The Wild Frontier

by William M. Osborn

  This act has been invaluable to the Indians. Under it the Sioux got a $105,000,000 judgment because land had been taken from them contrary to the Constitution. The Supreme Court held that under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the Sioux were to have exclusive occupation of the Black Hills, but then that land was effectively taken from them by an 1877 act of Congress, and the Fifth Amendment required the government to make just compensation to the Sioux.19 A few of the other judgments are $31,000,000 for the Ute, $13,000,000 for the Delaware, $7,000,000 for the Pawnee, more than $5,000,000 for the California tribes, and almost $5,000,000 for the Miami. Other important claims are pending. So far as is known, although some Indians claimed that tribes possessed their land forever, the tribes such as the Sioux who dispossessed others to get the land on which their award was based never gave any part of the award to the dispossessed tribes.20

  By 1951, 852 claims had been filed concerning more than twice the amount of land in the lower 48 states. (This resulted because of overlapping claims.) The government agreed to return 48,000 acres to the Pueblos and 21,000 acres to the Yakimas. Since 1970, the courts and Congress have returned more than 4,500,000 acres to Indians and have paid about $2,000,000,000 by way of compensation for land. The Indians did not win all their claims before the commission, but they did win 60 percent of them.

  TRIBE AFTER tribe took by conquest land being occupied by others. A few examples: Iroquois by conquest displaced the Hurons. The Cree and Chippewa displaced the Sioux from their woodland homes in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Sioux in turn displaced the Kiowa, Crows, Pawnee, Ioways, Omaha, Arikara, and Mandan in the West. The Navajo took the land of the Hopi.21

  We know about the purchases of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, the Florida Purchase from Spain in 1819, the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico in 1854, and the Alaska Purchase from Russia in 1867. Under international law then and now, lands occupied by Indians in these territories purchased by treaty belonged to the government and not the Indians.

  The same result obtained when the territory was conquered. In the Mcintosh case, plaintiffs claimed title to land in Illinois by reason of purchases from the Indians. The defendant claimed title to the same land on the basis of purchase from the government. The Supreme Court, speaking through Chief Justice John Marshall in 1823, found for the defendant, holding in part that even without a treaty, title to the Indian land was acquired by the settlers by 2 additional means:

  Conquest gives a title which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny. The title by conquest is acquired and maintained by force. The conqueror prescribes its limits. Second, title by conquest on the part of the settlers themselves. “If a country has been acquired and held under it [the rule of title by conquest]; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned.22

  The law of complete conquest is described in this way in the American Jurisprudence legal encyclopedia:

  Complete conquest, by whatever mode it may be perfected, carries with it all the rights of the former government. In other words, the conqueror, by the completion of his conquest, becomes the absolute owner of the property conquered from the enemy nation or state. His rights are no longer limited to mere occupation of what he has taken in his actual possession, but they extend to all the property and rights of the conquered state, including even debts as well as personal and real property [emphasis added].23

  Under international law then and now, lands occupied by Indians in those territories conquered by the government belonged to the government and not to the Indians.

  Although the government was entitled to take all the Indian land without compensation under the law of conquest, the fact that it chose to try to purchase that land instead was to its credit. It was also perhaps unprecedented in world history.

  It is still argued by some that most of the land was taken by force without compensation. One example did occur during the Revolutionary War. After the war, in 1783, the Americans, according to Edward H. Spicer, “took over the greater part of the land of the Cayugas, Mohawks, and Onondagas.”24 These 3 tribes fought against the Americans during the war.25 They were not paid for their land because of their exceptionally atrocious conduct toward the settlers. The Americans held title to this land, however, under the law of conquest.

