The politics of compromise across sectional lines died on the plains of Kansas, and a new arrangement took its place. In order to win a national election, the Republicans, an antislavery party of northeastern interests, needed western support. In 1856 they played to western sympathies by running the peripatetic John C. Frémont under the banner “Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont.” Frémont lost, but not by much. The Jacksonian coalition had depended on the political alliance of the Old Northwest and Old Southwest, the linking of farmers and planters via the Mississippi. But the construction of the Erie Canal, the development of steam transport on the Great Lakes, and finally the construction of railroad lines redirected the commercial connections from New Orleans to New York City. These prospering economic ties generated increasing support for the Republican program: protective tariffs for northern industry, internal improvements, cheap public land, and railroads for westerners, and an end to slavery’s expansion. In 1860 the states of the Old Northwest sealed the new sectional alliance by voting in a block for Abraham Lincoln. When the South refused to accept the election’s outcome and seceded, the West and the Northeast not only joined forces to preserve the union, but they also seized the reins of the federal government. Purged of southern representation, Congress moved on two of the West’s most cherished political goals: a Homestead Act providing free land for settlers and a Pacific railroad.
Antislavery militia in Kansas, c. 1856. Kansas State Historical Society.
. . .
When military historians speak of the “western theater” during the Civil War, they refer to battles fought at sites like Shiloh, Chattanooga, and Vicksburg, strategic sites in the trans-Appalachian West. The war in the West meant the war in the Old Southwest with two exceptions. Confederate president Jefferson Davis took a strong interest in the territory that had been acquired from Mexico. Serving as secretary of war during the 1850s, he had noted with interest the long tradition of irrigated cotton cultivation by Indians and Mexican farmers living there. Some historians argue that slavery was climatically unsuited to the arid West, yet in the twentieth century Arizona and California became two of the nation’s largest cotton-producing states using a labor force that was barely free. Historian Donald Frazier argues that the creation of a Confederate slave empire in the West “was a basic goal of Southern independence.” It is revealing that one of the first strategic moves of the Confederacy was an attempt to grab the territory of New Mexico. An army of 3,500 Texans pushed up the Rio Grande from El Paso and forced the retreat of Union forces, giving the proslavery minority in the area the opportunity to proclaim the Confederate Territory of Arizona.36
During the following winter of 1861–62 the Texans extended their control, capturing the towns of Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Gold had been discovered in the front range of the Rockies in 1859, and with the aim of seizing these valuable Colorado mines, the troops advanced on Fort Union, east of Santa Fe, the largest federal facility in the Southwest. But at Glorieta Pass in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains they were turned back by Colorado volunteers. Leading the charge with “a pistol in each hand and one or two under his arms” was Major John M. Chivington, a Methodist minister known to his men as the “fighting parson.” Chivington’s maneuver broke the Texan lines and forced a Confederate retreat from New Mexico.37
An even more important Confederate goal was control of the state of Missouri, which would put the rebels in command of the entire west bank of the Mississippi River. As part of this strategy, the Confederate government sent agents to court the leaders of the Indian nations in Indian Country, directly south of strongly Unionist Kansas. The Choctaws and Chickasaws quickly signed Confederate treaties without much dissent in 1861, but among the Creeks, Seminoles, and especially the Cherokees, there were strong pro-Union factions. These new divisions reopened old wounds. Chief John Ross of the Cherokees, for example, found his principal support among those who had opposed removal from Georgia, including most of the full bloods and traditionalists. The pro-Confederate faction, by contrast, was led by Stand Watie, the lone survivor of the group of leaders who had signed the removal treaty. Watie’s supporters also included most of the Cherokee slave owners. Ross tried to maintain Cherokee neutrality but was seriously undercut when federal troops withdrew from Indian Territory in April 1861. By then Watie was already organizing fighters from the “United Nations of Indians” for the Confederacy.
