There is no man living so extensively and correctly informed as to the geography of the headwaters of the Mississippi, the Yellowstone, and the Columbia Rivers, and their tributaries and lakes, and the mountains from whence they rise, or through which they pass, and how they interlock and pass each other, than Father DeSmet,” wrote David Mitchell in his personal journal. And as for the foulmouthed, unwashed rogue named Jim Bridger, “He has traversed the mountains from East and West, and seems to have an intuitive knowledge of the topography of the country, the courses of the streams, the direction of the mountains, and is never lost, we are told, wherever he may be.” Without the well-versed services of these two men of opposite callings and personal character, the peace council at Horse Creek, Mitchell admitted to himself, would have amounted to a fool’s errand.
No sooner had the smoking ceremony concluded the morning following Big Robber’s speech than Terra Blue rose to voice a protest. Speaking for the other Sioux chiefs, he told Mitchell that the Sioux bands were very concerned about disputes that would arise over boundaries between themselves, the Cheyenne, and the Arapaho. This new complaint was an attempt to regain lost bargaining power by asserting dominion over a larger territory than they had any right to claim. The Platte River was a natural line of demarcation between the Sioux and the Arapaho. Terra Blue was claiming territory on both sides of the Platte, in addition to the Brule’s right to hunt as far south as the Republican Fork of the Kansas River. The Oglala’s chief, Black Hawk, then rose to voice similar concerns. With a growing sense of foreboding, Mitchell and Fitzpatrick listened patiently as the Sioux’s objections were quickly echoed by the Snake and Cheyenne.
The Sioux’s tactic, aimed at disrupting Congress’ proposal for tribal boundaries, quickly took hold among the other tribes. Before he understood what had happened, Mitchell found himself hamstrung between a myriad of claims and counterclaims. Although each tribe occupied a homeland that was recognized by all the others, territorial boundaries were completely foreign to their thinking. Mitchell called for a recess and withdrew to his camp. After devising a new strategy over lunch with Fitzpatrick, Mitchell reconvened the council of chiefs.
Now taking the offensive, Mitchell preempted any further protests by reframing the government’s purpose for demarcating tribal territories. This time, the commissioner presented the plan in terms the Indians could easily translate and explain to their people. Fixing boundaries to tribal territories, he assured them, was simply a formal recognition by the Great White Fathers of the Indian world as it already existed. Formal boundaries would in no way limit the tribes’ right to travel or hunt in the country of another nation. As long as they remained at peace with each other and the white settlers, they would be free to travel and hunt as always.
Mitchell’s distinction seemed to allay the Indians’ greatest fears. His caveat gave the chiefs an escape from the trap set for them by the Sioux. The commissioners were now free to advance Congress’ condition for established territories without requiring the tribes to give up their widely scattered hunting grounds. In this, Mitchell had overstepped his instructions from Washington, but in light of John Marshall’s Trilogy, the tribes’ rights to hunt, gather, and fish as they were accustomed was a moot point. The government was in no position to strip the tribes of rights that were already legally protected. In Mitchell’s view, he and Fitzpatrick had agreed to a demand that succeeded in securing the peace without costing the government a single bargaining chip. Without this condition, Mitchell knew there would be no peace. Lawmakers in Congress wanted one thing: to avoid bloodshed on the Oregon Trail. This simple concession, so easily and reasonably granted, would still be confounding federal courts in the twenty-first century.
For the next two weeks, the business of establishing territories for the principal tribes of the West continued. Negotiations filled the days, while dancing and feasting went on till dawn. By the middle of the second week, Brown wrote, the commissioners and interpreters were delirious from lack of sleep. Mitchell, the chiefs, and their interpreters were creating a blueprint for governance that translated the abstractions of John Marshall’s Trilogy into a real-world model for federalism that formally vested the American Indian tribes with constitutionally guaranteed powers of self-government. Day after day, the leaders of each tribe worked with Mitchell, DeSmet, Culbertson, and Bridger toward consensus with the chiefs of other Indian nations on identifying the basic geographic features that outlined their home territories. For the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, Raven Chief, Four Bears, and Gray Prairie Eagle agreed to band together for the purpose of establishing a common homeland for their three peoples.
