trap. A small company of Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Sioux struck a wagon train on the Bozeman road. They did enough damage to anger the soldiers stationed at Fort Phil Kearny, where the second in command was Captain William Fetterman, a Civil War hero who couldn’t believe Indians could fight nearly as effectively as the Confederates he had defeated. “A single company of regulars could whip a thousand Indians,” he boasted. “A full regiment could whip the entire array of hostile tribes.” On another day he declared, “With eighty men I could ride through the Sioux nation.”15
With eighty-one men Fetterman galloped forth in pursuit of Crazy Horse and the Indian raiders. Fetterman’s explicit orders were to halt at Lodge Trail Ridge, several miles from the fort, lest he outrun reinforcements. But he ignored the orders, intent on crushing the savages. Just beyond Lodge Trail Ridge waited two thousand Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Sioux; as Fetterman rode past they sprung their trap, cutting off the federals’ retreat. Though Fetterman’s men, better armed than the Indians and now fighting for their lives, put up a desperate resistance, they were annihilated. Not one escaped. Fetterman’s body was found with a bullet through the temple; powder burns indicated that it was fired at close range, either by himself or by a fellow officer, in order that the captain not be taken alive. Many of the bodies were mutilated.16
TILL WILLIAM SHERMAN was nine he went by his middle name, Tecumseh, chosen by a father who admired the Shawnee chief responsible for the best organized and most nearly successful counteroffensive—in the early 1810s—in the history of the long struggle between whites and Indians for mastery of North America. Even after his father died and his mother adopted him out to a family that insisted on employing his Christian name, Sherman was “Cump” to his friends. If he noted the irony, after he inherited command of the war against the Indians of the Plains, he never let on.
Sherman could have entered politics at the end of the Civil War. In the celebrations that marked the Union victory he was the hero second only to Grant, and not always second. “The acclamation given Sherman was without precedent,” a reporter covering the Washington review of the Union army declared. “The whole assemblage raised and waved and shouted as if he had been the personal friend of each and every one of them.… Sherman was the idol of the day.” Happiness had never come easily to Sherman; depression trailed him for years. His brooding, even scowling, demeanor put people off. But now that he was the vindicator of liberty his sternness simply made him more appealing. Young women rushed to kiss his red-bearded cheek; he gained a reputation as “the great American soldier who whipped every foeman who stood before him and kissed every girl that he met.” The young ladies couldn’t vote, but their husbands and fathers could, and, by all evidence, many would have been delighted to vote for the man who drove Dixie down.17
But Sherman knew himself well enough to realize he wasn’t meant for politics. He didn’t suffer fools, and crowds made him testy. “At first he was affable,” an observer at one of Sherman’s ceremonial outings recalled. “Then he grew less cordial as the crowds crushed. He pushed down the steps, step by step, and refused proffered hands, finally exclaiming, ‘Damn you, get out of the way, damn you!’ ” A voice called out asking whether Sherman would lead an army against French forces then occupying Mexico. Sherman shouted back, “You can go there if you like, and you can go to hell if you want to!” On another occasion he explained his political philosophy to a reporter: “When I speak, I speak to the point, and when I act in earnest, I act to the point. If a man minds his own business, I let him alone, but if he crosses my path, he must get out of the way.”18
Sherman’s admirers refused to be discouraged, and his disavowals of interest in politics merely titillated popular feeling. But meanwhile he accepted a new assignment from his old commander, Ulysses Grant. General orders issued in June 1865 divided the United States into nineteen departments and five divisions; Sherman received command of the Division of the Mississippi, comprising the Departments of the Ohio, Missouri, and Arkansas. The Ohio department was soon transferred to another division, and Sherman’s command was renamed the Missouri Division, leaving him responsible for the entire West north of Texas.
From his headquarters in St. Louis he observed with concern the escalating hostilities on the Plains. Sherman initially blamed the white settlers, who wanted the army to “kill all the Indians,” as he explained to Grant in the summer of 1866. The Indians, he said, were “pure beggars and poor devils more to be pitied than dreaded.” Sherman determined to resist the white pressure for an army offensive. “I will not permit them to be warred against as long as they are not banded together in parties large enough to carry on war.”19
Sherman was imposing an impossible condition. The Sand Creek massacre demonstrated that the Indians couldn’t rely on the goodwill of whites for their survival (many of those killed at Sand Creek had huddled beneath a flag of the United States), and so they had little choice but to band together. Yet Sherman declared this unacceptable.
