The time had come to reconcile.
While cataclysms could snuff out whole populations, the flora or fauna that did adapt could survive. “Plasticity,” he said, implied an “accommodation between the individual organism and [the] organic environment,” not a “Malthusian death struggle in which only the victor survives.” Something more meaningful than blind chance, the survival of the fittest, and war rules the cosmos. “He who brought to bear that mysterious energy we call life upon primeval matter bestowed at the same time a power of development by change,” he finished his speech, “arranging that the interaction of energy and matter which make up environment should, from time to time, burst in upon the current of life and sweep it onward and upward to ever higher and better manifestations.
“Moments of great catastrophe, thus translated into the language of life, become moments of creation, when out of plastic organisms something newer and nobler is called into being.”
Squaring Darwinism with the divine, King tamed calamitous change. Catastrophe, particularly in America, had a purpose.
“YOU MAY DIVIDE THE RACE,” King wrote, “into imaginative people who believe in all sorts of impending crises,—physical, social, political—and others who anchor their very souls in status quo.” King’s theory of catastrophism (“impending crises,” in Hilton Helper’s controversial term) nicely suited a postwar world racked by the recent American catastrophe, and, according to King, ensured a future of survival, adaptation, recovery, and value. Two years after speaking at Yale, King became the founding director of another centralized institution, the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, which brought together under one roof various and sometimes competing surveys and field groups.
But King’s theory pleased neither uniformitarians nor catastrophists, and his years in the West had taken their toll.
Suffering from recurrent bouts of malaria, he resigned from the U.S. Geological Service in 1881—he was thirty-nine—but not before he spent months whoring, as Wallace Stegner wrote, after Mexican gold mines, whose glitter lured him away from science and in pursuit of the meretricious that he increasingly scorned. “Size, brute mass, the big figures of the census are our pride,” King complained bitterly in 1885. Ultimately dissatisfied with science and likely with himself, he declared that the scientific brain contained about as much passion as a wrought-iron derrick. He invested in large mining ventures, he served as an expert witness for mining litigation, he traveled to Mexico and Cuba and the Caribbean, and for a while he took up residence in one or another expensive resident hotel in Manhattan. And though he still intended to work on his theories of catastrophic geology, more to his fancy were treasures in the Sierra Madre and women of color—archaic women, Henry Adams called them—with whom he often fell in love. According to Henry Adams’s wife, Clover, King seemed reckless of life and strength.
He also inveigled the biologist and entrepreneur Alexander Agassiz, the son of the famed Louis, to invest in several mines in Mexico whose prospects turned sour. King’s “optimism,” remembered Agassiz, “was greater than his judgment.”
Nor was he luckier in his literary ventures. His manuscripts were accidentally tossed out from the Brunswick Hotel by a chambermaid; his business ventures were failing; and his health was precarious. He no longer fit into the life he lived, though his peers certainly believed he did. Unbeknownst to those friends who gathered at the Pacific Union Club in San Francisco and the Century Club in New York, King had introduced himself as a Pullman porter named James Todd when he met Ada Copeland, a black nursemaid almost twenty years younger than he. Ada Copeland became his secret common-law wife, with whom King, disguised as James Todd, had five children.
In 1893, as if the pressure of secrets, financial failures, and unfulfilled literary promise were all too much for him, he picked a violent fight at New York’s Central Park Zoo, and he was arrested for disorderly conduct. He was willingly institutionalized for two months in the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum in Manhattan.
By 1901 King was also deteriorating physically. Restless and reckless, as Clover Adams had said, he went to Colorado, Arizona, Montana, the Klondike, and Missouri, where, despite a lung ailment, he evaluated a lead mine. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, he suggested that Ada move herself and their children to Toronto, where they would encounter less racism, while he went to California to recuperate. His condition grew worse. During his last days, he tried to make sense of his life from a cottage in Arizona. He could not. “I have been trying to understand why a man as well endowed with intelligence as I,” he wrote to his friend John Hay, “should have made such a failure of many matters as I have.” He then revealed his real name to Ada so that her letters might not go astray.
