Frontier Regulars
Page 52
This changing orientation intensified the historic rivalry and discord between the army and the Indian Bureau. Army officers charged agents with corruption and mismanagement. Agents replied with complaints of military meddling in reservation affairs and immoral use of Indian women by soldiers. The army and its friends continued to urge the transfer of the Indian Bureau to the War Department as the solution to the Indian problem. As in the past, advocates emphasized the obvious truth that the army, rather than the Indian Bureau, possessed the power needed to control the Indians, although the congressional authorization in 1878 of Indian police forces, over the vociferous opposition of the army, somewhat weakened this argument. With the growing importance of the reservation, proponents also contended that the army could more efficiently administer the reservations and more successfully “civilize” the Indians. The controversy reached a peak in 1876—79, when transfer became one of the several issues involved in the congressional movement to reorganize and reform the army (see Chapter Four). The Banning committee, the Cameron commission, and the Burnside committee all grappled with the question. Twice, in 1876 and again in 1878, the House of Representatives passed a transfer measure, only to see it killed in the Senate. Although not again a serious proposal in Congress, transfer remained a much-debated issue well into the 18gos.3
Underlining its claim to superiority in managing and civilizing Indians, the army took on an increasingly humanitarian image. Repeatedly in the late 1870s and the 1880s, officers appeared as articulate and forceful defenders of the Indian. A well-publicized example was the battle of Generals Howard and Crook against the deportation of the Chiricahua Apaches to Florida at the time of the surrender of Geronimo in 1886. Another was Colonel Miles’ advocacy of Chief Joseph’s cause after the Nez Perce surrender in 1877. General Pope eloquently, if verbosely, assailed the inequities of federal Indian policy for more than three decades. Such actions partially offset the familiar picture of cavalry storming through a village cutting down fleeing Indians.4
Further contributing to the humanitarian stance, some treaties and executive agreements with Indian tribes required an army officer to oversee the issuance of Indian goods and rations. The conspicuous presence of a military observer in such transactions dramatized the historic reputation of the Indian Bureau and drew a contrast between civilian dishonesty and military integrity highly favorable to the army’s image.
Finally, despite the statutory ban on military appointees to civil posts, local circumstances frequently compelled the Indian Bureau to accept army officers temporarily as “acting” Indian agents. The performance as agents of such officers as Adna R. Chaffee, Ezra P. Ewers, and George M. Randall cast the army in a notably humanitarian character. “Oh, where is my friend Randall—-the captain with the big mustache which he always pulled?” an Apache chief asked about a former agent. “When he promised a thing he did it.”5 Such tributes were common and reinforced the army’s contention that Indians preferred military to civilian agents.
The army’s changing role in the West brought with it amenities of daily life unknown in earlier years. “The period of ‘temporary huts’ for the troops is passed,” General Schofield declared in 1884.6 The reservation system, fixing Indian tribes to specific locations, enabled concentration to get underway (see p. 47), and posts selected for retention were given comfortable, substantial buildings. Plumbing and sewage systems were installed in many. The spreading network of railroads vastly eased frontier life, affording rapid travel anywhere and bringing food and consumer goods in greater abundance and variety. With the telegraph, the railroad permitted timely communication, both personal and official, with the outside world. Also, as settlement spread, the Regulars on the frontier enjoyed an increasing social intercourse with nearby civilian communities almost wholly absent in the past.
