Freedmen and women would have to “repeat the history of the Israelites,” declared one assembly of black Alabamians, and “seek new homes beyond the reign and rule of Pharaoh.” Benjamin Singleton, a former Tennessee slave, led a group of African Americans to an agrarian colony in western Kansas in 1875, and three years later he circulated broadsides throughout the Old Southwest exhorting other freedmen and women to join him in an even bigger venture. Singleton’s plans called for the orderly migration of several hundred families, but the word of mouth soon grew into wild rumors—that there was free land for ex-slaves in Kansas and that the federal government would provide free transportation and supplies. Suddenly, in the spring of 1879, thousands of African Americans throughout the cotton belt packed up and headed for the fabled land of John Brown. “I am anxious to reach your state,” one black Louisianan wrote to John Pierce St. John, the governor of Kansas, “because of the sacredness of her soil washed by the blood of humanitarians for the cause of freedom.” Within a few short weeks, more than twenty thousand Exodusters, as they called themselves, flooded into Kansas. The state rose to the occasion. “Kansas has a history devoted to liberty,” proclaimed Governor St. John, and its citizens would not deny the freedmen and women in their hour of need, for “when the life of the Nation was in danger, the blood of the negro mingled with our own to sustain the Union.” A hurriedly organized state relief association assisted several thousand Exodusters to settle a dozen communities in western Kansas and several more in Indian Territory (later the state of Oklahoma). Eventually some forty black towns were established on the southern plains.10
The Shores family, Custer County, Nebraska. Photograph by Solomon D. Butcher, 1887. Library of Congress.
One hundred and fifty black families founded the settlement of Nicodemus on the upper Solomon River in central Kansas. Like most easterners, the transplants found the arid Great Plains an agricultural dustbin, and many moved on during the drought and economic hard times at century’s end. A group of stickers, however, found jobs on the railroad or took work with neighboring white farmers as hired hands, and the community survived into the twentieth century. Grant Cushinberry, born and raised in Nicodemus, remembered the heart of the community: the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “Momma didn’t allow us to dance or play no music on Sunday,” he said, “every living soul had to go to church.” After the service his mother “always brought some old preacher home for dinner.” At these gatherings the family told stories of their suffering in the South during Reconstruction. Cushinberry remembered a vivid tale of the Ku Klux Klan coming to the Mississippi cabin of an uncle late one night. Dragging the man’s pregnant wife into the yard, they strung her up by the heels and “cut the baby out of her stomach.” Her husband grabbed his shotgun and slaughtered the night riders, “then he ran all day and all night until he got to Kansas.” Cushinberry’s relatives cultivated the western dream of finding justice and refuge in community.11
Rather than plow the dry prairies, most Exodusters elected to live in established Kansas towns, where they found work as laborers and domestics as well as informal and explicit racial segregation. “We were all pushed back of there (across the railroad tracks),” remembered Dorothy Fulghem, a longtime black resident of Manhattan. “We had our own churches”—three African American congregations that provided a rallying point for the community—and “we were raised in the church,” Fulghem remembered. The black congregations led the unsuccessful opposition to a school board plan to segregate the town’s public schools. “Compel us to associate with the negro,” warned one white resident, “and we become a slave in turn.” Soon Frederick Douglass School was opened for the black children across the tracks.12
Despite the state’s historic “devotion to liberty,” white Kansans abandoned their commitment to racial justice at the turn of the century, joining the rest of the nation in establishing separate and unequal institutions for minorities. The writer, photographer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks was born into this broken-promise land in 1912. Nearly all of the public facilities in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, were segregated. “The grade school was segregated but the high school wasn’t,” Parks writes in his autobiography, “mainly because the town fathers couldn’t scrounge up enough money to build a separate one. But even inside those walls of meager learning, black students had to accommodate themselves to the taste of salt. The class advisers warned us against seeking higher education, adding ‘You were meant to be maids and porters.’” Even after achieving success in his profession, Parks considered Fort Scott “the place I attack in dreams.” He later wrote a poem in which he tried to summarize his ambivalent feelings. He filled the stanzas with June bugs and fireflies, and with warm summer days spent crawdad fishing, but smashed these warm memories in the final lines: “Yes, all this I would miss—along with the fear, hatred and violence / We blacks had suffered upon this beautiful land.”13 In 1985 the Native Sons and Daughters of Kansas selected Parks as “Kansan of the year.” During the presentation ceremony in Topeka, sitting with the governor and one of the state’s United States senators, Parks listened as the master of ceremonies read his Kansas poem aloud, regaling the audience with the cozy details but omitting the crucial last two lines. Parks arose, walked to the podium, and read the deleted lines to the thunderstruck audience. Going back to Kansas was “like returning to a battlefield where a truce has been signed,” he mused. “It will always be the identity of my brutal past.”14
Gordon Parks, c. 1943. Library of Congress.
. . .
