The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (43 page)

44
    For an account of this episode see Marquis,
Custer, Cavalry & Crows,
33. Though Doane is not named, references to “the officer in charge” lead Black, among others, to the conclusion that it was Doane who ordered the executions. For his part, Bear Head believed there were four victims, and they were Bloods who had been in the Piegan camp. See deposition of Bear Head, 18 Jan. 1915, MTHS, HRR, MF 53.

45
    For their part, the Piegans insisted that the number of confiscated horses was closer to 5,000. See, e.g., statement of Joe Kipp, 8 Feb. 1913, MTHS, HRR, MF 53. John Ponsford, a member of the expedition, offered a figure of 3,000 horses seized, noting that all but 800 were claimed by their rightful white owners at Fort Shaw, with the balance sold to the highest bidders at an average price of eight dollars each. See John W. Ponsford, Baker Battle, 1870, MTHS, John W. Ponsford Reminiscence, SC 659.

46
    
Billings Gazette,
3 April 1932.

47
    Telegram from Régis de Trobriand to O. D. Greene, 30 Jan. 1870, MTHS, RDT, SC 5, folder 1-2.

48
    Letter from Régis de Trobriand to O. D. Greene, 18 Feb. 1870, MTHS, RDT, SC 5, folder 1-2.

49
    U.S. Congress,
Piegan Indians,
17.

50
    
Helena Daily Herald,
2 Feb. 1870.

51
    
New North-West,
11 Feb. 1870.

52
    
Owyhee Avalanche,
5 March 1870.

53
    See, e.g., the
Daily Rocky Mountain Gazette,
30 Jan. 1870.

54
    Letter from Régis de Trobriand to Marie Caroline Post, 30 Jan. 1870, MTHS, RDT, SC 1201.

55
    Letter from Régis de Trobriand to Marie Caroline Post, 9 March 1870, MTHS, RDT, SC 1201.

56
    Quoted in Hutton,
Phil Sheridan and His Army,
192.

57
    For Pease’s report, see U.S. Congress,
Expedition against Piegan Indians,
House Executive Document 185, 41st Cong., 2nd sess. (1870), 7–8. For more on the exploitation of the forty-ninth parallel by Indians from both sides of the international boundary, see Andrew R. Graybill,
Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2007), 23–63.

58
    For Sully’s letter, see U.S. Congress,
Expedition against Piegan Indians,
6. Sully explained later that he had intended to send a copy of Pease’s letter to the War Department at the same time, but that his clerk had forgotten to do so. See
New York Times,
21 March 1870.

59
    
Congressional Globe,
41st Cong., 2nd sess., 25 Feb. 1870, 1576. Ironically, less than a year earlier Colyer had declared with great optimism that “in less than two years we shall have heard the last of ‘Indian outrages.’” See
New York Times,
15 July 1869. Baker was a brevet colonel, hence Colyer’s appellation.

60
    
New York Times,
24 Feb. 1870.

61
    
Harper’s Weekly,
19 March 1870. Secretary of the Interior Jacob D. Cox sounded a similar note in a letter to President Grant dated 7 March 1870. Cox insisted that much of the conflict in the West stemmed from U.S. expansion into Indian territory, and he called particular attention to the circumstances in Montana, where, he explained, “the very capital of the Territory is located upon the land to which the Indian title has never been extinguished and which has never been formally opened by the government for settlement.” See U.S. Congress,
Appropriations for Certain Indian Treaties
, Senate Executive Document 57, 41st Cong., 2nd sess. (1870), 4.

62
    U.S. Congress,
Piegan Indians,
9–10. Colyer did not allow Sheridan’s insult to go unanswered, insisting to the general, “Because I pull aside the curtain and let the American people see what you call ‘a great victory over the Indians,’ it does not follow that we do not want the
men
who perpetrated the horrid crimes you portray with so much zest, justly punished. Strike, if you must strike, the guilty, not the innocent.”
New York Times,
10 March 1870 (emphasis in the original).

