Pen and Ink Witchcraft

by Calloway, Colin G.

  The architects of US Indian policy always assumed that, faced with starvation, Indians would give up their hunting culture and settle down to become farmers. But one Yamparika Comanche chief named Tananaica (Hears the Sunrise, or Voice of the Sunrise) spoke for many of his people when, in a council held with American agents in 1872, he proclaimed in a booming voice that he would rather stay out on the prairie and eat dung than come in and be penned up in a reservation.122 Rather than succumb to the government’s starvation policies, the Indians struck back against the men who were slaughtering their food source.123

  The Red River War, or Buffalo War as it was sometimes called, produced atrocities on both sides, but the attack by Cheyenne Dog Soldiers on the family of John and Lydia German in western Kansas in September 1874 and the lurid reports it generated of murder, mutilation, and gang rape fueled demands for rapid retribution.124 The same year Colonel Ranald Mackenzie attacked a large village of Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes encamped at Palo Duro Canyon. Few Indians died but Mackenzie destroyed their lodges and food supplies and slaughtered more than one thousand ponies. With winter approaching, other army columns pressing them hard, and the once-vast buffalo herds dwindling to near extinction, southern Plains warriors began to straggle in to Fort Sill. Grey Beard, one of the Dog Soldiers who had refused to sign the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, was one of the last Cheyenne chiefs to surrender.125 Leaders like Woman’s Heart and White Horse were placed in cells. More than one hundred other warriors were confined under guard in an unfinished ice house; once a day soldiers tossed chunks of raw meat over the walls. “They fed us like we were lions,” recalled one Kiowa.126

  Satanta was inevitably assumed to be in the thick of the trouble, even though the evidence for his involvement was shaky at best. In late 1874 he was sent back to prison, this time for life. On October 10, 1878, in his sixties and growing feeble, Satanta asked if there was any chance of his being released. He was told there was none. “I cannot wither and die like a dog in chains,” he said. The next day he slashed several arteries. Taken to the prison hospital, he jumped from the second-floor landing and died. He left two daughters and two sons. One of his sons enlisted in Troop L, the all-Indian troop of the Seventh Cavalry organized at Fort Sill in 1892; another attended boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Big Tree, who was not sent back to prison with Satanta, converted to Christianity in his forties and became a deacon and Sunday school teacher in a Baptist church.127

  Other warriors who fought in the Red River War were arrested for murder. Frontier feeling against the Indians was so intense that they had no chance of a fair trial. “It was therefore concluded,” recounted Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, “best to punish the most notorious of the recent offenders by arbitrarily sending all of them to some remote eastern fort to be held indefinitely as prisoners of war.” Pratt, who as an officer in the Tenth Cavalry had led African American “buffalo soldiers” and Indian scouts in the war, was now assigned to be the jailor. Seventy-two prisoners—thirty-two Cheyenne men and one Cheyenne woman, twenty-seven Kiowas, nine Comanches, two Arapahos, and one Caddo—were selected, shackled, and sent to Fort Sill, loaded on trains bound for Fort Leavenworth, and finally shipped to Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida.128 Kicking Bird assisted the government in selecting those Kiowas to be exiled. Soon after he was assassinated by poison, although some Kiowas attributed his death to the prayers of Maman-ti, or Touching the Sky, also known as Dohate, the Owl Prophet, who was reputed to have led the wagon raid in 1871 and had great power.129 Kicking Bird was given a Christian burial.

  Among the prisoners, Heap of Birds had signed the Treaty of Medicine Lodge for the Cheyennes; Mayetin, or Woman’s Heart, now an old chief, had signed for the Kiowas. Grey Beard, who refused to sign, attempted suicide while he was in prison in Fort Leavenworth and never made it to Florida. Pratt, who accompanied the Indians on their cross-country journey, encountered him on the train:

  Going through the cars with my oldest daughter, then six years of age, I stopped to talk with Grey Beard. He said he had only one child and that was a little girl just about my daughter’s age. He asked me how I would like to have chains on my legs as he had and to be taken a long distance from my home, my wife, and little girl, as he was, and his voice trembled with deepest emotion. It was a hard question.

