Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  The second era of treaty making would be different from the first era, both in kind and quantity. Many of the treaties between tribes and the federal government during this later period were treaties of peace, agreements in which no land was exchanged. Instead, annuities were offered and rights formally conferred on these widely dispersed Indian nations, in exchange for guarantees of peaceful coexistence.

  “Uncle Sam simply wanted to make peace with these people and guarantee its citizens safe passage on the Oregon Trail. The treaties that apply today to the salmon tribes on the Columbia came from that second big wave of treaties. All Congress really wanted from the Indians was a guarantee of peace. In order to get that, they were pretty much willing to guarantee the Indians anything they wanted, such as perpetual access to their hunting grounds—such as guarantees that their salmon fishery would be protected in perpetuity.”

  The typical treaty from this era struck bargains between the American people and the tribal nations that would be in effect “for as long as the waters shall flow.” Western tribes with little previous experience in dealing with the white men quickly learned that water in white communities seldom flowed for more than ten or fifteen years. The ink had no sooner dried on one treaty than a new president or a new Congress was dispatching more agents to Indian Country to bring back new treaties. In these second- and third-generation contracts, Congress was bargaining not for peace and safe passage for pioneers but for land, and more land. To achieve that end, the legislature ratified in less than fifty years more than three hundred treaties. Some tribes signed four and five agreements, each with overlapping conditions, a new exchange of values, and reconfigured boundaries to their homelands. Federal courts are now routinely asked to sort through the myriad of conflicting conditions to divine what tribal leaders understood at the time the treaty was made, and to rule on which “as long as the rivers shall flow” clause controls the conditions and boundaries being contested in the twenty-first century.

  Great leaders such as Red Cloud, Black Kettle, Sitting Bull, and Plenty Coups were not fooled by the conflicting conditions offered by Indian agents in treaty negotiations. What the left hand took in friendship and peace, namely Indian land, the right hand of government gave away to settlers and homesteaders a few years later. “If you can find one man in Washington who speaks the truth,” Sitting Bull told General Sherman at Fort Laramie, “I will gladly meet with him.”

  “What you are now dealing with here on the Columbia is a result of all that treaty history,” says Cross. “It’s obvious to us today that the federal government didn’t do a very good job of thinking things through in the last phase of the treaty era. Congress’ final treaty was made with the leaders of the Nez Percé nation in 1871. Today, that’s one of the treaties that has your backs against the wall here at the BPA. The Nez Percé were guaranteed their fishing livelihood on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, in perpetuity.

  “So, as you can see, it is no fault of the tribes that the BPA, the states, the agricultural interests, the aluminum industry, and the cities of Portland and Seattle all find themselves in such a predicament over the salmon. As long as Congress secured its desired short-term goals in the nineteenth century, legislators tended to ignore the long-term consequences, not to mention their responsibilities as trustees. But that didn’t matter to the Indian people in the short term. The Indian people were always willing to take the long view, to think far out into the future. They were thinking about today.”

  To illustrate that point from his own family history, Raymond Cross notes that hundreds of land-claims cases brought by tribes such as the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, all filed in the final decades of the twentieth century, have a common point of origin. As often as not, a modern tribe’s complaints of malfeasance against the United States government reach back across 150 years to retrace the sacred lines drawn by hand on a sheet of parchment beside a meandering tributary of the Platte River. For three weeks in September 1851, at the peak of the second era of treaty making, the greatest peace council in the history of the American republic was convened by Superintendent of Indian Affairs David Mitchell, at Fort Laramie in the Nebraska Territory.

  With visions of white women’s scalps dangling before their eyes, lawmakers in Washington had finally acted on William Medill’s dire warnings. In the winter of 1851, Congress appropriated $100,000 for “the expense of holding treaties with all the wild tribes of the prairie and for bringing delegates to the seat of government.” Fortunately for David Mitchell, when word of Congress’ formal action reached him in St. Louis, Thomas Fitzpatrick, the father of the Oregon Trail, happened to be in town on his annual business trip from the Wyoming Territory. Congress’ approval came as great news to the new treaty commissioners, but it came with a challenge that was equally daunting. Nothing of this scale had ever before been attempted with nomadic tribes. With no time to waste, Mitchell and Fitzpatrick scattered runners across a million square miles of “territory unknown” with invitations to leaders of all the great western tribes. Promising gifts, Mitchell invited them to bring their men, women, and children so they could all gather in September for a great peace council at Fort Laramie.

