America Aflame (87 page)

A major celebration occurred at the exposition on July 4. General Philip Sheridan was among a host of dignitaries that day. When a messenger rushed up to him on the platform to pass him a note, the general blanched and departed hastily. The message informed Sheridan of the destruction of the 7th Cavalry and the death of its commander, General George Armstrong Custer.

Sheridan's winter campaign of 1868–69 ended the Plains war, but only temporarily. The familiar cycle of inadequate provisions, the need to roam far and wide to find alternative food supplies in the face of the decimation of the buffalo, and incursions by white settlers touched off another round of hostilities in 1874. Sheridan was philosophical about the situation: “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 they made war. Could any one expect less?” Sheridan's empathy did not deter him from his mission to force Indians onto reservations or annihilate them. Scouring the southern Plains for Indian camps, Sheridan's men destroyed food, livestock, and weapons, leaving the tribes with neither sustenance nor shelter and a hard winter at hand.
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Rumors circulated that the Black Hills, sacred land for the Sioux, hid an untold treasure store of gold. Sheridan ordered Custer into the Black Hills, ostensibly to survey the region for the location of a fort to protect the construction of a second transcontinental railroad. Gold was on Custer's unofficial agenda. Custer found only modest amounts of gold, but the press inflated it as a second Sutter's Mill, and thousands of eager miners flooded the region. Though the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 gave the Sioux rights to the land, whites in the region wanted them evicted. The
Yankton
(S.D.)
Press and Dakotan
called the treaty an “abominable compact” and a barrier to “improvement and development.” The editor asked, “What should be done with these Indian dogs in our manger? They will not dig the gold or let others do it.… They are too lazy and too much like mere animals to cultivate the fertile soil, mine the coal, develop the salt mines, bore the petroleum wells, or wash the gold.” The free labor ideology of hard work, improving oneself and one's surroundings, and achieving upward mobility was foreign to the Indians, westerners argued. They did not deserve stewardship over this vast and rich domain.
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President Grant, seeking to avoid a bloody confrontation, directed Sherman to keep miners out of the Black Hills “by force if necessary.” Sheridan torched the wagons and possessions of the intruding miners and hauled the prospectors off to the stockade. These policies created an uproar in the mining camps, and for a while it appeared as if the army would be fighting prospectors instead of Indians. Large numbers of soldiers, dismayed at Sheridan's actions, deserted and set off to find gold themselves. With more than one thousand miners entering the Black Hills per month, Sherman could not effectively carry out Grant's order. The president, still seeking a fair resolution, offered to purchase the Black Hills from the Lakota Sioux chief Sitting Bull, who angrily rejected the offer. Seeing no alternative, Grant ordered all Indians in the Black Hills region onto reservations by January 31, 1876. If they declined, the army would force compliance. The Plains Indian war now entered its final phase.
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By the early summer of 1876 a sizable proportion of the Lakota Sioux led by Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse refused to enter the reservation. The army moved to end their rebellion. On June 17, 1876, Crazy Horse fought General George Crook to a standstill at the Battle of Rosebud Creek. A week later, Custer, or “Long Hair,” as the Sioux called him, led five hundred men to a large Sioux village containing twenty-five hundred warriors commanded by Sitting Bull. The settlement lay in the valley of the Little Big Horn in southeastern Montana. The Sioux referred to the area as the Greasy Grass. It was a hot, dry, and windy day. The cottonwood trees on the banks of the Greasy Grass released their white fluffy seedpods simulating a snowfall along the river.
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Custer dangerously divided his troops. Crazy Horse attacked and overran the contingent led by Major Marcus Reno, sending them into full flight. The Sioux warrior and his men galloped to aid Sitting Bull, who engaged Custer's 260 cavalrymen. Crazy Horse arrived on the battle scene late; Sitting Bull wiped out Custer and his men in about forty-five minutes, or “about as long as a hungry man to eat his dinner,” recalled one Cheyenne chief. In an interview given in his Canadian refuge the following year, Sitting Bull commented, “Where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.” He had assumed, incorrectly, that Custer and his men were drunk; no sober person would have attempted an assault of so few against so many.
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The western press renewed its call for a war of extinction against the Sioux. The
Black Hills Pioneer
thundered, “There is but one sentiment on the Indian question here—the hostile Sioux should be exterminated.” The southern Democratic press used Custer's defeat as a metaphor for the failure of Reconstruction policies and the allegedly inept and corrupt Republican regimes both in the South and in Washington. The “tragic events,” the
Charleston Journal of Commerce
noted, were “hardly more than the logical results of the scandalous mismanagement of the army by our military President and the infamous frauds, peculation and inefficiency which flourished in the Indian Bureau.”
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Custer's defeat shocked Sheridan and northerners generally, though not everyone clamored for revenge. By now, most white Americans east of the Mississippi understood the reduced options confronting the Native Americans. A writer in the
Nation
praised “the gallantry of General Custer and his men” and added, “but who shall blame the Sioux for defending themselves?”
Harper's
used the occasion of Custer's death to depict him as a victim of a misguided Indian policy. The contradictions were obvious, if the means to correct them were not. “We make solemn treaties with them [the Indians] as if they were civilized and powerful nations, and then practically regard them as vermin to be exterminated.… We make treaties … and then leave swindlers and knaves of all kinds to execute them.… [We] respect their rights to reservations, and then permit the reservations to be overrun.… [We] treat them as men, and then hunt them like skunks.” Custer's fate illuminated the failure of the administration's Indian policy as much as the persistent racial violence in the South demonstrated the futility of its Reconstruction policy.
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The summer victories of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were sensational though hollow triumphs. The army under Sheridan's direction was relentless after Custer's fall. Black Elk, who fought with Crazy Horse, recalled, “Wherever we went, soldiers came to kill us.” Crazy Horse and his Sioux band went deep into their country, and they encountered what many southerners experienced when they returned to their homes in the Valley of Virginia or along Sherman's route in Georgia and the Carolinas. The Sioux came upon a land “black from the fire, and the bison had gone away.” A hard winter came early. “It snowed much,” Black Elk related. “Game was hard to find, and it was a hungry time for us. Ponies died, and we ate them.… There had been thousands of us together that summer, but there were not two thousand now.” The buffalo were gone; the Black Hills were lost; and soon, so was a way of life.
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Sheridan pursued the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies through the winter, the most serious blow being inflicted on a Cheyenne village where American soldiers burned two hundred tepees, destroyed all food stores, buffalo robes, and ponies, and made a bonfire of blankets and sacred objects. That night, the temperature fell to thirty below zero. A dozen babies froze to death, and the Cheyenne killed the few horses they had saved so the elderly could place their hands and feet into the warm entrails of the dead horses. Sitting Bull fled to Canada, and most of the Sioux tribes entered the reservation.

