Pen and Ink Witchcraft

by Calloway, Colin G.

  We know you will not forsake us, and tell your people also to act as you have done, to be as you have been.

  I am old, but still am chief. I shall have soon to go the way of my fathers, but those who come after me will remember this day. It is now treasured up by the old, and will be carried by them to the grave, and then handed down to be kept as a sacred tradition by their children and their children’s children. And now the time has come that I must go. Good-bye!

  You may never see me more, but remember Satank as the white man’s friend.

  The old man passed down the line shaking hands with each of the commissioners, then mounted his pony and rode away. The correspondents and commissioners were moved by his words. Reporter H. J. Budd, who rarely had much good to say about Indians, wrote that he had heard plenty of oratory in Congress and in church “But never have I known true eloquence before this day.” Stanley said it was the best speech they heard at Medicine Lodge, equal to any by Red Jacket or Logan, and that there was “a good deal of truth in it which strikes home.” Satank closed the Kiowa treaty on a note of good feelings and hope for the future.69

  Neither lasted long. Like the commissioners’ talks, Satank’s talk contained some wishful thinking and some half truths as well as hard truths. After Medicine Lodge the United States pressed on destroying the Kiowas’ way of life and Satank and Satanta went back to raiding.

  There could be no peace without the Cheyennes, and although the commissioners and reporters were tired of the endless proceedings and “hankered for the flesh pots of St. Louis” and the joys of city life, they waited. The Cimarron Cheyennes finally showed up on October 27. The news that they were coming spread through the camp “like wildfire.” Led by the renowned Dog Soldiers (“modern Spartans, who knew how to die but not to be led captive,” wrote Stanley), five hundred warriors galloped in, chanting in unison, and firing their pistols in the air—an event that caused considerable alarm in the camp even though Little Robe had given the Peace Commission advance warning. They reined their horses to an abrupt halt right in front of the commissioners, a dramatic grand entry that impressed everyone: “The Wild Chivalry of the Prairie in Force,” said the Chicago Tribune. That evening a Cheyenne woman, who was giving gifts in celebration of the birth of her son, presented a pony to General Harney.70

  The next day Henderson began the proceedings by explaining to the Cheyennes gathered in a semicircle before him that the Great Father had sent the commissioners to make peace. Bad men on both sides had caused bloodshed but, said the senator, “the world is big enough for both of us.” He then offered the Cheyennes the same treaty the Kiowas and Comanches had agreed to: they must stop attacking railroads and settlers and settle on a reservation of their own. The government would provide the implements and livestock they needed to become farmers: “In lieu of the buffalo you must have herds of oxen and flocks of sheep and droves of hogs, like the white man.” Nevertheless, so long as there were sufficient buffalo, the Cheyennes could continue to hunt south of the Arkansas River, in accordance with the terms of the Little Arkansas treaty.71

  When Henderson had finished, the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs smoked and passed the pipe. Then Little Robe invited Little Raven to speak first, for the Arapahos. Somewhat surprised, Little Raven, who only a few days before had wanted a separate treaty and did not get it, now expressed his undying love for his Cheyenne friends. “The Cheyennes are like my own flesh and blood,” he said, “and what they do, I am concerned in it.” He said he was pleased with the idea of a reservation now that the buffalo were disappearing and hoped that whites would not encroach on it. If the whites were kept away, he promised not to interfere with the railroads. “As for myself, and men aged like me, we will be dead before the farms get to be productive, but those who come after us will enjoy them and have the benefit.” He repeated his request for a separate Arapaho reservation: “This country here don’t belong to me. It belongs to the Kiowas, Comanches, and Cheyennes. That country in Colorado belongs to me and I want to go there. I do not want to be mixed up with the other Indians.” He asked when the annuities would be delivered, hoped the commissioners would keep their promises, and requested that honest traders be appointed. However, the Arapahos did not get their Colorado reservation.72