Another change of significance in the 1880s occurred in the composition of the top command. The generation that had guided the army through the Indian conflicts of the 1870s at last began to pass into retirement. Sherman stepped down in 1883, handing his post, but not his four-star rank, to Sheridan. Congress gave Sheridan four stars in 1888, three months before death ended his brief and unhappy tenure. His successor, the able Schofield, had to content himself with only two stars. These changes, together with the retirement of McDowell and the death of Hancock, gave the brigadiers of the 1870s their long-awaited promotions. After comparatively brief service, Pope, Terry, Crook, and Howard retired or died. In turn, the aspiring young colonels who had so tormented Sherman—Miles, Mackenzie, Gibbon, Merritt, Ruger, Stanley—finally became brigadiers. Miles ultimately made it to the top—the army’s last commanding general. Mackenzie, his closest rival as an Indian-fighter, went insane less than two years after earning his star.7
“I now regard the Indians as substantially eliminated from the problem of the Army,” Sherman wrote in 1883, on the eve of his retirement. “There may be spasmodic and temporary alarms, but such Indian wars as have hitherto disturbed the public peace and tranquillity are not probable.”8 All the tribes had been corraled on reservations. Almost no place remained to which Indians might flee when discontent boiled over. Herds of longhorns grazed the Staked Plains, last bastion of the southern Plains tribes. Stockmen occupied the Powder, Bighorn, and Yellowstone country, long the Sioux and Cheyenne hunting grounds. Mining communities sprouted all over the Oregon and Idaho mountains where once Nez Perce, Paiute, and Bannock would have sought refuge. Although Mexico’s Sierra Madre still held forth a fading alternative for the Apaches, Sherman’s forecast was essentially correct. The Indians had been conquered. They had no realistic choice but to accommodate to reservation life.
The reservation process struck the tribes with stunning impact. All the customs and institutions of the old way of life—social, political, economic, military, and religious—came under incessant attack from reservation officials. Agents, schoolteachers, missionaries, farmers, blacksmiths, and others strove to make the Indian over in the white man’s image. They promoted factionalism that split the tribes into “progressives” and “nonprogressives.” They withheld rations and freely employed the Indian police in campaigns to neutralize the chiefs, break up the tribal relationship, suppress “barbarous” practices, educate the children, and make farmers and Christians of all. At the same time, the spoils system continued to burden the reservations with incompetent or corrupt officials. Hunger and want often stalked the reservations as rations and other supplies, inadequate to begin with, passed through various levels of fraudulent shrinkage before reaching the Indians, and as attempts at agricultural self-support repeatedly encountered the realities of western soil and climate.9
Also, continued pressures on the reservations from land-hungry whites raised fears of further losses of land. The Dawes Act of 1887 gave substance to these fears. It provided for the division of the reservations into individual allotments—a measure long championed by reformers as essential to civilization and self-support—and for the opening of remaining reservation land to white settlement. Most Indians resisted allotment. They were chagrined to find the government seeking to throw open “surplus” land anyway, in advance of allotments and even, in many instances, before surveys had been undertaken. As an old Sioux expressed it, “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.”10
A decade of intensive and unrelieved civilization programs threw the Indians into a state of shock. The old ways had been purged, or corrupted, or rendered meaningless by the new environment. No satisfactory new ways had been substituted. Anger, bitterness, frustration, resentment, and, above all, a pervasive sense of helplessness and futility settled over the reservations. The people were no longer Indians but not yet whites; indeed, they did not know who they were.
Throughout history, people subjected to cultural disaster of this magnitude have sought solutions in religion. Often a messiah has come forth to guide the afflicted to the promised land. In
North America such was Pope, who led the Pueblo rebellion of J68O against the Spanish in New Mexico; such was Pontiac, who threw the English back from the Appalachian frontier in 1763; and such was the Prophet, the spiritual power of Tecumseh’s bloody crusade against the Americans of the Old Northwest in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
The stresses of the reservation program brought forth similar mystics. Smohalla agitated the Columbia River groups in the 1870s. Nakaidoklini gave the Apaches visions of a new order before he was cut down by Carr’s troopers at Cibicu in 1881. Even the Crows, historically friendly to the whites, had their prophet in Sword Bearer, whose exhortations swept their Montana reservation with religious frenzy in 1887. Sword Bearer died in a collision with troops from Fort Custer and the movement collapsed. Surpassing all in the power of his teachings and the response of his followers was a gentle Paiute shaman named Wovoka. His Ghost Dance religion precipitated the final important confrontation between soldiers and Indians.11
Paradoxically, Wovoka preached a peaceful doctrine, blending elements of Christianity with the old native religion. To the emissaries from tribes all over the West who gathered at his Nevada home in 1889 and 1890, he foretold a new world, in which Indians would be reunited with dead friends and relatives in a blissful and eternal life, free of pain, sickness, want, and death, free, above all, of white people. By praying, dancing the prescribed Ghost Dance, and singing Ghost Dance songs, Indians could “die” and be permitted brief glimpses of the world to come. In the meantime, they must embrace a rigid moral code strongly suggestive of Christianity’s Ten Commandments. Especially, enjoined Wovoka, “Do no harm to anyone. You must not fight.”
