The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (25 page)

Several factors explain the increasingly precarious circumstances facing mixed-blood peoples in Montana in the 1870s and after. First was a surge in native-white violence in the middle of the decade, as the territory’s Indian wars lurched fitfully to a bloody conclusion. On a blistering day in June 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer plunged the Seventh U.S. Cavalry into an enormous Indian encampment on the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana. Nearly 275 men in Custer’s command were killed, in fighting, according to one Indian participant, that lasted “no longer than a hungry man needed to eat his dinner.”
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The following summer Chief Joseph and his fugitive Nez Perces engaged the U.S. Army in a series of costly battles along the Montana–Idaho border, before surrendering just miles from the safety of the Canadian boundary.
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Such conflict and the instability it engendered mobilized white rage against all Indians, a category that by virtue of their heritage extended to many mixed-blood people, too, especially those who “looked” native.

More important were Montana’s rapidly changing demographics, which in the space of a decade remade the territory as a white man’s country. Whereas in 1870 Montana’s native and non-native populations were roughly equal, at approximately 20,000 people each, by 1880 the number of whites had doubled even as the native population had begun a dramatic slide. Complicating matters, these white newcomers, like Lizzie and Robert Fisk, who arrived in 1867, had no sense of the relative racial accommodation that had characterized the fur trade era. Instead, as had happened on each successive American frontier—from the Appalachians to the Great Lakes, from Colorado to Texas—white emigrants looked with revulsion upon the mixed-blood communities they discovered, seeing in them a combination of the worst elements of both races: white dissipation on the one hand, and native ignorance on the other. “Half-breed” was perhaps putting it too delicately; in the words of one late nineteenth-century white Montanan, such individuals were “sons of a degenerate ancestry.”
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Insults like these inflicted lasting psychic wounds on their victims, all the more painful for the reminder that to be only part white was in fact to be nonwhite, and maybe something worse. After all, many race scientists of the day believed that pure-blooded individuals, even those of supposedly second-rate stock, like Africans and Asians, were biologically superior to the racially amalgamated offspring of mixed marriages.
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No less a figure than Joe Kipp, who spent his entire adult life serving as an intermediary between Indians and whites (often to the detriment of Montana’s native peoples), suffered grievously from such slights. In a poignant eulogy, a white friend remembered, “Above all things, Kipp hated the word ‘breed,’ generally prefixed by the expletive ‘damn,’ so often used by the ignorant and thoughtless. … None know better than I how hard he tried to live so as to ever have the respect and friendship of the whites, and what fits of terrible depression overcame him when he heard his kind mentioned in terms of contempt or derision.”
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T
O HIS MANY DETRACTORS
, Wilbur Fisk Sanders was the “Mephistopheles of Montana politics.” While he may have looked the part, with his dark complexion and piercing black eyes, it was his vigorous leadership of the territory’s beleaguered Republican Party that earned Sanders the hatred of his foes. In Montana as in many other western locales, Democrats enjoyed a tenuous majority, having opted to ride out the ideological discomforts of the Reconstruction era as far as geographically possible from the reaches of the federal government. Sanders and his fellow partisans worked tirelessly to stymie their opponents’ best-laid plans. Add to that his natural belligerence and hardball tactics, and it is no wonder that Sanders lost four elections—in 1864, 1867, 1880, and 1886—to serve as the territory’s lone delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.
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He tasted victory, if by proxy, in a historic 1882 campaign. Capitalizing on recent territorial legislation that extended to women the right to vote as well as to stand for election in various school-related contests, Sanders used his influence with the Republican Commission of Lewis and Clark County to get Helen Clarke on the ballot as their candidate for superintendent of schools.
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Local Democrats were so impressed with her qualifications that they set aside their animosity toward Sanders, if only for a moment, and withdrew their own candidate, who promptly endorsed Clarke as “a lady well qualified and eminently worthy of the position.”
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On 7 November 1882 Helen Clarke thus became the first woman elected to public office in the history of Montana Territory (though she shared the distinction with Alice Nichols, who won the same post in Meagher County).

