This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  29. Quoted in McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears, 211–12.

  30. See Andrew Denson, Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture, 1830–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 82.

  31. Ross, Life and Times, 10.

  32. Ibid., 2.

  33. Ross, Life and Times, 56, 58. Interestingly, the Confederate Cherokees also emphasized the theme of unity. When they met with federal officials, they promoted the agreements they had recently reached with western tribes. See Anna Lewis, “Camp Napoleon,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, v. 9, no. 4 (December, 1931), 359–64; and Paul Kelton, “William Penn Adair: Cherokee Slaveholder and Indian Freedom Advocate,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, v. 77, n. 1 (1999), 32–34.

  34. David Lavere, Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains Indians and Removed Indians in Indian Territory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 26–27.

  35. While Ross did not sign the 1866 treaty, he was apparently named to the delegation that traveled to Washington, D.C. See Morris L. Wardell, A Political History of the Cherokee Nation, 1838–1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938), 208.

  36. Ross, Life and Times, 17.

  37. Treaty with the Cherokee, July 19, 1866, 14 Stat., 799.

  38. See McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears, 231–32; H. Craig Miner, The Corporation and the Indian: Tribal Sovereignty and Industrial Civilization in Indian Territory, 1865–1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 22. The Union Pacific’s initial offer (which proposed a line from Kansas to Fort Smith) is contained in R. M. McBratney and John J. Cox to John Ross et al., June, 1866, Folder 170, Box 6, Ballenger Collection, Newberry Library.

  39. Quoted in James Pairns, Elias Cornelius Boudinot: A Life on the Cherokee Border (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 88.

  40. Quoted in ibid., 101. While the former Confederates Johnson and Pike originally represented Boudinot and Watie in federal district court, the Cherokee Nation secured the services of the former Union general Benjamin F. Butler for its appeal to the Supreme Court. Despite his past differences with his fellow attorneys, Butler made a parallel argument. “The United States have never claimed to exercise general jurisdiction independent of treaty provisions,” he told the Court. The nation had always “legislated in subordination to those [treaty] provisions.” See ibid., 101.

  41. The Cherokee Tobacco, 78 U.S. 616 (1870).

  42. “Letter of the Cherokee Delegation of Indians,” Senate Miscellaneous Document 154, 41st Congress, 2nd Session, Serial 1408.

  43. See “A Copy of the Proceedings of the Council of Indian Tribes Held at Ocmulgee, in December, 1870,” Senate Executive Document 26, 41st Congress, 3rd Session, Serial 1440. Andrew Denson includes an excellent description of this gathering in Demanding the Cherokee Nation, 121–47.

  44. Serial 1440, 8–12. The invitation to western tribes is reprinted on page 21.

  45. Ibid., 6.

  46. Denson, Demanding, 129.

  47. Grant Foreman, “General Sherman in Okmulgee,” Foreman Papers, Oklahoma Historical Society.

  48. In March 1871 Congress approved a resolution declaring that no further treaties would be negotiated with Indian tribes. While the legislation acknowledged that all existing treaties would remain in force (and the Indian Office would continue to negotiate “agreements” with tribes), this action underscored how disenchanted white politicians had become with the American government’s traditional method of dealing with Indian tribes. See Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 527–33.

  49. “Argument Delivered February 1, 1872,” in Ross, Life and Times, 12.

  50. Ibid., 21.

  51. “Argument Delivered March 5, 1872,” Ross, Life and Times, 35, 44.

  52. Ibid., 30, 33.

  53. Ibid., 37.

  54. See William Potter Ross Collection, statements of November 28, 1873, February 21, 1874, March 28, 1874, and February 3, 1877. Box 1.

  55. Ibid. October 17, 1874.

  56. Ibid.

  57. For the meeting with Grant, see “To the Honorable National Council of the Cherokee Nation” (n.d. 1876?), Cherokee Nation Papers, Federal Relations, Box 71, Oklahoma Historical Society. See also articles in Cherokee Advocate, February 3, 1877, McAlester, Star Vindicator, October 20, 1877, William Potter Ross Collection, University of Oklahoma, Box 1. On Ross’s later career, see McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears, 289–314, 344, 365.

  58. “The Raven,” Cherokee Advocate, March 7, 1874, Box 1, William Potter Ross Collection, University of Oklahoma.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. Sally Zanjani’s biography Sarah Winnemucca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001) contains an excellent narrative of the activist’s early life. See especially 3–41.

  2. Ibid., 47–49.

  3. Ibid., 56–67; Gae Whitney Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 21–28.

  4. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 72–77. Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 36–43.

  5. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 78, 82.

  6. Quoted ibid., 106.

  7. Ibid., 90–99, 126–27, 128–31. Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 76–77.

  8. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 134–38.