  ONE OF the great tragedies of the war between the Indians and the settlers was that there was plenty of land for both. Black Hawk returned from a hunt in 1829 to find a settler family settled in his lodge. He got an interpreter and told the squatters not to occupy those lands and that “there was plenty of land in the country for them to settle upon.” The family didn’t leave, more settlers arrived, and the Black Hawk War started. S. L. A. Marshall observed in Crimsoned Prairie that at the time of the Plains wars, “the Far West was still a largely unpeopled land of magnificent distances. There remained plenty of room for the red man and for the white man.”26 As late as 1872 any newly arrived foreigner who declared his intention to become a citizen was given 160 acres of land and tools and stock.27

  As WE have seen, diseases were as destructive to the Indians as anything else. Carl Waldman in Atlas of the North American Indian put it succinctly:

  As devastating as warfare and forced removals were to Indian peoples, another result of contact with whites proved to be even more debilitating, demoralizing, and deadly—the spread of European diseases. It is estimated that, whereas many tribal populations declined by more than 10 percent from Indian-white conflicts, the average tribal loss of life from infectious diseases was 25-50 percent. For some tribes, these diseases meant near extinction….

  The extent of the tragedy is staggering. The subject of infectious European diseases pervades every aspect of Indian studies. Disease was a principal disrupter of Indian culture, with shattering impact even on Indian faith and religion. The debilitating effects of these diseases also helped the whites win many of the Indian wars…. As for land cessions, disease through depopulation played a large part in the ultimate displacement of tribes.28

  It may be that more Indians were killed by disease than by intertribal warfare and fighting the settlers combined,29 and William T. Hagan concluded that had it not been for Indian diseases, the war “would have been bloodier and more protracted.”30 Wilcomb E. Washburn believed that “unwittingly, disease was the white man’s strongest ally in the New World.”31

  Three years before the Mayflower arrived, an epidemic decimated the Indians from Rhode Island to Maine. Thus the Indians were not in as strong a position to oppose the Plymouth colony. “If they had been, it [Plymouth] could not have survived.”32 A smallpox epidemic struck the New England Indians in 1633 and 1634. Thousands died. Plymouth and the other colonies got a new life.33

  In 1849, cholera swept through the western tribes. The Cheyenne were devastated, the Flexed Leg band vanished, the Sioux reported terrible losses, and a Pawnee agent reported that one fourth of the tribe, or 1,200, had died, with the epidemic still raging.

  Disease almost wiped out the Omaha tribe. In the smallpox epidemic of 1800, the tribe’s population dropped from about 3,000 to about 300. At that point, the tribe decided to commit collective suicide. Bordewich discussed how: “They formed a village-wide war party to attack their traditional enemies and fought through the Poncas, Cheyennes, Pawnees, and Otoes until those left realized some of them might survive after all. Then they returned home.”34

  Smallpox was the most harmful disease to the Indians. It was a serious disease among whites as well, but most survived it because they had built up some resistance by reason of centuries of exposure. This was not true, of course, of the Indians. The Mandan Indian tribe of 1,600 suffered a smallpox epidemic in 1837. Half committed suicide with knives, guns, or by leaping from a 30-foot ledge.35 Only 31 survived. Those were enslaved by the Riccarees, a neighboring tribe, who later were attacked by the Sioux. The Mandan, not wishing to live, ran onto the prairie, calling out that they were Riccaree dogs and asking for the Sio
ux to kill them. The Sioux did.36

  Edward Jenner developed his vaccine for smallpox in 1796. It was available for use not long thereafter. Various government officials made efforts to see to it that the Indians were vaccinated, but it is clear from the fact that epidemics continued that those efforts were not successful.37

  There were smallpox epidemics in 1780-1800 in Texas, in 1830-33 in California, in 1837 in Wyoming, in 1837-70 in Kansas, and in 1869-70 in Montana.38

  In 1805, Blackfoot Indians hired Alexander Culbertson to get a keel-boat of goods for the Indians. Several passengers came down with smallpox. When he learned about their smallpox, Culbertson tried to stop the boat until cold weather, but the Indians refused, so the boat went on. Ten days later, the Blackfeet had an epidemic. No fewer than 4,000 out of the 6,000 members of the tribe died.39