  As the train neared the Georgia-Florida state line, Grey Beard jumped from a window at night and was shot trying to escape. Before he died, he said “he had wanted to die ever since being chained and taken from home.” Another Cheyenne, Lean Bear, stabbed himself several times in the neck and chest on the journey and starved himself to death at Fort Marion.130 Woman’s Heart was reputed to be one of the most notorious Kiowa raiders but Pratt said he was “especially noted for the strength of his family affection.” In prison in Florida he suffered from homesickness and wore the little moccasin of one of his children around his neck.131 Maman-ti, who was said to have predicted his own death for using his power to kill Kicking Bird, died of tuberculosis at Fort Marion in July 1875.132

  At Fort Marion, Pratt subjected his Indian prisoners to an immersion program that he later incorporated into the Indian Industrial School he opened in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and that became the core of federal assimilation policy for thousands of Indian children for more than half a century. Freed of their shackles, the prisoners were stripped of their clothing and had their hair cut short. Pratt gave them military uniforms, organized their daily lives according to a strict military regimen, and taught them reading, writing, Christianity, and American values. Some of the Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne men, bored and restless in confinement and with access to paper and drawing materials, depicted new sights and experiences in Florida as well as old scenes of fighting and hunting on the Plains. Some of the artists sold their drawings to tourists; some continued to draw after their release. Howling Wolf, one of the most prominent of the Fort Marion artists, made a drawing of the Medicine Lodge treaty council (figure 6.6); as a young unmarried man he would have been living in Black Kettle’s village at the time.133

  Woman’s Heart was one of the first prisoners to return home. In the spring of 1877 he was allowed to accompany an old and ailing Kiowa named Coming to the Grove on his trip out of exile. Back on the reservation, Woman’s Heart lobbied for the release of the other prisoners. He also urged his people to follow the new road, settle down, and attend church, although when Pratt’s son visited him in 1882 just before he died, the old man looked like “a regular Indian” and had “turned against the agency.”134 The Fort Marion prisoners who returned home faced dark days and hard times. Kiowa calendars recorded the summer of 1879 as the “horse-eating sun dance”: with the buffalo gone and government rations woefully inadequate, the people had to kill and eat their own horses.135 Lone Wolf died of malaria in 1879 shortly after being allowed to return home. Before he died, he passed his name, together with his shield and his medicine, to his adopted son, Mamaydayte.136 Lone Wolf “junior” carried the story of Medicine Lodge into the twentieth century.

  In 1917 the citizens of the town of Medicine Lodge initiated efforts to commemorate the treaty that occurred fifty years before. World War I delayed things and it was another ten years before the town first marked the event with a historical pageant. I-See-O, a Kiowa who had attended the treaty as a young boy and later served as a sergeant in the US army, identified the site and the pageant was staged in a natural amphitheater designated as the Memorial Peace Park. Every five years until the 1960s, and since then every three years, citizens of Medicine Lodge and its vicinity and members of the tribes who attended the treaty council participate in a pageant billed as a commemoration of “the great Peace Council of 1867 between the US government and the proud civilization of the Plains Indians.” In fact, the Medicine Lodge treaty reenactment “compresses 300 years of history into two hours of entertainment and education.” Visitors watch history unfold as Coronado, Lewis and Clark, and other historical actors “come alive on the prairie” and Me
dicine Lodge “transforms into a frontier town,” complete with parades and a reenactment of a bank robbery.137 As the French historian Ernest Renan said, “forgetting … is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”138