The Ghost Dance gripped most of the western tribes without losing this peaceful focus. Among the Teton Sioux, however, it took on militant overtones. The Sioux had been shaken with particular ferocity by the civilization program. They had recently been stampeded by smooth-talking government commissioners into parting with half the Great Sioux Reservation—the “surplus” that would remain after allotments—and accepting six separate reservation. A ration cut brought hunger and worse. Disease carried off large numbers of people. In their bitterness and despair, the Sioux let the Ghost Dance apostles, Short Bull and Kicking Bear, persuade them that the millennium prophesied by Wovoka might be facilitated by destroying the white people. Wearing “ghost shirts” that the priests assured them would turn the white man’s bullets, the Sioux threw themselves wholeheartedly into a badly perverted version of the Ghost Dance.12
Military leaders pondered the prospects of war. The key commander was no stranger to the Sioux. Maj. Gen. Nelson A. Miles had inherited the Division of the Missouri when General Crook died suddenly in March 1890. Miles discounted the fashionable view that the progress of settlement made Indian warfare no longer possible. On the contrary, he pointed out, most Indians now possessed repeating rifles and abundant ammunition. If they broke out, the cattle herds of white stockmen afforded a commissary and their horse herds a source of fresh mounts. But the army enjoyed assets too. Forts ringed the Sioux country—Lincoln, Yates, Bennett, Sully, and Randall along the Missouri River on the east; Niobrara, Robinson, and Laramie on the south; and Meade on the west. Telegraph lines connected these posts with one another and with department headquarters in Omaha and St. Paul. Railroads made it possible to speed troops to trouble spots in a matter of hours. Veterans of campaigns against the Sioux scarcely more than a decade in the past marveled at such radically changed military conditions.
By November 1890 the Ghost Dance had brought at least two of the Sioux reservations to the edge of anarchy. The Oglalas of Pine Ridge and the Brulés of Rosebud defied their agents and danced themselves to pitches of excitement that raised fears for the lives of government employees. Daniel F. Royer, the inept Pine Ridge agent, emitted frantic cries for military help. Citizens of nearby Dakota and Nebraska communities took alarm and stirred up their representatives in Washington. At last a reluctant Indian Bureau conceded loss of control, and on November 13 President Benjamin Harrison directed the Secretary of War to take action. On November 20 elements of the Second and Eighth Infantry and Ninth Cavalry, 600 strong, occupied Pine Ridge and Rosebud Agencies. Other units boarded trains at posts all across the nation for the journey to the Sioux country. Brig. Gen. John R. Brooke, commander of the Department of the Platte, stationed himself at Pine Ridge Agency.13
The appearance of troops separated the Indians into two groups that the whites called “friendlies” and “hostiles.” Those who wanted no part of a test of arms with the soldiers gathered at the agencies. Those intent on further defiance withdrew to remote points of the reservation and continued to dance. By early December the Oglala and Brule “hostiles” had united and taken refuge on an elevated plateau rising several hundred feet above the prairie between White and Cheyenne rivers, in the northwest corner of the Pine Ridge Reservation. Their village contained about 600 lodges—some 600 men with their families. Short Bull and Kicking Bear conducted the dances. The most prominent chiefs were Little Wound of the Oglalas and Two Strike of the Brules.14
While General Brooke made peace overtures to the Indians in the “Stronghold,” Miles tried to head off trouble on the other reservations. At Standing Rock dwelled Sitting Bull, still the mightiest of Sioux chiefs, still uncompromisingly opposed to the white man’s ways. The Ghost Dance had taken hold in his camps on Grand River, and he had seized upon it as a powerful weapon in his long contest with the government for the allegiance of the Hunkpapas. At Cheyenne River, the Miniconjou reservation, the leaders of disaffection were Hump and Big Foot. One of Miles’ officers succeeded in pacifying Hump, and Big Foot retired to his village near the forks of Cheyenne River. Miles issued orders for the arrest of both Sitting Bull and Big Foot.
