The legendary trapper Kit Carson, now serving as Manifest Destiny’s premier scout, led the assault on the Navaho redoubt at Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona. The campaign featured indiscriminate killing and a scorched-earth assault on cornfields, water resources, and the flourishing orchards of peach and other fruit trees. “The maelstrom of destruction and death brought by Carson and his men and their Native allies had the desired effect,” Peter Iverson notes.
In 1864, in an incident not unlike the Trail of Tears or even the Bataan “death march” of World War II, some 8,000–9,000 poorly provisioned Navaho were sent on their “long walk” to the barren land of the Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Hundreds escaped to the hills and canyons to avoid the walk, which was not a single procession but several disjointed compulsory treks. Yet all had in common privations of disease, starvation, and arbitrary execution. If children or the elderly could not keep pace, they were summarily executed or left for the trailing wolf packs. The Americans executed several pregnant women or recent mothers who could not keep up. More Indians perished after arrival in New Mexico, where the alkaline river water at the fort was virtually undrinkable, and where they were prone to devastating assaults by the nearby Comanche. Navaho women were forced into prostitution around Fort Sumner.
The Navaho persisted, resisted, conducted a determined diplomacy, and ultimately overcame the attempted genocide by negotiating a return to their homeland in a remarkable triumph of colonial ambivalence. Continuing to insist on the illegitimacy of their removal to the barren sands, the Navaho leaders achieved an audience in Washington and exploited the rising “peace policy” movement in 1868 to successfully negotiate a treaty that allowed them to return to Canyon de Chelly. The treaty was a “great triumph” for the Navaho and is one of the main reasons why the tribe has flourished and is the second most populous in the United States today behind the Cherokee.68
Less fortunate were the tribes most known for their militant raiding cultures, the Comanche, the Kiowa and the Apaches. In Texas the tumult of the Civil War offered the Comanche and the Kiowa a window of opportunity for retribution, but the violence boomeranged back against them in the familiar dialectic of American settler colonialism. Ever opportunistic, the Comanche renewed their raids on Texas settlements, took captives, and preyed on the cattle drives emanating from the Longhorn State. With the Confederacy in defeat, Indians drove Americans back about 100 miles in the first ten months of 1866—”the worst ten-month period in the history of the Texas frontier.”69 The Texans rallied, however, as the Rangers continued to assault Comanche villages, “slaughtering men, women, and children by the hundreds.”70
In the mid-1870s, a series of clashes known as the Red River Wars culminated the ethnic cleansing of Texas. The fighting began at Adobe Walls in June 1874 when well more than 200 Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa warriors attacked a handful of American buffalo hunters who were killing the bison on Indian hunting grounds. The entrenched and well-armed hunters held off the attack, which gave the Army a pretext to encircle and destroy the Panhandle tribes. Sheridan encouraged mass slaughter of the buffalo, noting approvingly in 1875 that by “destroying the Indians’ commissary” the hunters “have done more in the last two years to settle the vexed Indian question than the regular army has done in the past thirty years.” The Comanche and other tribes also bore responsibility for the decline of the buffalo, however, by “slaughtering vast numbers of bison for subsistence and for trade.”71
In September 1875, the Red River campaign culminated when the army drove the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa out of a large encampment at Palo Duro Canyon. US forces burned the village and slaughtered more than 1,000 horses. The destruction left the Indians “facing grim winter circumstances: their horses were killed; lodges, clothing, and robes burned; and winter food stores destroyed. For most,” Frederick Rathjen explains, “making their forlorn way to their agencies was the only alternative left, humiliating though it was.” The Indian population of Texas thus plummeted from about 35,000 in 1835 to just a few thousand relegated to hardscrabble reservations in 1875.72
Although the Apaches would become one of the most reviled tribes in American history, and stock villains of the Hollywood Westerns, Americans had allied with some Apache bands against the common foe during the Mexican War. The Apaches had long plagued first the Spanish then the Mexicans, who searched in vain for an “efficient means to exterminate … the barbarian Apache.”73 The Apache learned, as did all other Indians over the longue dureé, that alliance with the Americans invariably proved ephemeral.