Communities offered refuge and comfort—and they could turn cold to those deemed outsiders. The white community in Fort Scott wounded Parks through exclusion and discrimination. Race defined both white and black communities, but whites possessed more resources and stronger allies. In the West the federal government joined groups like the Native Sons and Daughters of Kansas to police the color line. The motivation, though racist, was not always venomous. White Kansas honored Parks even as it insulted him. The reformers and federal officials dismantling Native American communities in the late nineteenth century acted out of kindness more than malice. In the actual West, bad guys didn’t wear black hats and twirl long mustaches. They often carried a Bible and a court order and cast themselves as the heroes in the stories they told themselves.
Persecution drove the flight of the Mormons and the Exodusters, though they were at heart migrations of hope. The West, however, witnessed its share of forced removals and relocations—migrations of terror. The Cherokee Trail of Tears was repeated many times, not only for eastern Indians like the Seminoles or the Sauks, but for the native peoples of the plains and mountains, forced to relocate to godforsaken corners of Indian Territory or squeezed onto small “reserved” portions of their former homelands. One memorable migration of terror took place in the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 1877, when the federal government insisted that all the men and women of the Nez Perce tribe of Indians be relocated to a confined reservation. About a quarter of them refused, a group of young warriors led a bloody raid on nearby settlers, and the army attacked. At that point the Nez Perce chiefs decided that their only alternative to destruction was flight. They led fifty fighting men and three hundred women and children over a desperate trail of more than thirteen hundred miles through the rugged mountains of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, in the hope of reaching Canada, and successfully beat back three full-scale army attacks. Just fifty miles short of freedom they were surrounded. After five days of watching his people freeze and starve, Chief Joseph, the only surviving leader, surrendered.
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Photograph by William H. Jackson, c. 1880. Wikimedia Commons.
The end of three centuries of warfare found western Indians confined to a series of reservations. These reservations were conceived as temporary expedients, not permanent institutions. White Americans premised their Indian policy on the assumption that natives would become farmers, Christians, and citizens. The task, as Sioux agent T
homas J. Galbraith put it, was “to make white men of them.” He provided a succinct summary of federal goals for Indians during the era that stretched from the 1870s to the 1930s: “weaken and destroy their tribal relations and individualize them by giving them each a separate home and having them subsist by industry.” The goal of federal policy, according to Galbraith, was “to break up the community system.” At the same time as pioneers spun webs of affinity, creating new communities, the federal government was using its power to smash ancient ones.15
INDIAN LAND CESSIONS
The first step: eliminate all vestiges of Indian sovereignty. The limited sovereignty of Indian nations had been a foundation of federal policy since the early days of the Republic, enacted into law in the Indian Intercourse Act (1790) and confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1832 in the famous case Worcester v. Georgia. The United States wanted circumscribed political entities to negotiate treaties with and help make sense of a fractious tribal landscape that could be extremely confusing. Now they wanted to sweep away the Indian nations. Ely S. Parker, commissioner of Indian Affairs during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, condemned the treaty system for falsely impressing the Indians with notions of their own independence. The time had come, he wrote, when “this idea should be dispelled, and the government cease the cruel farce of thus dealing with its helpless and ignorant wards.” Indians had never been citizens of the Republic but constituents of their own tribes or nations, subject to government, law, and custom administered by their own authorities. Without institutions of their own they became subjects of the federal government—“helpless wards,” in Parker’s words. The sad irony was that Ely Parker himself was an Iroquois, a member of a distinguished family of Senecas, and he quietly ignored the long struggle of his people to maintain their independence.16
In 1870 the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the power to supersede or even annul treaties made with Indian nations. Given a green light by the court, the next year Congress passed a resolution that once and for all put an end to the system of Indian treaty-making. From that date forward, read the text, “no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract a treaty.” In 1885 Congress passed legislation taking away the right of tribal governments to operate under their own customary laws and extending federal jurisdiction to include felony crimes committed on reservations.17
Then the feds rushed in. Federal Indian agents were directed to undertake a sustained campaign of forced cultural modification—outlawing Indian customs they considered “savage and barbarous,” such as the Sun Dance of the Plains Indians or the “pagan, horrible, sadistic, and obscene” rituals of the Pueblos. The United States was doing precisely what other imperial powers had done to their colonial subjects. In the Pacific island colonies, for example, the French outlawed singing and dancing at native religious ceremonies, while in southern Africa the British imprisoned “witch doctors.” The similarities were noted. The United States was “a great colonial power,” wrote Harvard history professor Albert Bushnell Hart, and “our Indian agents have a status very like that of British in the native states of India.”18