  The Blackfeet raided a Shoshoni camp in 1781. They found all the Shoshoni dead or dying of smallpox. More than half the Blackfeet then died of smallpox as well.40 In 1801, a Pawnee war party returning from a raid in New Mexico (then Spanish territory) brought smallpox back with them. It spread from their territory on the lower Platte to Texas.41 A war party of Pawnee took several Sioux prisoners in 1838. The prisoners had smallpox. About 2,000 Pawnee died of smallpox as a result. They in turn carried it south to the Osages, who also suffered many deaths and then passed the disease on to the Kiowa and the Comanche. The latter 2 tribes moved to north Texas to try to escape.42

  George Catlin watched as Indians “in this [smallpox] as in most of their diseases, ignorantly and imprudently plunge into the coldest water, whilst in the highest state of fever, and often die before they have the power to get out.”43 But something devastating happened beyond the diseases themselves. James Wilson claimed European diseases “undermined the Native Americans’ confidence in themselves and their view of the world. The failure of the shamans to contain and cure smallpox and bubonic plague was the failure of an entire system of belief.”44

  Diseases affected the soldiers as well and with similar consequences. Axelrod noted that “disease [in the army] was responsible for more casualties than Indian hostility.”45 In King William’s War in 1690, the English army was overcome by both the French and by smallpox, which killed many soldiers, and the army withdrew.46 During the French and Indian War, in 1757, the American army was in Halifax training for an assault on Louisbourg. The army was stricken with an epidemic, presumably smallpox. There were 200 deaths and an additional 500 hospitalizations. This army also withdrew.47 In 1757, French general Montcalm promised the American commandant and his men safe passage out of their fort, Fort William Henry. His Indian allies ambushed the surrendered men and massacred the hospital patients, including the smallpox patients, and took their infected scalps back to their people, where many deaths occurred.48 During the siege of Quebec in 1759, the British lost fewer than 250 soldiers. After the city was taken, however, an epidemic (no doubt smallpox) killed 1,000 more and 2,000 became unfit for service.49

  Disease was not a one-way street. Columbus perhaps brought smallpox, but his crews took back syphilis and tobacco. The exchange was not a good one for the whites. Smallpox was made preventable in 1796 by Jenner’s vaccine, but syphilis could not safely be cured until the late 1940s, when antibiotics were developed. This was more than 325 years after Plymouth was founded in 1620.50 Syphilis was the most common medical problem for the Lewis and Clark Expedition.51

  Indians over almost all of North America used tobacco before Columbus came. Catlin found in the 1830s that “the luxury of smoking is known to all the North American Indians…. In their native state they are excessive smokers.”52 Columbus took it back with him to Europe and from there its use spread all over the world.53 More deaths have no doubt resulted from tobacco than from smallpox and syphilis combined. The World Health Organization estimates that about 2,500,000 people in the world die as a result of smoking each year, and about 400,000 of those deaths are in the United States.54 Tobacco throughout the world kills more than 3 times as many people each year as there were Indians in the United States in 1492.

  EXTERMINATION WAS a topic popular among both settlers and Indians. Indians and their advocates have argued that it was soon clear that settlers intended to exterminate the Indians either by deliberately spreading contagious diseases or by use of force. There is no evidence that settlers attempted to use diseases to exterminate Indians. The question remains whether the settlers tried to exterminate the Indians by use of force.

  The Ottawa chief Pontiac said in 1763, “It is important to us, my brothers, that we exterminate from our lands this nation [Great Britain] which seeks only to destroy us.” He then led an assault on Fort Detroit, the strongest British garrison in the area, which was unsuccessful.55

  A great pan-Indian council was held near Detroit in 1786. Bil Gilbert said the Shawnee and the Miami urged all the tribes “to exterminate all the Americans who might be in those lands [the Ohio River line].” The Shawnee began acting on that policy immediately.56

  Thomas Jefferson, quoted by Bernard W. Sheehan, wrote in 1813 about the Indians that “ferocious barbarities justified extermination.”57 Jefferson had left office 4 years earlier.

