Roger Di Silvestro
Page 26
Eastman added: "How much do the Indians receive on average? . . . The men get a shoddy blanket apiece, the women a cheap quilt. Each man is issued a full suit of clothes, hat, and boots; each woman six or eight yards of linsey for a dress, some flannel, gingham, unbleached cotton, a shawl, and a few sundries. Yet so poor is the quality that the total cost to the government is only about ten dollars, according to the agent's estimate."
12 Elaine Goodale Eastman left an account of a beef distribution at Pine Ridge in Sister to the Sioux, pp. 59—60:
As each excited animal was released from the corral, a crier with stentorian voice named the heads of families to whom the meat was assigned. A mob of a hundred or more Indians, each mounted on his best pony, and armed with a repeating rifle, surrounded the exit. Wild, long-horned Texas cattle galloped madly over the open prairie, each one closely followed by several yelling horsemen. Shots rang out, and screams of exultation were mingled with howls of contemptuous laughter when someone's aim was bad. Dead and dying beasts lay all about. Carcasses were butchered while yet warm by the women and old men. Soon blue curls of smoke began to steal upward from frugal small fires and hungry families to gather about the teasing fragrance of boiling meat. Liver and other tidbits were eaten raw while mothers prepared portions for the pot. The greater part was sliced in thin strips to be dried in the open air—their only means of preservation until the next Issue Day.
13 The Lakota even made war while hunting. In 1873 they ran into Pawnee hunters who had just shot widely scattered bison. About one hundred Lakota attacked as a unit, and the Pawnee, caught spread out over the plains skinning buffalo, retreated to a ravine where their women and children were arriving with ponies laden with meat. The Pawnee warriors then turned and attacked the Lakota, fighting them off for about an hour when, seemingly out of nowhere, between eight hundred and one thousand Lakota came charging across the plains. As the Lakota would do at Wounded Knee when the military opened fire on them, the Pawnee retreated into the ravine. The Lakota stormed down the ravine from both ends and attacked relentlessly, killing about one hundred Pawnee, including thirty-nine women and ten children. They chased the Pawnee out onto the plains along the Republican River and probably would have killed many more had not a bugle call warned that the U.S. Cavalry was coming to the rescue. The Lakota retreated, taking with them eleven Pawnee women and children and about one hundred ponies. (Hyde, Spotted Tail's Folk, pp. 207—8.)
14 Ibid., pp. 263-70.
15 Getting the Brulé to change locations was no easy feat for either the reservation agents or the chiefs. Initially, the government ruled that no new supplies were to be shipped to the White River area, so the Brulé had to move or go hungry. Over the objections of Spotted Tail and other chiefs, the Brulé chose hunger. As a result, Spotted Tail went to Washington, D.C., to discuss the deadlock with President Rutherford B. Hayes, who explained that food for the Brulé was already waiting at the new Ponca reservation and could not be moved to the White River. He promised that if the Lakota moved to the new site for the winter, in spring 1878 they could choose a new site for their reservation. And so in October 1877 Spotted Tail started leading his people back to the Missouri. Among those who traveled with him were Crazy Horse's parents, who carried with them the famous warrior's bones—he had been killed in an attempt by the army to jail him. His parents buried the bones somewhere in the Wounded Knee area. See ibid., pp. 286—97, for details of the account described here.
16 Ibid., pp. 287-88.
17 Ibid., p. 289.
18 Ibid., pp. 290-91.
19 Ibid., p. 291.
20 Ibid., p. 294.
21 See ibid., pp. 286-98, for details on the following story.
22 Ibid., p. 296.
23 Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 42.
24 John R. Milton, South Dakota: A History (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 67-68.
25 Hamlin Garland quoted in Herbert S. Schell, History of South Dakota, 3rd ed., revised (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), p. 168.
26 Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876—1915 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 115.
27 The following paragraph draws on ibid., pp. 23—25, and the Web site of the Museum for the Preservation of Elevating History.