In Missouri, meanwhile, ad hoc Unionist forces blocked the attempt of the governor to take his state into the Confederacy. When a rebel army composed of troops from Indian Territory and Arkansas invaded the state in March 1862, they were defeated by federal forces at Pea Ridge in the Ozarks, saving Missouri for the Union, at least on paper. But the violence metastasized into a vicious guerrilla struggle. Armed bands of abolitionist Jayhawkers crossed the Kansas border into Missouri, burning and looting. Confederate Bushwhackers like William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson answered in kind. Quantrill stormed abolitionist Lawrence in 1863, leaving 182 men and boys slaughtered. “More than any other state, Missouri suffered the horrors of internecine warfare,” writes Civil War historian James McPherson, and “produced a form of terrorism that exceeded anything else in the war.”38
Except maybe in Indian Territory, where factional guerrilla fighting nearly destroyed the Indian nations. “From being the once proud, intelligent, and wealthy tribe of Indians,” wrote a federal official, “the Cherokees are now stripped of nearly all.” Fleeing the devastation, ten thousand Indian refugees moved north into Kansas, where they mingled with thousands of proslavery refugees who had been evicted from their western Missouri homes. Both western Missouri and Indian Territory would remain wastelands for years. The victorious federal government made the Five Civilized Tribes pay dearly for their Confederate alliance, forcing them to relinquish half their lands. They also had to make room for the emigrant Indians evicted from Kansas to accommodate white settlers.39
. . .
During the war the Republican Congress carved the rest of the trans-Mississippi West into territories in preparation for their settlement. Mapping a domain, however, was not the same as having one. Bringing the West into the nation would require a generation of offensive warfare. For the several hundred thousand Indian people who called the West home, it meant thirty years of desperate resistance.
Suffering and slaughter became commonplace and changed the expectations and behavior of thousands of western Americans. New means of violence facilitated these new habits. In 1836 Samuel Colt patented the first modern revolver, an inexpensive weapon that had no utility as a hunting piece but was designed solely for violent confrontations among men. Colt advertised his guns with heroic scenes—a man protecting his wife and child from Indians armed only with a Colt revolver. Sales were brisk. The weapon soon found its way into the hands of the Texas Rangers, whose example made it the weapon of choice for irregular forces. By the 1850s the Colt factory in Hartford, Connecticut, was turning out a variety of new handguns—the .36-caliber “Navy” model was a favorite among border guerrillas—while the Sharps and Winchester companies perfected the manufacture of new breech-loading and repeating rifles. During the Civil War, the West was flooded with firearms of every type and description, from tiny pocket derringers to .50-caliber buffalo guns.
Innovations in handguns (from top to bottom): Colt 1851 Navy Revolver; Colt 1860 Army Revolver; Colt 1873 Peacemaker Single-Action Army Revolver. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming. Gift of Olin Corporation, Winchester Arms Collection.
