Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  And so the Lakota emerged from the eighteenth century as mounted warriors armed with rifles. After decades of retreat, pushed hither and yon by other tribes, the Lakota were now fierce and demanding warriors who roamed the Great Plains from the Missouri River to the Bighorn Mountains, from the Canadian prairies to the Platte River and down into the Kansas plains. The Lakota split into seven tribes: the Oglala (Scatters Their Own), Miniconjou (Planters by Water), Two Kettle, Sans Arc (Without Bows), Hunkpapa (Campers at the Opening of the Circle, so named because when they camped with other tribes, the Hunkpapa always took an outermost position, the one most exposed to danger), the Siha Sapa (Blackfeet, not to be confused with the Blackfeet people found farther west), and the Brulé.10The Brulé, with the Oglala, almost always had been in the vanguard of the movement west, blazing a path that the other tribes had followed.11Taken together, the Lakota were not just a force to be reckoned with in the northern plains; they were the force.

  ON SEPTEMBER 24, 1804, A band of about nine hundred Brulé Lakota under Chief Tatanka Sapa, or Black Buffalo, was encamped in what is now central South Dakota near the mouth of the Bad River, which empties into the Missouri. Black Buffalo and his people were in a celebratory mood—only two weeks earlier they had battled and beaten the neighboring Omaha, killing seventy-five warriors and capturing forty-eight women and children—when they heard that a party of white men in boats and pirogues was coming up the Missouri. Just the day before, three teenage Lakota boys had made contact with the white men, who gave the boys two or three pounds of tobacco and asked them to tell their chiefs that the white men wanted to meet the next day.12

  By and large, the arrival of the boats was good news to Black Buffalo, because the Lakota supplemented the rewards of hunting and tribal warfare with tribute demanded from riparian passersby. Usually the property of white trappers and fur companies, these boats were often loaded with trade goods when heading north and with furs when returning south. Jean Baptiste Truteau, a Canadian-born representative of the fur-trading Missouri Company who was waylaid and robbed by the Lakota during a 1794 expedition, wrote in his journal that "all voyageurs ought to avoid meeting this tribe, as much for the safety of their goods as for their lives even."'13

  The Lakota had no reason to think that this latest arrival of white immigrants would differ from the traders they had encountered in the past. They did not know that these men composed the U.S. Corps of Discovery, sent upriver under the military leadership of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark. President Thomas Jefferson had tasked these men with traveling across the virtually unknown northern West, starting at the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi and ending at the Pacific coast. The United States had just purchased that vast region from France, and officials wanted to learn more about what they had bought. Among other assignments, Lewis and Clark had been ordered by Jefferson to make a good impression on the lordly Lakota so that the Indians would become friends with America and trade with the young nation, exchanging furs for items such as guns.14The Lewis and Clark expedition thus amounted to the first official contact between Plenty Horses' people—he was himself a Brulé—and the United States.

  The result of that contact was not what Jefferson had sought. The time that the Corps of Discovery spent with the Lakota was punctuated with the baring of swords, stringing of bows, cocking of rifles, and, very nearly, the firing of cannons. Much of the tension grew from Brulé dissatisfaction with the gifts that Lewis and Clark offered them. Suspicions about one another's motives festered on both sides, and tension between the whites and the Lakota nearly exploded on September 27, as the expedition prepared to proceed up the Missouri. About two hundred Lakota gathered on shore, some with firearms, others with spears, cutlasses, and bows and arrows. Warriors laid hold of the ropes to the expedition boats and demanded tobacco. When Lewis and Clark finally tossed a few pounds ashore, the Lakota let them go, although by then Clark was preparing to light the fuse of a cannon.

  By and large, the first encounter of Lakota and Americans, while it did not go well, nevertheless accurately presaged the decades ahead.

  * * *

  LAKOTA LIFE WAS SHAKEN TO its foundations in the years following Lewis and Clark. By 1825 the Lakota, like so many other tribes, had come to depend on certain goods supplied by whites: guns, cloth, tools, pots, and pans. That year, the United States and the Lakota, as well as other related tribes who lived farther east, signed a treaty recognizing one another's sovereignty, although whether this had any real meaning to the Indians is open to debate.15For the United States, the treaty was a means for normalizing relations with the intimidating Lakota. From the Lakota perspective, the treaty was an agreement with a weaker nation—the United States—that recognized Lakota dominance in the upper Missouri. In return, the Lakota agreed to a U.S. demand for a monopoly on their trade.

