Tragedy of the Plains Indians



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Tragedy of the Plains Indians: 1860-1900

A Thirty Years War

Beginning in the 1860s, a 30 year conflict arose as the government sought to concentrate the Plains tribes on reservations. Philip Sheridan, a Civil War general who led many campaigns against the Plains Indians, is famous for saying "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." But even he recognized the injustice that lay behind the late 19th century warfare:

“We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this that they made war. Could anyone expect less?”

Violence erupted first in Minnesota, where, by 1862, the Santee Sioux were confined to a territory 150 miles long and just 10 miles wide. Denied a yearly payment and agricultural aid promised by treaty, these people rose up in August 1862 and killed 500 white settlers at New Ulm. Lincoln appointed John Pope, who had commanded Union forces at the second Battle of Bull Run, to crush the uprising. The general announced that he would deal with the Sioux "as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made." When the Sioux surrendered in September 1862, about 1,800 were taken prisoner and 303 were condemned to death. Lincoln commuted the sentences of most, but he authorized the hanging of 38, the largest mass execution in American history.

In 1864, warfare spread to Colorado, after the discovery of gold led to an influx of whites. Because the regular army was fighting the Confederacy, the Colorado territorial militia was responsible for maintaining order. On November 29, 1864, a group of Colorado volunteers, under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington, fell on Chief Black Kettle's unsuspecting band of Cheyennes at Sand Creek in eastern Colorado, where they had gathered under the protection of the governor. "We must kill them big and little," he told his men. "Nits make lice" (nits are the eggs of lice). The militia slaughtered about 150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children.

Violence broke out on other parts of the Plains. Between 1865 and 1868, conflict raged in Utah. In 1866, the Teton Sioux, tried to stop construction of the Bozeman Trail, leading from Fort Laramie, Wyoming to the Virginia City, Wyoming, gold fields, by attacking and killing Captain William J. Fetterman and 79 soldiers.

The Sand Creek and Fetterman massacres produced a national debate over Indian policy. In 1867, Congress created a Peace Commission to recommend ways to reduce conflict on the Plains. The commission recommended that Indians be moved to small reservations, where they would be Christianized, educated, and taught to farm.

At two conferences in 1867 and 1868, the federal government demanded that the Plains Indians give up their lands and move to reservations. In return for supplies and annuities, the southern Plains Indians were told to move to poor, unproductive lands in Oklahoma and the northern tribes to the Black Hills of the Dakotas. The alternative to acceptance was warfare. The commissioner of Indian Affairs, Ely S. Parker, himself a Seneca Indian, declared that any Indian who refused to "locate in permanent abodes provided for them, would be subject wholly to the control and supervision of military authorities." Many whites regarded the Plains Indians as an intolerable obstacle to westward expansion. They agreed with Theodore Roosevelt that the West was not meant to be "kept as nothing but a game reserve for squalid savages."

Leaders of several tribes--including the Apaches, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Navajos, Shoshones, and Sioux--agreed to move onto reservations. But many Indians rejected the land cessions made by their chiefs.

In the Southwest, war broke out in 1871 in New Mexico and Arizona with the massacre of more than 100 Indians at Camp Grant. The Apache War did not end until 1886, when their leader, Geronimo was captured. On the southern Plains, war erupted when the Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas staged raids into the Texas panhandle. The Red River War ended only after federal troops destroyed Indian food supplies and killed a hundred Cheyenne warriors near the Sappa River in Kansas. This brought resistance on the southern Plains to a close. In the Pacific Northwest, the Nez Perce of Oregon and Idaho rebelled against the federal reservation policy and then attempted to escape to Canada, covering 1,300 miles in just 75 days. They were forced to surrender in Montana, just 40 miles short of the Canadian border. Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader, offered a poignant explanation for why he had surrendered:

“I am tired of fighting....The old men are all killed.... The little children are freezing to death....From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

After their surrender, the Nez Perce were taken to Oklahoma, where most died of disease. The best-known episode of Indian resistance took place after miners discovered gold in the Black Hills--land that had been set aside as a reservation "in perpetuity." When thousands of miners staked claims on Sioux lands, war erupted, in which an Indian force led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull killed General George Custer and his 264 men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. "Custer's Last Stand" was followed by five years of warfare in Montana that confined the Sioux to their reservations.