By all accounts Clarke excelled in her position. In his annual reports, Montana’s superintendent of public instruction singled her out for special mention, praising her zeal and efficiency in managing the school system of the territory’s largest and wealthiest county.
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And the job clearly suited Clarke, starting with the $1,000 annual salary, which gave her a welcome measure of financial independence.
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Her success did not stop the Democrats from running their own candidate against her in 1884, but she easily dispatched Edmund O. Railsback, principal of the Helena Business College, winning with 55 percent of the vote.
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She was elected to a third term in 1886.

Clarke’s triumphs proved that, even if the fortunes of Montana’s mixed-blood peoples were fading by the 1880s, they were not yet in total eclipse. To be sure, hers was an exceptional case. After all, Clarke was unusually talented and had a commanding presence. She was descended from a leading (white) figure of the territory’s celebrated pioneer days and counted another such individual (however divisive) as a patron. Moreover, as an unmarried woman in a world defined by male preeminence, she posed no threat to Montana’s new social and political order.

As if to illustrate the singularity of her experience, a local newspaper dubbed Clarke the “Aspasia of the wilderness,” likening her to the famous woman from ancient Greece whose wit and charm allowed her to move with ease in a society normally closed to those of her sex.
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The analogy was apt in another, unintended sense as well. Aspasia was hounded in her own time by rumors that she was a prostitute, slanders spread by those who resented her influence with Pericles, the renowned Athenian statesman as well as the father of her illegitimate son.
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Clarke had her own chorus of detractors, the Lizzie Fisks of Montana’s emerging white middle class, to bully her.

Eventually, such calumnies wore her down, so that by the close of the decade she, too, was defeated by the rising tide of prejudice that had vanquished the territory’s other mixed-blood people. Like Joe Kipp, she bore her wounds internally, and perhaps her suffering went unnoticed by even some of her closest white friends. This emotional distress intensified over time and, according to one newspaper, ultimately drove her away from Montana, where the new binary racial calculus left little room for people in between. “Though endowed with much beauty,” the correspondent wrote, “Miss Clarke was known to be the daughter of a Piegan Indian woman, and this fact caused her to be looked down upon socially … the gilded doors of Helena’s social realm were closed to her by the four hundred.”
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Who comprised the “four hundred” (a shorthand then in vogue referring to the social elite of Gilded Age Manhattan, adapted for use elsewhere) and how exactly they ostracized Clarke is a mystery. But by the close of 1889 she had once again turned her back on Montana in search of a brighter future elsewhere.

Children as They Are

Perhaps the best that could be said of Senator Henry L. Dawes’s political career was that he remained a staunch Republican Party loyalist. After graduating from Yale College in 1839, he held a number of state offices in his native Massachusetts before winning election to the House of Representatives in 1857, where he served without earning much notice for the better part of two decades. Dawes’s so-called big break came in 1874, when he was plucked from obscurity to fill the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Charles Sumner, the radical reformer beloved by many (and hated by others) for his vociferous opposition to slavery. Dawes, in fact, delighted in showing visitors to the Senate chamber the gashes left in Sumner’s desk by Preston Brooks, the South Carolinian who, incited by a speech Sumner gave in 1856, had savagely thrashed the Massachusetts senator with a heavy cane, nearly killing him.
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Sumner’s wounded desk seemed about as close to greatness, or even relevance, as Henry Dawes was likely ever to get.

Yet for all his apparent mediocrity, Dawes came to write one of the most significant pieces of legislation enacted during the nineteenth century. Signed into law by President Grover Cleveland in February 1887, the General Allotment Act transformed federal Indian policy and governed U.S. relations with its native peoples for the next half century. Known more familiarly as the Dawes Severalty Act, its improbable sponsor achieved a kind of immortality, joining a select group of lawmakers—including men like Representative Justin Morrill (father of the land-grant college act) and Senator John Sherman (the noted trustbuster)—whose last names became synonymous with their landmark statutes. For a political hack who had discovered “the Indian question” only the decade before, Dawes’s lasting fame was a stunning personal triumph.

