A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  Like the Lakotas, the Cheyennes were recent immigrants to the plains, having lived along the Missouri for many years and in Minnesota long before that. They, too, had followed the buffalo out onto the vast expanses of the plains soon after acquiring horses and guns. Their lands lay between the Platte and Arkansas rivers, all the way to the Rockies. Several large-scale attacks by the U.S. Army had reduced their numbers but hardened their resolve.

  The Cheyennes agreed to a reservation south of the Arkansas River but in the process gave up virtually all the lands recognized as theirs in 1851. Shockingly, only six of the forty-four Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho chiefs took part in the talks. Many of their brethren were furious with them for having “touched the pen” and refused to be bound by the treaty.

  This was not an entirely uncommon phenomenon. The U.S. government never seemed to understand that the “chiefs” who put pen to paper rarely represented their tribes completely, in the way of traditional white representatives. Indians who did not sign a particular treaty felt no compunction to follow the treaty’s dictates, much as the government expected them to. Since the government needed someone to sign each treaty, in some cases government representatives anointed a chief if one did not exist, which usually resulted in tribal strife. And treaty chiefs often misunderstood what they had signed, further complicating compliance. Faulty interpreters also ensured failure.27

  Compounding the U.S. government’s deceitful tactics was the fact that its adherence to the treaties was arbitrary, even when the agreements were changed to the benefit of the whites after the tribal representatives had signed them. Along with the treaties, a system of annuities was developed, guaranteeing regular (usually annual) payments of money, food, and supplies, including arms and ammunition, designed to discourage the buffalo-hunting lifestyle and result in the purchase of additional Indian land over a period of years. Traders and agents hired to control annuity payments were seldom incorrupt. They took advantage of the Indians in many ways, from charging them with made-up debts for extended credit and delivering inferior goods to shorting them during the distribution of supplies — sometimes with the help of equally corrupt chiefs. The fact that these men were appointed by members of Congress initiated a widespread patronage-for-payment arrangement that further ensured an under-the-table and unfair distribution of funds. With regard to the Santee, or Dakota, Sioux, for example, little of the money promised to them by the terms of the 1851 treaty was ever paid. Most of the Plains Indians took poorly to their new farming life, if they took to it at all. The sedentary agricultural life seemed unnatural to them, and to make matters worse, many of the agency lands were not well suited for agriculture. The only alternative to starvation was to leave the reservation to hunt for game, which they did in great numbers.

  Most treaties were violated almost immediately, on both sides. But for the most part, the situation was tolerable, as long as the Indians were powerful enough to respect and major warfare was avoided. Thomas Fitzpatrick, the principled Indian agent, decried the system as “the legalized murder of a whole nation”28 as early as 1853, but it was already too late. The treaties had accomplished their main goals: the seizure of Indian lands under quasi-legal agreements, the avoidance of widespread bloodshed, and the removal of the Indians to modest-size reservations as far away from emigrant routes as possible. Subsequently, via steamboats up the Missouri and other waterways, and railroads and wagons along regular routes and trails across the plains, a never-ending flow of settlers penetrated the land of every tribe in the West.

  ONE SUNDAY in August 1862, in the frontier state of Minnesota, four young Dakota Sioux warriors returning home from a hunting trip worked themselves into a fury in an argument over some hen’s eggs spotted on a white man’s farm. The Dakotas were starving; that year’s annuities were overdue — again — although the agency warehouses were full of food and other supplies. The Dakotas had already suffered through a decade of disruption, having ceded 24 million acres of their ancestral hunting grounds for $1.6 million and the promise of cash annuities. One unsympathetic storekeeper, Andrew Myrick, summarized the feelings of many whites when he advised the Indians to eat grass or their own dung.29

  The warriors shot and killed the farmer, his wife, his daughter, and two neighbors. When they returned to their village and confessed what they had done, the Dakota chiefs decided after a long night’s deliberation to proceed with an all-out, preemptive war and pressured Little Crow, an elderly peace chief — who regularly attended a nearby Episcopal church and wore white men’s clothes — to lead them. A surprise attack on a nearby settlement at dawn the next morning ignited a frenzy of massacres in the area. By the end of the day, four hundred settlers had been brutally murdered. Before the uprising was over, more than eight hundred lay dead. Myrick’s lifeless body was later found outside his store, his bloody mouth stuffed with grass.