The arming of western America was accompanied by a hardening and coarsening of attitudes toward the Indians. A new rhetoric of violence appeared in official government discourse. Indian Bureau administrators did not shirk from the draconian design of their new reservation policy. “It is indispensably necessary that [Indians] be placed in positions where they can be controlled and finally compelled by sheer necessity to resort to agricultural labor or starve,” one bureaucrat wrote of the Plains Indians. “The
y cannot pursue their former mode of life,” wrote another, “but must entirely change their habits, and, in fixed localities, look to the cultivation of the soil and the raising of stock for future support. There is no alternative to providing for them in this manner but to exterminate them, which the dictates of justice and humanity alike forbid.” Coming out of the Civil War, the federal government issued ultimatums in the name of civilization at gunpoint.40
The West harvested the first bitter fruits of these trends among the Eastern Sioux of Minnesota in 1862. In treaties of 1851 and 1858, the United States forced these communities to relinquish title to twenty-eight million acres in exchange for annuities and a crowded reservation on the Minnesota River. Their agent described the regimen on the reservation as designed “to break up the community system among the Sioux; weaken and destroy their tribal relations; individualize them by giving each a separate home and having them subsist by industry—the sweat of their brows; till the soil; make labor honorable and idleness dishonorable; or, as it was expressed in short, ‘make white men of them.’” It is hardly surprising that the Sioux resisted. “If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them,” said Big Eagle, one of the Sioux chiefs, “the whites would have resisted, and it was the same with many Indians.”41
By the summer of 1862, a combination of crop failure and diminished supplies of game reduced the Eastern Sioux to near starvation, yet their authoritarian agent refused to depart from standard procedure and issue emergency stores from the abundant pantry in the agency warehouse. Chief Little Crow, a man inclined to accommodation, approached one of the reservation traders with a group of Sioux men. “We have not food, but here are these stores,” he said through a translator. “When men are hungry they help themselves.” Furious at what he considered a veiled threat, the trader responded: “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.” Two days later, the reservation exploded. The Sioux attacked surrounding farms, towns, and forts, killing five hundred settlers before the state militia crushed the rebellion. The body of the offending trader was later found, his mouth stuffed with grass. Thirty-eight Sioux were convicted of rape and murder and executed before a cheering crowd of settlers; several hundred more were imprisoned, and the remaining Eastern Sioux were removed to a reservation in Dakota Territory.42
Minnesota Sioux executed after the uprising of 1862. Lithograph, 1883. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
The Southwest became the focus for the next round of violence between the federal government and the Indians. In the spring of 1862, Colonel James H. Carleton promised the Hispanic and Pueblo residents of the Rio Grande valley to eliminate the raids of the Navajos and Apaches that had been a fact of life for at least three centuries. Yet the raids not only continued, they accelerated, for now American goods and livestock drew them as well.
Carleton commissioned former mountain man Kit Carson—made famous by Frémont’s reports—to lead a campaign to eradicate the raiders. “There is to be no council held with the Indians nor any talks,” Carleton ordered. “The men are to be slain whenever and wherever they can be found. The women and children may be taken as prisoners.” At a desolate spot in arid east-central New Mexico called Bosque Redondo, Carleton established a reservation for the subdued Indians. In a brutal campaign that included the murder of two surrendering Apache chiefs and the torture and beheading of another, several hundred Indians died and several hundred more were forced onto the barren reservation and put to work digging ditches. Most of the Apaches, however, eluded the troops, fleeing into the mountains or south of the border into Mexico. Rather than pacifying the Apaches, the campaign marked the beginning of more than twenty years of their fierce resistance to the Americans.43
Carleton next loosed Carson on the Navajos, who lived in the northern border region between New Mexico and Arizona. A group of chiefs attempted to mollify Carleton, but he insisted that their removal to Bosque Redondo was their only option. Like the Apaches, the Navajos had long raided Hispanic and Pueblo communities, but unlike their cousins, they were a farming and pastoral people, with gardens, orchards, and large flocks of sheep and goats. Carson attacked their subsistence, destroying hogans and crops, burning orchards, and slaughtering livestock. By the late winter of 1864, the Navajos were desperate. “Owing to the operations of my command,” Carson reported, “they are in a complete state of starvation, and many of their women and children have already died from this cause.” By winter’s end, some eight thousand Navajos had surrendered and been forced to march four hundred miles through the desert to Bosque Redondo. The Long Walk, as the Navajos call this brutal removal experience, was seared into their collective memory. In 1868 they were finally able to negotiate a return to their homeland—much constricted in size.44
. . .
From Minnesota to New Mexico, the Americans demonstrated their ruthless pursuit of control through reservations and forced agrarian reform. They were willing to starve people to change them. The Indians could plow furrows or dig their own graves. Yet neither the Long Walk nor the massacre in Minnesota revealed the furthest extent of some Americans’ inability to see and to treat different humans as humans in the 1860s. That designation belonged to the hero of Glorieta Pass, John Chivington, a Union man and an abolitionist, who was made a colonel and given command of the First and Third Colorado Regiments.