In 1861, a dispute over an exchange of captives prompted the Chiricahua Apache Cochise to kill and mutilate four Americans. The army responded by executing Cochise’s captive wife, nephew, and several children. From that point Cochise and his band attacked and killed Americans without restraint as indiscriminate warfare prevailed on both sides. The Arizona Miner proclaimed a “great battle of civilization to overthrow the barbarians and teach them that white supremacy … is decreed of God.” Another writer averred, “Extermination is our only hope, and the sooner the better.”74
Genocidal violence prevailed, as President Lincoln’s envoys informed him that “Indians are shot wherever seen” in the Arizona territory. In 1863, a group of Apaches were being fed after they were invited in for a parley when suddenly some 30 of them were shot to death by prearranged plan. In 1866 a physician relished “a great slaughter of Apaches” and offered a company of Arizona volunteers “a dollar’s worth of tobacco for every Apache they kill in the future.” A rancher offered a blow-by-blow account of an Apache hunting expedition in which “altogether we killed fifty-six Indians.” Aided by rival Apache scouts, the army reported killing 29 Apaches in 1865; 154 in 1866; 172 in 1867; and 129 in 1868. Settlers did not keep such records but killed and captured hundreds more as a “shared code of violence” existed between civilians and the military. Some planted bags of sugar laced with strychnine to kill Indians as they would wolves or other wild animals.75
Obscuring their own aggression, Arizona settlers rationalized the genocide as righteous retribution for “inhuman butchery of white men by Indian murderers.” Stories, some true and others wildly exaggerated, of Apache raids, murders, and rapes permeated the Arizona settler community and served to justify indiscriminate slaughter. As the settlers allied in genocidal campaigns against the common enemy, the Apaches, Arizona authorities were able “to reconcile the deep sectional animosities still lingering in the territory” in the wake of the Civil War.76
Nothing better illustrated the tolerance for genocide in Arizona than the Camp Grant massacre of non-resistant Apache. Much like the slaughter of Indians at Sand Creek and myriad other American sites, these murders facilitated settler colonialism by helping to clear the state for white American supremacy. At dawn on April 30, 1871, more than 100 Mexicans and Papago Indians along with a few whites—but all under the direction of the leaders of the Arizona territory— killed and mutilated at least 108 Apache camped along a stream on a refuge in the Aravaipa Canyon some 60 miles northeast of Tucson. Women were brutally raped and slaughtered, some babies bludgeoned to death, others taken for adoption or sold into slavery. “In less than half an hour not a living Apache was to be seen,” recalled a participant, who relished the killing of “the most bloodthirsty devils that ever disgraced mother earth.” This participant failed to mention that all but two of the slaughtered Apache were women and children. The suggestion that the “blood-thirsty” Indians posed a threat to the white community elided that these Indians had surrendered and were peacefully encamped under military authority.77
As happened so often on the American borderlands, colonial ambivalence materialized through the willing participation in the massacre of other Indians and also in this case of Mexicans. The Papagos (Tohono O’odham) and the Mexicans “purchased political and economic enfranchisement in the Arizona Territory, however temporary, through physical and sexualized violence against the Apache,” Nicole
M. Guidotti-Hernandez explains. “They sought not only economic gain but racial differentiation from indios barbaros.”78
The US Army condemned the unauthorized settler assault, which the commander of nearby Fort Grant described as “but another massacre, in cold blood, of inoffensive and peaceful Indians who were living on the reservation under the protection of the Government.” The overwhelming majority of Arizona settlers, however, applauded the mass killings. The organizers of the slaughter went on to become the most prominent citizens of Tucson. The massacre was so popular that for years, people who were not there claimed to have taken part. Settlers in nearby states heartily approved as well. The Alta California praised the massacre as “one of the most important victories ever achieved by the white men over the savages in Arizona” and envisioned “the extermination of the Apaches.” A Colorado newspaper cheered the Camp Grant massacre as the latest “of those victories for civilization and progress” much like their own at Sand Creek. “We only regret that the number [of killings] was not double.”79