28 Some people lamented the decline of the horse. The new forms of transportation were so bloodless, so mechanical, so heartless; they did not interact with the rider the way a horse did. But they also were not as demanding and as unreliable as horses, which had to be rested and fed and which fell sick, sometimes on a grand scale. In 1872 a mosquito-borne disease killed almost 25 percent of America's more than 16 million horses. In some cities men resorted to pulling wagons themselves. Home deliveries for items such as fuel failed. Garbage collectors were forced to neglect their pickups. Firemen could not race to blazing buildings. The business losses brought on by the dwindling number of horses contributed to the financial collapse of the following year, the Panic of 1873. Electric streetcars were more than a convenience. See Schlereth, Victorian America, pp. 23-25.
29 Ibid., p. 219.
30 Ibid., pp. 219-20.
31 Mark Twain, Mark Twain: Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims, ed. Charles Nieder (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 61-62.
32 Schlereth, Victorian America, pp. 89-90.
33 As newcomers to the area in which they staked claims, individual pioneers often wanted help picking out their farmland, so they hired professional land locators, who might charge up to twenty-five dollars for their services (ibid., p. 175). To mark the claim once it was made, the settler would dig a three-foot-deep hole to symbolize a well, or set up four fence posts to mark out the corners of a house, or erect a "straddlebug," which was a tripod of boards with the would-be landowner's name on it. Official claims were made at federal land-claim offices.
34 Schell, History of South Dakota, p. 170.
35 Ibid., pp. 171—74.
36 Ibid., p. 174.
37 Most of the prairie newcomers were poor and could not survive on farming alone in the early years of soil preparation. They had to supplement their income with other work. If a farmer owned a team of horses or oxen, he or she might hire out to plow the fields of more destitute, teamless cultivators. Settlers might work in town or on the railroads. "In many cases, a settler's first earnings came from collecting the buffalo bones which littered the prairie and also were found in the low places along the James River," Schell reports (ibid., pp. 177-78). "Often the first outward-bound freight from a new town would have aboard a load of bones and horns; many tons of them were shipped out of Dakota Territory and found a ready market in Chicago and elsewhere for processing into fertilizer."
38 The flavor of the frontier mining town comes out in Mark Twain's description of his first day in the silver-mining capital, Carson City, Nevada, in 1861.
We were introduced to several citizens, at the stage-office and on the way up to the Governor's from the hotel—among others, to a Mr. Harris, who was on horseback; he began to say something, but interrupted himself with the remark:
"I'll have to get you to excuse me for a minute; yonder is the witness that swore I helped to rob the California coach—a piece of impertinent intermeddling, sir, for I am not even acquainted with the man."
Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter, and the stranger began to explain with another. When the pistols were emptied, the stranger resumed his work (mending a whip-lash), and Mr. Harris rode by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through one of his lungs, and several in his hips; and from them issued little rivulets of blood that coursed down the horse's sides and made the animal look quite picturesque. I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it recalled to mind that first day in Carson. (Mark Twain, The Unabridged Mark Twain, vol. 2, ed. Lawrence Teacher [Philadelphia: Running Press, 1979], pp. 632-33, from Roughing It.)
39 Milton, South Dakota, p. 66.
40 Schell, His
tory of South Dakota, p. 243. Theodore Roosevelt, who tried ranching in Dakota Territory in the 1880s, in part to assuage his grief over the death of his mother and his wife on the same day, described the winter of 1886—87.
The snow fall was unprecedented, both for its depth and for the way it lasted; and it was this, and not the cold, that caused the loss. About the middle of November the storms began. Day after day the snow came down, thawing and then freezing and piling itself higher and higher. By January the drifts had filled the ravines and coulees almost level. The snow lay in great masses on the plateaus and river bottoms; and this lasted until the end of February. The preceding summer we had been visited by a prolonged drought, so that the short, scanty grass was already well cropped down; the snow covered what pasturage there was to the depth of several feet, and the cattle could not get at it at all, and could hardly move round. . . . The starving cattle died by scores of thousands before their helpless owners' eyes. The bulls, the cows who were suckling calves or who were heavy with calf, the weak cattle that had just been driven up on the trail, and the late calves suffered most. (Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's America, ed. Farida A. Wiley [New York: Devin-Adair, 1955], pp. 47-49.)