In 1861, anxious to clear title to land in the newly created Colorado Territory, the Indian Bureau arranged a treaty with some of the region’s Arapahos and Southern Cheyennes, assigning them to a barren reservation along the Arkansas River. Hungry and livid as they watched Americans build taverns and ranches near their traditional watering holes, the militant Dog Soldier society of the Cheyennes struck the Platte River road connecting Denver with the East, burning stage stops, driving off livestock, and taking captives. John Evans, the territorial governor, raised a regiment of volunteers and declared war on all Indians.
Some Cheyenne leaders worked hard to prevent this war. They disavowed the Dog Soldiers’ belligerence and tried to broker a peace. Black Kettle, a Cheyenne chief, traveled to Denver to request that Evans let his people move closer to their food supply: “We must live near the buffalo or starve.” Spoiling for a fight, Evans offered nothing but threats. Black Kettle returned to his band and brought them to Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado, where he sought federal protection from the belligerent Coloradans. Following the instructions of the fort commander, Black Kettle led his people forty miles to the northeast and set up camp on Sand Creek. The encampment was a fair representation of the inclusive world of the upper Arkansas valley frontier; counted among the hundred or more lodges of the Cheyennes and Arapahos were a few white men married to Indian women and a liberal number of métis. Three of the four children of trader William Bent and his two Cheyenne wives were there. “All the Indians had the idea firmly fixed in their minds that they were here under protection and that peace was soon to be concluded,” wrote George Bent.45
Colorado recruitment poster, 1864. Colorado Historical Society.
George Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Magpie, niece of Chief Black Kettle, c. 1867. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
But Colonel Chivington was acting under instructions received from the militia commander of the region: “I want no peace till the Indians suffer more.” He led the seven hundred men of the Third Regiment toward Sand Creek. “I have come to kill Indians,” he told his men, “and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”46
The army surprised the Cheyenne camp at sunrise on November 29, 1864, while most of the young warriors were away hunting. George Bent awoke to the sound of excited people rushing by his lodge. “From down the creek a large body of troops was advancing at a rapid trot,” he later wrote. “All was confusion and noise, men, women, and children rushing out of the lodges partly dressed; women and children screaming at the sight of the troops; men r
unning back into the lodges for their arms, other men, already armed, or with lassos and bridles in their hand, running for the herds. . . . Black Kettle had a large American flag tied to the end of a long lodgepole and was standing in front of his lodge, holding the pole, with the flag fluttering in the gray light of the winter dawn. I heard him call to the people not to be afraid, that the soldiers would not hurt them; then the troops opened fire.” It was a slaughter. When it was over, the bodies of some two hundred Cheyennes and Arapahos littered the cold ground, three-quarters of them women and children. Chivington boasted that his men killed more, close to five hundred, he guessed.47
“Colorado soldiers have again covered themselves in glory,” crowed the Rocky Mountain News. But there was public outrage in the East. A congressional committee investigated and issued a published report. The summary spared the goriest details, but witnesses testified that troops had carved the genitals from women’s bodies, stretching them over their saddle horns or pinning them to their hats. “No attempt was made by the officers to restrain the savage cruelty of the men under their command.” Governor Evans was forced to resign, but Chivington escaped court-martial, for he had left the service and was beyond military law. He became the sheriff of Denver and later served as county coroner.48
In the aftermath of the Sand Creek Massacre, the entire central plains exploded into war. Previously the Cheyennes had been divided on the issue of peace or war, but the Colorado brutality settled the matter. In early 1865, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho bands retaliated for Chivington’s attack by burning nearly every ranch and stage station along the South Platte, killing scores of American men, women, and children. Efforts to subdue the warriors were ineffective. “At night the whole valley was lighted up with the flames of burning ranches and stage stations,” said George Bent. Among the attackers was his métis brother Charles, who became known as the fiercest of the Dog Soldiers. Renounced by his father, Charles swore vengeance on all white people, including his kin.49
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