  As we have seen, at the time of the California gold rush in 1848, much of the gold country was inhabited by Indians known as Diggers because they dug roots and picked berries for food. The governor of California announced that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged until the Indian race becomes extinct. This must be expected.”58 In very little time, the prospectors had killed 10 percent of the Diggers.

  Around 1855, Oregon territorial governor George Curry called for a military campaign to exterminate the Indians in that state. Instead, army regulars defended Indians from aggressive settlers.59

  After the Rouge River War of 1855, a Modoc chief said, “I thought if we killed all the white men we saw, that no more would come. We killed all we could; but they came more and more like new grass in the spring.”60

  The fact that there were white people who did want extermination is exemplified by 3 editorials, the first from California in 1866, the next written in 1867 in Kansas, and the last dated 1870 in a Wyoming newspaper. The Chico Courant in California took the position that

  it is a mercy to the red devils to exterminate them, and a saving of many white lives. Treaties are played out—there is one kind of treaty that is effective—cold lead.61

  The Kansas editorial described Indians as

  a set of miserable, dirty, lousy, blanketed, thieving, lying, sneaking, murdering, graceless, faithless, gut-eating skunks … whose immediate and final extermination all men, except Indian agents and traders, should pray for.62

  The Wyoming editorial rationalized the elimination of the Indian in this way:

  The same inscrutable Arbiter that decreed the downfall of Rome, has pronounced the doom of extinction upon the red men of America. To attempt to defer this result by mawkish sentimentalism … is unworthy of the age.63

  The Battle of the Little Bighorn of 1876 was a shock to the settlers—so much so that a bill was introduced in Congress by Senator Paddock calling for the extermination of Indians. But it did not pass.

  After the Meeker raid in Colorado in 1879, Governor Frederick Pitkin even figured out the economic benefit of extermination:

  My idea is that, unless removed by the government, they [the Indians] must necessarily be exterminated. I could raise 25,000 men to protect the settlers in twenty-four hours. The State would be willing to settle the Indian problem at its own expense. The advantages that would accrue from the throwing open of twelve million acres of land to miners and settlers would more than compensate all the expenses incurred.64

  Was it ever the policy of either Indian or federal governments to exterminate the other? No. The holders of these extreme views never spoke for the government or for all the tribes. Fergus M. Bordewich put it best:

  Although many modern polemicists call upon Americans to regard the nation’s treatment of the
Indians as a pattern of deliberate “genocide,” the physical extermination of Native Americans was never an official policy of the United States government. With more realism than racism, the new republic initially worried less about ridding itself of Indians than about how to protect them from the depredations of its own citizens.65

  Was this a race war? Alan Axelrod commenced his book, Chronicle of the Indian Wars, with the statement that the book is a “chronicle of protracted racial warfare.”66 Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., in The Indian Heritage of America, correctly referred to the war as a “total conflict of one race against the other.”67 And Carl Waldman in Atlas of the North American Indian cautioned that “the hostilities [of the war] cannot be viewed simply in terms of Indian versus white. The Indian wars are now generally interpreted as wars of native resistance.”68

  If the words race war simply mean a war between people of different races, the war was a race war because red people were at war with white people. If those words are taken in their normal sense, however, to mean a racially motivated war, it was not, because for the most part the white people were fighting for the land of the red people and would have done so regardless of the color of the defenders’ skins, just as the defenders would have resisted regardless of the color of the attackers’ skins. No one apparently contends that this was a racially motivated conflict in the sense of one where a belligerent tries to exterminate all the opponent’s race. Waldman concluded that “the Indians’ tribal identity was stronger than racial, just as for the whites national or religious identity took precedence over shared race.”69

  Most people of Jefferson’s day did not consider that there were racial differences between whites and Indians. Sheehan observed that “divisions there were between white and Indian, but in the Jeffersonian age, they were not racial.”70 Jefferson himself wrote in 1785 that “I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the white man.”71 Clark Wissler argued in Indians of the United States that the war was economic and political, not racial: