A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  For a few years, a shaky peace held sway over the northern plains. At the same time, a stunning cavalry victory on the Washita River and the subsequent roundup of most of the warring Cheyennes largely eliminated hostilities to the south. The peace-seeking atmosphere in the East was augmented by the election of General Ulysses S. Grant, the architect of the Union victory in the Civil War. Grant felt sympathy for the Indians’ plight. He told a friend that “as a young lieutenant, he had been much thrown among the Indians, and had seen the unjust treatment they had received at the hands of the white men.”44 In 1853 he had written, “The whole race would be harmless and peacable if they were not put upon by the whites.”45 Soon after taking office in 1869, he halted the army’s offensives against the Indians and implemented his own Peace Policy.

  Grant’s policy consisted chiefly of moving all of the nomadic tribes onto reservations away from white expansion and attempting to civilize them. The difference was that now the government would attempt to do so nicely — “conquer with kindness,” as officials phrased it — without resorting to the brute force usually used. In an attempt to eliminate the rampant corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Grant’s administration hired churchmen, mostly Quakers, as Indian agents.46

  The War Department disagreed vociferously with Grant’s plan and proposed keeping the peace by instilling fear in the Indians. They wanted to wage war at the first sign of hostilities, since dead Indians would require no annuities — and thus no crooked traders and contractors.47 For a while, the two policies worked well in tandem, at least on the southern plains. Indeed, the combination of humane treatment of reservation Indians and hard war on recalcitrants had tamed most of the southern tribes.48 In the north, however, it was a different story.

  IN 1871, LARGELY due to a squabble between the Senate and the House,49 Congress forbade the making of any more Indian treaties. As an alternative, President Grant was forced to make “executive agreements” with the tribes, which would be ratified by both houses of Congress. These were essentially treaties under another name, but this time the House had a say in their approval. The most unfortunate result of the new agreement system was the change in attitude toward the Indian nations. No longer would they be considered sovereign powers, but orphans or wards to be treated as any domestic group of Americans might. It was a subtle but important difference, and the government would seek to justify its actions in the following years.

  It also became increasingly clear that filling agency posts with religious men would not stem the tide of corruption. The few safeguards fortifying the Peace Policy were circumnavigated fairly easily, and even some of the churchmen were unable to resist the lure of easy fortunes.50 By the final years of Grant’s presidency, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was marked by as much scandal as the rest of his administration, and his well-intentioned Peace Policy was completely discredited.

  Into the early 1870s, the northern plains remained relatively quiet and peaceful. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ turpitude steadily increased the natives’ ire, and starving warriors stepped up their raiding. In addition to the lack of annuities and the poor quality of the rations delivered, two transcontinental railroads, the Union Pacific and the Kansas Pacific, had recently been completed and carried even more emigrants into Indian lands. Even worse, the great buffalo herds were almost gone, scared off by the railroads and then killed off — gradually at first and then more quickly. Sherman and Sheridan’s troops aided the annihilation, visiting the same “total war” of food-supply destruction upon the Plains Indians as they had upon the Confederacy.51 Hide hunters slaughtered more than a million buffalo a year in the early 1870s. As the plains were emptied of this great animal, whites and Indians alike broke treaties. For their part, the nonreservation Sioux and Cheyennes retreated into the Powder River country and rarely ventured out of it, limiting their attacks primarily to white incursions into their lands and occasional cattle raids.

  The fuse to the northern plains powder keg was lit in a remote area of the Great Sioux Reservation in western Dakota Territory. The Indians named this place Paha Sapa, “Hills That Are Black,” for the peculiar dark green coloring of the craggy rocks that encircled it and the pine trees that packed its slopes. Rumors of gold in the Black Hills had circulated for decades, including stories of Indians appearing at nearby trading posts with large nuggets and gold dust. Then, in 1857, an army expedition detailed to explore the region discovered gold “in valuable quantities,” findings corroborated two years later by another military force.52 After the Panic of 1873 (the country’s most serious financial crisis up to that point), desperate men turned miners began sneaking into the Black Hills. Far from discouraging them, the army decided to send a reconnaissance expedition to find the best location for a fort, an idea Sheridan had been pushing for a few years. Two prospectors and four newspaper correspondents accompanied the large column. The Black Hills Expedition of 1874 was led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the colorful wartime cavalry hero who had become one of Sheridan’s — and the nation’s — favorite Plains Indian fighters.