And after the destruction of Fetterman’s force, he responded as might have been expected of the avenging angel of the Union army. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination: men, women, and children,” he told Grant. The power of the Plains tribes must be broken. “Both the Sioux and the Cheyennes must die, or submit to our dictation.”20
Sherman delivered his ultimatum personally to the Indians at a council at the forks of the Platte in September 1867. President Andrew Johnson had appointed a “peace commission” to seek an end to the fighting on the northern Plains. Johnson offered the Sioux a reservation consisting of the western half of the modern state of South Dakota. In addition the Sioux would receive hunting grounds along the Powder River, and the federal government would abandon the Bozeman road. Finally, the government would supply the Indians with rations and money payments for thirty years.
Sherman warned the Sioux to accept the president’s offer. “If you don’t choose your homes now,” he said, “i
t will be too late next year.” The Indians might drive the white soldiers back momentarily, but the soldiers would be followed by white settlers. “You can see for yourselves that travel across the country has increased so much that the slow ox wagons will not answer the white man. We will build iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotives any more than you can stop the sun or the moon.” The Great Father at Washington wanted to assist his Indian children. “Choose your homes and live like white men, and we will help you,” Sherman said. Yet the Great Father’s kindness was matched by his strength. “Our people in the East hardly think of what you call war out here, but if they make up their minds to fight, they will come out as thick as the herd of buffaloes, and if you continue fighting you will all be killed.”21
The Sioux leaders refused to heed his advice, and they rode defiantly away from the council. Sherman increased the pressure. He directed General Phil Sheridan, his principal subordinate, to adopt whatever measures seemed necessary to bring the Sioux into compliance with the president’s wishes. “Go ahead in your own way and I will back you with my whole authority,” Sherman said.
If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians, it is but the result of what they have been warned of again and again.… I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry out their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext they may choose to allege.22
Sheridan hardly needed the encouragement. The Union cavalry commander from the Civil War held all Indians in disdain; when a Comanche leader surrendered his force to Sheridan and identified himself as a “good Indian,” Sheridan muttered, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead Indians.” Reported and repeated, Sheridan’s characterization became a catchphrase of annihilation.23
As it happened, the extermination policy Sherman authorized wasn’t implemented just yet. Red Cloud, recognizing that the Sioux couldn’t hold out against the whites forever, led a delegation to Fort Laramie, where in November 1868 he signed a treaty accepting the reservation the Sherman commission had offered.24
Red Cloud’s surrender won him a trip to Washington and New York, where he was applauded for his statesmanship by federal officials and for his foresight and sincerity by those Easterners who counted themselves friends of the Indians. “His earnest manner, his impassioned gestures, the eloquence of his hands, and the magnetism which he evidently exercises over an audience, produced a vast effect on the dense throng which listened to him yesterday,” the New York Times observed after a rally in Red Cloud’s honor in Manhattan.25
LIKE OTHER PLAINS tribes, the Sioux practiced a form of democracy that verged on anarchy. The various bands acknowledged no central authority, and the leader of one band held sway only so long as his arguments convinced the rest of the band. This feature of Indian governance consistently vexed Indian relations with federal authorities, for Washington might negotiate an agreement with one set of leaders only to have the agreement repudiated by other leaders and much of the Sioux nation.
The American government was hardly blameless in this. Federal negotiators regularly found compliant chiefs—often made deliberately drunk—who were willing to sign agreements the federals knew other members of the tribe would reject, and then treated those agreements as though they bound the whole tribe. When those other members did reject the agreements, Washington claimed willful violation and released itself to take what it wanted.
The Fort Laramie pact was an agreement that split the Sioux. Crazy Horse, Red Cloud’s lieutenant, rejected the reservation the federals offered and determined to fight on. About the time Red Cloud was touring the East, Crazy Horse met a charismatic medicine man of the Hunkpapa Sioux named Sitting Bull. From youth Sitting Bull had been known for his visions, which frequently appeared to predict events that subsequently befell the Sioux. Of late he had gained a reputation for his vehement refusal to accept the reservation policy—“peace policy,” it was called by its advocates in the U.S. government—embraced by Red Cloud. Crazy Horse similarly rejected what he considered Red Cloud’s defeatism, and an affinity emerged between Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, each determined that the Sioux should hold their territory against further white encroachment or die trying.26
They launched their defense of their homeland with a campaign against the construction crews of the Northern Pacific Railroad, then inching west from the Missouri River. During the summer of 1872 Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull sniped at surveyors and clashed more seriously with the military escorts sent to guard them. The Sioux resistance inspired Sherman to dispatch reinforcements, including the Seventh Cavalry, led by a longhaired hero of the Civil War battle of Richmond, George Armstrong Custer.