Several factors contributed to the defeat of the Plains Indians. One was a shift in the military balance of power. Before the Civil War, an Indian could shoot 30 arrows in the time it took a soldier to load and shoot his rifle once. The introduction of the Colt six-shooter and the repeating rifle after the Civil War, undercut this Indian advantage. During the 1870s, the army also introduced a military tactic--winter campaigning. The army attacked Plains Indians during the winter when they divided into small bands, making it difficult for Indians effectively to resist.

Another key factor was the destruction of the Indian food supply, especially the buffalo. In 1860, about 13 million roamed the Plains. These animals provided Plains Indians with many basic necessities. They ate buffalo meat, made clothing and tipi coverings out of hides, used fats for grease, fashioned the bones into tools and fishhooks, made thread and bowstrings from the sinews, and even burned dried buffalo droppings ("chips") as fuel. Buffalo also figured prominently in Plains Indians' religious life. After the Civil War, the herds were cut down by professional hunters, who shot 100 an hour to feed railroad workers, and by wealthy easterners who killed them for sport. By 1890, only about 1,000 bison remained alive. Government officials quite openly viewed the destruction of the buffalo as a tool for controlling the Plains Indians. Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano explained in 1872, "as they become convinced that they can no longer rely upon the supply of game for their support, they will return to the more reliable source of subsistence...."

The Sand Creek Massacre

Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, the lone American Indian in Congress, called it "one of the most disgraceful moments in American history." About 700 U.S. army volunteers stormed through an Indian encampment near Big Sandy Creek in Colorado, slaughtering scores of women and children. This episode became known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

In the Spring of 1864, a wing of the Cheyenne tribe unleashed attacks on white settlers, which prompted John M. Chivington, a Methodist minister who had become Colorado's military commander and was eager to become a member of Congress, to call for volunteer Indian fighters for 100-day enlistments. On November 29, 1864, the colonel and his volunteers rode into the Arapaho-Cheyenne reservation, where Indians led by the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle had set up a camp weeks earlier. A white flag and an American flag flew above Black Kettle's tepee.

After unleashing cannon fire into the village, the volunteers swept the Creek bed, killing every Indian they could find, often hunting down fleeing children. "Kill them big and small," Chivington reportedly said, "nits become lice" (nits are the eggs of lice). After six hours, about 150 Indians, a quarter of the camp's population, lay dead. The soldiers took three prisoners, all children. A dozen soldiers were killed, some apparently by friendly fire in the frenzy.

Eyewitness accounts are chilling. Lt. Joseph Cranmer described "a squaw ripped open and a child taken from her. Little children shot while begging for their lives." Capt. Silas Soule, who was assassinated after testifying at a congressional inquiry, said, "it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized." A joint congressional committee concluded that Chivington "deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre, which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were victims of his cruelty."

In response to the massacre, President Lincoln replaced Colorado's territorial governor. A Congressional inquiry condemned the battle as a massacre. The Cheyenne and Arapaho were promised reparations in an 1865 treaty, but none were paid.

The Battle of the Little Big Horn

Hollywood film star Errol Flynn portrayed him as the personification of American heroism, as an officer who died with his boots on. Decades later, the film Little Big Man depicted him as a narcissistic goldilocks and a psychopathic killer. Today, Custer's defeat at the battle of Little Big Horn remains the single most studied military engagement in American history, and writers still debate whether Custer was a racist murderer; a swaggering, egotistical self-promoter; or a martyred hero betrayed by his subordinates. Historians tend to view him as an officer whose vanity, youth, and desire for victory clouded his tactical judgment.

The Ohio-born Custer graduated last in his class at West Point in 1861, but by the age of 25 he had risen to the rank of brevet major general, the Army's youngest. He fought in many Civil War battles including Gettysburg, and became one of the heroes of the Union army. At the end of the Civil War, he reverted to his Army rank of captain and served stints in Louisiana and Texas before being placed in command of the 7th Cavalry on the Great Plains.

In 1874, he led an expedition into the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota, which was then reserved for the Sioux. He brought along reporters and geologists, who informed the public that there was "gold in the grass roots." This led to a stampede of prospectors and miners into the Black Hills. President Ulysses Grant ordered all Indians to register at reservations. Many Sioux and Cheyenne gathered in southeastern Montana and decided to resist.