On Christmas Eve 1901, the nomadic Clarence King died, not yet sixty years old. His fall from grace, or what his friends considered grace, seemed shocking to those who thought they knew him well. But perhaps he was too superlatively American to be known by this small cadre of accomplished men. Perhaps King embodied in a tragic way the America still riven by a series of internal wars, the America that had mistaken a grand destiny for a pot of gold and that sought to bury its peevish, ambivalent feelings about race and so-called civilization under the cracking veneer of Gilded Age gentility.
WHEN HENRY ADAMS, at the end of his life, wrote a book about failure, although he was ostensibly writing about his anachronistic self and the fact that, despite advantages of birth and education, he was out of place in the modern world, Adams was probably thinking about Clarence King. Though, to Adams, King was the consummately American and formidably strong paragon of physical energy, mental range, wit, grace, and science, Adams had to see him too as a paradigm of American failure: a man of great promise whose life unaccountably sputtered out in the American West, a man unfit for the modern world of raw power.
Adams may have been wrong—not in his anatomy of failure but in his assessment of its cause. King’s life implied a failure of vision and of imagination, and his double life suggests that the white America of Adams and, in part, of King, fatally denied the country’s true breadth and fortune—that is, it denied the varied, native, and multicolored cultures it was hell-bent on removing from its collective white memory.
For no matter how the penny press marketed the West, no matter how fluently Emerson philosophized its future, no matter that Bret Harte laughed at Emersonian hoopla; no matter that Barnum exploited it; no matter that Clarence King tried to grasp, explore, and whore after it: it was also the homeland of thousands of people who had been ignored—and then, catastrophically, shoved aside.
(23)
WITH THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN ONE HAND
The war had ended, or so it seemed, when Grant met Lee at Appomattox, yet wars were still being fought—undeclared wars, wars that didn’t entail a draft or deadly confusions in the Wilderness or three days of fury at Gettysburg. The wars were fought on Dryades Street in New Orleans and in the black township of Colfax, Louisiana, where on Easter Sunday 1873, more than eighty black and white Republicans were killed by paramilitary whites. And wars were fought on that grand expanse of land stretching beyond the Mississippi to the Pacific, from the vast plains to the Rockies and the Sierras and to the north in the wide Montana Territory. These were the wars waged against tribe after tribe of Indians and wars that a century later would be called nation-building.
These wars killed people of all races. These were the Indian wars, a “subject,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman, “as important as Reconstruction.” These wars dragged on and on.
After Appomattox, General Sherman had left Washington for his home in St. Louis; he stayed there until Ulysses S. Grant appointed him head of the vast Military Division of the Mississippi, which extended to the Rockies and from Canada to Mexico. The area also happened to include land the federal government had donated to the railroads—although, technically and morally, it really belonged to the Indians.
“Possession is half the law: that is, regardle
ss of how the thing came into possession?” Herman Melville had wondered in Moby-Dick. The railroad and the federal government both claimed ownership of the western lands, and the four million men heading west in the two decades after the war hoped to own some of that land too, but, whether seeking fortunes or staking out homesteads, they were all lighting out to territory already possessed by the various tribes living there. On the Great Plains, for instance, there were the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche; in the Rocky Mountains, the Nez Perce, Ute, and Bannock, to name just a few.
Their numbers, though, had grown smaller. Reporting on the Ute, General Sherman noticed that they’d been reduced to a state of poverty “painful to behold.” Their food supply (the buffalo) had been depleted by disease, drought, and slaughter—buffalo hides made the best robes and belts—and by the sporting pleasure of men such as P. T. Barnum. And whereas the buffalo had once roamed freely in search of their food, after 1874, after the invention of barbed wire cordoned off the prairie into ranches and farms, they were no longer able to do so. Soon they would be virtually extinct.
