by H. W. Brands
On December 15, a large force of Indian police surrounded Sitting Bull’s cabin on the Grand River. They seized Sitting Bull, only to discover that they were surrounded in turn by a much larger group of Ghost Dancers. The Indian police tried to bluster their way past the Ghost Dancers, but one of the latter opened fire. By accident or design, the return fire of the police struck Sitting Bull, killing him instantly. At this point, according to eyewitnesses, something very strange happened. Sitting Bull had received a gift horse from Buffalo Bill Cody, a pony that had performed tricks in Cody’s Wild West show. One of the cues was a pistol shot, and when the animal now heard the gunfire, it started its routine of raising its hooves and shaking its head. The Ghost Dancers interpreted this as a version of the Ghost Dance and held their fire to watch. By the time the pony trotted away, a cavalry company had arrived to rescue the Indian police.2
This chance event simply deferred the reckoning, and perhaps made it worse. Fearing retaliation from the soldiers, the Sioux scattered; a band led by a chief named Big Foot started for the Pine Ridge agency, where they hoped to find protection with Red Cloud, the most faithful of the Sioux allies of the whites. Big Foot’s band was mostly women and children, but it contained enough warriors to worry the local army commander, who diverted the band to a camp on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. Big Foot acquiesced, though the exposed campsite put his ill-equipped people at risk of death from exposure. He himself had caught pneumonia and could barely ride.
In the last week of December, Colonel James Forsyth, George Custer’s successor as commander of the Seventh Cavalry, received orders to disarm Big Foot’s band. Black Elk happened to be at the Pine Ridge agency as the cavalry moved out. “When I saw them starting, I felt that something terrible was going to happen,” he recalled. “That night I could hardly sleep at all. I walked around most of the night.”3
The next morning—December 29—Forsyth distributed rations of hardtack to Big Foot’s hungry band. Then he demanded that they turn over their weapons. Some did; others resisted, although whether from defiance or confusion as to what qualified as weapons was unclear. Someone—perhaps an Indian, perhaps a soldier—fired a shot, triggering a general melee of gunfire and desperate hand-to-hand fighting. Several Indians and soldiers fell on the spot; other Indians broke away, only to be mowed down by the Hotchkiss machine guns the cavalry had mounted above the camp. The fire from the guns raked the camp, ripping through tepees and cutting down men, women, and children indiscriminately.
Black Elk heard the big guns from a distance. “I knew from the sound that it must be wagon guns”—the Hotchkiss guns—“going off. The sounds went right through my body.” He donned his sacred shirt (not a Ghost Shirt but one of his own), painted his face red, put an eagle feather in his hair, mounted his buckskin, and galloped in the direction of Wounded Knee Creek. He carried no gun, only a sacred bow that he had seen in his great vision and crafted later. On the road he joined up with several other Sioux, till they numbered about twenty. In time they mounted a rise that looked down upon Big Foot’s camp. “Wagon guns were still going off,” he remembered. “There was much shooting.… There were many cries, and we could see cavalrymen scattered over the hills ahead of us. Cavalrymen were riding along the gulch and shooting into it, where women and children were running away and trying to hide in the gullies and the stunted pines.”
Black Elk spotted a group of women and children huddled under the bank of the gulch. Several soldiers had rifles trained on them. Black Elk shouted over the din to his comrades: “Take courage! These are our relatives. We will try to get them back.” As they prepared to charge, they shouted to one another: “Take courage! It is time to fight!” They galloped headlong toward the gulch. The soldiers fired at them. “I had no gun, and when we were charging I just held the sacred bow out in front of me with my right hand,” Black Elk said. “The bullets did not hit us at all.” Black Elk found a baby lying on the ground crying for her mother. He stopped long enough to wrap her tightly in the shawl that had fallen loose around her. Then he set her down, out of the line of fire. “It was a safe place, and I had other work to do.”
By this time many more Sioux had raced up from Pine Ridge to join the fight. “We all charged on the soldiers. They ran eastward toward where the trouble began.” The soldiers retreated to the creek and there dug themselves in. The Indians couldn’t dislodge them. Eventually the soldiers marched away up the creek.
The carnage was all too evident by then. Black Elk rode slowly along the dry gulch. “Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the wagon guns hit them. I saw a little baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead.”