  The Minnesota Massacre, as it was called, was the first sign of large-scale, organized resistance to the relentless white incursions into the Indians’ lands and the indignities heaped upon them under the reservation system. State and national authorities responded immediately. General John Pope, in charge of the Department of the Missouri, vowed, “It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. . . . They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts.” (In later years, Pope’s views toward the Indians would soften, but his words were an accurate reflection of the views of most whites along the frontier.) A month later, General Henry Sibley and 1,500 troops defeated the Santees at Wood Lake. The most recalcitrant among the Indians escaped to the west into Dakota Territory and north into Canada, but 2,000 were captured, and 38 of them were hanged the day after Christmas in 1862. (The death toll would have been much higher — 307 had been sentenced to death — had President Abraham Lincoln not intervened and commuted all the sentences except for those of proven rapists and murderers.) In addition, the Dakotas paid for their actions with the loss of their strip of land on the Minnesota River, and they were moved to another reservation farther west, on the Missouri River.

  But the seed had been sown. Sioux resistance spread westward with the fleeing Dakota warriors, and the next few years saw a steady increase in hostilities and depredations throughout the Great Plains. The endless stream of emigrants (300,000 during the Civil War alone)30 up the Missouri River and along the main trails west — the Oregon, Bozeman, Bridger, and Santa Fe — angered the Sioux, who fought back the only way they knew how, with scattered raids throughout the area.

  During the Civil War, army regulars on the frontier were moved to theaters of war back east, and volunteer militia took their place. These westerners were personally motivated to wreak revenge, and at dawn on November 29, 1864, they got their chance. Led by a former Methodist minister, Colonel John M. Chivington, the Third Colorado Cavalry militia regiment surrounded and fell upon peace chief Black Kettle’s sleeping Cheyenne village of about one hundred lodges on Sand Creek, 175 miles southeast of Denver in Colorado Territory. The fanatical Chivington had ordered women and children destroyed — “Nits make lice,” he pointed out — and his seven hundred volunteers enthusiastically obeyed orders, chasing down, killing, and then carving up the Cheyennes, who had believed themselves to be under army protection. By day’s end, some two hundred Indians, most of them women and children, were dead, many of them hideously mutilated. Chivington’s men later marched triumphantly through the streets of Denver, proudly displaying Cheyenne body parts.

  White settlers in the area applauded and made Chivington a hero. Meanwhile, the Indian survivors made their way to other Cheyenne camps, and word of the massacre spread quickly across the plains. Over the next few months, enraged Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors raided towns, stage stations, ranches, and wagon trains, burning, looting, and killing wherever they could. Then, in late winter, they moved north to join their kinsmen in the Powder River country — that area between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains which the Lakota considered theirs, though in fact they had wres
ted it from the Crows only a few decades before.

  The end of the Civil War saw thousands more volunteer troops shifted to the frontier and the debacle known as the Powder River campaign of 1865, a largely fruitless effort to clean out the marauding Indians. That foray into the Sioux homeland by 6,000 soldiers in three columns stirred up the entire Lakota nation for good — particularly a tall, charismatic Oglala chief named Red Cloud, who had earned his reputation by collecting more than eighty coups from the time he was sixteen. (A warrior counted coup when he touched an opponent with his hand or a coup stick. Such bold acts were a measure of one’s bravery and were tallied carefully.)

  Over the next few years, the cunning and unrelenting Red Cloud rained havoc on any whites foolish enough to enter the Powder River country. Through the heart of this country ran the Bozeman Trail, the best route to the Montana gold mines. An attempted parley at Fort Laramie in June 1866 fell flat when the whites’ talk of peace was revealed to be just that — talk. In the middle of the parley, a battalion of regular U.S. Army infantry marched into the post on their way to build more forts on the Bozeman. Red Cloud and almost all the Sioux promptly decided to leave after warning the whites to stay off the trail. Only the Brulé Sioux, led by the opportunistic Spotted Tail, and some minor chiefs signed the treaty, which was good enough for the government — any signature or mark was deemed legally binding. But the document was effectively meaningless, since the signees had no stake in the Powder River lands.