As the process of drawing boundaries proceeded, Father DeSmet and Jim Bridger quickly discovered that in the world of realpolitick, it was one thing to get each tribal group to claim its territorial boundaries; once those boundaries were established, it was an undertaking of a different kind to square the results of these individual agreements on one large map. Midway through the second week, Bridger, DeSmet, Culbertson, and Fitzpatrick met after dinner one evening and struck upon a new plan. Rather than each of them working with individual tribes, Fitzpatrick suggested, the four of them should meet with each tribal delegation. One by one, starting at the North with the Blackfeet, they could work their way south across the Great Plains to the Arkansas River.
As the mapmakers called the roll of the tribes, each group of chiefs gathered around a large sheet of parchment. Bunched together in the shade, the unlikely band of adventurers, priests, traders, Indian chiefs, and loners, such as Jim Bridger and Robert Meldrum, knelt shoulder to shoulder in the dust. Line by line, geographic features slowly shaped a map of the new American West. When the map was finished at the end of the second day, the lines drawn on the sheet of parchment by DeSmet and Bridger had legally defined a dozen new tribal territories. At the formal signing ceremony officiated by Mitchell and Fitzpatrick three days later, Four Bears, Gray Prairie Eagle, Raven Chief, Terra Blue, Big Robber, Cat Nose, and all the lesser chiefs made Xs beside their names on the final document that between them divided up 640 million acres, or a million square miles, of North American landscape. The territory described by the treaty covered ten future states in the Great Plains and far West, and included the sites of modern cities such as Denver and Kansas City; Billings and Cheyenne; Bismarck and Fort Collins, Colorado; Salt Lake City; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Omaha, Nebraska; and Des Moines, Iowa.
The text of the final agreement was brief and simply stated. The Indians agreed to allow white settlers to pass unharmed through their country. It also granted Washington the privilege of building military posts along the trail to protect Indians and whites alike. The tribes promised to keep peace with white settlers and among each other. For these concessions and privileges, the commissioners guaranteed each tribe an annual payment of $50,000 for fifty years. The government also promised to honor the new boundaries of their tribal territories as defined by the treaty: white settlers would be prohibited from settling in those territories for “as long as the rivers shall flow.”
Alexander Culbertson described the ancestral territory claimed by the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes: Since they were now living as one tribal people on the Upper Missouri, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara were granted a common homeland in the following manner: commencing at the mouth of the Heart River, thence up the Missouri River to the mouth of the Yellowstone, thence up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Powder River, thence from the Powder River to the headwaters of the Little Missouri, and along the range of the Black Hills to the headwaters of the Heart River, then following that watercourse back to the place of the beginning.
For the three tribes of Village Indians, this was a formal recognition of what had been an informal arrangement since the fifteenth century. The new boundaries enclosed 12 million acres containing many of the tribe’s sacred sites and traditional hunting grounds. A century later, the area set aside for the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara would fall in parts of
eastern Montana, northeastern Wyoming, and western North Dakota.
After the official treaty signing concluded on September 17, 1851, Mitchell, Fitzpatrick, and several of the older chiefs made speeches to the young warriors. Terra Blue and Cat Nose entreated them to be wide awake, attentive to their promises. Long after we are gone, you will be bound by this peace, Terra Blue told them. You must keep the peace with whites, and not molest them in passing through the country. Equally important, you must keep peace with each other.
The celebrations that marked the end of the peace council at Horse Creek went on through the night and well into morning. Mitchell’s long-awaited wagon train arrived later that morning bearing the goods and gifts he had promised to the tribes months before. After presenting the principal chiefs with new military uniforms and gilt swords, Mitchell and Fitzpatrick distributed the twenty-seven wagonloads of gifts. Each band patiently waited to receive its share. In minutes, it seemed, the wagons were empty.