  Buffalo Chief spoke for the Cheyennes. Did the whites really want peace? Henderson assured him they did. Then the Cheyennes would not molest the railroads and travelers, Buffalo Chief said. But they did not want houses or to be treated as orphans: “You think that you are doing a great deal for us by giving these presents to us, but we prefer to live as formerly. If you gave us all the goods you could give, yet we would prefer our own life. You give us presents, and then take our land; that produces war.” In short, they just wanted to be left alone to live their own way of life as long as they could. When they chose to live like whites they would ask for advice; until then they would take their chances. The Cheyennes never claimed any land south of the Arkansas, said Buffalo Chief, “but that country between the Arkansas and the South Platte is ours.” Almost at the end of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, notes Douglas Jones, Buffalo Chief touched “the raw nerve that everyone had been afraid would be touched.” The territory he referred to was a vast expanse of territory embracing western Kansas and part of eastern Colorado. The Cheyennes and the Kiowas and Comanches had contested it and then shared it but the United States now wanted it cleared of Indians to make way for settlers and railroads. The Cheyenne land claim could wreck the whole treaty.73

  Little Raven stood up again and said that the Arapahos wanted Mrs. Adams as their regular interpreter and wanted an honest trader on their reservation, but the commissioners were too busy worrying about how to deal with Buffalo Chief’s bombshell to pay him much heed. They didn’t pay much more attention when a Cheyenne Dog Soldier named Little Man launched into a tirade against the Kiowas and Comanches.74

  For a moment, it looked as if the commissioners might have to adjourn the meeting and draw up a new treaty: clearly the Cheyennes would not agree to the one they had prepared. But Henderson was determined to get the treaty signed that day. Huddling with Buffalo Chief and several Dog Soldier chiefs at a distance from the council, with George Bent and John Smith interpreting and mediating, the senator hammered out a quick fix. He “explained to the Indians the obnoxious treaty clause” and that they did not have to go onto the reservation immediately. Henderson assured them that they could have hunting rights north of the Arkansas as far as the South Platte as long as there were buffalo and so long as they adhered to the terms of the Little Arkansas treaty and kept ten miles away from travel routes and white settlements. Henderson knew that, at the rate Americans were settling Kansas, the Cheyennes’ hunting would soon be severely restricted and the buffalo herds would not last long. But the Cheyennes bought his verbal promise and signed the treaty as it was written. Bull Bear (the head chief of the Dog Soldiers), White Horse, and Little Robe at first balked at touching the pen. (Indian leaders frequently objected to “touching the pen”: they were suspicious of it, thought it unnecessary, and did not always realize that affixing their names to the treaty signified their approval of everything in it, not just to the things they themselves had said.75) “By dint of infinite coaxing,” even the Dog Soldier chiefs were induced to fix their marks, although Bull Bear drove the pen through the paper when he signed. Little Raven led the Arapaho delegates in signing. Some Cheyennes refused to sign. Roman Nose stayed away from the council, and, perhaps most significantly, Medicine Arrows, also called Stone Forehead, the Keeper of the Sacred Arrows, would have nothing to do with the treaty. No provision authorizing the Cheyennes and Arapahos to hunt in the area between the Arkansas and the South Platte appeared in the final treaty ratified by the Senate; like the Kiowas and Comanches, they were permitted to hunt lands only south of the Arkansas.76

  The terms of the Cheyenne treaty were essentially the same as those in the Kiowa and Comanche treaty, with the exception that the Cheyenne reservation was to
be bounded on the north by the southern border of Kansas, on the east by the Arkansas River, and on the south and west by the Cimarron. It is difficult to believe the Cheyennes knew what they were getting into beyond agreeing to let the railroads through to secure peace. Stanley captured the essence of the Cheyenne position. They had been at war all summer and had come to Medicine Lodge at the commissioners’ invitation. “They had been conquerors, and we wished for peace. They did not wish any peace, but, since we asked it they, as brave men, were willing to accord it. As a recompense for this action we might, if we chose, build them schools, but they could not occupy them. They preferred the life they led.”77 As had the Kiowas and Comanches, the Cheyennes signed a treaty containing items they had expressly opposed during the treaty talks. On October 27, their Sacred Arrow ceremonies completed, they had galloped into Medicine Lodge full of power; the next day, they apparently agreed to surrender lands they said they would not give up, agreed to move to a reservation they said they did not want, agreed to have tribal members tried in white courts, agreed to have their children educated in English, and agreed to be trained to live as sedentary farmers. Alfred Barnitz, a captain in the Seventh Cavalry who was present during the negotiations, wrote that the Cheyennes “have no idea that they are giving up, or that they have ever given up the country which they claim as their own, the country north of the Arkansas. The treaty all amounts to nothing, and we will have another war sooner or later with the Cheyennes, at least, and probably with the other Indians, in consequence of misunderstanding of the terms of present and previous treaties.”78 George Bent later wrote that Medicine Lodge was “the most important treaty ever signed by the Cheyenne” in that it “marked the beginning of the end” for them as free and independent warriors and hunters.79