The veteran agent at Standing Rock, James McLaughlin, had been urging Sitting Bull’s arrest for several weeks, but preferred to accomplish it with Indian police rather than soldiers. Lt. Col. William F. Drum, commander of Fort Yates, agreed. Defying Miles’ expectations, they worked out a plan for using police while Drum’s soldiers stood by within supporting distance. At dawn on December 15, forty-three “metal breasts” surrounded Sitting Bull’s cabin and quickly seized the chief. His followers rushed to the rescue, and a furious fight broke out at close range. By the time Capt. Edmond G. Fechet’s squadron of the Eighth Cavalry reached the battle site, six policemen and as many dancers lay dead or dying. Among them was Sitting Bull. The chief who more than any other personified the spirit of Indian resistance, whose death more than any other event symbolized the end of resistance, had died at the hands of his own people, shot down by his captors at the first outbreak.15
News of the slaying of Sitting Bull reverberated across the nation and revived public interest in an Indian war that so far had produced no warfare. It also touched off a controversy between the War and Interior Departments over which was to blame for the old chiefs death. Finally, it sent some 400 Hunkpapa dancers flying southward to the reservation of the Miniconjous. Aided by Hump, military authorities persuaded most of the Hunkpapas to go to Fort Bennett and surrender. The rest, thirty-eight, took refuge with Big Foot’s people.
The assignment to arrest Big Foot fell to Lt. Col. Edwin V. Sumner, who commanded a “camp of observation” at the forks of Cheyenne River. Big Foot’s commitment to the Ghost Dance had weakened, and Sumner judged his arrest unnecessary and certain to provoke a fight. Since his orders left the timing to him, he delayed in carrying them out. But, unknown to him, Big Foot, a noted peacemaker, had received an invitation from the Oglala chiefs to come to Pine Ridge and restore harmony. His people, distrustful of Sumner and frightened by the approach of the entire Seventh Infantry up Cheyenne River, insisted that he go. On the night of December 23 the Miniconjous and their Hunkpapa guests, some 350 people in all, quietly slipped out of their village and headed south.
Big Foot’s escape infuriated General Miles, who had assumed personal command of field operations, with
headquarters at Rapid City, on December 17.16 In his view, the appearance of the Miniconjous on the Pine Ridge Reservation could have explosive consequences. Peace emmissaries from General Brooke had succeeded in detaching Little Wound’s Oglalas and Two Strike’s Bruléfrom the dancers in the Stronghold and were making one last concerted effort to persuade the rest to come in and give up. Determined to prevent Big Foot from getting into the Stronghold, Miles threw Col. Eugene A. Carr’s Sixth Cavalry and Maj. Guy V. Henry’s squadron of the Ninth into blocking positions. But Big Foot was not trying to reach the Stronghold. He slipped around these troops on the east, through the tangled topography of the Badlands, and pointed his march toward Pine Ridge Agency. On White River pneumonia struck the chief, and, desperately ill, he traveled swathed in blankets in the bed of his wagon.
To Custer’s old regiment fell the distinction of intercepting Big Foot. On December 28 Maj. Samuel M. Whitside and four troops of the Seventh Cavalry, scouting eastward from Pine Ridge Agency, came face to face with the Miniconjous. After a few apprehensive moments, the Indians consented to a military escort. Together the soldiers and the Sioux camped in the valley of Wounded Knee Creek, twenty miles east of the agency. That night Col. James W. Forsyth arrived on the scene with the rest of the Seventh, Light Battery E of the First Artillery, and some Oglala scouts. Forsyth carried orders from General Brooke to disarm Big Foot’s people and march them to the railroad in Nebraska for movement to Omaha.
The Indians awoke on the morning of December 29, 1890, to find themselves closely surrounded by 500 soldiers. From a low hill to the north four Hotchkiss cannon pointed threateningly at the village. Forsyth assembled the Indian men, 120 in all, in front of a large heated army tent in which the sick Big Foot had been placed. The women and children, 230 in number, began packing for the day’s march. Forsyth’s demand for their guns upset the Indians. But they were so plainly outnumbered, outgunned, and boxed in on all sides that no one, soldier or Indian, seems to have regarded a fight as possible.