Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Howard wasn’t seeking a town lot for himself, but rather a story for Harper’s Weekly. He ran alongside the others until he found a good spot from which to view the surge, and to catch his breath. As he straightened up, he realized he was standing beside a tent. A man was chopping holes in the prairie sod with a shiny new axe.

  “Where did you come from, that you have already pitched your tent?” asked Howard.

  “Oh, I was here,” said the man.

  “How was that?”

  “Why, I was a deputy United States marshal.”

  “Did you resign?”

  “No, I’m a deputy still.”

  “But it is not legal for a deputy United States marshal, or any one in the employ of the government to take up a town lot in this manner.”

  “That may all be, stranger. But I’ve got two lots here, just the same, and about fifty other deputies have got lots in the same way. In fact, the deputy-marshals laid out the town.”

  William Howard considered this perversion of the system outrageous. So, presumably, did the others on his train. But they were too busy grabbing what they could do dispute the matter. The deputies had laid out the main street of the town until they all had their lots. The train-men took things from there. “They seized the line of the embryo street and ran it eastward as far as their numbers would permit,” Howard said. Another train arrived. “The second train load of people took it where the first left off, and ran it entirely out of sight behind a swell of ground at least two miles from the station.” More trains came. “The following car loads of home-seekers went north and south, so that by the time that all were in for the day a city large enough to hold 100,000 inhabitants had been staked off.”

  As the town site became crowded, tensions increased. “Disputes over the ownership of lots grew incessant, for the reason that when a man went to the river for a drink of water, or tried to get his baggage at the railway station, another man would take possession of his lot, notwithstanding the obvious presence of the first man’s stakes and sometimes part of his wearing apparel. Owing to the uncertainty concerning the lines of the streets, two and sometimes more lots were staked out on the same ground, each claimant hoping that the official survey would give him the preference.”

  Yet the disputes did not lead to gunplay. Howard polled the participants to discover why. Their answers pointed in a single direction: the absence of alcohol. “The peaceful way in which Oklahoma was settled was due entirely to its prohibition,” Howard wrote. He added, as a word to the wise, “When Congress gives Oklahoma some sort of government, the prohibition of the sale of intoxicating liquor should be the first and foremost of her laws.”

  Oklahoma land rush. After the rushers staked their claims, they had to register them at land offices like this one.

  Howard traveled around the new territory in the following days. He visited Oklahoma City, where the mad rush for lots mirrored that in Guthrie, including the illegal preemption by the deputy marshals. “The actual home-seekers were compelled to take what was left,” he noted. This was the case throughout the territory. Insiders got the good land, those without connections the remainder. Many of the rushers, often the ones most in need, wound up with little to show for their high hopes. “The poverty and wretched condition of some of the older boomers who have been waiting for years for the opening of Oklahoma were painfully apparent,” Howard observed. “Men with large families settled upon land with less than a dollar in money to keep them from starvation. How they expected to live until they could get a crop from their lands was a mystery which even they could not pretend to explain. Like unreasoning children, they thought that could they but once reach the beautiful green slopes of the promised land, their poverty and trouble would be at an end. They are now awakening to the bitter realization that their real hardships have just begun.”

  47

  IT GREW VERY COLD

  MORE BITTER WAS THE REALIZATION OF OKLAHOMA’S Indian tribes that once again they were the victims of the whites’ insatiable hunger for land. For surviving Indians all across the West, the end of days—or at least of anything like the life they had known—seemed fast approaching.

  For this reason many were attracted to a rising millenarian cult. Black Elk was curious when he first heard of it, for he was having questions about his own vision. He had been twelve at the time of the Lakota victory at the Greasy Grass; he was thirteen when Crazy Horse was killed by a military guard who claimed he was resisting arrest. “I was frightened,” Black Elk recalled of the moment, “because everything felt the way it did that day when we were going up to kill on the Greasy Grass, and it seemed we might all begin fighting right away.” But there was nothing for the Lakotas to fight with; their weapons had been taken away.

  He grew to manhood on the Sioux reservation. He adjusted to life under the new order on the plains. He met William Cody, a former scout and buffalo hunter who likewise was trying to adjust to the new life. Cody, sensing nostalgia in the East for the life that was being lost in the West, created a traveling show called “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” He offered Black Elk a job, and Black Elk toured the East with the show. Cody took the troupe to Britain, and while there, Black Elk separately visited mainland Europe.

  The journey was enlightening but enervating. “All the time I was away from home across the big water, my power was gone, and I was like a dead man moving around most of the time,” Black Elk recalled. “I could hardly remember my vision, and when I did remember it, it seemed like a dim dream.”

