The American West

by Robert V Hine

  In spite of his victories, however, Red Cloud sensed that the days of Indian armed resistance were over. A tour of the eastern United States in 1870 opened his eyes to the extent of American power. In the hopes of saving the Sioux from destruction, he and other accommodationist chiefs led the majority of their people onto the reservation. But militants like Crazy Horse of the Oglalas and Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapas opposed the strategy. Drawing followers from across tribes and clans, they refused to participate in what Crazy Horse called the “piecemeal penning” of his people. Crazy Horse asserted his mobility, following the bison, as his fathers had done. Sitting Bull, a holy man as well as a war chief, argued that compromise would get the Sioux nowhere. “The whites may get me at last, as you say,” he told a group of reservation Indians, “but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee.” The factional conflict among Indians sometimes rivaled the hostility and intensity of the fighting with the Americans.42

  Red Cloud. Photograph by Charles Milton Bell, 1880. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Sitting Bull. Photograph by Zalmon Gilbert, c. 1880. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Then George Armstrong Custer marched into the volatile mix. A dashing Civil War hero who knew the value of publicity, Custer led an armed scientific expedition into the Black Hills on the Sioux Reservation to confirm rumors of gold there. “From the grass roots down,” he declared to the press, “it was ‘pay dirt.’” Within two years the town of Deadwood was swarming with ten thousand miners and the nearby Homestake Mine was exploiting the richest lode of ore in American history. The Sioux treaty of 1868 required the army to keep miners and settlers off the reservation, but officers looked the other way, hoping that hobnailed boots on the ground would force the Sioux into agreeing to sell the Black Hills. A federal commission attempted to negotiate a purchase, and although Red Cloud and most of the reservation chiefs were willing to sell, they set a price the government was unwilling to pay. Sitting Bull was contemptuous of even a hard-driven bargain. “I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell any land to the government,” he declared. And bending down, he picked up a pinch of dust: “Not even as much as this.” With gold beckoning, the federal government was in no mood to wait on stubborn Indians. Smashing the rejectionist Sioux became a bargaining gambit. With Sitting Bull trounced, more cooperative chiefs like Red Cloud might lower their price. American officials began to plan for a campaign of total war.43

  Knowing what was coming, free bands of Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos congregated in the summer of 1876 to hunt buffalo. In June, along the Powder River and the nearby Rosebud and Little Bighorn tributaries, more than four thousand men, women, and children assembled in what was the largest encampment any of them could remember. At a summer solstice Sun Dance ceremony, Sitting Bull had a vision of many dead American soldiers “falling right into our camp.” His dream reflected the Indians’ confidence and their determination to bloody the two army regiments of some thousand troops sent against them. In the first major encounter along the Rosebud, Crazy Horse and General George Crook fought with roughly equal numbers, and though Crook claimed victory, he was immobilized for nearly a month.

  On June 25, Custer, leading six hundred troops of the Seventh Cavalry, came upon the combined Indian camp. A veteran Indian fighter, Custer had led a charge through a sleeping village of Southern Cheyennes along the Washita River in 1868 that left 103 Indians dead, including Chief Black Kettle, survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre. Instead of trepidation, the massive encampment filled the colonel with glee: “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them.”44

  . . .

  A commotion woke Wooden Leg from his afternoon nap in the Indian camp. The eighteen-year-old Cheyenne warrior roused his sleeping brother. “We heard shooting. We hurried out from the trees so we might see as well as hear. Women were screaming and men were letting out their war cries. Through it all we could hear old men calling: ‘Soldiers are here! Young men, go out and fight them.’ We ran to our camp and our home lodge. Everybody there was excited. . . . Children were hunting for their mothers. Mothers were anxiously trying to find their children. I got my lariat and my six-shooter.” Wooden Leg’s memories of that day reflect the power dynamic at play. The U.S. Army charged into the Battle of the Little Bighorn to assert its might. The Americans fought for many things: glory, duty, patriotism, and because, as enlisted men, they had no choice. But they did not fight to protect their families, as Wooden Leg did. The Americans wanted to break Indian resistance by destroying their food, their homes, and their family support. They could do this because trains, steamboats, and wagons supplied them with bacon, bullets, and female camp followers who cleaned their laundry. Industrialization forced the rebel Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos to gamble everything, while Custer and his forces anted up only their lives.45