  { Conclusion }

  THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF INDIAN TREATIES

  After the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, the Peace Commissioners returned to St. Louis, and they then headed north again to resume talks with the Sioux. They made a treaty with the Crows in November and had talks with the Brulé chief, Spotted Tail, but full peace with the Sioux had to be delayed until the following spring. In December 1867 the commission convened in Washington, and in January the commissioners submitted a report to the president. In the spring they (minus Senator Henderson who remained in Washington for President Johnson’s impeachment trial) returned to Fort Laramie for another round of treaty negotiations. There, Harney, Sanborn, Tappan, Terry, and Augur negotiated a treaty with the several bands of Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, and Arapahos, bringing an end to the war that the Oglala chief Red Cloud and his allies had waged to close the Bozeman Trail. The Treaty at Fort Laramie contained many of the same provisions as the treaty made at Medicine Lodge. The Indians agreed to permit the building of railroads, move on to a reservation, settle down, farm, and send their children to school. The government allowed them to continue hunting buffalo in certain territory so long as there were sufficient buffalo “to justify the chase”; promised to feed, clothe, and educate them; and guaranteed that no additional lands would be taken without consent of three-quarters of the adult male population. The Laramie treaty set aside most of what is now South Dakota as “the Great Sioux Reservation” and guaranteed the Sioux possession of the Black Hills, the sacred center of their world.1

  Over a six-month period, 159 chiefs from ten Sioux bands “touched the pen” to the treaty. The commissioners left in May without meeting Red Cloud. Only after the forts on the Bozeman Trail were abandoned and burned did Red Cloud ride into Fort Laramie and sign the treaty with the post commander in November. Red Cloud later denied agreeing to the terms the commissioners recorded in the official document and said he had signed his name merely to make peace. In a speech to the Cooper Union in New York two years later, he said, “In 1868, men came out and brought papers. We could not read them and they did not tell us truly what was in them. We thought the treaty was to remove the forts and for us to cease from fighting.” As the historian Jeffrey Ostler notes, the terms of the treaty “were complicated and ambiguous to begin with and the commissioners did a poor job of explaining them. In fact, the record strongly indicates that the commissioners generally avoided saying things that might raise Lakota suspicions and deter them from signing.”2 The Bozeman Trail had been the sticking point in the negotiations but in 1868 the railroad moved beyond the contested area, opening up a better access route to Montana. The Bozeman Trail was no longer worth fighting for. “It was the single episode in United States history where an Indian treaty was signed on Indian terms, but in truth it was not much of a victory. It was simply that the railroad made the battle obsolete.”3 Nevertheless, having signed the treaty, Red Cloud kept the peace. The United States did not.

  While Harney, Sanborn, and Terry remained, collecting signatures from various Sioux bands, Sherman and Tappan headed south to make a treaty in June with the Navajos. After four years’ incarceration at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, an expensive failure the government was ready to terminate, the Navajos were allowed to return to their homeland in Arizona and were provided with livestock to rebuild their pastoral economy. The Navajos agreed to send their children to American schools and to permit railroad construction through their territory.4 Sherman and Tappan rejoined the other members of the commission in time to make a treaty with the Bannocks and Shoshonis at Fort Bridger in western Wyoming a month later.5

  In August, Commissioner Taylor signed the last formal Indian treaty ratified by the US Senate. In 1863 the Nez Perce chief Lawyer, who had been so quick to approve the Treaty of Walla Walla with Isaac Stevens in 1855, and fifty-one other chiefs signed another treaty in the Lapwai Valley. Lawyer began the negotiations by reading aloud some of Stevens’s statements, which the chief had written down word for word in a small pocket notebook, but he then ceded almost 90 percent of the reservation lands established by the Walla Walla treaty, almost seven million acres for about 8 cents an acre. Most of the ceded land belonged to other Nez Perce bands. Dealing with compliant chiefs had long been standard practice in American Indian diplomacy. Lawyer viewed himself as head chief and the government chose to deal with him as such and to regard the treaty as binding on all Nez Perces. Now, in 1868, Lawyer and three chiefs (one of whom died) traveled to Washington, D.C., and signed another treaty making “certain amendments” to the 1863 treaty. Other Nez Perces who were not present at what Yellow Wolf called the “lie-talk council” in 1863 refused to be bound by the “land-stealing treaty.” “It was these Christian Nez Perces who made with the Government a thief treaty,” said Yellow Wolf, and “sold what did not belong to them.” Confronted with American assertions that his people had sold their coveted Wallowa Valley homeland and that they must move to the new reservation, Chief Joseph, leader of one of the “nontreaty bands,” later responded:

  Suppose a white man should come to me and say, “Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.” I say to him, “No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.” Then he goes to my neighbor, and says to him: “Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.” My neighbor answers, “Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.” The white man returns to me and says, “Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.” If we sold our lands to the Government, this is the way they were bought.”6

  Joseph would have understood the kind of horse-trading that had gone on at Fort Stanwix in 1768, New Echota in 1835, and scores of other locations. It was, in many ways, a fitting final comment on the treaty making that had transferred so many Indian homelands into American hands. The Nez Perces, who had befriended Lewis and Clark in 1805, had asked for Christianity in 1831, and had held steadfastly to peace, were soon at war with the United States. In the last great Indian war, eight hundred Nez Perce people and their livestock tried to escape to Canada in an epic and ultimately tragic 1,500-mile odyssey.7 For ninety years US Indian policy had seen the treaty system as a “fair and honorable” way to acquire the continent from its original inhabitants but it had been reduced, finally, to American armies harrying hungry women, children, and old people through the snow and rounding them up for exile to Indian Territory.

  By then the treaty system was dead. The Medicine Lodge and Fort Laramie treaties helped to kill it. The signs were there even before the Peace Commission disbanded, even before the first signatures on the Medicine Lodge treaty were dry. Senator E. G. Ross of Kansas fired off a letter to the Lawrence Tribune as soon as he returned from the Medicine Lodge treaty grounds. Briefly reviewing the terms of the treaty, he urged congressional delegates throughout the West to get behind the movement “for the speedy abandonment of the present absurd Indian treaty policy” and to incorporate the Indians into American society, subject to US laws. “Our own self-respect forbids that we should continue to recognize a few squalid nomads as independent nations, and the sooner the Government places them in their proper relation to itself and the community, the better it will be for all concerned.” Doing so would require patience and careful consideration, Ross allowed: “The treaty system was adopted when the Indians were the stronger party, and having grown into a settled feature of our Indian jurisprudence, it cannot be hastily abandoned without encountering grave legal obstacles.” Nevertheless, “the idea of a nation of thirty millions of people constantly warring with, or suffering itself to be constantly harassed by a handful of miserable savages, is even more discreditable than that of continuing the petty, mock sovereignties into which they are divided. We can never have permanent peace so long as their present ab
surd status is continued.”8

  In October 1868 the members of the Peace Commission assembled for a two-day meeting at Tremont House in Chicago. The Republican nominee for president, Ulysses S. Grant, attended as an observer. Senator Henderson was still absent on impeachment business. After their long travels, hard work, and frequent frustrations, the commissioners were tired and testy. It was clear they had not brought peace to the Plains—the Treaty of Medicine Lodge was already a shambles and Red Cloud had yet to sign the Treaty of Fort Laramie. It was a time for review and rethinking. The commission generals—Sherman, Terry, Harney, and Augur—pushed their agenda over the opposition of Taylor and Tappan. General Terry proposed recommending to Congress that the Bureau of Indian Affairs be transferred back to the War Department. The army blamed civilian control for the inefficiency and corruption that plagued the system, produced hunger and suffering on the reservations, and drove Indians to war. Military control would instill more professionalism and humanity in the conduct of Indian affairs. Terry’s resolution prompted lengthy debate. Commissioner Taylor objected that such a move and placing troops in Indian country would promote war, not peace, and that the record of wars against the Indians showed that the costs and losses incurred by military action were huge, relative to the few Indians killed—unless, of course, Indians were surprised, surrounded, and butchered in large numbers as at Sand Creek. “As a rule, with rare exceptions, if any, Indian tribes never break the peace without powerful provocation or actual wrong perpetrated against them first,” he said. “Respect their wishes, fulfill our treaty stipulations promptly and faithfully, keep them well fed, and there will be no need of armies among them. But violate our pledges; postpone, neglect, or refuse the fulfillment of our treaty engagements with them; permit them to get hungry and half starved, and the presence of armies will not restrain them from war.”9