In 1871 for the first time in Arizona history the perpetrators were indicted and put on trial for killing the Indians, but a jury took only 19 minutes to exonerate them. Despite the Army criticism, “the massacre appeared far more ordinary than extraordinary at the time,” Karl Jacoby points out. Killing Apaches was nothing remarkable and certainly nothing for which settlers or their auxiliaries ought to be incarcerated. In April 1873, the Army itself slaughtered 76 Apache men, women, and children trapped in the “battle” (in which only one Indian auxiliary died on the federal side) of Salt River Cave. All resisting Apaches in Arizona eventually were rounded up and either killed or dispatched to reservations.80
The notoriety of the Chiricahua Apache Geronimo (Goyaalé) reflects the American penchant for elevating a single Indian “chief” to exaggerated prominence. Geronimo and a small band of Chiricahua eluded Crook and a large federal force in the mountains and deserts of Arizona and New Mexico for years.81 Rarely showing mercy to the settler victims of his raids, Geronimo ‘s violence obscured that most Apache had long since acquiesced to US authority. In September 1886, after a week of negotiations, Geronimo finally surrendered to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon in the Chiricahua Mountains.
Although he “would much prefer” to hang Geronimo, Secretary of War R. C. Drum instead exiled the Apache chieftain to Florida for safe keeping but later moved him to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where he died and is buried along with his wife in a remote corner of the base. In 1918 members of Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society—among them Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of two future US presidents—reportedly unearthed and pilfered Geronimo’s bones as a prank. Despite being on an Army base the stone burial mound with an eagle for a crown has repeatedly been desecrated over the years.82
Indian Removal from the Northwest
The fur trade created cultural space for ambivalent relations between Euro-Americans and Indians in the Pacific Northwest until explosive colonization overwhelmed the tribes. European and American trappers often took Indian wives and mistresses, establishing working relations with the bands. The fur traders, however, referred to the indigenes in Oregon as “Rogues” and thus left a legacy of racial othering. Most of the thousands of settlers who arrived on the Oregon Trail lumped the indigenes together as a unitary “doomed race” with no legitimate claim to colonial space.83
By the time of the Oregon Treaty with Great Britain (1846), settler colonials had begun to close in on the Indians of the northwest. That same year, Carson, blaming the Klamath Indians for an attack on his camp, led a slaughter of an Indian fishing village called Dokdokwas on the Upper Klamath Lake. “I wanted to do them as much damage as I could,” Carson later explained, so he burned the village to the ground, which he called “a beautiful sight.” A disappointed John C. Fremont arrived on the scene “too late for the sport.” Carson and Fremont “continued to kill Indians in a desultory fashion” as they circled Klamath Lake but “in all likelihood” the Modoc and not the Klamath had attacked Carson’s camp hence the victims were altogether innocent Indian men, women, and children.84
Cleansing campaigns erupted in the Northwest in the wake of the Whitman massacre, a case of religiously inspired ambivalence that came to grief. Long-simmering tensions over trade and cultural issues culminated on November 29, 1847, when Cayuse Indians killed 14 Americans, including the ethnocentric Presbyterian missionary couple Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. They had engendered resentment upon arrival in the region by taking over the home of a Cayuse headman at Waiilatpu. Like most missionaries the Whitmans compelled Indians to change their economies, gender relations, and spiritual way of life. The indigenes of the Walla Walla valley soon viewed Marcus Whitman as a shaman and blamed him for a measles epidemic that ravaged the tribe. Narcissa quickly gave up on saving the Indians and began to hate and fear them instead. After the Whitman killings and in an effort to protect the tribe as a whole, the Cayuse turned over five men said to be responsible for the murders. These Indians were quickly convicted and executed—but not before being baptized and “saved.” The Cayuse tribe scattered and broke up as the Americans forced many of its members onto Oregon’s Umatilla reservation.85
