By the summer of 1867 a policy proposal of fairly definite outline had taken shape in the thinking of Indian administrators and their political supporters. It held forth the short-term promise of restoring peace to the Plains and the long-term promise of a solution to the Indian problem. In its latest version the “concentration policy” contemplated the establishment of two vast reservations, one north of Nebraska, the other south of Kansas, on which all the roving tribes would be persuaded to gather. Except for government administrators, no whites would be permitted. Here the tribes would no longer threaten the travel routes and settlements. Here they could be insulated from the kind of interracial contact that in the past had infected them with so many of the white man’s vices and that had produced so many incidents leading to hostilities. And here, ultimately, they could be “educated,” “civilized,” and endowed with the privileges and obligations of United States citizenship.3
Ironically, the pacific concentration policy owed a large debt to a militant proposal espoused by General Sherman in his annual report for 1866 and urged vigorously thereafter. He wanted to restrict the southern Plains tribes south of the Arkansas and the northern Plains tribes north of the Platte. Any Indians found out of bounds without a military pass would be treated as hostiles. Secretary Browning and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Bogy agreed with Sherman’s goal of clearing the belt of country that contained the travel routes and settlements of all Indians, but they emphatically dissented from his desire to accomplish it by forceful methods that ignored the treaty rights of the Indians—especially the rights of the Cheyennes to hunt on the Smoky Hill.4
Bogy’s successor as Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Bogy failed of confirmation in the Senate) also embraced the creed of negotiated peace leading to concentration. A former Tennessee congressman of large girth and conspicuous piety, Nathaniel G. Taylor gave further refinement to the idea.5 So did the peace commissioners Buford and Sanborn.6 Although dubious about negotiation, Sherman saw that the objectives of concentration coincided with his own military objectives. With reservations defined, he could assume that any Indians found off them were hostile and act accordingly. This would alleviate the “unnatural attitude” into which his soldiers had been thrust, “when the people of the frontier universally declare the Indians to be at war, and the Indian commissioners and agents pronounce them at peace, leaving us in the gap to be abused by both parties.”7
Commissioner Taylor laid out the proposal in a letter of July 12, 1867, transmitted to the Senate.8 The scholarly, soft-spoken chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, Sen. John B. Henderson of Missouri, at once introduced legislation. After heated debate and considerable amendment, the bill passed both houses of Congress on July 20.9 General Sherman aided its progress by sending Secretary Stanton a telegram that was read on the Senate floor. As long as 50 Indians remained between the Platte and the Arkansas, he said, they would tie down 3,000 soldiers. “Rather get them out as soon as possible, and it makes little difference whether they be coaxed out by Indian commissioners or killed.”10 The act created a peace commission to try to coax them out. The commissioners were to go west and talk with the hostile tribes, learn the causes of hostility, and negotiate treaties removing the causes. They were also to examine the territory east of the Rockies for suitable reservations on which the tribes could be concentrated and begin supporting themselves. As a concession to western belligerence, the act carried an amendment by Kansas Sen. Edmund G. Ross authorizing the Secretary of War, in the event the commission failed, to accept up to 4,000 Volunteers “to conquer a peace.”