While his name may be forever linked with allotment, Henry Dawes did not with a mere flick of a wand create the idea, which, in fact, dated back as far as the colonial era. Still, in the post–Civil War period allotment became practically an obsession of Indian reformers, who seized upon the concept as a way to remake natives as “brown white people” by forcing them to assimilate into mainstream Anglo-American society. The humanitarians’ goal was straightforward: to break up communally held reservations and install native families on individually owned plots of land, with any surplus made available for purchase by non-Indians. Although the government would hold title to the Indians’ homesteads for a twenty-five-year waiting period, the humanitarians believed that native experience with private property would teach them thrift and self-sufficiency while encouraging the abandonment of what they perceived as abhorrent cultural traditions. Years later President Theodore Roosevelt, who was no friend to native peoples, noted admiringly that the Dawes Act had served “as a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.”
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The blunt paternalism of the Dawes Act, combined with the Indians’ staggering loss of land—some 86 million acres between the passage of the bill and its repeal in 1934—have made the law a deserving target of scorn.
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Yet the legislation was very much a product of its time, and its provisions grew from a fervid belief by “friends of the Indian” that such measures were in the best interests of America’s native peoples, a tragic instance of loving not wisely but too well. Surely this was true of the reformers who lobbied for allotment, the legislators who codified it, and the men and women, including Helen Clarke, who implemented the policy on reservations throughout the land.

H
ELEN
C
LARKE OWED
her surprising career as an allotment agent to the most famous institution that emerged from the same assimilationist impulse that spawned the Dawes Act. Established in 1879, the Carlisle Indian School was the brainchild of Richard Henry Pratt, a retired military officer who had carried out a fascinating experiment four years earlier. Charged with relocating seventy-two native prisoners from Indian Territory to Florida, Pratt decided to try and “civilize” his captives once the group had reached its destination at St. Augustine. His efforts, which included instruction in Christian dogma as well as the English language, wrought such a profound makeover in the natives that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who by then spent winters in Florida, trumpeted Pratt’s achievement to her readers. Because of their model behavior, the Indian prisoners were released in 1878, and the following year federal authorities approved Pratt’s request to convert some abandoned army barracks in central Pennsylvania to the nation’s first off-reservation boarding school.
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Like most humanitarians, Pratt had genuine affection for Indians but also believed that their cultures belonged to the Stone Age. At Carlisle, Pratt thus sought, as he famously put it, to “kill the Indian, [and] save the man.” Before-and-after photographs offer stark visual evidence of his maxim. Perhaps the best-known set features a young Navajo named Tom Torlino, who enrolled at the school shortly after it opened. Taken in 1880, the first picture shows Torlino as he arrived in Pennsylvania, with flowing locks, gold hoop earrings, and an extravagant necklace—in short, looking every bit the “savage” whom Pratt hoped to transform. The second picture was taken three years later and shows the “civilizing” effects of instruction in white mores: Torlino dressed in a coat and tie and sporting tightly cropped hair.
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Helen Clarke had the opportunity to look in on Pratt’s human laboratory in January 1890, when she arrived at Carlisle with a pair of her nephews in tow. Eager to escape Montana’s stifling social hierarchy, she had volunteered to deliver two of Horace’s sons—thirteen-year-old Malcolm and eleven-year-old Ned—to Pratt’s care, and then to remain indefinitely in the East, perhaps working again in the theater. No descriptions of the place are found in her papers, but it is easy to imagine her ambivalence as she ambled about the campus. On the one hand, a woman known to her lover by her Indian name could scarcely have endorsed Pratt’s extremist sentiments about the eradication of native culture. And yet in most other respects, Clarke embodied the outlook of the typical female reformer of the day, with whom she shared virtually everything else except race.