  And Custer was no stranger to wagering lives. A reckless man, he refused to wait for reinforcements, divided his forces, and charged. He attacked the camp to the north. Major Marcus Reno hit from the south, where Wooden Leg joined the skirmishing. “Many hundreds of Indians on horseback were dashing to and fro in front of a body of soldiers. The soldiers were on the level valley ground and were shooting with rifles. Not many bullets were being sent back at them, but thousands of arrows were falling among them.” Suddenly, the American soldiers panicked, mounted, and raced for the river. “We gained rapidly on them. I fired four shots with my six-shooter. I do not know whether or not any of my bullets did harm. I saw a Sioux put an arrow into the back of a soldier’s head. Another arrow went into his shoulder. He tumbled from his horse to the ground. Others fell dead either from arrows or from blows by the stone war clubs of the Sioux. Horses limped or staggered or sprawled out dead or dying. Our war cries and war songs mingled with many jeering calls, such as: ‘You are only boys. You ought not to be fighting. You should have brought more Crows or Shoshones with you to do your fighting.’” The warriors killed many of Reno’s troops, but they regrouped, dug in, and held their attackers off until they withdrew the next evening.46

  Custer’s men had no such luck. Their days of watching sunsets were done. Custer seems to have directed them in an attack on the northern fringe of the large camp. “I saw flags come up over the hill,” recalled the Cheyenne chief Two Moons, “then the soldiers rose all at once.” He and hundreds of other warriors raced across the river on horseback and met the charge head-on. Custer’s troops were quickly surrounded and overwhelmed. “The shooting was quick, quick,” said Two Moons. “Pop-pop-pop, very fast. Some of the soldiers were down on their knees, some standing. Officers all in front. The smoke was like a great cloud, and everywhere Sioux went the dust rose like smoke. We circled all round them—swirling like water round a stone.” The battle lasted only a few minutes. Afterward, Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull walked among the dead with a Hunkpapa who had known some of the soldiers. He pointed out a naked corpse and said it was Custer’s. “He thought he was the greatest man in the world, and there he is.” The flies and worms along the Greasy Grass River (the Sioux’s name for the Little Bighorn) devoured the meek and the publicized.47

  Americans have mourned, celebrated, ridiculed, and scolded Custer ever since his last stand. With his golden locks and chivalrous pretensions, he seems as much a relic of a lost world as the Indians he attacked. But both Custer and Sitting Bull sailed the same current of time. Custer helped create a gold rush to the Black Hills. He was out to prepare the West for industrial absorption, to stifle resistance to railroads, cattle drives, and sod-busting farmers. He represented historical forces of immense magnitude, and his death signaled what was coming rather than what was lost.

  “Custer’s Last Fight.” Lithograph for the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company by F. Otto Becker based on a painting by Cassilly Adams, 1889. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

>   The last stand for the Seventh Cavalry turned into the last major stand of the Sioux. The American army pursued the free bands relentlessly, keeping them from hunting or gathering food. No rations were distributed on the reservation. When the war ended that winter, it was not because the Americans had beaten the Indians in battle but because they had starved them into submission. By the end of the year, the reservation chiefs agreed to cede the Black Hills. Not until the following spring, however, did Crazy Horse surrender at the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska. He would die in custody, bayoneted in the back for “resisting.”

  Sitting Bull, meanwhile, had escaped with his followers across the border into Canada, where he petitioned the authorities for food and land. But Canadian officials were worried about their own Indian problems and the precedent such an action might set, and they refused. Sitting Bull returned to the United States, where federal authorities imprisoned him. He continued to lead and inspire the Sioux, jibing the Americans and offering his own class analysis of their modern industrial nation. “We have now to deal with another race—small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. . . . They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away.” Then he concluded. “Possession is a disease with them.” Karl Marx couldn’t have said it better.48

  . . .

  The U.S. Army lost battles but won wars because their meals, clothing, ammunition, and replacement soldiers could be ordered in. Steamboats and railroads carried men and material from a geographic larder and labor pool that stretched to the Atlantic seaboard and beyond. The same immigrant population, for example, attracted by factory jobs in the East signed up for stints in the military. Though vast and constructed over centuries of adaptation, the native traders, farmers, horse mongers, and bison hunters in the Far West drew from a much smaller and vulnerable resource base. In the end, the Americans outprovisioned the Indians, especially in the winters.

  Tribes elsewhere worried less about blizzards and subzero temperatures, but the railroads made life miserable for Indians even in more temperate climes. In the Southwest, rail lines encircled the territory of the fearsome Apaches. Most American military officers had trouble finding these elusive guerrilla fighters, much less engaging them. Propelled by sure-footed and durable mules as well as his own mulish personality, General George Crook finally defeated the Western Apaches, the largest of the six Apache tribes, and in 1875 moved them onto a reservation at San Carlos in southeastern Arizona. Crook, following the model of the Sioux wars when officers used Pawnees as scouts, recruited reservation Apaches to assist in tracking down and defeating the “hostiles” from other tribes.