The act of July 20 named four of the peace commission members—Taylor, Sanborn, Senator Henderson, and Samuel F. Tappan, the last a long-time crusader for humanitarian causes whose investigation of Colonel Chivington had earned him some notoriety as a friend of the Indian. In addition, the President was to appoint three army generals. In another stroke of irony, he named General Sherman to head the army delegation. The other military appointments went to old Gen. William S. Harney, retired veteran of conflicts with the Seminoles and Sioux before the Civil War,”11 and Alfred H. Terry, the lawyer-general who headed the Department of the Dakota.12
The peace commission organized at St. Louis early in August 1867 and headed up the Missouri River, its first object to deal with the troublesome Sioux. Determined to give the peace offensive a fair trial, Sherman instructed his department commanders to place all troops on the defensive and subordinate their movements to the plans of the commission. (“If entirely in order,” grumped an Omaha editor in response, “we should like to enquire when they have been on the offensive.”13) Runners set forth to invite Red Cloud and his fellow chiefs to gather at Fort Laramie in mid-September. Other emissaries arranged for a mid-October meeting with the southern Plains Indians. Meanwhile, the commissioners talked with friendly Sioux bands on the upper Missouri and, in September, with Spotted Tail’s technically peaceable Brulés at North Platte, Nebraska. Word from Fort Laramie offered little hope that Red Cloud would come in. The commissioners postponed the Fort Laramie conference, therefore, and turned to the October appointment. General Augur substituted for Sherman, who had been called suddenly to Washington by the President.14
The tribesmen of the southern Plains proved more willing than Red Cloud to meet with the Great Father’s emissaries. Some 5,000 Indians gathered at a popular sun-dance ground at Medicine Lodge Creek, Kansas, seventy miles south of Fort Larned. This site had been chosen because the Cheyennes refused to come any closer to the Arkansas River forts. Even so, while the commissioners negotiated with the Kiowas, Comanches, and Kiowa-Apaches, most of the Cheyennes remained sullenly on the Cimarron River, forty miles distant. Hancock’s destruction of the Pawnee Fork village still rankled, and a summer of successful warfare had done much to dim the attractions of the peace table. Several days of feasting, oratory, and distribution of presents put the Kiowas, Comanches, and Kiowa-Apaches in a cooperative frame of mind. Only after their chiefs had fixed their marks on a treaty on October 21, however, did the Cheyennes begin to drift in to pick up their share of the presents. On October 28 the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs also signed a treaty.15
The Medicine Lodge treaties embodied the principles of the concentration policy. They defined two large reservations in western Indian Territory. The Kiowas, Comanches, and Kiowa-Apaches were to be concentrated on one, the Cheyennes and Arapahoes on the other. No unauthorized whites would be admitted. Government teachers would educate the young. Seeds and agricultural implements would be furnished the adults, together with instructors to teach them how to farm. Each year for thirty years, under the watchful eyes of an army officer, the government would issue specified amounts of clothing and other presents. In return the Indians relinquished all rights to territory outside the reservations—although reserving the right to hunt anywhere south of the Arkansas so long as enough buffalo survived to justify the chase. In addition, they promised to withdraw all opposition to railroads and military posts and to refrain from harming white people or their property. In short, nomadic warrior-huntsmen were to be transformed into sedentary agriculturalists and inculcated with Anglo-Saxon values.16
The peace commission report, submitted to the President on January 7, 1868, elaborated the tenets of concentration as applied in the Medicine Lodge treaties and urged them as the foundation of future U.S. Indian policy. Conquest by kindness rather than armed force would be the guiding principle. Through wise and benevolent administration the Indian would not only be removed from the paths of expansion but also taught how to live like his white brothers, and ultimately be lifted to the grace of U.S. citizenship. The report neatly disposed of the thorny transfer question by advocating a separate, cabinet-level Department of Indian Affairs. It pointed to the need for thorough revision of the Indian Intercourse Laws. And it framed an eloquent appeal for mutual trust and understanding in interracial relations.
The evangelical and antimilitary tone of the report stamps it as the product of Com
missioner Taylor’s pen. With what misgivings and suppressed irritation Generals Sherman, Terry, Augur, and Harney affixed their signatures may be surmised. But Hancock’s War and the image in which it had cast the army left them little practical choice but to let the theoreticians try their way. If it worked, the army’s frontier mission would be much simplified. If not, the army would surely regain its lost stature.
While the proponents of concentration could draw satisfaction from the creation of a great southern reservation, they had to confess failure in the north. They had gone to Fort Laramie in November, after the Medicine Lodge council, to meet with Red Cloud. Instead, they found only a few Crows, long one of the friendliest of the Plains tribes. Red Cloud had sent a message: he would call off the war only after the army abandoned Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith. When spring came, the commission’s report suggested, another attempt could be made to bring him to the council table and complete the grand design of concentration.