CHAPTER 4. THE COMING OF THE GHOSTS
1 Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 42.
2 The text on the Lakota's discovery of the Black Hills is based on Robert W. Larson, Red Cloud: Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), p. 20.
3 John R. Milton, South Dakota: A History (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 24.
4 Larson, Red Cloud, p. 160. See also George Hyde, Spotted Tail's Folk: History of the Brulé Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), p. 225.
5 Stephen E. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), pp. 372-73.
6 Milton, South Dakota, pp. 24-25. The soldiers and scientists on the trip all agreed that the hills were imposing and beautiful, cooler than the sun-blasted prairies the men had crossed and alight with flowers. A New York Herald Tribune reporter who accompanied the expedition wrote that "no one, from the commanding general on down to the humblest private or the most profane teamster," could ignore the profusion of flowers. "Men who had never picked a flower since their childhood days bent and paid the long-neglected homage. Cavalrymen and teamsters decorated their horses and mules; infantrymen plumed their hats; officers gathered nosegays; pocket-books and note-books were brought into requisition to press and preserve the free gift of this valley." (Ernest Grate and Paul Horsted, Exploring with Custer: The 1834 Black Hills Expedition [Custer, SD: Golden Valley Press, 2002], p. 36.) There is an image only the Old West could have created: the grim, gaunt Custer picking flowers in a valley the nation was about to steal from the Lakota, then leading a column of one thousand men decked out in blossoms.
Thoughts turned to those who were not there. "Some said they would give a hundred dollars just to have their wives see the floral richness for even one hour," reported the Aberdeen, South Dakota, Pioneer. A reporter for the Inter-Ocean recalled the evening of July 24, 1874. "One who has never seen colors mixed as nature mixes them, in her own rare conservatories like these, can realize the artistic effect that is produced; but let the reader imagine if he can such a valley as I have described . . . darkened by the heavy shade to the tinge of twilight, and illuminated—yes, fairly illuminated—by the gold, and the scarlet, and the blue of its flowers. But the picture is not finished. The regimental band is playing on a shelf of one of the walls, and the 'Mocking Bird,' 'Garryowen,' 'Artist Life,' 'The Blue Danube,' and snatches of 'Trova-tore,' and other strains of music for the first time heard in paradise." (Grafe and Horsted, Exploring with Custer, p. 37.)
7 Quoted in Grafe and Horsted, Exploring with Custer, p. 79.
8 Quoted in Milton, South Dakota, pp. 25-26.
9 Larson, Red Cloud, pp. 190—91.
10 Quoted in Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 232-33.
11 Quoted in Hyde, Spotted Tail's Folk, p. 255.
12 Herbert S. Schell, History of South Dakota, 3rd ed., revised (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), p. 140.
13 Quoted in H. L. Williams, The Picturesque West. . . Our Western Empire Beyond the Mississippi (New York: Hurst, 1891), p. 248.
14 Schell, History of South Dakota, p. 147.
15 Ibid., p. 144.
16 For accounts of these land-allotment schemes, see Larson, Red Cloud, and Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation and The Lance and the Shield.
17 Under this process, by 1934 the amount of land owned by Indian people nationwide fell from 138 million acres to 55 million. See Larson, Red Cloud, p. 252.
18 Ibid.
19 Of course, none of this would happen until three-fourths of adult Lakota men had signed on to the plan. To gather these signatures, the government sent to the reservation another commission of three men, this one headed by Captain Richard Pratt, the founder of the federal Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—a place to which the Lakota had seen their children sent off, like it or not, some of them never to return. The Lakota bore no affection for the man who was assigned the task of persuading them to give up more than half their land.
