America Aflame (76 page)

Touring the West in the months after his appointment, Sherman complained of “premature settlement” by whites. The Indian could no longer pursue his way of life, so “the poor devil naturally wriggles against his doom.” Sherman ordered his officers to “act against all people,” including whites who provoked Indians, and to make every possible effort to discern peaceful Indians from the more belligerent tribes, a task the army neither seemed willing nor able to undertake. His colleague General Philip H. Sheridan took a harder line, sounding very much like the soldier who left a trail of destruction in the Valley of Virginia two years earlier. He recommended to the committee that Indians who refused to enter reservations should have “such destruction of their property made, as will render them very poor.” Sheridan believed that the tactics that worked successfully against the Confederacy would produce similar results against the Indians.
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Conflict on the Plains continued while the government debated. The transcontinental railroad construction entered Indian territory in 1866. General Grant, while acknowledging the construction of the road as a provocation, viewed the railroad as “one of its [the government's] most efficient aids in the control of the Indians,” as it would facilitate troop movements. When Thomas C. Durant of the Union Pacific Railroad vowed that he would suspend construction unless his workers secured military protection, Sherman responded, “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of a work of national and world-wide importance.” But the overextended army could not protect a thousand miles of railroad and separate the white settlers from the Indians at the same time. The railroad received priority, and the army generally maintained the safety of the workers and the company's property. The task of serving as a referee between white settlers and Indians proved impossible. Drawn into the conflict, the army heightened the bloodshed without materially alleviating the instability of the region.
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The construction of the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields through Indian territory and the establishment of three forts along the trail sent the Sioux on a series of deadly raids in 1866. Captain William J. Fetterman and his cavalrymen rode out to confront the Sioux, and the result cost eighty-four soldiers their lives, including Fetterman. It was the worst massacre for the army in the West up to that time. Fetterman had expressed disdain for the fighting abilities of the Sioux, and he had ignored warnings not to mount a frontal assault on the warriors. The Sioux did not fight like the Confederates. Chief Red Cloud and his Oglala Sioux warriors mutilated Fetterman's troops in much the same manner as Chivington's men had defiled the Cheyenne at Sand Creek. Post physician C. M. Hines described the bodies of Fetterman's cavalry as looking “like … hogs brought to market.” The official report of the battle noted “eyes, ears, mouth, and arms penetrated with spearheads, sticks and arrows; ribs slashed to separation with knives; [and] muscles of calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arms, and cheeks taken out.”
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Sherman resolved, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children. Nothing else will reach the root of this case.” The army, however, demonstrated little enthusiasm for a campaign in the dead of winter. Instead, in the Fort Laramie Treaty of April 1868 the government agreed to dismantle the forts on the Bozeman Trail in exchange for the cessation of hostilities. Federal negotiators also guaranteed fixed boundaries for the Sioux lands comprising what is now the western half of South Dakota, for “as long as the grasses grow.” The government gave up nothing, as the transcontinental railroad obviated the need for a trail to the Montana goldfields. And, as it turned out, the growing season for grass was very short.
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The Indians of the southern Plains, seeing the success of their northern brethren in getting the government to back down, and angered by the Federals' failure to comply with treaty guarantees, attacked army posts and settlers in Kansas in the late summer of 1868. Sherman ordered Sheridan to “go ahead in your own way, and I will back you with my authority. If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians, it is but the result of what they have been warned again and again.” Sheridan reminded his commander that an all-out campaign would inevitably result in the deaths of women and children, a price he was willing to pay. Recalling their work in the Civil War, Sheridan noted, “During the war did any one hesitate to attack a village or town occupied by the enemy because women and children were within its limits? Did we cease to throw shells into Vicksburg or Atlanta because women and children were there?”
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With Sherman and Sheridan directing the campaign, many whites believed that the Indian wars would end soon.
Harper's
regretted that the current campaign would probably result in “the extermination of the Indian tribes,” as “neither General Sherman nor General Sheridan are men to be turned back from their purposes by false sentiments of humanity.” In this unsentimental age they would pursue their objectives aggressively. Sheridan defended his policy of total war against the Plains Indians, asking, “Who shall be killed—the whites or the Indians?… Since 1862 at least 800 men, women, and children have been murdered within the limits of my present command in the most fiendish manner.… I have myself conversed with one woman who, while some months gone in pregnancy, was ravished over 30 times successively by different Indians.… Also another woman, ravished with more fearful brutality over 50 times, and the last Indian sticking the point of his sabre into the person of the woman.” Sheridan decried the government policy of “making presents to these savages.… If a man commits murder … we hang him.… If an Indian does the same we have been in the habit of giving him more blankets.”
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Sheridan launched an unprecedented winter campaign in 1868–69. When a Comanche chief asked Sheridan, “Why am I and my people being tormented by you? I am a good Indian,” the general replied infamously, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” often misquoted as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The sentiment, however, was the same. Sheridan's winter campaign was a bloody success even as the members of the Peace Commission condemned it. The southern tribes conceded defeat and most returned to reservations.
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When Ulysses S. Grant took office as president in March 1869, he tried to steer a middle course on Indian-white relations, an approach he would also apply to the southern front. He had spent time in the West as a young soldier, and he sympathized with the plight of the Indians. In a rare mention of Indian policy in an inaugural address, Grant declared, “The proper treatment of the original occupants of this land—the Indians—is one deserving of careful study.” He endorsed “any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.” Rather than exterminating or permanently isolating the Indians from whites, Grant hoped to transform them into American citizens much like the immigrants from Europe. In his first year in office, he replaced the troublesome Indian agents with Quaker missionaries noted for their pacifism and “strict integrity and fair dealings.”