  Custer’s column comprised 110 supply wagons, hundreds of cattle, a battery of Gatling guns, 10 companies of the Seventh Cavalry, 2 companies of infantry, almost 100 Indian scouts, interpreters, and scientific observers, and even a photographer — more than a thousand men in all. One of the strongest military forces to roam out onto the Great Plains, it wound its way southwest from Fort Abraham Lincoln, on the Missouri River five miles south of Bismarck, Dakota Territory, into the Black Hills three hundred miles away. The army expected — and perhaps hoped — to meet Indian resistance. Technically, according to the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the United States was within its rights — Article II allowed “such officers, agents, and employees of the government as may be authorized to enter upon Indian reservations in discharge of duties enjoined by law” — but it is highly doubtful that the Indians had ever understood the terms to allow such a massive military force. The year before, Custer and most of his regiment had accompanied a railroad survey party along the Yellowstone River and deep into Montana Territory, and they had twice skirmished with the Sioux. But this summer there was little sign of the Sioux, although the Black Hills, their ancestral hunting grounds, were sacred to them. As a result, the expedition evolved into a three-week picnic. Still, Custer kept up his customary brisk pace, and his reports featured a rapturous if repetitious litany of verdant valleys, crystal-clear streams, picturesque campsites, abundant game, and — of considerably more interest to the nation — gold. Custer had requested a geologist for the trip, and two miners were hired at his expense.53 That spring he had written to his good friend the renowned tragedian Lawrence Barrett, that “for many years it has been believed from statements made by the Indians that the Black Hills are rich in minerals,” and there is little doubt which mineral he meant.54 The Dakota territorial legislature, after all, had officially petitioned Congress more than once for a scientific survey of the Black Hills, chiefly to determine the truth of the reports of gold.55

  In his first dispatch, Custer reported that both of his prospectors had discovered the metal “in paying quantities,” but he judiciously tempered his remarks. He warned the newspapermen who accompanied him against exaggeration,56 although soon after striking gold, he sent a well-dressed, soft-spoken scout and legendary hunter named “Lonesome” Charley Reynolds through 150 miles of Indian country with the news. Custer’s second report stated that “men without former experience in mining have discovered [gold] at an expense of but little time or labor,” a claim that the hordes of out-of-work men still reeling from the Panic of 1873 found irresistible.

  By the time Custer returned to Fort Lincoln, his restraint had disappeared. He told a reporter there that the Black Hills would rival “the richest regions in Colorado,” and other officers with the expedition and all of the news correspondents supported his claims.57 (Later he would call for the extinguishment of Sioux title to the region “for mil
itary reasons” and declare that the Indians had no real need for the Black Hills.)58 When these reports of gold were played up by newspapers from coast to coast — and especially after a follow-up expedition the next summer “confirmed in every particular” Custer’s dispatch59 — men from all over the country headed for the Hills, precipitating the biggest gold rush since the one in California in 1849.

  Through most of 1875, only a few hundred miners could be found digging into the sacred land of the Sioux. By the spring of 1876, however, there were more than 10,000. The army was directed to expel trespassers, but there weren’t nearly enough troops for the job, although they did give it a try. Since the punishment was usually no more than expulsion, many of the miners escorted from the Black Hills merely turned around and headed back. The soldiers sympathized with the prospectors, and some of Custer’s men at Fort Lincoln even deserted to join them.