On June 25, 1876, Custer's scouts had observed what they thought was a retreating Indian village along the Little Big Horn River in what is now Montana. Custer knew that the Plains Indians usually scattered when attacked in order to protect non-combatants. He expected them to disperse when his men struck. Only two years earlier, Custer had staged a surprise, early morning attack on the camp of a southern Cheyenne Chief, Black Kettle, along the banks of Oklahoma's Washita River, in which 103 Indians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, had been killed.

But this Indian village was far larger than Custer imagined. It contained an estimated 8,000 Indians and more than 3,000 warriors and was led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The village was three miles long and a half mile wide. (Custer had initially estimated the village's population did not exceed 1,500). Custer divided his command of 645 soldiers into three columns. Major Marcus Reno's detachment approached the Indian camp from the southeast and lost a third of its men. Reno's men retreated to a nearby ridge, where they were under siege for nearly two days.

Meanwhile, the buckskin-clad Custer and his men tried to open an attack on the Indians' flank. But the Indians had watched Custer lead his men along the bluffs overlooking the Little Big Horn, and 1,500-2,500 warriors attacked Custer's forces. His men, many of whom were raw recruits, were ill-prepared for combat. Lacking cover and relying on single-shot rifles, Custer's troops fired few bullets. In contrast, many of the Indians were carrying repeating rifles and carbines. Within an hour, every soldier in Custer's command had died. Indian losses in the battles totaled less than a hundred.

Surviving letters and other documents give a human dimension to the battle. Many of Custer's troops were young immigrants and farm boys who lived a miserable existence on the Plains. They were forced to wear wool uniforms year-round and ate salt pork and hardtack, a cracker-like food that had to be soaked in water or coffee to be edible. The men drank heavily in order to pass the time.

One of Custer's men, Isaiah Dorman, was a former slave who had lived among the Sioux for several years before serving as a translator for Custer during the Little Big Horn campaign. His corpse was particularly mutilated because he was regarded as a traitor for leading the Americans to the Sioux. A 25-year-old second lieutenant, George D. Wallace, described Custer's camp at the mouth of the Big Horn River. "The Indians surrounded us & poured in a deadly fire, but we had to lie still and take it...," he wrote. "The next morning we moved to the scene of Gen'l Custer's fight, but the sight was too horrible to describe. We buried 204 bodies and encamped near Gen'l [Alfred H.] Terry. But the smell of dead horses forced him to move camp several miles." Wallace died in 1890, one of 31 soldiers killed during the assault on a group of 350 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

Custer's "Last Stand" also marked the Plains Indians' last stand. The shocking news of Custer's defeat arrived in the east two days after the nation's centennial, and encouraged a thirst for revenge. The Plains Indians suffered a series of defeats following the battle. The Indian alliance was shattered and Sitting Bull and some of his people fled to Canada. Buffalo Bill Cody would advertise himself as the first soldier to scalp an Indian in retaliation for Custer's defeat. Within a year, nearly all the Plains Indians had been confined on reservations.

In 1877, during a meeting under a flag of truce in Fort Robinson, Nebraska, an American soldier killed Crazy Horse by stabbing him with a bayonet. Black Elk, an Indian medicine man, said that before his murder Crazy Horse had told him: "I will return to you in stone." In 1998, a Connecticut sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, completed an 87 foot tall bust of Crazy Horse in South Dakota's Black Hills. Located 17 miles from Mount Rushmore, where the heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt were carved in a mountainside in the Sioux homeland during the 1930s, Crazy Horse's face rises higher than the Washington Monument and is more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.

Nez Perce

The last great war between the U.S. government and an Indian nation ended at 4 p.m., October 5, 1877, in the Bear Paw Mountains of northern Montana. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce nation surrendered 87 men, 184 women, and 147 children to units of the U.S. cavalry. For 11 weeks, he led his people on a 1,600 mile retreat toward Canada. He engaged 10 separate U.S. commands in 13 battles and skirmishes, and in nearly every instance he either defeated the American forces or fought them to a standstill. But in the end, the Nez Perce proved no match for Gatling guns, howitzers, and cannons.