  That the United States might not be as weak as it seemed, and that the Lakota might not be as much in command as they had believed, started to become apparent in the 1830s as white settlers infiltrated Lakota territory, and the United States dotted the northern plains with forts. By then Plenty Horses' Brulé ancestors were living in what today is southwestern South Dakota, largely in the watershed of a river they called Makazita Wakpa, which literally means "Earth Smoke River" but is more accurately rendered as "Dust River.16They gave it this name because the white clay beds through which the upper portions of the river ran made the water look milky. Today it is called the White River. Other streams in the area, such as White Clay Creek and the Milk River, were given their names for the same reason. The White River country was rich in grass, water, and game such as bison, deer, and pronghorn—a perfect paradise for mounted hunters. The Lakota could even find wild horses roaming the Sandhills to the south, in what today is Nebraska.

  Once the Brulé in the late 1700s took control of this area from the crop-growing and more sedentary Arikara, other Lakota tribes and even more distant relatives from as far away as Minnesota moved in. The area began to suffer. The newcomers cut cottonwood groves along streams for firewood and stripped off bark to feed horses. Game grew scarce. The degradation was compounded when the fur trade boomed after the War of 1812.17The Lakota switched from killing animals for food to killing them to provide hides for trade. A hunter knew when he had killed enough to feed his family or his band, but what was the limit in commercial hunting?18In the winter of 1829-30, at least 6,000 bison hides from the Black Hills alone—the heart of Lakota country—were shipped to St. Louis.19Those hides were a drop in the bucket. That same year, 26,000 bison hides from north of the Big Sioux River reached St. Louis, along with 25,000 pounds of beaver pelts, 37,500 muskrat skins, 4,000 otter, and 150,000 deer.20The Lakota, enamored of a trade that brought them firearms, ammunition, blankets, kettles, fabrics, beads, needles, and such exotic foods as coffee, flocked to trading posts set up along the Missouri.21

  By the 1820s White River wildlife was ebbing away, and rival fur companies were plying the Indians with bad liquor in an effort to win their trade. The fur dealers sold the booze at a loss or even gave it away.22Drunken Lakota often would quarrel and fight. People were killed.23

  Soon, much more powerful impacts hit the Lakota. In 1835 Brulé wandering along the Platte witnessed something they had never seen before— caravans of wagons enclosed under white canvas, like tents on wheels. At first the Indians were not alarmed and even approached wagon trains for trade and guided the settlers to fords in streams.24But the Lakota became increasingly hostile after they recognized in the 1840s that these whites were coming in endless numbers, using up grass and firewood and killing off game. Marauding Lakota attacked small parties of mounted white hunters and sometimes robbed them of everything, literally stripping them naked and setting them on foot to walk back to the wagon trains.

  The federal government in 1845 responded by sending out Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, who rode at the head of a force of dragoons and met with Brulé and other Lakota he found in June at a fur-tra
ding outpost just south of the Platte River in what today is eastern Wyoming. He gave the Brulé an intimidating demonstration of five companies of sword-wielding soldiers parading about on horses that towered over the Indian ponies—the Indians dubbed the Americans milahanska, "long knives," and called these big animals sunkawakan milahan-ska, "American horses." Having exhibited his might, Kearny reinforced his message with cajolery, giving the Lakota presents and telling them to leave the wagon trains alone.25

  The army in 1848 reinforced Kearny's warning by building a fort named after him on the Platte River in what is today south-central Nebraska. Fort Kearny stood in the heart of hunting grounds used by the Lakota and the Pawnee, who frequently fought one another over access to the region. The army also purchased the trading post where Kearny had met with the Lakota, reincarnating it as Fort Laramie. Many wagons moved through the area. In 1849 some 4,400, carrying twenty thousand settlers, had passed Fort Kearny by May, still early in the travel season.26