Twelve thousand Indians had spent the last three weeks camped at the confluence of Horse Creek and the Platte River. “Glad or satisfied, but always so quiet,” wrote Brown, they now loaded up their lodges, their families, and slipped away over the horizon. The small party of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara parted from their fellow traveler Father DeSmet, who returned to St. Louis with Commissioner Mitchell. Four Bears, Raven Chief, and Gray Prairie Eagle would journey overland with the Crow as far as the Yellowstone. They had little hope of reaching Like-a-Fishhook ahead of the first snows. The other tribes would turn south from Horse Creek. Many buffalo, they had heard, had roamed into the country of the South Platte. The Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne were particularly anxious to have one last hunt before winter drove them back to their camps.
Thomas Fitzpatrick, the man who had blazed the Oregon Trail thirteen years earlier, watched the closing moments of the monthlong drama with “a feeling of quiet elation.” He believed that the peace council had established a benchmark for Indian and white relations on the plains. This honorable, unassuming Irishman had played a leading role in two of the most pivotal events in the history of the American West. Less than two years later, it would fall to Fitzpatrick to shoulder the humiliating duty of revisiting each of the tribes and informing them that Congress had altered the agreement they had made at Horse Creek. In the intervening months, Congress decided that its original offer was too generous. Washington now wanted to reduce the promised annuities to $25,000 a year, and cut the terms of the payout from fifty years to ten. When Fitzpatrick tracked down Terra Blue in the Wyoming Territory, the Sioux chief spoke for many when he asked, “Where is our incentive to comply with these conditions when the White Fathers change every agreement to suit their own needs?”
Tribal leaders expressed bitter resignation over the revised provisions. Nevertheless, all but the Crow would eventually agree to the proposed amendments. By the time Congress finally acted on the treaty late in 1853, Mitchell and Fitzpatrick knew there was little hope that the original terms of peace with the Sioux would last out the decade. Every spring, new Indian agents made their way to the Oregon Territory with instructions to broker new treaties of friendship with tribes in the Northwest. Nearly every day, reports filtered back to Washington from agents on the frontier telling of Sioux atrocities against white emigrants and neighboring tribes. Despite DeSmet’s solemn pledge to Cherry Necklace, the council at Horse Creek would not lead to an era of peace and tranquility for the Village Indians. Immediately following the peace council, Sioux hostility seemed to abate for a brief period. By the end of the decade, however, the frequency and lethal consequence of their battles with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara would increase dramatically.
While Fitzpatrick was circulating the revised treaty among disgruntled tribal leaders, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and opened the eastern bank of the Missouri River to settlement by whites, immediately prompting a land rush into territory owned by the Sioux, Arapaho, and Pawnee. With the Civil War brewing in the east, fewer federal troops were being dispatched to the western frontier to keep the peace. Though the new amendments did not change the territorial boundaries of any of the tribes, a rising tide of settlers was encroaching on Indian lands. Each passing year recorded an increase in hostilities between Indians and whites. Neither side showed any willingness to back away from the bloodshed.
As the cycle of violence deepened, leaders of the great western tribes began to realize that the Great White Fathers in Washington had little, if any, control over their people. Time and again, white citizens demonstrated brazen contempt for the laws and treaty obligations of their government. When the ice broke on the Upper Missouri in the spring of 1860, more than a hundred steamboats left St. Louis with passengers bound for the High Plains and the gold-bearing hills of the Dakota Territory. The average trip from St. Louis to Sioux City, Iowa, took nine days and required the wood of fifty mature oak trees to fire a paddle wheeler’s boilers. The once-dense woodlands along hundreds of miles of river bottoms vanished like the buffalo.