  He returned to discover his people debilitated. The Sioux reservation had been cut in half since the 1870s. Hunger and measles befell the Lakotas, now dependent on government aid, which was always inadequate and often late. Black Elk’s healing powers revived somewhat, but for many he could do nothing. “There were more people sick that winter when the whooping cough came and killed little children who did not have enough to eat,” he said. “Our people were pitiful and in despair.”

  Amid their distress the Lakotas grasped at straws. “That summer when I came back from across the water, strange news had come from the West, and the people had been talking and talking about it,” Black Elk recounted. “This news said that out yonder in the West, at a place near where the great mountains stand before you come to the big water”—the Sierra Nevada—“there was a sacred man among the Paiutes who had talked to the Great Spirit in a vision, and the Great Spirit had told him how to save the Indian peoples and make the Wasichus disappear and bring back all the bison and the people who were dead, and how there would be a new earth.” The Lakota elders had discussed the strange news, and they decided to send three envoys to meet the holy man and hear more about his vision. The envoys undertook the journey and came back convinced that the Paiute messiah spoke the truth.

  Black Elk demurred. “I thought maybe it was only the despair that made people believe, just as a man who is starving may dream of plenty of everything good to eat,” he recalled.

  Yet the envoys remained convinced. The Paiute messiah had insisted that a new world was coming, they said. “It would come in a whirlwind out of the West and would crush out everything in this world, which was old and dying. In that other world there was plenty of meat, just like old times; and in that world all the dead Indians were alive, and all the bison that had ever been killed were roaming around again.”

  The messiah had given the Lakota envoys two eagle feathers and some red paint. He told them what to do. The people must daub the paint on their faces and do a dance—a ghost dance, for the dead Indians—that the messiah taught the envoys. “If they did this, they could get on this other world when it came, and the Wasichus would not be able to get on, and so they would disappear.” The eagle feathers were for a sign. “Receive these eagle feathers and behold them, for my father will cause these to bring your people back to him.”

  During the winter of 1889–1890 the Lakotas could talk of little else. They sent more envoys west; these returned with the same message as
the others. Tribes all across the West were dancing the Ghost Dance. The Lakotas must join, lest they not be able to enter the new world when it came.

  The Lakota dancing began. Black Elk heard that some of his people were dancing at the head of Cheyenne Creek, and that the dancers there had seen their dead relatives and spoken to them. He heard of dancing on Wounded Knee Creek, with similar results. He was still skeptical. But his father had recently died, and he started to wonder if the dance would bring him back. He mounted his horse and rode to Wounded Knee Creek.

  “I was surprised, and could hardly believe what I saw, because so much of my vision seemed to be in it,” he recounted. “The dancers, both women and men, were holding hands in a big circle, and in the center of the circle they had a tree painted red with most of its branches cut off and some dead leaves on it.” The holy tree in his vision was dying, and the circle of dancers was like the sacred hoop that would bring the tree back to life.

  At first Black Elk was sad. “It all seemed to be from my great vision somehow, and I had done nothing yet to make the tree to bloom.” But reflection yielded insight, and gratification. “All at once a great happiness overcame me, and it all took hold of me right there.” He would help make the vision—his vision and the messiah’s vision—come to pass. “The dance was over for that day, but they would dance again the next day, and I would dance with them.”

  THE DANCING WENT ON THROUGH THE SUMMER AND INTO the fall. The white soldiers in Dakota took alarm. Those whites with a knowledge of history knew that messianic movements among the native peoples often preceded violent attempts to hasten the coming of the new world. Those without such knowledge simply didn’t like to see the Indians join a cult that preached the annihilation of whites. The dancing alone was scary; the dancers kept at it for hours or days, falling into a trance state where the ordinary rules of fear and self-preservation didn’t apply.

  The soldiers warned the Sioux to stop dancing. The federal agent on Clay Creek gave a cease-and-desist order. The dancers rejected it. “They would not stop, and they said they would fight for their religion if they had to do it,” Black Elk recalled. “The agent went away, and they kept on dancing. They called him Young-Man-Afraid-of-Lakotas.”

  The effort to stop the dancing merely made it spread. “I heard that the Brulés were dancing over east of us,” Black Elk said. “And then I heard that Big Foot’s people were dancing on the Good River reservation; also that Kicking Bear had gone to Sitting Bull’s camp on Grand River, and that the people were dancing there too. Word came to us that the Indians were beginning to dance everywhere.”

  Black Elk and the other Sioux learned that the soldiers were moving in, apparently to stop the dancing. “We heard that there were soldiers at Pine Ridge and that others were coming all the time. Then one morning we heard that the soldiers were marching toward us, so we broke camp and moved west to Grass Creek. From there we went to White Clay and camped awhile and danced.”

  Black Elk by now had developed a reputation as a leader of the dancers. An Indian policeman, a Lakota who worked with the federal agents, tipped him off that he and another dancer, Good Thunder, were going to be arrested.

