Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The emigrants were suspicious of these conditions. And they queried Lee about the white men who had joined the Paiute attack. But Lee deflected the questions and convinced the emigrants that, whatever their suspicions, they had little alternative. They were short of water. Those wounded in the attack were especially suffering. The tight circle of wagons had become a prison. The emigrants’ only hope was to trust Lee. They accepted his terms.

  Out came the women and children, some in wagons, some walking along the dusty road. They proceeded past members of the Mormon militia, who presented themselves as the emigrants’ protectors against the Indians.

  After the women and children were clear of the camp, the men followed. All were tired from the siege; the wounded were in obvious pain.

  When everyone was out in the open, unarmed and undefended, the leader of the militia shouted, “Halt!” This was less an order to the emigrants than a signal to the militiamen and their Paiute accomplices. The militia opened fire on the emigrant men. Most fell in the initial volley. Those who weren’t killed outright were dispatched by close-range fire or by knife. The ones who tried to flee were run down and killed.

  The Paiutes fell upon the women and children. With guns, arrows, knives, clubs and stones, they killed them brutally and swiftly. The only survivors were children deemed too young to bear witness to the carnage.

  Within minutes the deed was done. To cover the crime, the militiamen and the Paiutes looted the bodies and carried away the emigrants’ property. When the world learned that more than 120 emigrants had been killed, the Mormons blamed the Paiutes. For years they stuck to their story, obstructing investigation and denying responsibility. They largely succeeded; only one man, John Lee, was eventually convicted. Their success owed something to the very enormity of the crime. Even in the West, where killings of Indians by whites hardly raised an eyebrow, and killings of whites by Indians were not unexpected, the cold-blooded mass slaughter of whites by whites was hard to believe. For many in Utah and beyond, it was easier not to.

  37

  ONCE WE WERE HAPPY

  “IAM A LAKOTA OF THE OGLALA BAND,” BLACK ELK TOLD an interviewer. “My father’s name was Black Elk, and his father before him bore the name, and the father of his father, so that I am the fourth to bear it.” Black Elk recalled his earliest days. “I was born in the Moon of the Popping Trees on the Little Powder River in the Winter When the Four Crows were killed”—December 1863—“and I was three years old when my father’s right leg was broken in the Battle of the Hundred Slain.”

  The Battle of the Hundred Slain was a turning point in the history of the Lakotas, or western Sioux, and it stuck in Black Elk’s memory. “I had never seen a Wasichu then, and did not know what one looked like,” he said. Wasichu was what the Lakotas called white people, though it didn’t refer to their skin color; African American soldiers in Lakota country were called black Wasichus. “But every one was saying that the Wasichus were coming and that they were going to take our country and rub us all out and that we should all have to die fighting. It was the Wasichus who got rubbed out in that battle, and all the people were talking about it for a long while.” With hindsight, Black Elk added, “But a hundred Wasichus were not much if there were others and others without number where those came from.”

  Only later did Black Elk learn what the battle was all about. “Up on the Madison Fork the Wasichus had found much of the yellow metal that they worship and that makes them crazy, and they wanted to have a road up through our country to the place where the yellow metal was; but my people did not want the road. It would scare the bison and make them go away, and also it would let the other Wasichus come in like a river. They told us that they wanted only to use a little land, as much as a wagon would take between the wheels; but our people knew better. And when you look about you now, you can see what it was they wanted.”

  Black Elk’s memory flitted backward to a time before the white men came, and forward to a much later date: “Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us. But the Wasichus came, and they have made little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichu; and it is dirty with lies and greed.”

  Black Elk resumed his story: “And so when the soldiers came and built themselves a town of logs there on the Piney Fork of the Powder, my people knew they meant to have their road and take our country and maybe kill us all when they were strong enough. Crazy Horse was only about nineteen years old then, and Red Cloud was still our great chief. In the Moon of the Changing Season”—October—“he called together all the scattered bands of the Lakota for a big council on the Powder River, and when we went on the warpath against the soldiers, a horseback could ride through our villages from sunrise until the day was above his head, so far did our camp stretch along the valley of the river; for many of our friends, the Shyela and the Blue Clouds, had come to help us fight.” The Shyela were the Cheyennes and the Blue Clouds the Arapahos. “And it was about when the bitten moon”—the last quarter moon—“was delayed in the Time of the Popping Trees”—December—“when the hundred were rubbed out.”

  BLACK ELK’S BOYHOOD OCCURRED AMID A REVOLUTION IN THE ecology of the Great Plains. Or perhaps it was simply evolution accelerated. When humans first arrived in North America via the Bering land bridge, the continent they invaded teemed with animals large and small. Some were prey to the arriving hunters; these were what drew the invaders on. The biggest game included mammoths and mastodons, elephant kin that taxed the cleverness and courage of the hunters but provided a fat payoff when a hunt succeeded. So clever and bold were the hunters that they sorely strained the populations of the beasts, leading—perhaps in conjunction with the same climate changes that trapped hunters and prey alike on the eastern side of the Pacific—to the animals’ extinction. A broad principle was demonstrated: that the introduction of new organisms, in this case humans, into a habitat could wreak havoc on the existing ecology.

