John Ross died in Washington ten days before the treaty was ratified. John Rollin Ridge returned to California where he died in September 1867. Saladin died in February 1868 at age twenty-one; Watica died of pneumonia while away at school in April 1869.176 Stand Watie, a delegate at the Okmulgee council in 1870, died at Honey Creek, in September 9, 1871.177 Both his daughters died, unmarried, in 1875. Sarah Watie lived another eight years. A widow who had buried all five of her children, she never got the chance “to see how it would be” to live in peace.
Because the emigrant tribes who allied with the Confederacy forfeited all their treaty rights with the United States, the government was free to disregard removal-era guarantees that the Indians would enjoy undisturbed possession of their new lands. In the next couple of years, some tribes would be required to give up substantial lands in the western part of Indian Territory—to provide reservations for the Southern Arapahos, Southern Cheyennes, Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches established under the terms of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge.
{ 5 }
Treaty Making in the West
In 1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the brother of George Rogers Clark, departed St. Louis on a two-year odyssey to the Pacific and back with “the Corps of Discovery.” They went to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and beyond and to proclaim American sovereignty over a world where Native people held the power. “In all your intercourse with the natives,” Jefferson instructed Lewis, “treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will permit.”1 Lewis and Clark had both been at the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, and, although the young nation’s muscle flexing was never far beneath the surface during their western expedition, they generally followed tried and tested protocols of Indian diplomacy in order to make their way through Indian country, just as they relied on Indian guides, Indian knowledge, and Indian assistance to get them where they were going. Their expedition marked the beginning of a diplomatic and colonial relationship between the United States and the Indian nations west of the Mississippi that would generate dozens of treaties. As the eminent scholar of Indian law Felix Cohen observed, the United States paid Napoleon Bonaparte $15 million for the transfer of political authority over the Louisiana Territory, and then proceeded to pay the Indian tribes—the actual owners of the ceded territory—more than twenty times that amount as it took possession of the land in treaty after treaty.2 American diplomacy west of the Mississippi replicated what had happened in the East. When Indians held the power, Americans adhered to Native American protocols; when the balance of power shifted irrevocably away from Indians, the United States continued to observe some of the forms of treaty making but subordinated them to the function of its treaties: to remove Indians from the land and obliterate their way of life.
Lewis and Clark entered a complicated diplomatic landscape in which initiating an alliance with one Indian nation could jeopardize relations with another. For more than a century, Indian tribes on the Great Plains and beyond had waged escalating contests for horses, guns, and hunting territories; at the same time, they engaged in increasing diplomatic activity to create, maintain, and renew alliances and exchange networks that were vital to obtaining and defending access to horses, guns, and hunting territories.3 Intertribal diplomacy catered for the suspension of hostilities in the interests of exchange. Alliances were part of the strategies necessary to deal with changing situations; the ebb and flow of power on the Plains sometimes made it expedient to make peace with yesterday’s enemies in order to confront a more serious threat today. When Europeans arrived, some Indian people incorporated the outsiders into their kinship systems and exchange networks, but the onus was on the Europeans to adjust to Indian ways when they dealt with the nations who held the upper hand and, to a large extent, determined which Europeans entered and operated in their country.