  The peace conference proposed by Congress would include dozens of tribes, many of which were mortal enemies. The council would also require the services of every interpreter Mitchell and Fitzpatrick could scour up from far-flung trading posts. Fitzpatrick calculated that once underway, the formal proceedings would be conducted in no fewer than twelve languages. Many of those whose talents the new treaty commissioners called upon—frontiersmen such as Jim Bridger and Robert Meldrum—were already legendary figures in the mountain West. At the top of their list were Alexander Culbertson, the veteran trader at Fort Union at the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone, and the distinguished Belgian Jesuit priest Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet, who was currently teaching at the nearby St. Louis University.

  DeSmet had recently returned to the city after spending fifteen years among the tribes of the Northwest. He was renowned among Indians and whites alike for his pacific demeanor and physical stamina. Mitchell sent a messenger specifically asking Culbertson to meet DeSmet at the Mandan Villages, eighteen hundred miles up the Missouri. Mitchell hoped that his emissaries could coax the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara into making the rugged eight-hundred-mile overland trek to Fort Laramie. He would have no way of knowing if his gamble paid off until they all arrived at Fort Laramie three months later. The white men who traveled to this distant outpost would call it the Fort Laramie Peace Council of 1851. The Indians would call it the Miracle at Horse Creek.

  CHAPTER III

  Miracle at Horse Creek

  “You speak by papers and record your words in books. We speak from our hearts, and memory writes our words on the hearts of our people.”

  GRIZZLY BEAR, MENOMINEE

  Commissioner Mitchell’s invitation to Father DeSmet and Alexander Culbertson came at propitious moments for both men. The Fort Union trader had already made plans to travel downriver for his annual rendezvous with the Mandan. The Belgian priest in turn had been actively lobbying his superiors at St. Louis University to release him back to his vocation as a sojourning “black robe” among the western tribes. After spending fifteen years wandering the West and living among the Indians, DeSmet chaffed against the yoke of cloistered priesthood. DeSmet’s superiors relented and agreed to send his close friend, Father Christian Hoecken, to accompany him as far as Fort Berthold, the American Fur Company trading post at the Mandan’s new village of Like-a-Fishhook, a day’s journey upstream from the Knife River.

  The priests’ fellow passengers on the paddle wheeler St. Ange were mostly young French, German, and Swiss emigrants, wide-eyed adventurers who had hired themselves out to the American Fur Company to trap beaver in the Rocky Mountains. But this was the last voyage many of them would make. To the horror of all those trapped aboard the small ship, one of the deckhands soon fell ill with cholera. Less than two weeks into the voy
age, the dreaded scourge swept through the ship like fire. Dozens of passengers and crew perished within days. Thousands of miles from friends and family, the dead were buried ashore whenever possible, or simply slipped over the gunwales into the Missouri. DeSmet’s companion, Father Hoecken, tirelessly attended to the sick, then perished himself in DeSmet’s arms. After hastily burying Father Hoecken on a small island near the mouth of the Little Sioux River, DeSmet and the St. Ange continued on their way upstream, fighting day and night against the Missouri’s dangerous currents. The Belgian priest was by nature a hard-nosed pragmatist, yet he now wrote in his journal that his brush with death on the St. Ange had unhinged his nerve. He feared the advancing plague could only be a dark omen for the tribes of the Great Plains.

  As the St. Ange was approaching the big bend of the Upper Missouri River, word of the cholera outbreak reached Commissioner Mitchell’s wagon train as it lumbered across the plains toward Fort Laramie. For Mitchell, already burdened with doubts about his enterprise, this was discouraging news. His secretary, a young lawyer and future governor of Missouri named B. Gratz Brown, reported in the commission’s official log that the new outbreak was sweeping across the Northern Plains like the smallpox epidemic of 1837. Mitchell pressed onward, knowing that this epidemic could upend any hopes for long-term peace with western tribes.