By the time Custer reached the Sioux country, construction on the Northern Pacific had been halted—not by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull but by the Panic of 1873. Another development, however, no less linked to American capitalism, ensured that the struggle for the Plains would continue and indeed intensify. Gold prospectors had skirted the Sioux region while less dangerous environs remained unexplored, but as they ran out of promising territory farther west, they were drawn to that easternmost island of Rocky Mountain topography, the Black Hills of Dakota. The Black Hills had long been holy to the Sioux, partly because their beetled ridges and dark canyons, contrasting so starkly with the open aspect of the plain that surrounds them, seemed an obvious home to spirits and other ethereal beings, but also because those canyons and their forests provided game in summer and shelter in winter.
The Sioux knew the Black Hills contained gold, but they wrapped their knowledge in a veil of enforced mystery. Decades earlier some Sioux had shown a Catholic missionary gold nuggets taken from the region; the missionary, warning them what the whites would do if they learned of the gold, advised them to bury the nuggets and suppress the knowledge. A Sioux council subsequently decreed death for anyone who told whites of the gold in the Black Hills.27
The mystery shrouding the area simply fired the imagination of the prospectors. With the possible exception of stock speculation, with which it shares many traits, no livelihood is more prone to rumor than gold prospecting. The slightest hint of gold in a new region can prompt a stampede to that place. This became the truer as the likely spots to look for gold dwindled. In the early 1870s reports of gold in the Black Hills surfaced periodically; by 1874 they had produced a groundswell of western demand that the Black Hills be opened to serious exploration. A Dakota editorialist spoke for many when he condemned the Fort Laramie treaty as an “abominable compact” that gave savages a veto over gold mining and other forms of economic development. “They will not dig the gold or let others do it,” he wrote. “They are too lazy and too much like mere animals to cultivate the fertile soil, mine the coal, develop the salt mines, bore the petroleum wells, or wash the gold. Having all these things in their hands, they prefer to live as paupers, thieves and beggars; fighting, torturing, hunting, gorging, yelling and dancing all night to the beating of old tin kettles.”28
As the depression in the East deepened, characterized by falling prices and other symptoms of shrinkage in the money supply, the Grant administration couldn’t resist the opportunity to show it was taking steps to rectify the problem. It authorized an expedition to the Black Hills to determine whether the region was as rich as the rumors suggested.
George Custer headed the expedition, which included sufficient soldiers and armaments to discourage attack, a cadre of scientists to assay the mineral resources of the region, a photographer to make a visual record of the journey, and four newspapermen to publicize the fine work Colonel Custer was doing for his country. The correspondents doubtless wished for a scrape with the Indians to enliven their dispatches, but they had to make do with Custer’s confirmation of g
old in the Black Hills. In a letter to the War Department, Custer reported finding “40 or 50 small particles of pure gold, in size averaging that of a small pin head, and most of it obtained today from one panful of earth.” The newsmen amplified Custer’s words for their lay readership. “Here, in Custer’s Valley, rich gold and silver mines have been discovered, both placer and quartz diggings,” the reporter for the Bismarck Tribune declared. “This immense section bids fair to become the El Dorado of America.” The Yankton Press and Dakotan headlined, “Struck It at Last! Rich Mines of Gold and Silver Reported Found by Custer. Prepare for Lively Times! … The National Debt to Be Repaid When Custer Returns.”29
The news set off a gold rush to the Black Hills, despite the Fort Laramie treaty and despite initial efforts of the federal government, in keeping with the “peace policy,” to stop it. “You are hereby directed to use the force at your command to burn the wagon trains, destroy the outfits, and arrest the leaders,” Phil Sheridan wired General Alfred Terry, the commander of the Dakota district, regarding the gold rushers. But neither Terry nor other officers in the field took more than rhetorical action against the miners. Even these efforts were undercut by Grant’s decision to try to purchase the Black Hills from the Sioux. Red Cloud was ready to deal, reckoning that what the whites wanted they sooner or later would get and that the Indians ought at least to receive something in return. But negotiations stuck on price (in part because a translator miscast the Indians’ demand for $7 million as $70 million). And in any event, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull denied the authority of Red Cloud or anyone else to barter away their sacred patrimony.30
Meanwhile the rush for gold continued. By the spring of 1876 some fifteen thousand miners and camp followers had occupied the riverbanks and gravel bars of the Black Hills. Their presence remained illegal, and in public comments to persons critical of the government’s unfair treatment of the Indians, Grant reiterated that the region was off-limits to white settlement. Yet he made no effort to remove the intruders.