At the end of the seventeenth century, both France and Spain had imperial aspirations in Texas. The French saw it as an area into which they could extend the network of Indian trade and alliances they had already established in the Mississippi Valley. For Spain, Texas represented a northern periphery of a great American empire, a vast borderland that might help thwart French intrusions and protect more valuable holdings to the south, particularly the silver mines of Mexico. French and Spaniards both courted the allegiance of the Caddos in what is now eastern Texas and Louisiana. Caddo power and numbers had plummeted since the first Spanish expedition wandered through their country in 1542: epidemic diseases had cut their population dramatically, perhaps from as many as two hundred thousand to as few as ten thousand, and as farmers they faced increasing pressure from mounted and mobile enemies. Nevertheless, they were strategically located, and far-reaching trade routes ran in and out of their villages. Accustomed to making pacts of friendship with other tribes, they extended their network of trade and alliance to include Europeans, who might provide merchandise and military assistance against their enemies. Caddos smoked the calumet pipe with the newcomers, gave them gifts, and offered them their women. Europeans frequently misinterpreted this as evidence of Indians’ promiscuity—Caddo women often functioned as diplomatic mediators.4
Indian power in the interior of the continent continued to limit European ambitions and compel European diplomatic responses throughout the eighteenth century. The Osages dominated the region between the Arkansas and Red rivers for much of the century. They exploited their trade with the French to expand their power over rival tribes and dictated the terms on which Europeans entered their domain. Spaniards and French alike treated them with healthy respect and courted their friendship.5 Meanwhile Spain confronted a new and growing power on the southern Plains, one produced and propelled by the horses the Spaniards themselves had introduced. Comanches and Utes moved out of the foothills of the Rockies and advanced onto the rich grasslands of the southern Plains, where they consolidated their position as horse-and-buffalo Indians. They captured and enslaved women and children from other tribes, incorporated other peoples into their society, and built exchange networks that enabled them to dominate trade between New Mexico and French Louisiana. By midcentury, the Comanches were the dominant power on the southern Plains. They raided deep into Texas, New Mexico, and Spain’s other northern provinces, carrying off captives and livestock and draining the limited resources Spain could afford for frontier defense.6 Confronted by Ute, Comanche, and Apache nomads who proved more than a match for heavily equipped Spanish soldiers in thinly spread garrisons, Spaniards came to rely on Pueblo and O’odham allies and on diplomacy to defend their provinces.7
When Tomás Vélez Cachupín became the governor of New Mexico in 1749, he inherited a colony beset by Indian enemies. Lacking the manpower and resources to maintain a constant war effort, Vélez Cachupín turned to diplomacy to secure the protection his province needed. After he defeated a large Comanche war party in 1751, he made peace, sitting down and smoking with the Comanche chiefs who visited trade fairs at the Pueblo towns. By the time he left office, he had made peace with the Utes, Navajos, and Apaches as well. He left his successor advice on how to preserve that peace with the tribes, especially the Comanches, and why it was necessary to do so. Spain had been too quick to respond with force and had alienated Indians whose friendship might have been secured by trade and diplomacy, he said. “There is not a nation among the numerous ones which live around this government in which a kind word does not have more effect than the execution of the sword.”8 The peace did not hold, and when Vélez Cachupín became governor a second time in 1762 he found the Comanches on the brink of war with New Mexico. Quickly following his own advice, he dispatched six captive Comanche women as emissaries, inviting the Comanches to Santa Fe for peace talks. A month later a Comanche delegation rode in, armed with French guns and ammunition. Vélez Cachupín reestablished peace with them and sent them away well fed and loaded with presents and bundles of tobacco “so that, in the councils of their chiefs, principal men, and elders, they might
smoke and consider well their resolution in regard to my purposes.”9