63
    The best source for information on the transfer debate (as well as the larger struggle for control of Indian affairs) is Henry G. Waltmann, “The Interior Department, War Department, and Indian Policy, 1865–1887” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1962). See also Donald J. D’Elia, “The Argument over Civilian or Military Indian Control, 1865–1880,”
Historian
24, no. 2 (Feb. 1962): 207–25; and Marvin Garfield, “The Indian Question in Congress and in Kansas,”
Kansas Historical Quarterly
2, no. 1 (Feb. 1933): 29–44.

64
    For more on Sand Creek, see Stan Hoig,
The Sand Creek Massacre
(1961; Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1977); and Ari Kelman,
A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2013).

65
    The literature on Grant’s peace policy is extensive. Among the most helpful sources are Henry E. Fritz,
The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860–1890
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1963); Loring Benson Priest,
Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1865–1887
(1942; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969); and Francis Paul Prucha,
The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians,
2 vols. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984). For a revisionist perspective, see Henry G. Waltmann, “Circumstantial Reformer: President Grant & the Indian Problem,”
Arizona and the West
13, no. 4 (Winter 1971): 323–42.

66
    Hutton, “Sheridan’s Pyrrhic Victory,” 33–34.

67
    
Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1868,
40th Cong., 3rd sess., 467–74. It is worth noting that, as a member of the Peace Commission, Sherman signed his name to Taylor’s report (along with three other generals). It is doubtful, however, that he endorsed this portion of the document.

68
    
Army and Navy Journal,
26 Feb. 1870.

69
    
Congressional Globe,
41st Cong., 2nd sess., 25 Feb. 1870, 1577. Because Voorhees was a Democrat, his indictment of Grant was surely informed more by the congressman’s partisan sensibilities than by a commitment to racial justice; in fact, the historian Kenneth M. Stampp attributed to Voorhees an “intense race prejudice,” which no doubt shaped his role as one of the chief Copperheads (northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and whom Abraham Lincoln lamented as “the fire in the rear”). See his
Indiana Politics during the Civil War
(1949; Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978), 211. For more on Voorhees’s life and career, see Henry D. Jordan, “Daniel Wolsey Voorhees,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
6, no. 4 (March 1920): 532–55.

70
    
New York Times,
11 March 1870. For his part, Sherman was convinced that Logan seized upon any opportunity to thwart him, given that Sherman had passed over Logan when selecting the commander of the Army of Tennessee after the death of General J. B. McPherson in July 1864. See Robert G. Athearn,
William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West
(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 254. For more on Logan, who is remembered for conceiving of the idea of Memorial Day, see James Pickett Jones,
John A. Logan: Stalwart Republican from Illinois
(Tallahassee: Univ. Presses of Florida, 1982).

71
    
Army and Navy Journal,
26 March 1870.

72
    
Congressional Globe,
44th Cong., 1st sess., 20 April 1876, 2673.

73
    Linda K. Kerber, “The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian,”
Journal of American History 62, no. 2
(Sept. 1975): 271–95.

74
    Henry Mayer,
All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery
(1998; New York: Norton, 2008), 138. For the importance of opposition to Indian removal in the strengthening of the antislavery movement, see Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s,”
Journal of American History
86, no. 1 (June 1999): 15–40. See also Allison L. Sneider,
Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008). On the intellectual connections between African colonization and Indian removal, see Nicholas Guyatt, “‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,”
Journal of American History
95, no. 4 (March 2009): 986–1011.

75
    Robert Winston Mardock,
The Reformers and the American Indian
(Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1971), 8.

76
    For more on Child, see Carolyn L. Karcher,
The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994).

77
    For a sampling of these and other pieces, see Lydia Maria Child,
Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher
(New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986). See also Laura L. Mielke, “Sentiment and Space in Lydia Maria Child’s Native American Writings, 1824–1870,”
Legacy
21, no. 2 (2004): 172–92.