At that moment, Joseph delivered one of the most eloquent speeches in American history. He spoke no English, but his translated remarks having handed his rifle to Col. Nelson Miles, Joseph concluded:

“The little children are freezing to death.... I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find.... Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. “

One of his terms of surrender was that his people be returned to their homeland.

For thirty-one years, Joseph fought for his peoples' return to eastern Oregon's Wallowa Valley, where his people had produced the famous appaloosa horse, bred for speed and endurance. He met with three American presidents to argue his case: Rutherford Hayes, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. He died at the age of 64 in 1904.

In 1877, the U.S. government sent General Oliver Howard to force the Nez Perce to move to an Idaho reservation. Chief Joseph and his band left for the reservation, but before they could reach it, several Nez Perce youths, disillusioned by broken treaty promises and white encroachment on their land, attacked and killed 18 white settlers.

Chief Joseph then began a three month, 1,600 mile flight to Canada with four separate U.S. military units in pursuit. repeatedly turned the tables on numerically superior forces. They eluded and out-fought 2,000 army soldiers in 13 battles before finally surrendering in a Montana snowstorm, just 40 miles from the Canadian border. Only 418 men, women, and children out of 800 who had set out were left. During the final battle, General Miles attempted to seize Chief Joseph under a flag of truce, but the chief had to be exchanged when the Nez took a white lieutenant prisoner.

Under the terms of the surrender, the Nez Perce were promised that they could live on a reservation in Lapwai, Idaho. But instead the Nez Perce were sent to Oklahoma. Half the tribe died from disease on the trip. A decade later the Nez Perce were relocated on a reservation in eastern Washington.

The surrender of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce ended a decade of warfare between Indians and the U.S. government in the Far West. It meant that virtually all western Indians had been forced to live on government reservations.

Wounded Knee

The late 19th century marked the nadir of Indian life. Deprived of their homelands, their revolts suppressed, and their way of life besieged, many Plains Indians dreamed of restoring a vanished past, free of hunger, disease, and bitter warfare. Beginning in the 1870s, a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance arose among Indians of the Great Basin, and then spread, in the late 1880s, to the Great Plains. Beginning among the Paiute Indians of Nevada in 1870, the Ghost Dance promised to restore the way of life of their ancestors.

During the late 1880s, the Ghost Dance had great appeal among the Sioux, despairing over the death of a third of their cattle by disease and angry that the federal government had cut their food rations. In 1889, Wovoka, a Paiute holy man from Nevada, had a revelation. If only the Sioux would perform sacred dances and religious rites, then the Great Spirit would return and raise the dead, restore the buffalo to life, and cause a flood that would destroy the whites. Wearing special Ghost Dance shirts, fabricated from white muslin and decorated with red fringes and painted symbols, dancers would spin in a circle until they became so dizzy that they entered into a trance. White settlers became alarmed: "Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy...We need protection, and we need it now."

Fearful that the Ghost Dance would lead to a Sioux uprising, army officials ordered Indian police to arrest the Sioux leader Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull resisted, he was killed. In the ensuing panic, his followers fled the Sioux reservation. Federal troops tracked down the Indians and took them to a cavalry camp on Wounded Knee Creek. There, on December 29, 1890, one of the most brutal incidents in American history took place. While soldiers disarmed the Sioux, someone fired a gun. The soldiers responded by using machine guns to slaughter over 200 Indian men, women, and children. The Oglala Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk summed up the meaning of Wounded Knee:

“I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there.”

The Battle of Wounded Knee marked the end of three centuries of bitter warfare between Indians and whites. Indians had been confined to small reservations, where reformers would seek to transform them into Christian farmers. In the future, the Indian struggle to maintain an independent way of life and a separate culture would take place on new kinds of battlefields.

Kill the Indian and Save the Man

In 1879, an army officer named Richard H. Pratt opened a boarding school for Indian youth in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His goal: to use education to uplift and assimilate into the mainstream of American culture. That year, 50 Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Pawnee arrived at his school. Pratt trimmed their hair, required them to speak English, and prohibited any displays of tribal traditions, such as Indian clothing, dancing, or religious ceremonies. Pratt's motto was "kill the Indian and save the man."

