Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (23 page)

As commanding general of the US Army from 1869 to 1883, one of William Tecumseh Sherman's primary goals was to ensure safe settlement of the West and the Plains regions. And his biggest impediments to doing so were the increasingly hostile native tribes, incensed because whites were displacing them from their hunting grounds. Chief among the troublesome tribes was the Sioux. In 1866 Sherman famously wrote to General Ulysses S. Grant: “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”

Sherman also famously advocated annihilation of bison herds in order to assist in the army's efforts in weakening Indian opposition. In his eyes he was acting as a soldier charged with a duty to perform, and his solutions were considered practical and efficient, if severe. . . .

“So you see, gentlemen, the only way to keep the savages in line is simple.” From under dark, beetling brows, General William Tecumseh Sherman eyed the men before him, arrayed in relaxed poses about the long gleaming walnut table. A burly General Grant, seated at the far end of the table, drew on his thick stogie and plumed a broad cloud of blue-gray smoke from between his large jowls. “Are you saying what I think you are, Sherman?”

The general spoke, nodding his head with the words, a measured effort. “Yes, I am. There is only the one course of action left available to us, only the one way we might once and for all defeat the Lakota Sioux—the same way you would any animal: starve them into submission. It can't help but work.”

“That's rather callous, don't you think?”

“Callous? When they've been taking every opportunity to flee the reservation, to kill white settlers and soldiers?”

“Ceding land that was already theirs was hardly a generous offering on our part.”

“Hardly the point.” Sherman's dark eyes squinted even narrower. “Don't you see the need?”

“I see the need to do something to minimize attacks by the savages on poor folks traveling westward, yes. But to starve children? Women? The old?”

“It will only be a ploy, a short-lived attempt to get them to change their ways.” Sherman stood and toyed with his own smoldering cigar. “At least that is my fervent hope. What they do with the opportunity is up to them.”

Grant snorted a bark of wry laughter. “‘Opportunity'? Heck, Sherman, you ought to run for office. Talk like that gets votes.”

Another of the men smirked, hid it behind his hand, and looked down at the table when Sherman raked the assemblage with his flinty glare.

“Be that as it may, it is an opportunity for us to get a leg up and over this problem once and for all.” The men still looked away, obviously ill at ease with what they were hearing. Sherman leaned heavily over the table, punched down with his knuckles. “I tell you now that if you want to subdue the Indians, you take away their food supply. And that means taking away the buffalo.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Sherman turned away, massaging his reddened knuckles, his flushed neck and ears betraying his rage. “Every damned last one of the big shaggies.” He turned back, wagged an accusing finger at the room. “Take away that primary means of sustenance and they will have no choice but to comply, to knuckle under, to . . . behave themselves.”

“You make them sound like petulant children.”

“Hardly children. The Sioux and all the others of their ilk are much more savage. But once they can no longer feast, they will fall into line or fall dead. At this point I don't much care which.”

“Seems a drastic way to get what you want.”

“If anyone here has a better way of doing it, then by all means let him speak up.”

“Once the buffs are gone. How will you feed the remaining Indians?”

Sherman smiled. “That's the beauty of it. Then we'll provide them with just enough to get by on. And if they become unruly once again, why we'll just have to withhold provisions.”

“Sounds like prison,” said Grant, shrugging into his jacket.

“It can't be helped.” Sherman stared at the ceiling.

The big man sighed. “It's a rough scheme, Sherman.” He looked up. “But it bears thought.” With that he left, trailing a stream of thick smoke behind.

For long moments no one said anything, then Sherman spoke up. “I take it none of you are any more impressed with the plan than he is.”

To a man they hesitantly shook their heads, not daring to meet Sherman's hard gaze.

One of the more tragic events in a long history of tragedies stippling US history in the West during the nineteenth century is the sad end of the Nez Perce War of 1877. This trek of desperation was led by Chief Joseph and his band of seven hundred, of which fewer than two hundred were warriors. The tribe traveled more than seventeen hundred miles across five states (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana) for three and a half months.

They hoped to make it to safety in Canada, where they would be beyond the reach of their tormenting pursuers, the US Cavalry. The army had cornered and engaged them in fights time and again on the journey, during which 120 Nez Perce were killed (fifty-five of whom were children and women). And yet the Nez Perce managed to strike back even as they fled, killing 312 soldiers.