The Whitman massacre provided settlers with the opportunity they relished to launch a cleansing campaign against the indigenes “infesting” the land. “We came not to establish trade with the Indians,” a settler acknowledged, “but to take and settle the country exclusively for ourselves.” As in California, the federal government arrived too late to head off “squatter sovereignty” backed by “violence and outrage.” Indian agents belatedly negotiated treaties, which the settlers opposed and the US Senate rejected in 1852. Pressured by the settlers, the federal government provided “monies from the national treasury, reimbursing militia expenses” to cleanse the Oregon Territory.86
Settlers followed by the army conducted indiscriminate campaigns not only against the Cayuse but also against the Klamath, Kalapuyas, Molalas, Clackamas, Chinooks, and other Oregon tribes. In the mid-1850s they completed the violent dispossession of the indigenous residents of southwestern Oregon, the Puget Sound area, and the Yakama Country on the Columbia Plateau. Settler discourse rationalized ethnic cleansing citing the threat of a pan-Indian “uprising” but unity among the various bands was “tenuous and never approached the scope of a grand tribal alliance.”87
Little cultural space for ambivalence remained in the wake of the Whitman killings. Although not everyone favored indiscriminate slaughter, by the mid-1850s “the ranks of the extermination-minded Euro-Americans swelled, counterdiscourse waned, and no colonist did much to prevent the massacres of native people.” As Whaley notes, “Settler colonialism made the citizenry’s extermination attempts seem warranted in the tense atmosphere of southwestern Oregon in the 1850s.”88
In 1855 Oregon’s first territorial governor Isaac Stevens, a zealous proponent of Manifest Destiny and railroad development, forced the indigenes to sign over their land in treaties or face “extermination.” Lacking subtlety, Stevens told Yakima chief Kamiakin at Walla Walla in 1855, “If you do not accept the terms offered, you will walk in blood knee deep.” Stevens simultaneously served as governor, head of the Pacific Railroad Survey, and though he had utterly no expertise on Indians and would have preferred their “extermination” he also landed the key position of superintendent of Indian affairs for the territory. “Stevens’ principal aim … centered on extinguishing Indian title to the lands in the Pacific Northwest in order to promote the settlement of the region.” Miners and settlers soon clashed with Palouse, Yakama, Walla Walla, and other tribes on the Columbia Plateau in what became known as the Yakima War.89
The Nez Perce, whose land had been spared from dispossession under the 1855 treaties, joined with the Americans in the Yakima War. In fact, US–Nez Perce relations had been amicable since Lewis and Clark spent a month resting with the tribe—a visit that gave Clark time to impregnate a Nez Perce woman.90 In 1858 t
he discovery of gold brought miners flooding onto Nez Perce land and found the Americans declining to enforce the restrictions against white settlement.
Following the pattern established by Stevens, the Americans tried to force a hasty acquiescence to landed aggression on the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph (Heinmot Tooyalakekt). They promised schools, teachers, churches, and houses, but Chief Joseph pointedly replied that the Nez Perce had no interest in adopting any of the white man’s ways, that they only wanted to be left alone on their land. Vexed by the concept of savages rejecting the benefits of civilization, the Americans moved to dispossess the unreasoning Nez Perce.91
Thus the Nez Perce War, one of the most famous and romanticized of Indian resistances in the history of American settler colonialism, broke out in 1877. A bloody outburst in June replete with killings and rapes of white women by the previously peaceful Nez Perce traumatized the settler colonials. The Nez Perce took flight and repeatedly outmaneuvered and defeated their army pursuers. The army caught up with the Indians in western Montana, surprising and damaging them at the Battle of Big Hole. As the army killed off the stragglers, mostly women and children, at the encampment, the Nez Perce regrouped and closed in on the Americans behind a wall of fire they had deliberately set. The retreating army barely avoided a Little Big Horn type rout when the wind changed direction pushing the fire back into the faces of the Indians, who were soon on their way again, though weakened by the battle. The Nez Perce passed through the newly created Yellowstone National Park, killing and capturing a handful of astonished tourists. Aided by Cheyenne and Sioux scouts, Miles finally tracked down the Nez Perce before they could reach the Canadian border.92
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 24