  The superintendent of Indian affairs, D. D. Mitchell, visited Fort Laramie in 1851 and found himself "much surprised to witness the sad change which a few years and unlooked-for circumstances had produced. The buffalo, upon which [the Indians] rely for food, clothing, shelter, and traffic, are rapidly diminishing. The hordes of emigrants passing through the country seem to have scattered death and disease in all directions. The tribes have suffered much from the small-pox and cholera, and perhaps still more from venereal diseases." 27

  To reduce tensions, in 1851 the U.S. Congress appropriated one hundred thousand dollars for negotiating another Lakota treaty. Promises of gifts for participants brought ten thousand Indians to Fort Laramie to talk things over. The treaty signed at Fort Laramie on September 17 assigned boundaries to territories controlled by the Lakota and other tribes. Lakota territory covered what today is North Dakota south of the Heart River, South Dakota west of the Missouri, northwestern Nebraska, and eastern Wyoming between the North Platte and the western slope of the Black Hills. The Lakota agreed to let white travelers cross the Platte River valley in Nebraska and Wyoming and to allow the United States to build roads and outposts—including forts—in Indian territory. For these benefits, the government promised for the next fifty years to pay the Indians fifty thousand dollars yearly in various types of goods and equipment and to protect the Indians from settlers. The U.S. Senate reduced the term of the contract to ten years and gave the president the option to renew the terms every five years.

  In the early 1850s none of the Lakota knew what they were up against in their dealings with the U.S. government. They thought of the milahanska as merely another enemy tribe that could be beaten into submission when needed. The Indians reached the conclusion that such measures were necessary in August 1854, when a young lieutenant, John L. Grattan, rode with thirty other soldiers, a twelve-pound fieldpiece, and a mountain howitzer into a Lakota camp near Fort Laramie and tried to arrest a Miniconjou Lakota for shooting and killing an ox that had passed by with a Morman wagon train. The camp included some two hundred lodges, almost all of them Brulé.

  Fresh out of West Point, Grattan—like many another brash officer—was convinced he could beat the entire Lakota nation with a handful of soldiers and some artillery. When he reached the camp, he set up his men in battle order, palavered with the Indians for a while, lost his patience, and ordered his men into action.

  The Brulé went into action, too, annihilating Grattan and all his men. Flushed with victory, the warriors instantly went off to raid nearby trading posts. The next day, cooler and somewhat older heads prevailed as the Lakota recognized the vulnerability of their position, camped as they were with women and children along a main immigrant thoroughfare with the U.S. military nearby. The Indians broke camp and melted into the wilder parts of the prairie to begin their annual autumn bison hunt.28

  The Grattan affair marked the first battle between the Lakota and the U.S. Army. After it, the Lakota returned to such conventional activities as attacking the Crow and the Pawnee, hunting buffalo, and holding a sun dance, a key religious ritual that preserved tribal unity through individual sacrifice on behalf of all Lakota. Then, in spring and summer 1855, they again attacked trading posts, primarily to steal horses and other goods. The traders warned friendly Lakota that the army would soon retaliate for the Grattan affair and these other affronts.

  In fact, earlier in the year, Brigadier General William S. Harney had begun putting together an attack force at his base in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In August the Indian agent at Fort Laramie told the Lakota that friendly bands should move their camps from the north to the south side of the North Platte River and keep close to the fort. Any bands north of the river would be deemed hostiles. The bulk of the tribe crossed over.29

  The alacrity with which the Lakota complied was a measure of how wary they had become of the whites. Only a few years earlier they would have ignored such an order. But not all the Lakota submitted, including most of the Brulé. About 250 of the latter were camped on a Platte tributary called Blue-water. Among them was a young warrior of growing fame who would not only shape but also personify the changes that the Lakota, particularly the Brulé, made in dealing with the United States. Born in 1823, Sinte Galeska, or Spotted Tail—so named because in battle he always wore a raccoon tail attached to his headdress—was tall and aristocratic in bearing, with a round face, narrow nose, and wide mouth.30He had by the age of sixteen won so sterling a reputation as a warrior that he had already served as an advance scout for at least one war party.31At seventeen or eighteen, in a knife fight over a woman, he killed a Brulé chief named Running Bear. Badly wounded, Spotted Tail survived to marry the woman, his first of several wives.32By 1855 he was becoming a Brulé leader, had taken more than one hundred enemy scalps, and with two other warriors was wanted by the military for his role in a November 1854 mail-wagon attack that resulted in the death of three whites. He was ardently anti-white and pro-war.33