  As the soldiers began building three forts along the Bozeman, they were constantly harassed by Red Cloud’s warriors. In December 1866, a large force of Oglalas, Minneconjous, Cheyennes, Hunkpapas, and even two friendly Crows31 bore down on Fort Phil Kearny. On December 21, they lured William J. Fetterman, a young Captain with little regard for the Indians’ fighting ability, out of the fort with an eighty-man detail made up mostly of raw recruits. The soldiers charged over a long hill in pursuit of a small band of Indians led by an audacious young warrior. At the most opportune moment, the warrior let out a war whoop, and hundreds of braves hidden in the gullies and woods along the trail swarmed upon the stunned bluecoats. In less than an hour, it was all over. Few of the Indians had guns; most of them relied on bows and arrows, lances, stone clubs, and knives, and most of the fighting was at close range. The Sioux lost twelve warriors,32 but Fetterman and every one of his men were killed. Earlier, Fetterman had been heard boasting, “Give me eighty men and I would ride through the whole Sioux nation.”33

  The daring young war chief who led Fetterman to his death was named Crazy Horse. One writer would later call him “the strange man of the Oglalas.” It was an appropriate description, for Crazy Horse went his own way.

  This warrior-mystic was born in the late fall of 1840 near Bear Butte, outside modern-day Sturgis, South Dakota, on the northern edge of the Black Hills.34 His father, also named Crazy Horse, was an Oglala holy man; his mother, Rattle Blanket Woman, a Minneconjou.35 His actual birth name was Light Hair, for his fine, sandy brown locks. His light hair, combined with his light complexion and sharp features, caused more than one settler to mistake him for a white child. An uncle died when the boy was about four, and his mother, grief-stricken, committed suicide. More than most Lakotas, Crazy Horse’s life would be colored by the loss of those close to him.

  When Crazy Horse was a boy, he went by the name of Curly, and he was known for his shy personality. Like all young Lakota males, he was regaled with stories and songs that celebrated the cult of the warrior and progressed from paternal instruction and childhood games that emphasized war skills to buffalo hunts and war parties, during which older boys assisted seasoned fighters with relatively safe duties such as tending the packhorses and equipment. Curly became an expert with horses at an early age, and as an adolescent he began a close relationship with a renowned warrior named Hump, who may have been an uncle. Hump became Curly’s mentor, and soon the two were nearly inseparable.

  As a young man, Curly was introverted and somewhat antisocial, to the point that others in his tribe considered him peculiar. Almost all Lakotas danced and sang socially, but Curly never would. “He never spoke in council,” said a longtime friend, He Dog. “He was a very quiet man except when there was fighting.”36 He took to the life of a warrior naturally. When he came of age and displayed conspicuous bravery in a fight with an enemy tribe, his father passed on his own name, Crazy Horse, to his son and took the name Worm for himself.

  When fully grown, Crazy Horse was five feet seven inches tall,37 slight, and wiry. He had a narrow face, a straight nose, and “black eyes that hardly ever looked straight at a man,” according to a close friend.38 When the wife of a white scout encountered him in 1877, she thought him “a very handsome young man,”39 despite a noticeable scar on his left cheek.

  Throughout the late 1850s and early 1860s, in dozens of raids and fights against enemy tribes such as the Crows and the Shoshones in and around the Powder River country, Crazy Horse proved his worth as a warrior. His reputation was so secure that sometimes he would drop back and allow others to count coup; once he did this for his younger brother, Little Hawk. He always led his men from the front, and unlike most Lakotas, he dismounted to fire his rifle. He used good judgment and planned soundly. In battle he eschewed ostentatious dress. Instead, he wore a simple eagle feather upside down on the back of his head, a cotton shirt and breechcloth, and moccasins. His waist-length hair was braided down both sides. With one finger, he would draw a zigzag streak of red earth down the center of his face. As a good-luck talisman, he wore a small white stone in a bag under his left arm. Whether due to this amulet or not, Crazy Horse was rarely injured, though nine horses were shot out from under him in battle. Only once was he badly wounded, in the leg, and that was before he began carrying the stone.