78
    The article originally appeared in two installments of the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
with the title “A Plea for the Indian,” before being reissued in pamphlet form. For a reprint of the essay see Carolyn L. Karcher, ed.,
A Lydia Maria Child Reader
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), 79–94.

79
    Lydia Maria Child, “The Indians,”
Standard
1, no. 1 (May 1870): 2. This periodical, which published only three issues, between May and July 1870, was the successor to the
National Anti-Slavery Standard.

80
    
New York Times,
19 May 1870.

81
    U.S. Congress,
Piegan Indians,
70–71.

82
    
New York Times,
19 May 1870.

83
    U.S. Congress,
Public Acts of the Forty-First Congress,
2nd sess. (1870), chap. 294, 319. President Grant, apparently, was infuriated by this maneuver, and—according to Sherman—declared to his opponents (who, presumably, hoped to install their own supporters in the Indian agency positions), “Gentlemen, you have defeated my plan of Indian management; but you shall not succeed in
your
purpose, for I will divide these appointments up among the religious churches, with which you dare not contend.” Quoted in Waltmann, “Circumstantial Reformer,” 334 (emphasis in the original).

84
    U.S. Congress,
Second Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners
, Senate Executive Document 39, 41st Cong., 3rd sess. (1871), 90–91.

85
    Hutton, “Phil Sheridan’s Pyrrhic Victory,” 41. See also Sully,
No Tears for the General,
210–34.

86
    James H. Bradley,
The March of the Montana Column: A Prelude to the Custer Disaster, ed. Edgar I. Stewart
(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 55–63.

87
    Eugene Mortimer Baker chronology, GAI, SGF.

88
    There are two sources for this interview, and they differ slightly on various details: Martha E. Plassmann, notes taken in an interview with Horace Clarke [n.d.], MTHS, Horace Clarke Reminiscence (cited hereafter as HCR), SC 540; and Martha E. Plassmann, “A Double Heritage,” MTHS, Martha E. Plassmann Papers (cited hereafter after as MEP), MC 78, box 4, folder 18. I find the first of these more reliable, because the notes were presumably taken at the time of the interview, and because Plassmann confessed to adding “minor touches to render [the article] more salable.” See letter from Martha E. Plassmann to James Knapp Reeve, 29 June 1926, MTHS, MEP, MC 78, box 2, folder 24. Plassmann was the daughter of Sidney Edgerton, the first territorial governor of Montana (1864–66).

89
    Plassmann, “A Double Heritage.” Plassmann stated that Horace was eighty-two, which would place his date of birth in 1844, an impossibility, since that was around the time of his parents’ marriage and before the birth of his older sister, Helen.

90
    Martha E. Plassmann, notes taken in an interview with Horace Clarke [n.d.], MTHS, HCR, SC 540.

91
    Letter from Plassmann to Reeve, 29 June 1926, MTHS, MEP, MC 78, box 2, folder 24.

92
    Plassmann, notes taken in an interview with Horace Clarke [n.d.], MTHS, HCR, SC 540. In “A Double Heritage” he remembers the Indian’s name as “Big Nose.”

93
    Letter from Francis Paul Prucha, S.J., to Stan Gibson, 4 Feb. 1997, GAI, SGF.

94
    
Helena Weekly Herald,
1 Jan. 1880.

95
    James Willard Schultz, “Joe Kipp,” MTHS, James Willard Schultz Papers, SC 721.

96
    Letter from Stan Gibson to Jack Hayne, 6 May 1995, GAI, SGF. James Welch paints an unsparing portrait of Kipp in
Fools Crow,
depicting the scout as callous and opportunistic.

97
    Martha E. Plassmann, “That Affair on the Marias,” Aug. 1934, MTHS, MEP, MC 78, box 4, folder 12.

98
    Martha E. Plassmann, “The Baker Massacre,” Sept. 1925, MTHS, MEP, MC 78, box 2, folder 15.

99
    See Hugh A. Dempsey,
The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and Other Blackfoot Stories: Three Hundred Years of Blackfeet History
(1994; Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 47–58.