Ten years after Horse Creek, the material condition of the village tribes was “pitiable,” writes Roy W. Meyer, a leading historian of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people. With their number of able-bodied warriors greatly diminished by disease and war, they were increasingly more cautious in their dealings with the pugnacious Sioux. Cholera and deteriorating conditions with their nomadic neighbors finally drove the Arikara inside the protective walls of Like-a-Fishhook. From 1862 onward, the three tribes would engage the external world as a single political and economic unit. Though diminished from 25,000 to fewer than 1,000, the three tribes were still intact and culturally solvent. Each had retained its own language and its own religious traditions, clans, and secret societies. Despite the decades of adversity they had weathered since the smallpox epidemic at the Knife River, the tribes, according to reports from agents and traders during the 1860s, had a continuing sense of dignity and cohesive tribal identity. Often outnumbered ten to one, they seldom lost a face-to-face battle with the Sioux, yet increasingly their isolation forced them to live like prisoners inside the walls of their own village. The Sioux, by contrast, were chronically hostile to whites and other tribes but still managed to obtain horses, firearms, annuity goods, and treaty concessions from both government agents and private traders.
The Sioux reached the zenith of their military power in the 1860s just as the three tribes reached their low, a perfect reversal of the balance of power of a hundred years before. Driven west by the rapid encroachment of settlers from the east, the Sioux pushed across the plains at a furious pace. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara lay directly in their path. The three tribes’ long history of friendship with the whites did little to promote peaceful relations with their rivals. Washington’s lax attention to its treaty commitments, combined with the widespread corruption of federal Indian agents at frontier outposts, made the government’s presence more of a liability than an asset.
Combined with the sudden disappearance of the buffalo on the plains, these mounting adversities seemed to assail the three tribes from all quarters. By the late 1860s, living conditions at Like-a-Fishhook were dire and rapidly worsening. In the winter of 1871, Captain Walter Clifford, the new officer in charge of the cavalry post at the nearby Fort Berthold, saw no choice but to send the tribes’ youngest and strongest hunters into the Yellowstone country of the Crow. Otherwise, fifteen hundred Indians at Like-a-Fishhook faced the prospect of imminent starvation. Clifford gambled that the hunters would find game in the Yellowstone River country and be able to feed themselves through the winter. Using up the reserves of his own meager supplies, Clifford managed to keep the remaining five hundred women, children, and elders alive through the winter. For weeks on end, they huddled around bonfires inside the walls of the fort and survived from day to day on rations of soup.
This was a humiliating ordeal. Thankfully Clifford’s gamble paid off. The hunters found elk and deer on the Yellowstone, enough to sustain them
through the bitter cold winter. It was during this forced march into the country of the Crow that a Hidatsa matriarch named Yellow Corn gave birth to a girl in a tepee on the banks of the Yellowstone, a week’s march upstream from the trading post at Fort Union. At a naming ceremony ten days after her birth, the baby girl was called Many Dances. She was a healthy, robust little girl who would one day marry a legendary warrior named Old Dog, a man twenty years her senior, and they would have five children. The couple’s fourth child, a boy named Martin Old Dog Cross, would marry a Norwegian girl and make Many Dances a grandmother—ten times over.
That same year, 1871, the young Hidatsa warrior named Old Dog killed two Sioux warriors in hand-to-hand battle a stone’s throw from the palisades of Like-a-Fishhook. At the age of twenty-one, the grandson of Cherry Necklace had already earned a reputation for fearlessness in combat. If he survived the exploits of early manhood, Old Dog would one day be a chief. After killing the two Sioux interlopers, he added to his glory by chasing a young Hunkpapa warrior named Sitting Bull completely out of their country.
The surrender of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull in the years that followed the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 brought a long-awaited cessation of hostilities between the Sioux and the Village Indians. The Sioux’s two-hundred-year history of conflict with the Arikara would cost them dearly in the end. For many years they had held the upper hand. In the spring of 1876, the Arikara were the first to sign on as scouts for the 7th Cavalry’s last great campaign against the plains tribes. Though Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse would vanquish their nemesis George Armstrong Custer, the cooler heads of General Terry and General Miles would prevail in the end. The Arikara would lead them to their ultimate military victory over the Sioux and Cheyenne.
As the American Indian Wars were approaching a denouement on the Northern Plains, the new commissioner of Indian affairs, Amasa Walker, would declare to Congress in 1872: “What shall be done about the Indian as an obstacle to the progress of settlement and industry? . . . They must yield or perish, as they are altogether barbarous and incompatible with civilization.”
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