  Since the military was unable to control the region, some people in the government began to consider another option: buy the Black Hills from their owners. After all, jobs were scarce, other western mining fields had cooled, and an infusion of gold would be good for the precarious economy. The Panic of 1873 had ushered in a depression, and bankruptcies were frequent, crime rates up, and farm prices down, in no small part due to one of the most severe grasshopper plagues ever to hit the Midwest. Hundreds of thousands of out-of-work men, many of them Civil War veterans, were desperate for employment. There was a clamor from both the public and many in the press to open the Black Hills, as unrestrained newspaper accounts embellished and trumpeted potential fortunes, even going so far as to claim that Black Hills gold could pay off the national debt, then more than $2 million.60

  There was one slight problem. The Black Hills belonged to the Lakota Sioux, not only by birthright but also by treaty, and they did not want to sell their land. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, the two most prominent peace chiefs, made that clear when they were summoned to Washington in the spring of 1875 to negotiate. They remained adamant in the face of veiled threats that included the withdrawal of food rations at their agencies and suggestions that the government might not continue to keep miners out of the region.

  Red Cloud and Spotted Tail returned home without signing an agreement, but that September a commission was sent west to negotiate a lease. About 5,000 Lakotas gathered to meet with them near Red Cloud Agency in northern Nebraska. The hard-core nontreaty faction led by Crazy Horse and the Hunkpapa Lakota Sitting Bull did not attend, but they sent word that the Black Hills were not for sale and would be defended to the death. By this time, however, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail could see that they had no choice — the whites would take what they wanted, deal or no deal — and they were ready to strike a bargain. When the United States refused to meet their price — $70 million — negotiations broke down. Some of the nontreaty Indians from the north then made their belligerent presence known. A Minneconjou named Lone Horn rode up and delivered a fiery speech against some of the Lakotas for trying to sell his country.61 They succeeded in stirring up enough trouble that the commission members barely escaped with their lives. “The Commission were the gladdest people to get away from that part of the country that had ever visited there,” observed General George Crook.62 They returned to Washington in high dudgeon, recommending that Congress simply fix a fair value on the region and “then notify the Sioux nation of its conclusions.”63

  Thus, President Grant in 1875 found himself on the horns of a dilemma. What was good for the nation — and virtually demanded by a desperate public, particularly in the frontier states and territories — would constitute a direct repudiation of the high moral ground underlying his Peace Policy. How could he justify such a brazen seizure of lands solemnly ceded to the Lakotas by treaty?

  The answer came in November. Sheridan had been in San Francisco on a five-month honeymoon with his new wife when he was summoned to an executive meeting at the White House. He took a train east, picking up General Crook in Omaha.64 On November 3, the two met with the President and his top advisers on Indian affairs. Grant was persuaded — or decided, no one knows for sure — to follow a new course. The army was secretly ordered to no longer bar any settlers from entering or remaining in the Black Hills. To protect U.S. citizens from the sure-to-be-furious Lakotas, Grant would rely on an edict built on tenuous moral and legal grounds: the government would maintain that the 1868 treaty had been abrogated by the Sioux. Of course, some depredations had occurred, but Sheridan had reported that 1874 had seen relatively few Indian problems, and the Commissioner of Indian affairs had proclaimed that the Sioux had been more peaceful in 1875 than in any year for more than a decade.65 Nevertheless, a report issued a week after the November 3 meeting by a Bureau of Indian Affairs inspector cited various trumped-up accusations and smoothly worded falsehoods regarding Indian violations. The inspector concluded: “The true policy, in my judgement, is to send troops against them in the winter, the sooner the better, and whip them into subjection.”