The official statistics registered 146 Indians dead, including 44 women and 18 children, and 51 wounded. The Indian death toll almost certainly was higher, perhaps much higher, as many uncounted wounded ran or crawled away to die unmolested further by the soldiers. The soldiers suffered 25 dead and 39 wounded. Several, perhaps many, of the casualties among the soldiers were inflicted by their own fire.
“It was a good winter day when all this happened,” Black Elk remembered. “The sun was shining. But after the soldiers marched away from their dirty work, a heavy snow began to fall. The wind came up in the night. There was a big blizzard, and it grew very cold. The snow drifted deep in the crooked gulch, and it was one long grave of butchered women and children and babies, who had never done any harm and were only trying to run away.”4
WOUNDED KNEE, as matters proved, marked the end of an era, the last armed resistance to white control of the territory claimed by the government of the United States. For three hundred years Indians had fought the Anglo-Americans; the struggle had stained every state and nearly every county with the Indians’ blood or the whites’. Now the struggle was finally over. The Indians could no longer resist; the invaders had won.
A less sanguinary sign of the white victory was being registered even as the Seventh Cavalry rolled its Hotchkiss guns away from Wounded Knee. During 1890 the federal government conducted its constitutionally mandated decennial census; the tally—the first census to employ mechanical tabulating machines—revealed a population of 63 million living in the forty-two states. This aggregate population represented an increase of 25 percent over 1880, resulting from both heavy immigration and healthy natural increase. Nine million of those 63 million were foreign born. Most Americans, 64 percent, still lived in rural districts, although the cities were growing rapidly. The largest cities were New York, with 1.5 million inhabitants; Chicago, with 1.1 million; Philadelphia, 1 million; and Brooklyn (still separate from New York), 800,000.
The most intriguing part of the report was a statement inserted near the end of the summary on the population and its distribution:
Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent and its western movement it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.5
Politicians read the census report for guidance on redrawing legislative districts; merchants studied its tables in search of business opportunities; speculators scanned the maps for clues to future movements of population. Frederick Jackson Turner read it for insight into America’s past. A young historian at the University of Wisconsin, Turner judged existing interpretations of American history inadequate. The graybeards of the history profession, preeminently Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins, had adapted the evolutionary thinking of Charles Darwin to the study of history and concluded that American institutions had evolved from English precursors, which in turn reflected Ger
manic practices. The roots of American history lay in Europe; to understand America, one must examine Europe.
Turner had studied with Adams and mastered the conventional wisdom sufficiently to earn his doctorate in 1890. But he thought Adams and the Teutonists fundamentally wrong. No doubt the germ of American democracy could be discovered in Europe, but its distinctiveness reflected the New World soil in which the seed had sprouted and blossomed. Turner didn’t reject Darwin, but he was a Lamarckian at heart, believing acquired characteristics could be passed from one generation to the next.
He was also a Westerner. Born in Portage, Wisconsin, at a time when Indians still roamed the forests among the lakes, Turner believed the West—in particular, the moving frontier of settlement—had made America what it became. Turner deemed history inseparable from geography, as he explained to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association held in Chicago in 1893. “The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society,” he said.
Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system.
In his thirty-two years Turner had observed the frontier passing across Wisconsin; now he asked his audience to imagine its motion in their mind’s eye.
Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader’s frontier, the rancher’s frontier, or the miner’s frontier, and the farmer’s frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line the traders’ pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghenies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader’s birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri.
The moving frontier had shaped American history in distinctive ways. It attracted the disparate nationalities that differentiated the United States from the European countries. The Atlantic Coast was predominantly English, but Germans and Scotch Irish quickly filled in behind the coast. The frontier diminished the dependence of the Americans on Europe; the individual self-reliance evoked by the frontier extrapolated into a national self-reliance that led to separation from Britain. The frontier promoted egalitarianism; the gentry didn’t leave the coast, and those persons who did leave were judged on their accomplishments, not on their breeding. Most important, the frontier fostered democracy. Those independent Westerners wouldn’t tolerate the restrictions on the franchise practiced in the East; as the numbers of Westerners increased and their influence in national politics grew—manifested most clearly by their election of Andrew Jackson as president—the Easterners had to lower their restrictions out of self-defense.
All this mattered to historians, but not to historians alone. The statement by the census director that the frontier had disappeared suggested that American society had reached a turning point in its evolution.
Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.
But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.