  The Peace Commission had been at Medicine Lodge more than two weeks. Eager to get back to St. Louis now that the treaty was signed, the commissioners had the treaty presents delivered promptly to the Cheyennes and Arapahos. The Arapahos held a dance for the commissioners that night, in another rainstorm, and the next morning the great council at Medicine Lodge broke up. The commissioners headed back east to St. Louis where they met and briefed General Sherman.80 Reaching St. Louis after a seventy-five-hour journey, Taylor telegraphed the secretary of the interior with the good news: “Please congratulate the President and the country upon the entire success of the Indian Peace Commission thus far.” Treaties of peace had been concluded with the five tribes south of the Arkansas and “everything passed off satisfactorily.” The commission now turned its attention to the northern tribes.81

  Henry Stanley agreed. When the Peace Commission began its work, war raged all across the Plains, he wrote. The commission met thousands of Indians in council “and turned their thoughts and feelings from war to peace.” “Peace has been concluded with all the Southern tribes,” declared Stanley. “Civilization is now on the move, and westward the Star of Empire will again resume its march, unimpeded in the great work of Progress.”82 After Medicine Lodge, Stanley’s newspaper career took a decided upward swing when he joined America’s most famous newspaper, the New York Herald. The Herald’s editor dispatched him on an expedition to “Darkest Africa” to find the famous missionary Henry Livingstone. Stanley’s success, and his greeting—“Doctor Livingstone, I presume”—won him world renown, and even a small measure of immortality. The first European to travel the full length of the Congo River, the illegitimate boy from the workhouse became one of the most famous, and controversial, British explorers of the Victorian era.83

  Others who attended the treaty were not so fortunate. The commissioners had handed out peace medals to Satanta, Satank, Kicking Bird, and Black Eagle of the Kiowas, and to Tall Bull, Bull Bear, Little Robe, and the son of a former head chief of the Cheyennes.84 The chiefs would not have much peace.

  Medicine Lodge was the last great treaty council held on the southern Plains and it was one of the very last treaties. The Great Peace Commission was a product of dissatisfaction and demand for change in Indian affairs but it failed to satisfy the dissatisfied or to effect the necessary changes. The commission was intended to bring peace to the Plains but it brought only an appearance of peace. In order to get the Indians to agree to the terms of the treaty, the commissioners had promised them they would be able to continue the very way of life the treaty was designed to terminate. They had persuaded the chiefs to touch the pen to documents the Senate could accept as valid treaties and which “gave the stamp of legitimacy to United States efforts to concentrate the Indians and open the region to white exploitation.” The Indians at Medicine Lodge accepted the peace treaty but rejected the new way of life that came with it, making conflict inevitable with the Americans who invaded their hunting lands.85 Back in the summer General Sherman was quoted as saying that the mission of the Peace Commission was “a humbug” and that it would achieve nothing. He now ordered that hostilities cease with the tribes who had signed the Medicine Lodge treaty and that their rights to hunt south of the South Platte be respected. Sherman’s goal was to clear the Natives out of the territory between the Platte and the Arkansas and he believed “it makes little difference whether they be coaxed out by Indian commissioners or killed.” He now informed General Ulysses Grant that “the chief use of the Peace Commission is to kill time which will do more to settle the Indians than anything we can do.”86 The flawed peace cobbled together at Medicine Lodge quickly unraveled as American expansion drove the pace of events even faster than the commissioners’ cynical schedule anticipated. As Douglas Jones points out, “October 28, 1867, was the last time the representatives of the United States ever sat at a treaty table with any of the Southern Plains tribes. The next time red and white diplomats met, terms were not offered, they were dictated.”87 Less than four years after Medicine Lodge the treaty system itself was terminated.