Crazy Horse escaped defeat, but it was only a matter of time before hunger and the overwhelming odds forced him and his dwindling band into Fort Robinson. Placed under arrest, which he had not expected, Crazy Horse resisted, and an army private thrust a bayonet into his back while members of his own tribe held him down. He died that evening, September 5, 1877. The soldiers released his body to his parents the following day, and they carried him away on a horse-drawn travois. Young women uncovered Crazy Horse's body, as is the Sioux custom, washed him, and anointed his arms with red paint and painted his face as if for war. They tied a reddish brown stone behind his ear. His mother wrapped him in new deer hides as his father chanted a song. Both parents lifted him onto a scaffold, and at sunset the following day, they took him down, loaded him back on the travois, and rode off into the night to bury their son. The final resting place of Crazy Horse is unknown, but some have said that his grave lies on the banks of a creek in South Dakota called Wounded Knee.
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The incident rated only brief comments in the eastern press. Americans had placed the Indian wars behind them, just as they were relegating the issues of Reconstruction to oblivion. Economic recovery and the centennial celebration held public attention, not the fate of men and women of color. Crazy Horse was a man out of time, a man of yesterday. The
New York Times
observed, “In the tribe over which he ruled he was almost worshiped on account of his personal bravery; and yet he was greatly dreaded by his people, for his way was that of a despot. He had been a bad Indian ever since he had obtained manhood.” The
New York Tribune
condemned Crazy Horse as a “religious enthusiast.” The writer noted darkly and with unintended irony that “during his campaign … he used to boast that he held communion with a spirit from above that aided, sustained and directed him.” The Plains Indian war was over. Chief Red Cloud, who had led the attack on Fetterman, offered a fitting epitaph: “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.”
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Crazy Horse and his Oglala Sioux people on the way to Fort Sheridan to surrender to General George Crook, May 1877. (National Archives and Records Administration)

The army could no more stem the tide of white migration than a farmer could plough the sea. By 1880, an agricultural empire had arisen on former Indian lands in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas. Between 1860 and 1880, the population in these states grew from three hundred thousand to over two million, an amazing advance considering the predominantly rural nature of these states. Their bountiful crops, transported on railroads, fed the nation and the world. For the great middle classes of the North and their entrepreneurial partners, the rise of the West more than compensated for the fall of the South.

Whites agreed that the confinement of Indians to reservations and the demise of the buffalo were good things. In an era when Americans expected their generation to both transcend and improve upon nature, the Indians were hopelessly retrograde. General Nelson Miles, a veteran of the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s, looked out over the prairie and saw the amber waves of grain and the fat livestock and noted with satisfaction, “The buffalo, like the Indian, stood in the way of civilization and in the path of progress.… The same territory which a quarter of a century ago was supporting those vast herds of wild game, is now covered with domestic animals which afford the food supply for hundreds of millions of people in civilized countries.”
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The Quaker missionaries dispatched by President Grant proved more compassionate than the old Indian agents, but just as convinced that the Indians must adopt the white man's culture. The Quakers proposed in the late 1870s to begin the conversion to white civilization with the Indian children. Merrill Gates, president of the Friends of the Indian, vowed, “We are going to conquer barbarism, but we are going to do it by getting at the barbarism one by one.… We are going to conquer the Indians by a standing army of school teachers, armed with ideas, winning victories by industrial training, and by the gospel of love and the gospel of work.” The belief among whites grew that adult Indians were too set in savagery to successfully convert to the white man's ways. Reformers instead proposed bringing “the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization,” so “he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.”
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Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt became a leading advocate of this philosophy. He had led black soldiers during the Civil War and believed that it was possible to “train up” an inferior race. He coined a phrase for his policy: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879. Its first class consisted of 129 Plains Indians youngsters. Carl Schurz, appointed interior secretary in 1877, believed that the Indians should follow the example of southern blacks and get an education in the agricultural and mechanical arts. He advocated for their admission to Hampton Institute in Virginia, a school established for freedmen after the Civil War. As educated Christian workers, both Indians and blacks could make their way as farmers and mechanics in industrial America. That was the best possible scenario for these races. Without the discipline of work, the black man and the red man would literally fade away.
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