  9. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 128–201; Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 109–61.

  10. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes (Boston: Cupples, Upham and Co., 1883), 5, 6.

  11. “Editor’s Preface,” Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 2; Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 336–39.

  12. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 37.

  13. Ibid., 34. For a full and insightful discussion of this theme in Winnemucca’s writings, see Rosemarie Stremlau, “Rape Narratives on the Northern Paiute Frontier,” in Dee Garceau-Hagen, ed., Portraits of Women in the American West (New York: Routledge, 2005), 37–60, especially 48, 52. For the story of frontier violence in California, see Robert Heizer, The Destruction of the California Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

  14. Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 71–72.

  15. Ibid., 139.

  16. Ibid., 41, 43.

  17. Ibid., 87.

  18. Ibid., 209. See also Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 193, on Wilbur.

  19. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 45, 50, 53.

  20. Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 107.

  21. Ibid., 115, 116.

  22. Ibid., 207.

  23. Elizabeth Peabody to Edwin Munroe Bacon, n.d. 1883, Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, American Renaissance Woman, ed. Bruce A. Ronda (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 415.

  24. The petition was reprinted as part of an appendix to Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 247.

  25. Luke Lea, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1850, quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents, 81.

  26. For modern biographies of these leaders, see Angie Debo, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Kingsley M. Bray, Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).

  27. Francis A. Walker, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1872, quoted in Prucha, Documents, 139–40.

  28. Ibid., 140.

  29. John Wesley Powell to Henry Teller, March 23, 1880, quoted in Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 24. For a discussion of the broad cultural appeal of the assimilation campaign for U.S. leaders in the 1870s, see ibid., 1–40.

  30. See, for example, Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Gail Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Mary P. Ryan, Empire of the Mother: American Writing About Domesticity, 1830–1860 (New York: Haworth Press, 1982).

  31. This theme is central in Jane E. Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

  32. Quoted in Robert Winston Murdock, The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 16. The early linkage of woman reformers and Indian issues is explored by Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

  33. For a description of this process, see Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  34. See Slobhan Senier, Voices of Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 41.

  35. “Letter from Sarah Winnemucca, April 4, 1870,” reprinted in Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886; originally published in 1881), 396.

  36. Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 243.

  37. “Editor’s Preface,” ibid.

  38. Quoted in Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 248; report from Virginia City, Nevada, reprinted in Chicago Tribune, September 27, 1884.

  39. C. C. Painter, “A Visit to the Mission Indians of Southern California and Other Western Tribes” (Indian Rights Association: Philadelphia, 1886), 18.

  40. O. O. Howard, My Life and Experiences Among Our Hostile Indians (Hartford: A. D. Worthington, 1907), 420.

  41. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 256–59.

  42. See Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance, 89, 93–95. See also Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands, American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 21. The exception to this literature is an essay by the anthropologist Catherine Fowler, “Sarah Winnemucca, Northern Paiute, 1844–1891,” American Indian Intellectuals, ed.Margot Liberty (Pittsburgh: West Publishing, 1978).

  43. The Virginia City Appeal story was reprinted in the New York Times, July 29, 1873. Agent Rinehart to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, March 20, 1880, Office of Indian Affairs, Special Case #268. This “Special Case” file contains numerous affidavits charging Winnemucca with immorality. Zanjani discusses these accusations in Sarah Winnemucca, 206–7.

  44. See Special Case #268, Wilbur to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 27, 1881. Wilbur repeated his charge a month later; see ibid., November 21, 1881.

  45. See Special Case #268, Nevada Agency to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, January 31, 1885 (encloses December 1884 report on Winnemucca’s behavior). For the Indian Office decision on relocating the Paiutes, see Report of the Secretary of the Interior, House Executive Document 1, Part 5, v. 1, 46th Congress, 3rd Session (1881), Serial 1959, 26–27. For the Interior Department’s recommendation to close the Malheur agency, see Senate Executive Document 121, 47th Congress, 1st Session (1882).

  46. See Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 252, 281–83. Hopkins lived three more years. He came back to her after her return to Nevada and stole from her again, but she remained loyal and mourned him when he died.

  47. Virginia City report reprinted in Chicago Tribune, September 27, 1844.

  48. San Francisco Alta California, February 11, 1885. Zanjani believes that this event was Winnemucca’s last public appearance. See Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 262.

  49. San Francisco Alta California, December 4, 1879.

  50. See Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 265–83.

  51. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sarah Winnemucca’s Practical Solution to the Indian Problem: A Letter to Dr. Lyman Abbott of the Christian Union (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1886), 3.

  52. Painter, “A Visit to the Mission Indians of Southern California and Other Western Tribes,” 18. According to Winnemucca’s most recent biographer, Sarah Zanjani, the finances of the Lovelock school were “one of the murkier episodes” in her career. See Sarah Winnemucca, 276.