  The army had been itching for an excuse to make all-out war on the last unyielding Indians on the plains, but their hands had been tied by the Peace Policy and by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Here was justification for Sheridan’s winter campaign and the seizure of the Black Hills all wrapped up in one tidy report. Still, a further coloring of legality was needed. An ultimatum would be delivered to all the “wild” Lakota bands in the Yellowstone and Powder river country. Unless they left their hunting grounds in the unceded territory and arrived at the Great Sioux Reservation by January 31, 1876, they would be declared hostile. The U.S. government would then make war on them until they returned to the reservation to learn the white man’s ways or were exterminated.66

  Runners were sent from the Sioux agencies out to the hunting bands near the end of December, but by then winter had set in on the northern plains. Even if the Lakotas had wanted to come in to the agencies, it would have been impossible to do so before the ultimatum expired. The weather, their weakened ponies, and their women and children precluded their compliance. “It was very cold,” one Oglala warrior said later, “and many of our people and ponies would have died in the snow. We were in our own country and doing no harm.”67 Furthermore, most Lakotas had little desire to live on the reservation, especially this winter, when worse than usual ration deliveries had led to famine and supreme distrust of any promise from the whites. Even Sheridan admitted that the ultimatum “will in all probability be regarded as a good joke by the Indians.”68

  So the deadline came and went, but only a few small bands arrived at the agencies. On February 1, 1876, the Interior Department announced that since the nontreaty Sioux had not complied with the ultimatum, they were now considered hostile and would be turned over to the army “for such action as the Secretary of War might deem proper under the circumstances.”69 Preparations for an immediate winter campaign moved forward quickly, built around a three-pronged attack to encircle and capture or destroy the hostiles.

  All the while, whites continued to sweep across the country, beyond the Missouri River and the Great Plains, into and through the valleys bordering the Rocky Mountains, over the continent’s spine to the Pacific: settlers, miners, and adventurers; men, women, and children, tearing up the country, scaring off the buffalo and other game, chopping down the forests, destroying the grass with their cattle and other livestock, and desecrating the most sacred Indian places. Only a few tribes of the northern plains stood against them — the Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos — and only a hard-line contingent of each tribe, around 3,000 Indians (no more than 800 warriors), were unwilling to abandon the only way of life they had ever known.

  To be sure, these three tribes did not present a united front. Most of their people lived most of the year on reservations and were not interested in war — or at least not a year-round war. They had become too dependent on the white man and his wares, or too tired of fighting him. But their situation was far more fluid than was generally known. Quite a few of the agency Indians would
spend the winter on their reservations, drawing supplies, arms, and ammunition, and then journey out in the spring, spending half the year following the buffalo and raiding their traditional Indian enemies in quest of battle honors, which led to prestige and status. That had been their life for generations, and the wasichu threat to their homelands and their way of life would not interrupt it.

  AGAINST THESE SUPERB guerrilla fighters defending their lives, lands, families, and way of life, Sheridan could muster less than 3,000 U.S. soldiers in his two northernmost military areas: the Departments of Dakota and the Platte.70 This tiny force, ill trained and badly equipped by a miserly Congress, was scattered across the frontier in dozens of garrisons large and small. Regiments spent little time together in training or maneuvers, and most soldiers spent little or no time improving their execrable marksmanship or devising tactics suited to fighting Indians. Most did not care. Aside from an educated officer corps — many of whom were graduates of West Point — the enlisted ranks were not composed of the best and the brightest. “All the really valuable survivors of the volunteer army had returned to civil life,” wrote one historian. “Only the malingerers, the bounty-jumpers, the draft-sneaks and the worthless remained. These, with the scum of the cities and frontier settlements, constituted more than half of the rank and file on the plains.”71

  Another major problem — or blessing, given these sentiments — was desertion. As many as a third of the enlisted men in the 1870s took the “grand bounce” before settling into their new lives in frontier garrisons. The reasons were many: poor pay ($13 a month), inferior food, poor sanitation, harsh discipline, immediate danger, and, not to be underestimated, sheer boredom. Another temptation was gold. Many of the enlistees were unemployed and unemployable in the hard times following the Panic of 1873, and some of them, particularly those recruited in the big cities of the East, saw enlistment as transportation west. Once there, they skedaddled to the mining regions to make their fortunes.