What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.6
AMERICAN FARMERS READ the 1890 census, too, and it confirmed a decades-old belief that history was tilting against them. As America industrialized, as corporate capitalism became the dominant mode of economic enterprise, farmers felt their autonomy diminish, and, against the inclinations of many of them, they grew increasingly radical. Industrial workers squeezed by wage cuts might complain about particular capitalists—their bosses, most obviously—without rejecting capitalism per se. And in fact this was what most American workers did. But farmers, typically being their own bosses, could hardly damn falling crop prices and rising interest rates without condemning capitalism as a whole. In the 1890s farmers were still the largest occupational group in America, although they no longer constituted an absolute majority of workers; and they still considered themselves the repository of the nation’s core values. But their numbers continued to slip compared with industrial workers and with the emerging white-collar class of office personnel, and their incomes eroded relative to workers and big capitalists both. Like other petty capitalists—the victims of John Rockefeller’s conquest of oil, the merchants left stranded by J. P. Morgan’s reorganization of railroads—the farmers could easily believe that capitalism was failing them. Or perhaps they were failing capitalism. Either way, capitalism had to be radically transformed. The obvious means was democracy.
Farmers didn’t reach this conclusion all together or all at once. Many, viewing their problems as chiefly economic, at first sought to tackle them by economic means. With capitalists consolidating into trusts, and workers into trade unions, many farmers sought to consolidate into organizations of their own. In 1867 Minnesota’s Oliver Kelley founded the Patrons of Husbandry, commonly called the Grange. An erstwhile employee of the federal Department of Agriculture, Kelley worked the contacts he had made among farmers to advocate a brotherhood (and sisterhood: the Grange admitted women) of children of the soil. His program emphasized cooperation in purchasing supplies and marketing crops, and a united front against railroads and other shippers. Kelley’s concept caught on; the Grange grew to nineteen thousand chapters and 750,000 members by 1875.7
The Grange self-consciously eschewed politics and avoided endorsing candidates. Yet members gravitated to politics nonetheless. The Panic of 1873 revealed the limits of private-sector activism; though Grange cooperatives increased farmers’ leverage with suppliers and customers, they couldn’t cope with the general destabilization of American finance. Farmers took to the hustings in the mid-1870s, running independent candidates who promised to curb the railroads and pressure the federal government to loosen the money supply or backing Republicans and Democrats who promised the same thing. In several midwestern states they won approval of “Granger laws” regulating railroad and warehouse rates. The railroads and their allies challenged the laws in court, contending that th
ey violated the commerce clause of the Constitution and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. At this point in American constitutional history, however, the concept of “substantive” due process remained undeveloped, and the Supreme Court, in the 1877 case of Munn v. Illinois, upheld the Granger laws. Chief Justice Morrison Waite, writing for the 7-to-2 majority, asserted that the popular prerogatives of democracy trumped the property rights of capitalism, at least in the area of commerce. “For protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts,” he said. Yet Associate Justice Stephen J. Field sounded a warning in dissent: “If this be sound law, if there be no protection, either in the principles upon which our republican government is founded, or in the prohibitions of the Constitution against such invasion of private rights, all property and all business in the State are held at the mercy of a majority of its legislature.”8
The Granger laws didn’t address the currency issue, which began to emerge as the crucial one for farmers. In the industrial era farmers typically carried a heavy load of debt: for land, equipment, seed, fertilizer, and living expenses till their crops were sold. Falling crop prices in the decades after the Civil War increased the real cost of repayment—a thousand-dollar loan incurred when wheat fetched a dollar a bushel represented a thousand bushels; when wheat fell to fifty cents, two thousand. Had farmers been able to organize among themselves and reduce their output (in much the way the trusts restrained their output, and labor unions attempted to reduce the supply of labor), they might have boosted prices through the marketplace. But the farmers faced two daunting handicaps. In the first place, there were millions of farmers, in contrast to the scores, perhaps, or fewer of corporations potentially competing in a given industry. Organizing all those farmers, and enforcing any agreement, was nearly impossible within the confines of the private sector. (Workers faced similar problems, which was a principal reason the larger unions—conspicuously the Knights of Labor—didn’t last.) Second, even if American farmers organized, they would still face foreign competition. Basic farm commodities were fungible: wheat was wheat, whether grown in North Dakota or the northern Ukraine, and cotton was cotton, whether from the vicinity of Alexandria, Louisiana, or Alexandria, Egypt.