Early in April 1868 the peace commissioners set forth for Fort Laramie. (Henderson remained behind for the Johnson impeachment trial; Sherman, recalled from Omaha for the same purpose, got to Fort Laramie the first week in May.) With them the officials carried a treaty draft that conceded all of Red Cloud’s demands. The Bozeman Trail would be yielded. Its guardian forts would be abandoned. Already, on March 2, General Grant had issued orders for the garrisons to withdraw when summer dried the road.17
For the army, it was an unpalatable but not indigestible prescription. The forts had cost a great deal of blood, toil, and treasure, and to hand them over to Red Cloud’s torch-bearing warriors was deeply humiliating. Such abject surrender, furthermore, could not help but inspire them—and by example their brethren of the southern Plains—to further resistance. Besides, strategists contended, the forts were needed to keep the Indians off the railroad and to serve as offensive bases when the time of reckoning came. Yet top officers had to admit that with available resources the road could not be made safe for travelers, and the withdrawal would free a full regiment of infantry for more mobile use along the railroad. And they conceded the obvious truth that every mile the Union Pacific advanced toward the shorter Salt Lake City-Virginia City route made the Bozeman Trail that much more obsolete.18
The treaty laid before the Indians at Fort Laramie also defined a reservation on which to concentrate the Sioux and other northern tribes—nearly all of present South Dakota west of the Missouri River. It granted hunting rights on the Republican River and in Nebraska and Wyoming north of the Platte. And, a further necessary concession to the Red Cloud people, it reserved the Powder River country as “unceded Indian territory” on which no white might trespass without Indian consent. In its other provisions the Fort Laramie Treaty closely paralleled the Medicine Lodge treaties.19
Agents of the peace commission had been laboring all winter to round up key Sioux leaders for the April meeting, but none was on hand to greet the commissioners. For almost a month they waited. Spotted Tail and his Bruits came up from the Republican River country and signed on April 29, but still Red Cloud held back. “When we see the soldiers moving away and the forts abandoned,” was the message received early in May, “then I will come down and talk.” Most of the commissioners departed, but Harney and Sanborn persisted, and on May 25 and 26 they managed to sign up an encouraging array of Oglala, Miniconjou, and Yanktonai leaders. Meanwhile, the veteran Jesuit missionary Pierre Jean DeSmet once more stepped into his familiar role as peacemaker for the Indian Bureau and journeyed to the upper Missouri to collect other needed signatures. During a dramatic visit to camps at the mouth of the Powder, he failed to soften the rocklike resistance of Sitting Bull, but did succeed in mellowing some of his militant followers. On July 2, at Fort Rice, they joined with other Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Sans Arc, Two Kettle, and Santee leaders in signing the treaty. It now bore almost 200 signatures—but still not that of Red Cloud.20
By early August the Twenty-seventh Infantry had packed up and moved out of the Bozeman Trail posts. Red Cloud’s warriors promptly burned Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith. Although the Indians knew of the decision to abandon the forts, they had not relaxed the pressure on them, and even after the troops left depredations continued around Forts Fetterman, Sanders, and Laramie until late September. Then the hostiles passed October laying in their winter’s meat. Finally, early in November, Red Cloud and most of the hostile chiefs showed up at Fort Laramie. On the sixth, Red Cloud placed his mark on the copy of the treaty left behind by the peace commission the previous May.21
Congress, preoccupied with the impeachment of President Johnson, proved almost as dilatory as the Sioux. Senator Henderson’s bills to create a separate Indian Department and organize territorial governments for the two great Plains reservations died in committee, together with bills introduced by friends of the army to transfer the Indian Bureau to the War Department. On July 25 the Senate finally consented to the ratification of the Medicine Lodge treaties. Not until February 24, 1869, two months after Red Cloud’s grudging acquiescence, did the Fort Laramie Treaty gain like approval. Repeated warnings from the Indian Bureau that the Plains tribes faced starvation failed to hasten the slow progress of the regular Indian appropriation bill.22 Senator Henderson managed to insert provisions for the first installment of clothing and other annuity goods for the Medicine Lodge signatories, but his amendments to appropriate funds for concentrating and feeding the tribes covered by both the Medicine Lodge and Fort Laramie treaties ran into trouble in the conference committee charged with reconciling the House and Senate versions of the bill. As finally approved on July 27, 1868, the bill appropriated half a million dollars for this purpose. But the Indian Bureau, as always struggling under allegations of corruption, was not to be entrusted with the money. The law specified that it be spent under the direction of General Sherman.23
In the context of the feud over transfer of the Indian Bureau, here indeed was an irony. Without disturbing the formal organization of Indian administration, Congress in effect handed the Plains tribes over to the army. Lacking control of the rations, the regular agents could not expect to concentrate the Indians or to exercise much authority over them once concentrated. The Plains Indians were subordinated to the very influences from which Taylor, Henderson, and Tappan had sought to liberate them.