  By 1851, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara had been dealing with white men for more than a century. Measured against the French, Spanish, and English, the Americans had the shortest history, and they were the least trustworthy. It seemed to leaders such as Cherry Necklace that the tribes had paid a high price for friendship with the Americans. Since the departure of Lewis and Clark in 1806, the ensuing parade of profiteering vagabonds, explorers, and fur traders had brought far more grief to the Mandan Villages than could be offset by promises of material wealth. Fourteen years before, in 1837, smallpox had cut a deadly path up the Missouri aboard an American Fur Company steamboat, the St. Peters.

  Though the origin of the great smallpox epidemic of 1837 will forever be shrouded in mystery, the virus is believed to have traveled up the river from St. Louis, finally coming ashore at the Fort Clark landing on June 18, on a blanket wrapped around the shoulders of an Arikara woman. On July 14, the white trader at Fort Clark, a semiliterate alcoholic cur named Francis A. Chardon, recorded the first Mandan death in the trading post’s log. After carefully listing various business transactions that took place throughout the day, Chardon ends his entry with a matter-of-fact postscript: “A young Mandan died today of the smallpox. Several others has caught it. The Indians all being out making dried meat has saved several of them.”

  By summer’s end, the piles of rotting bodies in the villages had become so extensive and commonplace, and the wails of grief so constant, that Chardon himself became semideranged. After watching more than a thousand villagers perish in six weeks, Chardon wrote in his journal on the last day of August that a friend in the village had taken ill and killed himself. Rather than waste away in physical agony and grief, the young man’s wife then “killed her two children, one a fine boy of eight, and the other six, and to complete the affair, she hung herself.” Two weeks later, he entered a final note on the epidemic without a further word of explanation: “My youngest son died today. . . . What a bundle of rascals has been used up [by the epidemic].”

  From the Mandan Villages at the Knife River, the plague cut a deadly path through the nearby communities of Hidatsa and Arikara. Fortunately for both, their hunters had scattered on the plains in pursuit of buffalo and were spared from the brunt of the epidemic. The Hidatsa lost only half of their people before the first winter snows. The strain of pox was so virulent that its victims often died within hours of showing the first symptoms. Bodies turned black and swelled to three times their normal size in the prairie sun. Before it had run its course, the epidemic of 1837 claimed half a million Indian lives.

  This was the second devastating epidemic to visit the Village Indians in two generations. A previous outbreak, in 1781, reduced their population from fourteen thousand to fewer than three thousand in just four weeks. The survivors moved upstream and built two new villages near the mouth of the Knife River, close to their longtime allies, the Hidatsa. It was here that Lewis and Clark found them in October 1804. Two more generations would live at the Knife before the epidemic arrived on the St. Peters and reduced the Mandan tribe to fewer than two hundred people. The survivors abandoned the Knife River and commenced a migration upstream in search of a new village site. A few miles upstream, they found a high spit of land on the northeastern bank of the river. There, the Mandan and Hidatsa joined their tribes for the first time. Together they built a small village that they named Like-a-Fishhook.

  When Father DeSmet disembarked at the new village, his spirits brightened when he learned that his longtime friend Alexander Culbertson had arrived from Fort Union several days ahead of him. The two men had not seen each other since DeSmet returned to St. Louis from Montana five years before. By the time DeSmet arrived, Culbertson had already extended Mitchell’s invitation to the Mandan and Hidatsa leaders. The trip to Fort Laramie would cross hundreds of miles of hostile country. To Cherry Necklace the risks entailed in such a venture appeared to outweigh the potential rewards. Where the Mandan’s bellicose neighbors, such as the Sioux and the Blackfeet, seemed to have flourished, the fortunes of the Village Indians had suffered greatly. The contrast was lost on no one, but the chiefs nevertheless agreed to postpone their decision until they met with the black robe.