  Members of the genus Equus were among the species that greeted the human invaders but didn’t long survive their coming. Whether hunting or changing climate was the larger cause of their demise is as uncertain as with the mammoths, but by the time the Spanish reached mainland North America in the early sixteenth century, the ancient horses weren’t even a memory among the indigenous peoples. The horses the Spanish brought gave their soldiers a tremendous advantage in their campaigns against the Indians, demonstrating that the disruption attendant upon the introduction of a new species could be cultural as well as ecological. The Spanish took pains to preserve their advantage by keeping the horses away from the Indians. But horses occasionally escaped. Possibly some got loose from Coronado’s expeditionary force in the 1540s, or from that of fellow Spaniard Hernando de Soto, who explored the Mississippi Valley at about the same time.

  Yet no evidence shows horses in the possession of native peoples until a century later. More was involved in adopting the horse than simply capturing horses. The Indians had to learn how horses and humans interact. The Spanish settlements in New Mexico placed horses and Indians in close proximity for decades; the Indians watched and learned what horses could do, how they could be trained for riding, and how herds of them might be managed. The first horses acquired by Indians might have been gifts from Spanish missionaries to Indians who converted to Catholicism and adopted Spanish ways. Some horses might have been stolen by Indians. A revolt by the Pueblo people in the late seventeenth century put hundreds of horses in Indian hands, at a time when Indians had learned what to do with them.

  Over the following decades the Indians and the horses adapted to each other. Settled peoples like the Pueblos found horses to be a convenience but not a life-changer. But for the migratory tribes of the Great Plains, who acquired horses by sale and theft from the Pueblos, horses upended thousands of years
of habit. The Plains peoples, from the Apaches in the south to the Sioux in the north, suddenly became vastly more mobile than before. They had hunted buffalo on foot; now they could hunt on horseback. Dogs had dragged their tepees and other equipment; a horse could do the work of ten dogs. Dogs, being carnivores, had to be fed, in effect competing with the Indians for buffalo meat and other killed flesh. Horses, as herbivores, could eat the prairie grasses humans and dogs couldn’t.

  Horses changed the nature of warfare on the plains. Raiders now could roam over thousands of square miles, striking far from their camps and disappearing quickly. Spanish soldiers on horses had seemed almost godlike to the first Indians they encountered; Indian soldiers on horseback possessed a comparable advantage over tribes that still moved and fought afoot. Some tribes, most notably the Comanches, took military horsemanship beyond what the Spanish had accomplished, and seemed to their enemies a terrifying hybrid of man and beast.

  Horses weren’t an unmitigated blessing. The lore of the Cheyennes told of tribal elders making a choice for their people: to adopt the horse culture, as their neighbors the Comanches had done, or to stick to the traditional ways. The elders prayed to their principal god, who answered them through the senior priest. “If you have horses, everything will be changed for you forever,” the god said. “You will have to move around a lot to find pasture for your horses. You will have to give up gardening and live by hunting and gathering, like the Comanches. And you will have to come out of your earth houses and live in tents. I will tell your women how to make them and how to decorate them. And there will be other changes. You will have to have fights with other tribes, who will want your pasture land or the places where you hunt. You will have to have real soldiers, who can protect the people. Think, before you decide.”

  The elders chose horses. The prophecy came true.

  LIKE THE COMANCHES ON THE SOUTHERN PLAINS, THE SIOUX on the northern plains were a people on the move. The western Sioux—the Lakotas—had broken away from the eastern branch of their tribe, a forest people of Minnesota, in the seventeenth century, as the Ojibwa and other tribes from farther east, feeling pressure from tribes still farther east and from whites, pushed into their territory. The Lakotas lacked horses when they emerged onto the northern plains, and they developed pedestrian techniques for exploiting the primary resource of the plains, the buffalo. They would set fire to the grass when the wind was blowing toward a place where the level surface was broken by a ravine; the buffalo would flee the flames and be pinned at the edge of the ravine. Yet the weight of the herd behind would push many over the side; they would fall and break their legs. The Sioux hunters would kill them with spears and arrows.

  The Lakotas discovered horses on the plains yet didn’t immediately adopt them. Their existing life suited them well, and they might have anticipated the bargain described by the Cheyenne priest. Even when the Sioux began riding horses, they didn’t at once become full nomads. During their time on the plains they had contrived to dominate the regional trading network. Lewis and Clark had encountered the Sioux dominance, in the form of the tribe’s blockade of the upper Missouri River. The Sioux valued their stranglehold on the Missouri trade, and they were loath to jeopardize it by adopting the full horse culture and its nomadic requirements.