But freedom was not in the cards for the Nez Perce. On October 5, 1877, they were trapped by an early winter storm in a valley in the Bear Paw Mountains of northern Montana. Surrounded by his people, starving, diseased, and freezing to death, Chief Joseph surrendered to General Nelson Miles.

He closed his famous surrender speech by saying, “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.”

General Miles promised they would be allowed to return to their home-land. That promise was never kept. Instead the Nez Perce were herded to an Oklahoma reservation, far from their ancestral lands in northeastern Oregon, from where they had earlier been forcibly removed by the US government to make room for white settlers.

In Oklahoma many more of his people died in squalid conditions rampant with disease. Chief Joseph died on September 21, 1904, aged sixty-four, on the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington, never having been allowed to return to his ancestral home.

In 1887 the US government passed the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, an effort to assimilate Indians into mainstream American society, to end the ownership of tribal property, and to put an end to Indian government. The “indian land,” according to the act, was to be divvied up for use by individuals and not their tribes. By accepting an allotment of land, an individual also agreed to live apart from the tribe and would then be eligible for United States citizenship. The Dawes Act was a continuance of the widespread federal practice of what was popularly and piously referred to as “killing the Indian to save the man.”

The obvious subtext was that Indians were regarded as little more than uncivilized savages who, for their own good, should no longer be allowed to be part of their tribes, practice their native forms of religion, or speak their native languages. Rather they should be taught how to be “American” by learning such occupations as farming.

Critics of the plan pointed out its flaws, to little avail. One such outspoken voice, Colorado Senator Henry M. Teller, said in 1881 that the underlying motive of the allotment plan was “to get at the Indian lands and open them up to settlement. The provisions for the apparent benefit of the Indians are but the pretext to get at his lands and occupy them. . . . If this were done in the name of Greed, it would be bad enough; but to do it in the name of Humanity . . . is infinitely worse.”

From owning 150 million acres in 1880, native-owned land reduced to seventy-eight million acres by the turn of the century. Common notice boards read: “Indian Land for Sale: Get a home of your own; Easy payments; Perfect title; Possession within thirty days; Fine lands in the West; irrigated, irrigable, grazing, agricultural, dry farming.”

On behalf of the Dawes Act, a meeting was held at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation on August 22, 1883. Revered Hunkpapa Lakota Chief Sitting Bull was verbally attacked by Senator John Logan of Illinois:

I want to say that further you are not a great chief of this country. That you have no following, no power, no control. You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today is because of the government. If it were not for the government, you would be freezing and starving today in the mountains. I merely say these things to notify you that you cannot insult the people of the United States of America or its committees . . . the government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.

Assimilation, it seems, was the means and the end, a way to eradicate the culture of Native Americans and replace it with something whites found less threatening. The government's steps toward assimilation were broad and unflinching. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Indian children ages four and up were removed without permission from their parents' homes on reservations and forced to attend federally run boarding schools so that they might assimilate into white society. They were not allowed to dress as Indians, wear their hair as Indians, or speak in their native languages, and if they did, they received beatings.

Given no alternative, these young, impressionable people gave in and became, for all intents and purposes, whites—though they were never allowed by whites to forget they were most definitely not white. Nor, as they were reminded when they returned to their families, were they quite Indians.

On the cold morning of December 29, 1890, the Lakota Sioux were already reduced to a state of near starvation on a paltry, windblown patch of land at Wounded Knee Creek, on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. A deaf warrior, Black Coyote, was told by US Army troops to give up his rifle, but he refused, saying he paid much for it and should be compensated for its value. A scuffle resulted in a single fired shot.

That act of weary defiance triggered a terrible overreaction among the assembled soldiers. Five hundred US troops opened fire with four Hotchkiss revolving-barrel guns. Most of the Sioux had already been disarmed. The rest were women, children, and the elderly.

The soldiers rampaged for an hour, massacring without discrimination. More than two hundred Lakota Sioux were killed (some historians claim the number is closer to three hundred) and fifty-one wounded, to the army's twenty-five dead and thirty-nine wounded. Many soldiers were shot by friendly fire by their fellows manning the blazing fifty-five-round-per-minute Hotchkiss guns.

In desperation, women and children fled on foot across the snowy wastes. They were hunted down by mounted officers and killed. Others died of hypothermia. Three days after the slaughter, ten surviving Indians were discovered, among them four babies found beneath their mothers' dead bodies.