Sherman lost no time in seizing the initiative. On August 11, 1868, he issued orders creating two new military districts, one to coincide with the northern reservation, the other with the southern. General Harney would command one, Bvt. Maj. Gen. William B. Hazen (colonel of the Thirty-eight Infantry) the other.24 Controlling “all issues and disbursements,” these officers would be certain to rule the reservations in fact, if not in name.
Shepherding the Platte and Powder River Sioux to General Harney’s reservation turned out to be an undertaking of several years’ duration. But from most appearances the Fort Laramie Treaty could be counted a success. It ended the Red Cloud War. Red Cloud submitted himself to Indian Bureau paternalism, and although he remained a maddeningly disruptive influence for the next forty-one years, he never again took the warpath. Many of his people chose the same course, and a state of comparative tranquility settled on the northern Plains. But not all Indians followed. Some stayed in the unceded territory, a nucleus for people disenchanted with reservation life. This small cloud increasingly darkened the Powder and Yellowstone. In 1876 it burst. In that costly and dramatic war Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith would have been priceless; indeed, one may well doubt that the war would have occurred at all had the treaty of 1868 not denied the army its hard-won positions on the Powder and Bighorn.
The Medicine Lodge treaties, so very much easier to negotiate, proved less enduring than the Fort Laramie Treaty. The Senate had scarcely approved them, in fact, before war came once more to the southern Plains.
The tribes party to the Medicine Lodge treaties passed the winter of 1867–68 south of the Arkansas. The Kiowas and Comanches continued to raid the Texas fronti
er and also played havoc with Chickasaw horse herds near Fort Arbuckle. The Cheyennes and Arapahoes impressed the perennially optimistic Agent Wynkoop as tranquil and contented. They had but one grievance. At Medicine Lodge the peace commission had promised them arms and ammunition, and impatience for their delivery was fast turning to discontent. In June 1868 a Cheyenne war party seeking revenge for a past humiliation assailed a Kaw Indian settlement near Council Grove, Kansas. At once, Indian Superintendent Thomas Murphy ordered the arms withheld from the Cheyennes. Wynkoop thought this action unjust and provocative. So did the Cheyennes, and they refused to accept any of their annuities until the ban was lifted. Wynkoop finally prevailed. On July 23 the Indian Bureau authorized the issue if the agent judged it necessary to keep the peace. On August 9 most of the tribe gathered at Fort Larned to receive a modest shipment of 160 pistols, 80 Lancaster rifles, and kegs of powder and lead.25
Several days earlier a party of about 200 Cheyenne warriors, unaware of the government’s decision to give in, had ridden north to raid the Pawnees. En route they picked up twenty Sioux and four Arapahoes. Only a handful actually went to the Pawnee country. The rest rode among the new settlements on the Saline and Solomon Rivers. There appears to have been no concerted intent to start trouble, and just how it began is a matter of conflicting evidence. Whiskey, ill temper stemming from the arms ban, misunderstandings between the Indians and suspicious settlers, and perhaps some white provocation all played a part. Even after the first collisions had occurred, the majority of the warriors wanted to avoid more, but at last they all united in a savage raid. Between August 10 and 12 they robbed and burned cabins, ran off stock, ravished five women, and killed fifteen men. “War is surely upon us,” conceded Superintendent Murphy.26
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