  “We get no help at all from our old friends, the mah-shi,” the chiefs told the trader and the priest. “When the men go off hunting, the women cannot work in the cornfields without being raped and murdered by the Sioux. When we ask for the help of our friends, the white men, they grow scarce and are nowhere to be found.”

  As he listened to the litany of complaints from the elders, Father DeSmet waited for the right moment to present his arguments. The Great White Father asked for this treaty council, he told them, in hopes of putting an end to all the fighting among the Indians. Gifts were promised to all the tribes who attended the peace council at Fort Laramie. DeSmet assured them that future generations of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara children would reap the benefits. He personally knew the commissioner, David Mitchell, and he could vouch for the honesty and character of this man. Mitchell wanted to protect the Village Indians by making peace with the Sioux.

  Culbertson translated DeSmet’s apology. If the conference was an opportunity to make lasting peace with the Yankton and Lakota Sioux, then Cherry Necklace agreed that their tribes must attend and proposed that they proceed with the selection of representatives. Raven Chief and Red Roan Cow would speak for the Mandan. The Hidatsa selected their young war chief, Four Bears, and the Arikara tapped their elder chief, Gray Prairie Eagle. With two wagons and a small herd of horses, DeSmet, Culbertson, and the small band of headmen and their families set off into the unknown on July 31, 1851.

  As the widely dispersed tribes approached Fort Laramie and the rendezvous with David Mitchell, many saw the “Great Medicine Road” of the white man for the first time. After a journey of eight hundred miles across unmapped wilderness, DeSmet, Culbertson, and their small party of war chiefs met the Oregon Trail about fifty miles west of Fort Laramie. The vision that now filled the Indians’ disbelieving eyes, wrote DeSmet, “was the broadest, longest, and most beautiful road in the whole world, a highway as smooth as a barn floor swept by the winds, and not a blade of grass can shoot on it on account of the continual passing.”

  The last wagon trains of the year had passed this way three months earlier. By September the trains that left St. Joseph, Missouri, in mid-March were approaching the Columbia River across the high desert of eastern Oregon. The Nebraska plains were now silent, but the evidence of their passing was strewn everywhere: cooking utensils, knives, axes, hammers and kettles, barrel staves and parts of wagons and wheels, rotting carcasses of oxen, discarded furn
iture and clothing, and hastily dug graves marked with simple crosses.

  When they came upon this spectacle, Four Bears, Raven Chief, and Gray Prairie Eagle stared speechlessly in both directions. These were men accustomed to traveling hundreds of miles across the prairie on trails no wider than their shoulders. Surely, they told DeSmet and Culbertson, a road such as this was made by so many people that the exodus had left their homelands empty. To the contrary, DeSmet assured them, the whites that made this trail would not be missed from the great cities of the East. The silver-haired black robe was the most trusted mah-shi they had ever known, but Gray Prairie Eagle told the priest that the Indian’s eyes did not lie. What he told them could not be so.

  The men in Washington who called for peace and friendship with the “wild tribes” of the West could no more imagine the scale of the endeavor being undertaken by Mitchell and Fitzpatrick than Four Bears and Gray Prairie Eagle could imagine life in an eastern city. Despite Mitchell’s promise to shower the tribes with gifts, when the government’s five-mile-long wagon train left St. Louis on the final day of July, the anxious Mitchell had no way of knowing how his invitations had been received, nor whether any of the tribes would accept. Before he left, he wired Congress and told them that he and Fitzpatrick were hoping to meet with as many as five thousand Indians. As the wagon train approached Fort Laramie on September 3, he saw the answer to his question swarming in the distance. The small fort was surrounded by an encampment of twelve thousand Indians. Fifty thousand Indian ponies ranged loose on the plains. The Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Assiniboin, Sioux and Cheyenne, Shoshone, and Arapaho and Gros Ventre had all come to smoke the pipe of peace with the Great White Fathers. Yet Mitchell had no sooner swung down off his horse than word reached him that problems were already brewing between enemy tribes. Buffalo, it seemed, were scarce, and there was not enough water for the herd of ponies. And as far as the eye could see there was not a blade of grass left on the prairie.