Often western settlers said they wouldn’t mind if the Indians could be similarly removed; they blocked the way of new homes and fresh starts. And settlers wouldn’t or shouldn’t be stopped by uncivilized savages, especially when shiny metals were at stake. “If the whole Army of the United States stood in the way,” said Senator John Sherman, “the wave of emigration would pass over it to seek the valley where gold was to be found.”
The way west was fraught with danger, some real and some imagined and often exaggerated by the press, which recounted tales of babies brained in front of their petrified mothers and pioneers captured and roasted alive. Yet in 1864, during the war, it was the atrocities committed by white soldiers that grabbed headlines. Colonel John Chivington, the Methodist minister known as “the Fighting Parson,” was bucking for a place in the government should Colorado be granted statehood. In the meantime, he had been authorized by Colorado’s territorial governor, John Evans, to raise a 100-days’ regiment, the 3rd Colorado Cavalry, to fight Indians—regardless of the fact that the Southern Cheyenne chief, Black Kettle, was a peaceful man who had been urging his people not to engage the white soldiers. Along with several other Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs, Black Kettle had signed a treaty relinquishing their land in Colorado. For that, he had received assurances from the U.S. government that if they gave up their arms, which they did, he and his people could migrate in peace to the Oklahoma reservation, which is where they were heading.
What happened next would happen again and again in the next decade. In the fall of 1864, Major Edward Wynkoop, the Indian agent whom the Cheyenne affectionately called “Tall Chief,” had been relieved of his command at Fort Lyon in Colorado Territory. Nervous before he left the fort in November, he explicitly instructed Chivington not to disturb the Indians who lived nearby. But Chivington, the Fighting Parson, did not care for such minutiae as directives or treaties. “On the 27th day of November, 1864,” Wynkoop later reported, “Colonel J. M. Chivington, with the Third Regiment of Colorado Cavalry (100-days’ men) and a battalion of the First Colorado Cavalry, arrived at Fort Lyon, ordered a portion of the garrison to join him under the command of Major Scott J. Anthony, and against the remonstrance of the officers of the post, who stated to him the circumstances of which he was well aware, attacked the camp of friendly Indians, the major portion of which were composed of women and children.”
The attack occurred at Sand Creek on November 29, at dawn. The young men of the village were away hunting when Chivington and his soldiers rode into the camp and killed almost two hundred of the remaining Cheyenne and Arapaho. Black Kettle, hearing the sound of the oncoming horses, had rushed out to hang a U.S. flag as well as a flag of truce on a pole in front of his tipi, but Chivington and his men were stalking the Indians like wolves, said one observer, and they shot them in cold blood as they tried to flee. White Antelope, another Cheyenne chief, stood with his arms folded, signifying peace. He was gunned down where he stood.
That wasn’t all. “Bucks, women and children were scalped, fingers cut off to get the rings on them,” reported a horrified soldier who had refused to fire his gun. “A squaw ripped open and a child taken from her, little children shot, while begging for their lives, many shot while on their knees, and with their arms around soldiers a begging for their lives.”
The Denver press congratulated Colonel Chivington and his men even though—or likely because—they had hauled an array of Indian scalps and mutilated body parts back to Denver, where they were exhibited as trophies to loud applause at the Apollo Theatre.
Silas Soule was a twenty-six-year-old soldier from Massachusetts and an abolitionist who had roamed the Kansas border as a jayhawker. Not only had he known John Brown, he had tried to break Brown’s accomplices out of jail, and he was a friend of Walt Whitman. At Fort Lyon that November, he hadn’t been told where he was going—just to fight “hostile” Indians—and when he learned of the plan to raid the sleeping Sand Creek village, he protested to his commanding officer that Black Kettle had been promised protection. “Any man who would take part in the murder, knowing the circumstances as we did,” Soule said, “was a low lived son of a bitch.”