The Carlisle Indian School became a model for Indian education. Not only were private boarding schools established, so too were reservation boarding schools. The ostensible goal of such schools was to teach Indian children the skills necessary to function effectively in American society. But in the name of uplift, civilization, and assimilation, these schools took Indian children away from their families and tribes and sought to strip them of their cultural heritage.

By the late 19th century, there was a widespread sense that the removal and reservation policies had failed. No one did a more effective job of arousing public sentiment about the Indians' plight than Helen Hunt Jackson, a Massachusetts-born novelist and poet. Her classic book A Century of Dishonor (1881), recorded the country's sordid record of broken treaty obligations, and did as much to stimulate public concern over the condition of Indians as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did to raise public sentiment against slavery or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did to ignite outrage against environmental exploitation. Ironically, reformers believed that the solution to the "Indian problem" was to erase a distinctive Indian identity.

During the late 19th century, humanitarian reformers repeatedly called for the government to support schools to teach Indian children "the white man's way of life," end corruption on Indian reservations, and eradicate tribal organizations. The federal government partly adopted the reformers' agenda. Many reformers denounced corruption in the Indian Bureau, which had been set up in 1824 to provide assistance to Indians. In 1869, one member of the House of Representatives said, "No branch of the federal government is so spotted with fraud, so tainted with corruption...as this Indian Bureau." To end corruption, Congress established the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1869, which had the major Protestant religious denominations appoint agents to run Indian reservations. The agents were to educate and Christianize the Indians and teach them to farm. Dissatisfaction with bickering among church groups and the inexperience of church agents led the federal government to replace church-appointed Indian agents with federally-appointed agents during the 1880s.

In 1871 to weaken the authority of tribal leaders, Congress ended the practice of treating tribes as sovereign nations. To undermine older systems of tribal justice, Congress, in 1882, created a Court of Indian Offenses to try Indians who violated government laws and rules.

Native Americans at the Turn of the Century

As the 19th century ended, Native Americans seemed to be a disappearing people. The 1890 census recorded an Indian population of less than 225,000, and falling. The prevailing view among whites was that Indians should be absorbed as rapidly as possible into the dominant society: their reservations broken up, tribal authority abolished, traditional religions and languages eradicated. Late 19th century federal policy embodied this attitude. In 1871 Congress declared that tribes were no longer separate, independent governments. It placed tribes under the guardianship of the federal government. The 1887 Dawes Act allotted reservation lands to individual Indians in units of 40 to 160 acres. Land that remained after allotment was to be sold to whites to pay for Indian education.

The Dawes Act was supposed to encourage Indians to become farmers. But most of the allotted lands proved unsuitable for farming, owing to a lack of sufficient rainfall. The plots were also too small to support livestock.

Much Indian land quickly fell into the hands of whites. There was to be a 25 year trust period to keep Indians from selling their land allotments, but an 1891 amendment did allow Indians to lease them, and a 1907 law let them sell portions of their property. A policy of "forced patents" took additional lands out of Indian hands. Under this policy, begun in 1909, government agents determined which Indians were "competent" to assume full responsibility for their allotments. Many of these Indians quickly sold their lands to white purchasers. Altogether, the severalty policy reduced Indian-owned lands from 155 million acres in 1881 to 77 million in 1900 and just 48 million acres in 1934. The most dramatic loss of Indian land and natural resources took place in Oklahoma. At the end of the 19th century, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations held half the territory's land. But by 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, much of this land, as well as its valuable asphalt, coal, natural gas, and oil resources, had passed into the possession of whites.

Questions:

1. Why did Gen. Sheridan believe Indians were justified in waging war against the United Stated?

2. Against whom did Lincoln order the largest mass execution in US history?

3. What did the Congressional Peace Commission recommend in 1867?

4.What 3 factors led to the defeat of the Plains Indians?

5. Describe the Sand Creek Massacre.

6.What was the cause of the Battle of the Little Big Horn?

7.What was the outcome of the Battle of the Little Big Horn?

8. Why did the Nez Perce flee to Canada?

9. Why did Indians in the late 19th century believe in the Ghost Dance?

10. What happened at the Battle of Wounded Knee?

11. What does Pratt’s motto “kill the Indian and save the man” mean?

12.Why did Congress establish the Board of Indian Commissioners?

13. What did the Dawes Act call for?

14. What was the result of the Dawes Act?

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