Cultural imperialism invaded the curriculum of reservation schools. “If Indian children are to be civilized they must learn the language of civilization,” ruled the secretary of the interior, and the Indian Bureau issued regulations that “no textbooks in the vernacular [the native language] will be allowed in any school.” This, too, was a familiar colonial practice. In a similar vein, a British official in South Africa wrote that “primitive customs and taboos must go [and] with them must also go the native mode of life and probably the language which was adapted to that life.” Even more severe was the practice of sending children to Indian boarding schools, most famously the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, founded in 1879 by Richard Henry Pratt, a former commander of Indian scouts. Carlisle administrators gave the girls Anglo-American names, dressed them as Victorian ladies, and taught them to play the piano. The boys were organized into military companies and drilled in uniform.19
“They told us that Indian ways were bad,” Sun Elk, a resident of Taos Pueblo, remembered years later of his boarding school experience. “They said we must get civilized. . . . The books told how bad the Indians had been to the white men—burning their towns and killing their women and children. But I had seen white men do that to Indians. We all wore white man’s clothes and ate white man’s food and went to the white man’s churches and spoke the white man’s talk. So after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances.” After seven years of education, Sun Elk came home. “It was a warm summer evening when I got off the train at Taos station. The first Indian I met, I asked him to run out to the pueblo and tell my family I was home. The Indian couldn’t speak English, and I had forgotten my Pueblo language.”20
A group of Chiricahua Apache students on their arrival at Carlisle Indian School and four months later, c. 1890. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
On the reservation, federal officials strove to instill work discipline. The Indians were to be placed “in positions where they can be controlled and finally compelled by sheer necessity to resort to agricultural labor or starve.” By design the government supplied only basic necessities. Indeed, the goods issued to reservation Indians—who had been deprived of their ability to hunt—were the equivalent of only half the daily rations distributed to American troops in the field. Hunger and poverty haunted the reservations. But necessity did not transform Indians into farmers. Tillers of the soil actually need soil, and reservations were often too barren or arid to support crops. And many Indians resisted the agents’ occupational advice: “The whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their life and live like the white men,” said the Sioux chief Big Eagle, “go to farming, work hard, and do as they did—and the Indians did not know how to do that, and did not want to anyway.”21
Indian communities reeled from policies administered by government officials and crusading educators, but their so-called allies, the Friends of the Indians, delivered the killer blow, striking at the material foundation of group cohesiveness—the land. Their solution to “the Indian problem” was a program called “allotment in severalty.” Collective ownership of the land would give way to individual tenure. Reservations would be divided up and “allotted” in small parcels to each Indian head of household. Once the family had shown a flair for Jeffersonian yeomanry, improving their fields and homesteads, they would become naturalized United States citizens and slip into a highly nostalgic vision of American society. “Selfish-ness,” declared Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, “is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress.” After allotment, reformers believed, tribes would wither away.22
The majority of Indian tribes opposed allotment. Reformers blamed the lack of enthusiasm on chiefs’ reluctance to cede their power. Indian leaders, went the conventional wisdom, didn’t know what was good for their own people. Western politicians added to the momentum for allotment. Eastern reformers broke up reservations for philosophical reasons, but westerners joined the movement when it became clear that after reservations had been allotted in parcels of 160 acres to Indian families, there would be tens of thousands of acres of “surplus lands” that would be opened to white settlers. It was a corrupt alliance and a raw deal. Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado was one of the few who spoke out against the bill. “I want to put upon the record my prophecy in this manner,” Teller told his Senate colleagues. “When thirty or forty years have passed, and these Indians shall have parted with their title, they will curse the hand that was raised professedly in their defense.” Allotment proceeded precisely as Te
ller had feared. In 1888 Indian tribes held 138 million acres. By 1934 that number had dropped to 47 million.23
. . .
With armed resistance impossible and their cultures and communities under attack, the Indian people of the West responded like their fellow modern westerners—they turned to religion to manage the turmoil. The Ghost Dance united seekers across tribal lines, recalling earlier religious movements. This revival also featured a charismatic holy man, like the Delaware Prophet Neolin, the inspiration for Pontiac’s Revolt, or Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, brother of Tecumseh. The Ghost Dance emerged from the vision of Wovoka, a shaman among the Paiutes of Nevada. Wovoka had a vision in which the Great Spirit instructed him to speak to all Indians. We must act as brothers and never resort to violence, Wovoka preached. If Indians gave up alcohol, lived simple lives, and dedicated themselves to meditation and prayer, the Great Spirit would restore control of their lives and lands. Wovoka foresaw a day when the whites would disappear, along with all their stuff—guns, whiskey, and manufactured goods. Dead Indians would then rejoin their living brothers and sisters and reside together in a world “free from misery, death, and disease.” Wovoka’s followers developed his message into a ritual that included five days of worship in the form of slow dancing and meditation. Wovoka’s was a message of community flowering from the depths of despair. It spread rapidly among tribes throughout the Far West, suggesting yet again the power of religion to bring people together despite the best efforts of large-scale modern organizations—like the Friends of the Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Army—to pry them apart.24
The American West Page 32