The commission launched its mission at the Standing Rock Reservation in what is now south-central North Dakota. There James McLaughlin, who over the years would earn a reputation as one of the best agents—firm but honest in his dealings with Indians—concluded that the terms the commission offered were unfair. Nevertheless, as a good team player, he helped the commissioners state their case, although he also let the Lakota know that he did not like the deal. Pratt told the Lakota that the United States had determined that no "threat, menace or force was to be used to induce them to assent; that it was a matter which was to be left to their own free will." Then he promptly threatened them with the menacing suggestion that refusal to sign the agreement would render "further action which may be taken in regard to the reservation problematical and uncertain." In other words, rations might be cut, goods might not be delivered, the land might be taken anyway—who knew? All was "problematical and uncertain."
20 Ibid., p. 254.
21 The Lakota also had time to enjoy their trip, learning to smoke cigarettes, then a fad. Sitting Bull joined other smokers in the lobby of the Belvedere Hotel, but he savored a cigar given to him by a Texas senator. Gall, one of the fiercest of warriors in the old days, went to dinner with Captain Edward Godfrey at one of Washington's finest restaurants. The dinner was another of those ironies of the Old West. Godfrey and Gall had fought against one another at the battle of the Little Bighorn. Godfrey had been under Major Marcus Reno's command, which had nearly gone the way of Custer's unit. See Utley, The Lance and the Shield, p. 275.
22 Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 50.
23 Utley, The Lance and the Shield, p. 278.
24 About his discussion with Grass, McLaughlin recalled, "I told him that if the act was not concurred in, a worse thing might happen: that legislation might be enacted which would open the reservation without requiring the consent of the Indians; and I labored with him until he agreed that he would speak for its ratification and work for it." In James McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989; reprint of 1910 edition, published by Houghton Mifflin), pp. 284-85.
25 Frederic Remington, The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington, ed. Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels (n.p.: Castle 1986), p. 62.
26 This quote pops up in just about every history of the Lakota. You can find it, for example, in Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 59; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, p. 280; and Larson, Red Cloud, p. 263.
27 Larson, Red Cloud, p. 264, and James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (New York: Dover, 1973; reprint of 1896 edition of The Ghost Dance Religion
and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 published by the Government Printing Office, Washington, DC), pp. 26—28.
28 Quoted in Mooney, Ghost Dance Religion, p. 827.
29 Ibid., pp. 827-28.
30 Quoted in ibid., p. 827.
31 For details on Wovoka and the origins of the ghost dance, see Alice Beck Kehoe, The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitaliiation (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983). Also see Mooney, Ghost Dance Religion.
32 Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, p. 56.
33 Mooney, Ghost Dance Religion, p. 791.
34 John Sugden, Tecumseh, a Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), pp. 117-20.
35 Quoted in ibid., pp. 118-19.
36 Quoted in ibid., p. 119.
37 Ibid., pp. 119-20.
38 Elaine Goodale Eastman, a New Englander who had come to the Great Sioux Reservation in 1886 to teach school, told in her autobiography, Sister to the Sioux, pp. 96—7, how she first encountered the spreading word of the ghost dance. Restless at the close of her third year out west and wishing to get to know the "wilder" Lakota better, she talked a family into letting her join them for several weeks on a summer deer hunt into the Nebraska Sandhills. "After my first full day on horseback I was stiff and very sleepy and, in fact, fell asleep before supper was ready," Goodale recalled. "I ate and slept again. Later in the night there arose a cry: 'Someone comes!'"
That someone proved to be a lone rider, Chasing Crane, who arrived with a strange tale: Christ had returned to Earth. Goodale continued:
"God," he declares, "has appeared to the Crows across the Stony Mountains. They say he arrived out of nowhere, announcing himself as the Savior who once before came upon earth and was killed by the white people. He told the Indians he could no longer bear to hear parents crying for their children, dying everywhere of hunger and strange diseases brought by white men. He promised to let down the sky upon all the whites and to bring back the buffalo for our use. The Messiah was beautiful to look upon, with waving hair. He bore paint as a sign of power."