Soule had refused to fire his weapon at Sand Creek and the following February willingly testified before Congress, recounting what he’d seen happen there. Two months later, he was shot in the back on a Denver street, purportedly by a soldier acting on behalf of Chivington, though that was never proved. In Washington, the congressional investigating committee condemned the massacre, and though Benjamin Wade said it demonstrated “the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man,” Chivington was never indicted on any charges. Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians retaliated by cutting telegraph wires, setting fire to ranches and stagecoach stations, plundering wagon trains, and murdering settlers.
Sherman faced an infuriated, fearful public—and a difficult situation. He had taken up his post as head of the Division of the Mississippi believing that the Indians were “pure beggars and poor devils more to be pitied than dreaded,” as he said. In 1865 he informed Grant that he was bound to honor the treaties with the Indians—and that “our plans for protecting the whites must be modified to conform to these treaties.” But Indians and settlers alike disregarded treaties whenever it suited them, and settlers often wanted the troops to police the tiniest of infractions, such as an Indian’s stealing a cow. “Our soldiers are not to be used against cattle thieves,” growled Sherman. Plus, during a tour of the West, he came to the conclusion that the settlers wanted mainly to kill Indians—and do so indiscriminately—which he would not allow them to do.
Rather, the Indians should be absorbed into white civilization, he believed, where they would come under the jurisdiction of constables, not soldiers. The truth was that the government had so often backed out of its commitment to the Indians that it was in effect goading the Indians into war. The only solution that Sherman could see was to confine the Indians to reservations; otherwise they were sure to be annihilated. Senator Lot M. Morrill of Maine had to agree, at least in part. “We have come to this point in the history of the country that there is no place beyond population to which you can remove the Indian,” he said, “and the precise question is, will you exterminate him, or will you fix an abiding place for him?” In the meantime Sherman ordered his troops to kill Indians only to scare them—so they would stop raiding white settlements.
For the railroads were coming. “Whether right or wrong, those roads will be built,” Sherman said, “and everybody knows that Congress, after granting the charts and fixing the routes, cannot now back out and surrender the country to a few bands of roving Indians.” The railroad, he calculated, could solve the Indian problem: by ferrying more and more settlers to the West, it would force the Indians to assimilate—and if the Indians resisted, the railroad could transport more and more soldiers west as well.
Yet by funding the railroads
, the government was tacitly promising to protect its financiers, its builders, and its riders. There was the rub for Sherman: he didn’t have enough soldiers. The regular army was diminishing—in the next year, it would have only 55,000 enlisted men and soon after that as few as 30,000. Regardless, blue-clad soldiers had been putting up forts along the Bozeman Trail, which cut right through the heart of the Powder River hunting grounds. And that meant trouble. In late 1866, for instance, not long after Fort Phil Kearny was built in present-day Wyoming, the Oglala Sioux, under their chief, Red Cloud, ambushed a group of eighty soldiers. Red Cloud had obviously planned well, having sent ten warriors ahead as decoys, including the young, sandy-haired Crazy Horse, to lure Captain William J. Fetterman and his troops out of the fort. Almost two thousand Sioux, Miniconjou, and Cheyenne, concealed behind the slope of the nearby hills and in the tall grass, wiped out the soldiers in a hailstorm of arrows. The Sioux then took the soldiers’ shoes, rifled their pockets for coins, and dismembered their bodies.
Known as the Fetterman massacre, the attack was another headliner. “Now and then you will hear a chicken-hearted historian, who knows nothing of the red savage, extolling his noble characteristics and prizing his natural knightly endowments,” railed the Kearney [Nebraska] Herald. “The best and only way to reconcile the blood-washed animal will be to impose upon him a worse schooling than has ever befallen the inferior races.”
MAYBE NOT SO FAST: in the summer of 1867, after the release of a report, Condition of the Indian Tribes, Congress authorized a Peace Commission to discover the causes of the Indian wars, to investigate the well-being of various tribes, to negotiate treaties, and then to place Indians in reservations, where they could weave, learn to farm, and take English lessons. If that didn’t work, the secretary of war could call for army volunteers; the implicit threat was clear.
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