  In fact, the Sioux expanded their commercial activities by joining the fur trade. They had no use for beaver pelts, but on learning that white people would pay for them, they began collecting the pelts and trading them for items they did value. They became adept in their new line. “The Sioux tribes are those who hunt most for the beaver and other good peltries of the Upper Missouri,” a French trader observed. “They scour all the rivers and streams.”

  They scoured so well that the beaver disappeared. Like Joe Meek, the Sioux were compelled to find other work. At this point they turned fully toward the horse, and with it, the buffalo, which the horse allowed them to hunt more efficiently. The buffalo provided them sustenance; it also gave them a new item of commerce. The Sioux traded robes, dried meat and tongues to other Indians and to white traders.

  They exhibited their characteristic energy, and ruthlessness. They eliminated or conquered all who stood in their way, wiping out entire villages of rivals and compelling others to pay tribute. They became the lords of the northern plains—respected, feared, obeyed.

  They were an anomaly among Indian peoples in that their population increased at a time when the populations of other tribes were declining, often drastically. Their secret was employment of a vaccine against smallpox, acquired from some of their American trading partners. Between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the 1850s, the Sioux population quintupled, if only to around twenty-five thousand.

  Observers predicted that the strength of the Sioux would continue to increase. “The day is not far off when the Sioux will possess the whole buffalo region, unless they are checked,” a federal agent wrote.

  To provide such a check, the U.S. government in 1851 called a peace conference, to be held at Fort Laramie. Ten thousand Indians came, from dozens of tribes. But the only tribe that really mattered—the one for which the conference had been called—was the Sioux. And on account of the Sioux the conference failed. The American officials tried to persuade the Sioux to stay north of the Platte River, the main emigrant route to Oregon and California. Black Hawk, the leader of the Oglala Sioux, refused. His people had conquered the lands the Americans sought to deny them, he said. “These lands once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we whipped those nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians.” And this they would continue to do.

  A clash was inevitable. The discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858 triggered a rush to that territory, smaller in scale than the rush to California, but sufficient to alarm the tribes of the plains. The miners—and the shopkeepers, saloon owners, hoteliers and all the others who followed the miners—meanwhile demanded protection, and such was the reputation of the Sioux that Congress swiftly complied. A territorial government was created for Colorado in 1861, and a governor—John Evans—appointed. As a first order of business, Evans oversaw the raising of a territorial militia, commanded by Colonel John Chivington.

  Neither Evans nor Chivington displayed any desire for peace with the Indians. Upon receiving a peace offer from a delegation of Arapahos and Cheyennes, Evans responded, “What shall I do with the Third Colorado Regiment if I make peace? They have been raised to kill Indians, and they must kill Indians.” The Civil War had begun, and Evans knew that if he didn’t put the militia to use, they might be called into service against the Confederacy.

  Chivington was even more bloody minded. He had been a Methodist minister, but he found a new calling as an Indian fighter. “Kill all the Indians you come across,” he ordered his troops. That included women and children. “Nits make lice,” he explained.

  His soldiers got their chance in November 1864. Chivington led them against a camp of Cheyennes and Arapahos on Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. Most of the men of the bands were away hunting; the camp consisted primarily of women, children and the old. There was no confusion about this. “I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter,” an eyewitness recalled. “When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy.”

  They received not mercy but the most brutal violence. “The soldiers shot them all,” the witness continued. “There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection. They sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick. She had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed.” After death came mutilation. “Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side.… I saw one squaw whose privates had been cut out.”

  The soldiers reveled in the atrocities. “I did not see a body of man, woman, or child
but was scalped,” a soldier said. “And in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner—men, women, and children’s privates cut out, &c.; I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman’s private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick.… I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.”

  THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE SPARKED A WAR ON THE PLAINS that would last a decade. The Cheyennes and the Arapahos allied with the Sioux for a reprisal campaign against white settlements in eastern Colorado. In early 1865 the allies attacked the town of Julesburg, killing all the settlers they could find, scalping the dead and burning the buildings. They cut telegraph wires and closed the road to Denver, isolating the territorial capital and threatening it, in the middle of winter, with starvation.

  The leader of the Indian alliance was Red Cloud, war chief of the Sioux. Red Cloud made clear that his fight was to the bitter end. “The white men have crowded the Indians back year by year until we are forced to live in a small country north of the Platte,” he told a council of American officials and fellow Indians held during a pause in the fighting. “And now our last hunting ground, the home of the People”—the Sioux—“is to be taken from us. Our women and children will starve, but for my part I prefer to die fighting.”

  The council had been called by federal officials who hoped to negotiate a road to Bozeman in Montana Territory, where gold had been discovered. This was the road Black Elk spoke of. Despite Red Cloud’s opposition, the whites built the road, and fortified it with military posts at various points along the way.