  Most of the warfare Crazy Horse participated in during this time was intertribal, but that changed in the mid-1860s. The opening of the Bozeman Trail and the army’s three forts made it clear to Crazy Horse and several thousand other Lakotas that they would never walk the white man’s road. For most of the decade, any soldiers or travelers along the Bozeman ran the risk of attack by a Lakota war party.

  When the news of Fetterman’s defeat reached the East, there was an immediate clamor for retaliation, particularly in the army. General William T. Sherman, Civil War hero and now commander of all military forces on the Great Plains, called for total extermination, if necessary. But a burgeoning peace movement, which had gained full steam after the Sand Creek Massacre and which comprised many humanitarians who had campaigned against slavery and were now turning their attention to the plight of the Indians, lobbied for a less bellicose solution. Their efforts, combined with the realization of the precarious positions of the three isolated forts and the fact that hostilities had reduced the traffic on the Bozeman to almost nothing, paid off. After much saber rattling and throat clearing in Congress, and an abortive campaign on the plains, President Andrew Johnson called for a peace commission to convene in the fall of 1867 at Medicine Lodge Creek, Kansas (with the southern Plains tribes), and in April 1868 at Fort Laramie (with the northern Plains tribes). Sherman was one of three generals named to the commission.

  The discussions at Medicine Lodge led to the permanent establishment of many reservations in Indian Territory, as, for the first time, the idea of one big Indian reservation was abandoned. Plans also were made for the education and assimilation of the Indians into white culture via agency schools, the encouragement of farming and Christianity, and eventually individual landownership. At Fort Laramie, the government bowed to the dictates of the resolute Red Cloud, agreeing to abandon the three forts along the Bozeman and to concede the country to the Powder River tribes. Only when the soldiers had left and the forts were put to the torch did Red Cloud put pen to paper. The trail itself was closed, and no whites were allowed in this territory.

  Red Cloud’s was the only war with the United States that western Indians ever won. Even then, the victory prove
d illusory. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 established the Great Sioux Reservation west of the Missouri in Dakota Territory, and Red Cloud and most of his followers soon became, in effect, reservation Indians. Now the government could more easily control them, which was the point. An “unceded territory” outside the reservation, where nonreservation Indians could hunt “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers to justify the chase,” had been granted to the Sioux, but in classic treaty double-talk, another article dictated that the Indians were not allowed to “occupy” those lands. (Sherman was reassured by his fellow commissioners that the buffalo would not last long enough for the clause to be a problem.)40 Thus, the very territory that Red Cloud and his countrymen had fought so hard to defend — the hunting grounds along the Powder and Bighorn rivers — would only momentarily remain theirs.

  The U.S. government pledged to provide supplies and annuities while the tribes adjusted to their new homes. The treaty also allowed the construction of a railroad to the Pacific — and virtually anything else the government decided was necessary — through the heart of Lakota country. Some of the treaty’s terms were vague, confusing, and somewhat contradictory, and only a few Indians at best understood them.41 In a few years, the unceded territory especially would prove to be a sticking point for the U.S. government, when the rights of tribes there — particularly the nonreservation bands who lived and hunted there year-round and had never signed any agreements — clashed with the inexorable white tide working its way west. And the treaty’s essential ineffectiveness was underlined less than four months after its proclamation by a general order from Sheridan, at Sherman’s direction, that any Sioux found outside the reservation would be considered “hostile.”42 (Sherman, after returning east, wrote to his brother with chilling clarity: “The Indian war on the plains need simply amount to this. We have now selected and provided reservations for all, off the great roads. All who cling to their old hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off.”)43