  The most feared of the hostiles was Geronimo of the Chiricahuas, famed among his people as a spiritual leader, a healer, and a war leader. As a young man, Geronimo had a vision in which a spirit informed him that “no gun can ever kill you, and I will guide your arrows.” From that moment he fought without fear. “Not content to fight according to Apache custom, from behind rocks and greasewood bushes,” in the words of one Indian agent, “he rushed into the open many times, running zigzag and dodging so that bullets from the soldiers’ rifles did not hit him.” Pursued relentlessly by Crook’s Apache scouts, Geronimo finally laid down his arms and brought his people into the San Carlos Reservation in the late 1870s. They found it hard to live in this desolate and confining place, surrounded by strangers, and in 1885 Geronimo and forty-two of his Chiricahua warriors, along with several dozen women and children, broke out.

  Geronimo. Photograph by A. F. Randall and A. T. Wilcox, c. 1886. Library of Congress.

  For more than a year, these last rogue Apaches eluded the army. Seventeen Arizona settlers died from Chiricahua attacks. “If he were seen by a civilian, it meant that he would be reported to the military and they’d be after us,” one of the Apaches later explained, “so there was nothing to do but kill the civilian and his entire family. It was terrible to see little children killed. I do not like to talk about it. I do not like to think about it. But the soldiers killed our women and children, too. Don’t forget that.” Total war, the modern form of war, provoked savagery on all sides. White Arizonans panicked and alarm spread throughout the nation. Newspapers proclaimed Geronimo the “wickedest Indian that ever lived.” Finally, after months of being hounded, he accepted the American promise of a new reservation for his people. But it was a lie. Once they had surrendered, all five hundred Chiricahuas were hustled onto sealed railroad cars and shipped eastward across the continent to an army prison in Florida. Without sanitation facilities or ventilation, their transcontinental journey was hellish. “When I think of that trip, even at this time, I get sick,” wrote the officer in command.49

  Geronimo died of pneumonia in 1909 at age ninety. A prisoner at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he (and many of the Chiricahua families who followed him) never returned to the Southwest despite a fervent desire to go home. After enshrining Geronimo in their terrorist hall of fame, the American public wouldn’t entertain the thought of freeing him. The New York Times eulogized the Apache chief as the most sinister, cunning, elusive, and dangerous Indian who ever lived. Missing from the obituary was any sense that Geronimo belonged in the world that buried him. He perished as an unredeemed savage, though the paper did note that he had converted to Christianity. A throwback, he represented a frontier the United States had pacified through military force. The enforcers moved on to inflict progress on others. The paper lauded the white commanders of the Apache scouts, Henry W. Lawton and Leonard Wood, for catching the wily old chief. Lawton became a general and died suppressing insurgents in the Philippines, while Wood hiked up the ranks to an administrative post on Governor’s Island in New York harbor. The transpacific imperialist and the paper pusher represented industrial America perfectly, whereas Geronimo embodied a simpler past.50

  But the chief walked the same earth as Lawton and Wood. He shared their days and had much in common with other industrialized Americans. Like immigrants who journeyed from across the globe to find employment in a growing economy, Geronimo moved back and forth across international boundaries and used his mobility to gain whatever leverage he could on the large-scale organizations that wanted him to stay put and respect their authority. Like the agrarian Populists who would wrestle with corporations, banks, and markets, Geronimo and his followers rejected the raw deal industrial America offered them—poverty on a reservation. Finally, like the labor radicals who tossed bombs and attacked soldiers, the Apaches tried to use violence against a state that sided with corporate interests against them only to suffer the crushing blows of public disapproval and military persecution. Through their violence, anarchists and Apaches were turned into public enemies, leaving them vulnerable to extraordinary punishments not covered in the Constitution. Geronimo never carried a lunch bucket or punched a clock, but he ended up a cog in the machine nonetheless.

  FURTHER READING

  Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Mercy: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865–90 (1985)

  Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (1986)

  William Deverell, Railroad Crossings: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (1994)

  Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (1968)

  Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (1988)

  Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000)

  Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (1993)

  Rodman Wilson Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1880 (1963; reprint, 1974)

  William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (1994)

  Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950)

  Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to
Colorado (1998)

  Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011)

  Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860–1910 (1979)

  8

  A Search for Community

  Large-scale organizations touched most every westerner. Corporations supplied jobs and set rates. Unions, political parties, and agricultural co-ops offered solidarity and leverage. The federal government bolstered economic development and targeted radicals and hostile Indians. Yet, even though these entities invaded everyday lives and sometimes bullied people, their grip was never as firm as the leaders intended. Large-scale organizations atomized social arrangements. They induced turmoil, and the people churned about by all this change reacted in both new and old ways. Westerners countered upheaval by forming relationships, families, and communities. These bonds held the modern West together, much as they had held people together on earlier frontiers. Communities made the West function well enough for most.

  Holding on to families and communities amid constant flux was an old frontier challenge. The movement of people from one place to another is one of the most important factors in American history. By the time of the Revolution, the press for new land and opportunity meant that in typical American communities throughout the nation, at least four of every ten households packed up and relocated every ten years. High rates of geographic mobility have continued to characterize North Americans ever since.