Despite Vélez Cachupín’s advice and efforts, Spanish-Comanche relations continued to be marred by hostilities. In 1779, Governor Juan Bautista de Anza defeated and killed the Comanche chief Cuerno Verde (Green Horn). Realizing that the years of fighting could have been avoided if Spain had always treated the Comanches “with gentleness and justice,” Anza quickly moved to restore peace.10 Following Native diplomatic protocols that involved exchanging gifts and sending Comanche women as mediators, Spaniards and Comanches made peace in Texas in 1785 and in New Mexico early the next year at Santa Fe.11 The Utes, alarmed at the prospect of peace between their Spanish allies and the Comanches, sent delegates to Santa Fe to observe the Comanche-Spanish peace and then made peace themselves with the Comanches. After the requisite pipe ceremonialism, gifts of horses, and probably an exchange of captives, the Utes and Comanches became reconciled after more than a quarter century of conflict and concluded a peace agreement in February 1786, sanctifying the pact “according to their manner, their chiefs and the individuals mutually exchanging clothes in the presence of the governor.”12
Horses that transformed the balance of powers on the southern Plains spread northward, following and expanding networks of exchange, kinship, and alliance. Apaches traded horses to Pueblos; Kiowas and Kiowa-Apaches traded them to Caddos; Wichitas and Pawnees traded them to Osages; Comanches and Utes traded them to Shoshonis. Shoshonis, Flatheads, and Nez Perces traded them to Crows and to Blackfeet. Blackfeet traded them to Assiniboines. Crows, Kiowas, Arapahos, Cheyennes, and others brought horses to the villages of the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras. The Lakotas, the western Sioux, obtained horses at the Arikara villages and traded them to their eastern Yankton and Dakota relatives. Indian hunters living on the Plains who for years had traveled to the Missouri River trading centers to exchange meat and leather for corn, tobacco, and other crops grown there now went to obtain manufactured goods and guns as well. Bands of Crows and Cheyennes brought horses and meat to the villages, traded for guns and goods, and then headed back to the Plains where they traded those guns and goods to more distant neighbors. Crow traders often traveled to a rendezvous with the Shoshonis in southwestern Wyoming; the Shoshonis in turn traded with the Nez Perces, Flatheads, and other groups in the mountains. Many of those groups were in contact in turn with Native traders at the Dalles, the great salmon fishing site on the Columbia River. The Native traders also connected with European and American maritime traders on the Pacific Coast. When Indian peoples traded, they smoked, made or renewed alliances, and intermarried. The huge web of trading networks that spanned the West was held together by ritual, kinship, and sacred pledges as well as by shared economic needs and opportunities.
Lewis and Clark traveled across parts of this web, but they could neither see its full extent nor fully appreciate how it was built. They were rather like the blind man feeling the elephant. Leaving St. Louis in June 1804 and heading up the Missouri River, they had to learn to navigate the turbulent waters of inter- and intratribal politics. They tested their Indian diplomacy among the Otos, Omahas, and Missouris, once-powerful tribes badly reduced by disease. Meeting and smoking in council after council, the American captains announced the new era of peace and prosperity that would surely come to the Indians now that their land “belonged” to the Great Father in Washington. They gave gifts, flags, and medals to Indian chiefs, sometimes distinguishing between chiefs of different rank by giving medals of different grade.13 Lewis and Clark understood that giving tobacco served “as a calling card for Europeans and Americans seeking entrée into Indian societies,” and they dispensed twists of tobacco and other gifts among the tribes they met. But their reluctance to give gifts to the Brulé Sioux almost caused them to come to blows.14
The Sioux bands on the Missouri were accustomed to levying tribute from St. Louis traders and were not about to allow the American strangers to pass upriver to other tribes without exacting a share of their cargo. Clark called them “the pirates of the Missouri.” Determined to show that the United States would not be bullied, the Americans refused to concede. There was a tense scene in which each side stood to arms. “I felt my Self warm & Spoke in verry [sic] positive terms,” wrote Lewis with characteristic understatement. Only the presence of Indian women and children and a measured conciliation on the part of the Brulé chief Black Buffalo averted conflict. The Americans tossed the Indians some tobacco as a token tribute and Black Buffalo allowed them to proceed. It was touch-and-go. The Brulés followed the Americans for a while and offered them women, which Lewis and Clark rejected (or at least they said they did in their journals), interpreting the offer as evidence of immorality rather than an effort to establish relations of peace and trust.15 The first serious test of American diplomacy in the West initiated a pattern of hostility between the Sioux and the United States that would endure through the century.