  The Many Deaths of Medicine Lodge

  Press reports of the Medicine Lodge council had been appearing in newspapers while it was going on. Once the treaty was over, the commissioners prepared an official report.88 The press reports and the official report show essential agreement but, even before the official report was written, Major Joel Elliott, commander of the cavalry escort at Medicine Lodge and commander of the Seventh Cavalry during Custer’s fifteen-month suspension, was criticizing the Peace Commission and advocating tougher measures in fighting Indians. He filed his own dissenting report and sent it to General Sherman. Elliott claimed the treaties were never interpreted to the Indians, charged the commissioners with pandering to the Indians, and complained that the negotiations “were conducted in such a manner that anyone unacquainted with the relative strengths of the two contracting parties would have imagined the Indians to have been the stronger and we the suppliants.”89

  Enoch Hoag, Indian superintendent for the central region, tried to see things from the Indians’ perspective. They had relinquished “a domain large enough for an empire, comprising some 400,000 square miles, with the agreement to abandon their accustomed chase, and move to a diminished and restricted reservation in the Indian territory, and enter upon the new and untried duties of civilized life, with the assurance on the part of our government of protection in all their rights”90 (see figure 6.9). But Congress was busy impeaching President Andrew Johnson and did not ratify the Medicine Lodge treaty until July 1868. The required appropriations were not included in that year’s budget, no annuities were paid, the reservations were not established on time, and the promised rations were not delivered on schedule.91 Congressmen argued at length about whether appropriations were pledges honoring treaties and payments for Indian lands or “handouts to a broken people” that constituted an endless drain on the Treasury. Corruption, notorious within the Indian department, further reduced the quantity and quality of the goods designated for Indians. General Sherman used the rations of food and clothing as an inducement to attract Indians to the reservations but things were in short supply. Withholding rations from people whose economies
were being destroyed—in essence, keeping them on the edge of starvation—was a powerful instrument of colonial control, calculated to render formerly independent people entirely dependent on the government and its agents, but the policy pushed young men off the reservations and back into the kind of activities the government was trying to suppress. Indians complained that their families were going hungry waiting for the government to honor its pledges and some went back to raiding. At the same time, the government failed to honor its treaty commitments to keep predatory whites out of the reservations, and horse thieves preyed on the Indians’ herds.92

  Jesse Leavenworth took charge of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache reservation and the Kiowas settled in the Eureka Valley near their agency at Fort Cobb on the northern edge of the reservation. But they protested that the government had “no right to pen them up on this small tract of land, only about one hundred miles square, and then give half their rations of provisions in corn, feeding them as the white people do their horses and mules.” The cornmeal often arrived damaged and caused diarrhea if they ate it—sometimes they did not even take the corn from the commissary, “thinking it not worth carrying home.” The Comanche chief Silver Brooch said his people were supposed to receive coffee, sugar, flour, seeds, and farm implements but their agent gave them nothing but cornmeal. Silver Brooch also asked where was the house he was promised? Kiowa men ranged west into the Texas Panhandle looking for buffalo, raided Wichita and Caddo villages for food and horses, and raided into Texas for horses and mules. The interpreter Philip McCusker intercepted one raiding party and asked why they were going to Texas and had so quickly forgotten their talk to the Peace Commission: “they told me that their Agent no longer cared for them, that he had induced them to move down into this country where they had been cheated with false promises and had given their goods and provisions away to other Indians.” The Kiowas and Comanches generally were displeased with Leavenworth and complained that he “always makes away with a large share of their goods.”93