  Lakota camp. This image is from the era of the Ghost Dance. Note the wagons, which the Sioux adopted from whites, after adopting the horses generations earlier.

  Black Elk and Good Thunder decided not to wait around. They rode to the camp of the Brulés on Wounded Knee Creek.

  They learned that Sitting Bull had been killed by Indian policemen at his cabin on the Grand River. The federal authorities had suspected Sitting Bull of being behind the Ghost Dance, and they ordered his arrest. When some of the other Lakotas tried to prevent the arrest, a struggle ensued, in which Sitting Bull was shot dead.

  “It was now near the end of the Moon of Popping Trees”—December—“and I was twenty-seven years old,” Black Elk said. News came that Big Foot was coming to Wounded Knee with four hundred men, women and children, including some from Sitting Bull’s band. They were in desperate condition. “They were all starving and freezing, and Big Foot was so sick that they had to bring him along in a pony drag.”

  On the evening of December 28, Black Elk rode to Pine Ridge. While he was there he saw soldiers preparing to march out, toward Big Foot’s camp. “I felt something terrible was going to happen,” he recalled. “That night I could hardly sleep at all. I walked around all night.”

  The next morning, when he went to gather his horses, he heard shooting in the east, in the direction of Big Foot’s camp. “I knew from the sound that it must be the wagon-guns”—cannons—“going off. The sounds went right through my body.”

  He donned his sacred shirt, painted his face and put an eagle feather in his hair. He mounted his horse and rode toward the shooting. Several other young men joined him as he rode, till they totaled about twenty. They reached the crest of a ridge, from which they could see a crooked, dry gulch.

  What Black Elk then witnessed became etched in his brain. “Wagon guns were still going off over there on the little hill,” he recounted, decades later. “And they were going off again where they hit along the gulch. There was much shooting down yonder, and there were many cries, and we could see cavalrymen scattered over the hills ahead of us. Cavalrymen were riding along the gulch and shooting into it, where the women and children were running away and trying to hide.”

  Black Elk and his small party charged toward the shooting. Black Elk had no gun, only a sacred bow, which he held out in front of him as the soldiers turned their fire on them. “The bullets did not hit us at all,” he said.

  Yet without a gun he could do nothing. Anyway, he and the others had arrived too late. “We followed down along the dry gulch, and what we saw was terrible. Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed along the gulch, and they ran, and murdered them in there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the wagon guns hit them. I saw a little baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead.”

  Black Elk learned from one of the few survivors how the massacre had begun. The soldiers had entered Big Foot’s camp and demanded that the warriors relinquish their weapons. Most did, seeing that they were outnumbered and badly outgunned, with the cannons trained on them. But one man refused to give up his rifle. A soldier tried to take it from him, and in the scuffle the rifle went off and killed the soldier. At this another soldier, standing over the bedridden Big Foot, shot and killed the chief. The rest of the soldiers opened fire on the camp, sparing none their weapons could reach.

  Black Elk remembered that the day had dawned clear. “But after the soldiers marched away from their dirty work, a heavy snow began to fall. The wind came up in the night. There was a big blizzard, and it grew very cold. The snow drifted down in the crooked gulch, and it was one long grave of butchered women and children and babies, who had never done any harm and were only trying to run away.”

  48

  LESS CORN AND MORE HELL

  THE MASSACRE AT WOUNDED KNEE—AT LEAST 150 Lakotas, and perhaps twice that many, were killed—marked the end of the violent struggle for control of the lands of the American West. The indigenous peoples had lost; the invaders had won.

  A different marker of the passing age caught the eye of Frederick Jackson Turner, a young historian from Wisconsin who addressed a convention of his colleagues in Chicago during the summer of 1893. Turner asked his audience to conjure a parade of American history from two points in time. The first was in the late eighteenth century. “Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer,” Turner said. He paused. “And the frontier has passed by.” He then asked his listeners to jump forwar
d to a more recent time. “Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later, and see the same procession with wider intervals between.” And the frontier had passed by there, too.

  Turner proposed a theory of America’s westward expansion that embraced successive kinds of frontiers. “The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader’s frontier, the rancher’s frontier, or the miner’s frontier, and the farmer’s frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line, the traders’ pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghenies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader’s birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri.”

  The multiphase frontier accounted for the distinctive features of American civilization, Turner said. It afforded individual opportunity; it leveled social differences; it nurtured democracy. If not for the frontier, America would have been much like Europe.

  Turner noted that the director of the U.S. census, referring to the 1890 tally, had observed that a clear line separating the settled regions of the country from the unsettled regions no longer existed. The frontier had disappeared. Turner inferred from this that America had reached a turning point in its history. “Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them.” Those days of westward expansion were over. “Never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves.”