For Lewis and Clark flags symbolized Indian loyalty and recognition of US sovereignty. But when they gave a Brulé chief a flag he displayed it alongside two Spanish flags. He was either building multiple alliances or just collecting flags. Clearly, the flags meant something different to Indians. Farther upriver at the Mandan villages, Lewis and Clark found that traders from Canada had given the Indians British medals and flags. They protested to the traders and told the chiefs “to impress it on the minds of their nations that those Simbells were not to be recved by any from them, without they wished incur the displeasure of their Great American Father.”16 Jean Baptiste Truteau, a St. Louis fur trader who presented Spanish medals, flags, and commissions to Arikara and Cheyenne chiefs in the 1790s, noted that the Indians carefully preserved these objects in wrapping and when they took them out “smoked” them, smudging them with burning sweetgrass.17
Lewis and Clark participated in the smoking rituals of the peoples they met, recognized how important pipe rituals were in establishing friendship, and incorporated the rituals into their own diplomatic repertoire. When they met Shoshonis in the foothills of the Rockies in the summer of 1805, Lewis “had the pipe lit and gave them smoke; they seated themselves in a circle around us and pulled off their mockersons before they would receive or smoke the pipe. This is a custom among them as I afterwards learned indicative of a sacred obligation of sincerity in their profession of friendship given by the act of receiving and smoking the pipe of a stranger.” Lewis and Clark became “fluent in the language of the pipe.” They brought back from their journey more pipes than any other category of object, not because they “collected” them but because Native people had given them the pipes as powerful diplomatic gifts in order to establish formal relations between the Indian nations and the United States.18
The language of pipes was especially important where the language of humans failed, which it often did as the Americans made their way through various language groups. In western Montana, for instance, Lewis and Clark attempted to open relations between the United States and the Flathead or Salish Indians. The captains gave their speech in English; one of their men translated it into French; the expedition’s interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau translated it into Hidatsa; his Shoshoni wife, Sakakawea, who had lived among the Hidatsa, translated it into Shoshoni; and finally a Shoshoni boy who was living with the Flatheads translated it into Salish.19
On their return home, a Mandan Indian chief named Sheheke accompanied Lewis and Clark as an ambassador to the nation’s capital, embarking on his own voyage of discovery.20 Throughout the rest of the century the federal government followed European precedents and brought Indian delegations from the West to Washington, D.C. The Indian delegates usually received a tour of the sights and military installations, were outfitted with suits of clothing, and also sat for portraits or, later, had their photographs taken. Sometimes they negotiated treaties in Washington with the commissioner of Indian affairs. Sometimes, like Sheheke, they met the president.21
The Indian diplomacy of Lewis and Clark did not en
d with their expedition. Jefferson appointed Lewis as territorial governor of upper Louisiana, and he appointed Clark as the principal Indian agent for the tribes west of the Mississippi, except for the Osages, where Pierre Chouteau served as agent. Clark drew up his first formal Indian treaty in September 1808 with the Osages. Perhaps anxious to impress the government in his new position, he coerced Osage chiefs to sign a treaty that ceded fifty thousand square miles of land (about half of present-day Missouri and Arkansas). Governor Lewis tweaked the treaty and had Choteau present it to the Osages for approval, repeating Clark’s thinly veiled threats that they must sign it if they wished to remain at peace with the United States and continue to receive American trade. In later years Clark reflected that the Osage treaty “was the hardest treaty on the Indians he ever made and that if he was to be damned hereafter it would be for making that treaty.”22
Lewis was highly strung, driven, and subject to fits of depression that worried his few friends. In 1809 he committed suicide. Clark was easygoing, dependable, pragmatic, and levelheaded. In 1813, Madison appointed him as the governor of Missouri Territory. In addition to his former duties as Indian agent, Clark was now responsible for all tribes in the Louisiana Purchase north of the state of Louisiana. American treaty commissioners in the upper Mississippi region after the War of 1812 were primarily concerned with establishing peace with tribes who had been allied to the British, regulating Indian trade, and extending American sovereignty, rather than obtaining land cessions. Clark served as commissioner for twenty-five treaties during his tenure as governor, many of them signed at the great treaty council held at Portage des Sioux near the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi, and Illinois rivers in 1815.
Pen and Ink Witchcraft Page 25