  53. For Standing Bear’s tour, see Hoxie, A Final Promise, chapter 1; for Red Cloud, see New York Times June 7, 1870, for Joseph, see “An Indian’s View of Indian Affairs,” North American Review, v. 128 (April 1879), 412–33.

  54. The care with which the guest list at Mohonk was created is discussed in Larry Burgess, “The Lake Mohonk Conferences on the Indian, 1883–1916” (PhD dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1972), 19–21. The first Indians to address the group included Sherman Coolidge, an Episcopal priest. See ibid., 91.

  55. While my historical narrative differs in emphasis from Kevin Bruyneel’s discussion of Native American resistance to American expansion, it has benefited from his description of the late nineteenth century as an era of “American colonial imposition” and his assessment that American Indian activists of this era, whatever their differences, were “compelled . . . to counter” the expansion of U.S. authority. See Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Post-colonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 93, 94.

  56. Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five, quoted in Frederick Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 43.

  57. Charles Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (Boston: Little Brown, 1916), quoted in Hoxie, Talking Back, 76. A recent study of Charles Eastman’s career as a writer and activist takes special note of his caution, noting that he worried about the “retribution” of government officials could deliver to educated Indians like him. See David Martinez, Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman and American Indian Thought (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009), 86.

  58. It is not known how many copies of Winnemucca’s book were printed in 1883. Today 153 libraries report on WorldCat that they own a copy of a first edition of Life Among the Piutes. Guessing that perhaps one in ten or one in twenty copies might have survived into the mid-twentieth century, when her book was considered worth saving, it seems reasonable to estimate that two thousand copies of the book might have been printed.

  59. Filed with the Office of Indian Affairs archives, this letter has been reproduced at least twice, most recently in Bernd C. Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s–1930s (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 276.

  60. Ely Parker to Harriet Maxwell Converse, n.d. [1885], Ayer Manuscript 674, Folder 5, Newberry Library. All subsequent quotations in this sections are from that document. An edited version of the letter is reprinted in Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, 268–69. While the letter is undated, Parker refers to the Indian Rights Association (founded in December 1882) and refers to the rising popularity of forced allotment, a policy adopted with the passage of the Dawes Act in February 1887. The letter was apparently written after the first date and before the second. For a more sanguine view of Parker’s career, see C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, “Ely Parker and the Contentious Peace Policy,” Western Historical Quarterly, v. 41, n. 2 (Summer 2010), 196–217.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1. Annual Report of the Secretary of Interior, 1880, House Executive Document 1, Part 5, 46th Congress, 3rd Session (Serial 1959), 4. The Indian Office was (and remains) a division of the Department of Interior.

  2. For two famous examples, see Angie Debo, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sit
ting Bull (New York: Henry Holt, 1993). Sitting Bull both resisted militarily and later fled to Canada. He was killed during the government’s crackdown on the Ghost Dance movement in 1890.

  3. See James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893); Michael Hittman, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); Susan A. Miller, Coacoochee’s Bones: A Seminole Saga (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). Sitting Bull offered his followers both military and spiritual resistance. See Robert M. Utley, Lance and the Shield.

  4. See Melissa Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

  5. Article Two, Treaty with the Chippewas of the Mississippi, 1867. 16 Stat. 719.

  6. “Chippewa Indians in Minnesota,” House Executive Document 27, 51st Congress, 1st Session, March 6, 1890, 22.

  7. Ibid., 166. Spellings of this man’s name vary.

  8. Ibid., 171.

  9. Article Two, Treaty with the Chippewas, 10 Stat. 1165.

  10. Treaty with the Chippewa of the Mississippi and the Pillager and Lake Winnibigoshish Bands, 1863. 12 Stat. 1249. Shobaushkung was in Washington, D.C., to sign the 1867 treaty that established the White Earth Reservation but expressed no interest in moving there.

  11. “Chippewa Indians in Minnesota,” 174.

  12. “Report of Interview Between Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Delegation of Mille Lacs Chippewas, February 23, 25, 1875. Letters Received, Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives Microfilm (NAM), 234, Reel 162, Frames 320–329; 59–70.

  13. “Chippewa Indians of Minnesota,” 168.

  14. Ibid., 173.

  15. Ibid., 46.

  16. Ibid., 174.

  17. Ibid., 10.

  18. Nathan Richardson to Herbert Welsh, February 12, 1890, Letters Received, Office of Indian Affairs (LROIA), 6199-1890. For more on Richardson, see Mary Warner, A Big Hearted Paleface Man: Nathan Richardson and the History of Morrison County, Minnesota (Little Falls: Morrison County Historical Society, 2006), 102–5.