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Grant appointed Brigadier General Ely S. Parker as commissioner of Indian affairs, charging him to root out corrupt agents. Parker, a Seneca Indian from New York State, was the first Native American to occupy that position and also the first of his race to hold a cabinet-level office. He had a lengthy association with Grant, having served as his adjutant during the Civil War. Parker was present at Appomattox when Lee surrendered to Grant. He drew up the documents with the terms of surrender. According to eyewitness accounts, Lee went around the room shaking hands with the Union officers but hesitated before the dark-skinned Parker. Grant introduced Parker as his adjutant, adding that he was a Native American. Lee took Parker's hand and reportedly replied, “I'm glad to see that there is at least one real American here,” to which Parker responded, “We are all Americans.”
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Parker believed, with Grant, that the surge of migration to the West could ultimately lead to the Indians' extinction. He told the president, “Unless they [the Indian nations] fall in with the current of destiny as it rolls and surges around them … they must succumb and be annihilated by its overwhelming force.” Parker would eventually run afoul of powerful congressmen who challenged his authority to eliminate waste and corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He left Washington and made a distinguished career as a member of the Board of Commissioners in New York City, where he died in 1895.
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Parker's appointment indicated Grant's seriousness to formulate an Indian policy that would be as fair as possible to Native tribes. Grant refused to consider the systematic “extinction of a race,” instead advocating “placing all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection there.” Once acclimated to the new environment, they would receive individual plots of land and establish self-government, a policy not implemented until 1887. The former general advanced an enlightened view for the time, though he shared the racial condescension of most white Americans toward nonwhites. Grant avowed he was on the “side of the Civilization & Christianization of the Indian. I do not believe our Creator ever placed different races of men on this earth with the view of having the stronger exert all his energies in exterminating the weaker.” Grant's proposals did not represent a significant break with earlier policies favoring concentration of the tribes. He tried, however, to introduce fairness and honesty into the system. Destroying the Native American culture was the price, steep though it was, for the preservation of the Indian race.
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In practical terms, and this was a practical age, it would have been extremely difficult for the Indians to survive as they had in the past. The settlement of the trans-Mississippi West in the three decades after the Civil War was the largest migration of people in American history to that time. These new arrivals were well aware of the threats the Indians presented, both to their property and to their lives. As the western population grew, so did the political pressure on the army and on the Grant administration. With Republican fortunes more uncertain by the day in the South, the West required nurturing. While the reservation system moved the Indians out of the way of white harm, it did not remove the Indians. Nor did it guarantee that the Indians would remain there. The Grant administration could hardly ignore the clamor from white westerners demanding a tougher Indian policy.

In 1870, Red Cloud and several other Sioux chiefs visited Washington, D.C. Red Cloud had moved onto the reservation, and his journey to Washington was a reward for that decision. The Grant administration hoped that Red Cloud would return to the Plains and persuade the other bands of Sioux to do the same. Red Cloud ate strawberries and cream with the president and Mrs. Grant and gave a speech at Cooper Union in New York to a packed house and a standing ovation. The
New York Times
gave Red Cloud's presentation a rave review: “His earnest manner, his impassioned gestures, the eloquence of his hands, and the magnetism which he evidently exercises over an audience, produced a vast effect on the dense throng.… ‘You have children, and so have we. We want to rear our children well, and ask you to help us in doing so.' It seems to us that this is not an unreasonable request even though it does come from a ‘savage.'”
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Red Cloud also delivered an address to the Department of the Interior and its secretary, Jacob Cox. This speech encapsulated the failure of U.S. Indian policy to that point and the growing misery of the Native American population that the next seven years of warfare would only exacerbate. It was both a summary and an elegy. “What has been done in my country,” Red Cloud spoke, “I did not want, did not ask for it; white people going through my country.… The white children have surrounded me and have left me nothing but an island. When we first had this land we were strong, now are melting like snow on the hillside, while you are grown like spring grass.” Red Cloud knew, of course, that he could he could not stem the tide of migration, but he hoped for a more enlightened government policy.
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Although Red Cloud had agreed to bring his people onto the reservation, he regretted his decision. “I do not want my reservation on the Missouri; this is the fourth time I have said so.… Our children are dying off like sheep; the country does not suit them. I was born at the forks of the Platte, and I was told that the land belonged to me.” Moreover, the promised annuities and goods fell far short of the agreement. “When you send goods to me, they are stolen all along the road, so when they reached me they were only a handful. They held a paper for me to sign, and that is all I got for my lands. The railroad is passing through my country now; I have received no pay for the land.” The officials listened politely. Nothing changed.
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In 1872, P. T. Barnum was already famous for his circus shows. In that year, he introduced a new attraction, a “Wild West” show that featured an Indian camp with real squaws and warriors sitting in wigwams, performing war dances, hunting real buffalo, and racing their ponies. This idyllic scene was suddenly crashed by a horde of swarthy Mexicans who attacked the camp, igniting “such a scene of savage strife and warfare as is never seen except upon our wild western borders.” Wild West shows soon became a staple form of entertainment rivaling minstrel shows in popularity. Buffalo Bill Cody eclipsed Barnum as the leading impresario of these staged dramas, trading on his experience and fame as a man of the West. White men replaced Mexicans, and the Indians became the aggressors. The Indians, and the West, had passed into the realm of caricature, much as African Americans and the South became the stereotype of minstrel shows. White Americans came to “know” both races and regions from what they saw on the stage. What they saw was two races of limited intelligence and ability to compete in the modern world without the assistance and direction of whites. The policies governments devised over the next century for these two races reflected more the act than the reality. For an age that exalted reason and realism, this was the ultimate abstraction.
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