  Although, as would happen nearly forty years later with Plenty Horses, the army demanded the surrender of Spotted Tail and the other two warriors, in this case the Brulé shrugged off the order. They would soon learn, however, that the army meant to impose its authority. On the morning of September 3, 1855, Harney and six hundred soldiers, backed with artillery, attacked the Bluewater village.

  Accustomed to dishing out harsh punishment to enemies, the Lakota for the first time in living memory lost one of their big camps to foe. When the attack ended, eighty-six Lakota had died, and the army had captured seventy women and children. Spotted Tail was among the wounded who fled. His wife and child stood among the captives.

  Spotted Tail, an important Brulé chief. He advocated peace after a visit to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, persuaded him that his people could not win a war against the United States. (Library of Congress)

  Harney went on to Fort Laramie, where he cut off the goods that the government had promised to provide yearly for friendly Lakota. He also ended all trade with them and vowed that his ban on trade and annuities would not be lifted until the warriors involved in the mail-wagon slaughter were turned over to the military. He then headed off with his troops on a raid through the heart of Brulé country.

  Harney's scouring of the countryside ended when cold weather blew in, closing the war season. But Harney, whom the Lakota called the Hornet, vowed to buzz back in the spring. During the ensuing weeks, Lakota chiefs begged Spotted Tail and the two other warriors to turn themselves in.34The tribe could withstand the loss of three warriors, but it could not survive without trade. And so, decked out in elaborate war costumes and mounted on their best horses, the trio rode into Fort Laramie on October 18, 1855, singing their death songs and fully expecting that they would be hanged.35

  The surrender marked a turning point for the Brulé, if not for the Lakota as a nation, in at least two ways. First, the Brulé had chosen not to rebuff the U.S. military over the issue of the surrender of the three warriors, a sure sign that some of the fight had been take
n out of them. Second, when Spotted Tail and the others arrived at Fort Leavenworth on December 12,1855—having crossed what was, for Lakota people, a vast chunk of ground, taking them into alien territory—they discovered for the first time the magnitude of the force against which they had been fighting. The Kansas plains were swarming with whites— white men, white women, white children—scattered in homesteads, clustered in towns, passing through in countless streams of wagons. Among the whites, surrounded by them, were the Kaw Indians, the native people of this land, boxed up on a reservation. In Kansas, too, lived Indians the U.S. government had transported from distant reaches beyond the Mississippi—Delaware and Shawnee Indians who wore Euro-American clothing, lived in houses, and farmed the land. In them Spotted Tail saw the bleak future of his own people.36

  The army did not hang Spotted Tail and the others. Their agent, working through the superintendent of Indian affairs, won a pardon for them from President Franklin Pierce. Spotted Tail then lived at Fort Leavenworth until the following spring, learning the ways of U.S. society while charming and befriending army officers and their wives.37

  However socially buoyant he was, something within Spotted Tail died at Fort Leavenworth. A year earlier, he had been a Brulé firebrand, a strong advocate for war with the whites. But now, seeing the vast numbers of settlers, of their soldiers, of their houses, of their weapons, he knew that fighting these newcomers would destroy the Lakota nation. Fort Leavenworth alone held more soldiers than there were Brulé warriors in all the world.38And more immigrants were coming west all the time—Spotted Tail saw them passing by on the crowded steamboats that plied the Missouri, within sight of the fort. The question on his mind concerned how his people would adapt to the challenges the new settlers posed and how he would convey to them a sense of what he had seen and learned. In the process of answering those questions, he would create the new Brulé world in which Plenty Horses would grow up. But between his realization that the Lakota could not survive a fight with the United States, and actually giving up that fight, lay a few more years of hostility and aggression.