Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  BY 1857 THE Brulé OF the Platte country were mired in trouble. U.S. settlement was pressing upon them from the south and east, and the federal government was planning to put a railroad right in their midst. They had no choice but to find ways to get along with the whites. Although they sometimes joined Lakota who lived in more distant hunting grounds around the Powder River, in what today is Montana and northern Wyoming, that region could feed only so many Indians, and the bison were ebbing. Anyway, the lands in Nebraska Territory and in southern Dakota Territory were the Brulé home. They did not want to leave, and the only way to survive there was through accommodation with the whites.

  The settlers continued to come. Bison and other Lakota prey dwindled further. During the 1860s fighting between Lakota and the newcomers intensified, and forts went up in Montana along the Bozeman Trail, blazed as a thoroughfare to Oregon by an explorer who would later be killed by Indians. In January and February 1865 Spotted Tail joined in two raids on Julesburg, Colorado, killing soldiers and citizens and raiding stagecoach stations and trading posts. As many as 1,500 Lakota took part in these raids. Spotted Tail would later declare that he had participated in what he saw as futile battle only because of tribal pressure.39

  In summer 1865 the army invaded the Brulé hunting grounds. With soldiers lurking about, the Lakota could not leave their families to hunt. Desperate, they retreated north to the old White River country, but they had already hunted out the game there. Spotted Tail and other leaders decided that seeking peace was the best avenue for returning safely to the Platte River. The following spring they went to Fort Laramie with these hopes in mind.

  By then the Lakota people were fractured by white contact. Among the Brulé were bands that had learned to plant corn, although traditional Brulé considered planting crops demeaning and would threaten the corn bands when they tried to farm. Year round at Fort Laramie lived bands of Lakota who counted among their number many who had intermarried with white traders, soldiers, and others. In the early days of white contact, these marriages, usually between white men and the daughters of chiefs, were seen by the Lakota as creating useful ties with the newcomers. But by the 1850s the independent Lakota of the Powder River area looked down on these stay-around-the-fort Indians because they had given up traditional ways. The wilder Lakota called them Waglukhe, or Loafers. The Waglukhe, in turn, looked down on traditional Lakota as the equivalent of country bumpkins who had not grasped the new reality.40

  One of the key leaders of the independent Lakota was Red Cloud, an Oglala whose people, ironically, had lived and hunted for years in the country just north of Fort Laramie. Red Cloud had known Fort Laramie since its trading-post days during his childhood and, like others of his people, had gone there often to sell furs and hides.

  Red Cloud was not a hereditary chief. In fact, his father had besmirched the family by dying of alcoholism when Red Cloud was only about five years old, forcing his mother and siblings to live with relatives.41But Red Cloud won status through success in battle. Born around 1820, he had already taken a scalp by age sixteen, while on his first war party.42A few months later, he joined a war party that trapped fourteen Crow warriors who gave up in despair, sitting down and covering their heads with their blankets to await death. Red Cloud rode up and struck three of them with his bow, leaving himself open to retaliation, but rode away unscathed.43To these coups he would later add seventy-seven more. Once, he and a friend rode ahead of a war party and swooped down on an unsuspecting Crow guarding a herd of fifty horses. Red Cloud killed the guard, and he and his friend made off with the horses.

  In 1866 Red Cloud was leading a war meant to drive the new enemies out of Lakota territory. This war hit a high note on December 21, when Captain William Fetterman led a contingent of soldiers out of Fort Phil Kearny in northern Wyoming to pursue half a dozen Lakota warriors who had attacked a detail of men cutting wood near the fort.44The warriors were led by Tasunka Witko, or Crazy Horse, a man in his midtwenties who was idolized by the Lakota as one of their top warriors.

  The fort commander had ordered Fetterman not to chase the Indians beyond a nearby highland called Lodge Trail Ridge. However, the thirty-one-year-old captain—eerily echoing the Grattan affair—was an overconfident hothead who had bragged that he could beat the entire Lakota tribe with eighty soldiers, exactly the number with which he left the fort.45

  Once the soldiers rode out on the plains, the Lakota with Crazy Horse taunted Fetterman, who promptly veered away from the woodcutters and chased after the Indians, rushing without pause over the top of Lodge Trail Ridge and straight into several hundred warriors waiting in ambush. The attack on the woodcutters and the taunts by Crazy Horse and his men were a mere ruse to lead soldiers to doom. For Fetterman, that doom came in the form of an Oglala Lakota named American Horse, who clubbed Fetterman to the ground and cut his throat so deeply that the knife slashed all the way to the bone. The rest of Fetterman's troops suffered a similar fate in a battle that U.S. historians came to call the Fetterman Massacre. The Lakota called it the Fight of One Hundred, as they thought one hundred soldiers were fighting under the feckless captain. When it was over, the Indians dispersed to hunting grounds around the Powder River in what today is southern Montana.

  The Fight of One Hundred caused considerable grief in Washington, D.C.46The army, particularly Civil War hero General William Tecumseh Sherman, wanted to punish the Indians severely.

  Sherman was expert at punishing enemies, having laid waste to much of Georgia during his march from Atlanta to the sea toward the end of the Civil War. He was perfectly willing to use the army, which he saw as "the picket line at the front of the great wave of civilization," to scour away the Indians. 47He declared to General Philip Sheridan, commanding troops on the southern plains, that war in the West would lead to the "extermination—the utter annihilation of these Indians." He told Sheridan not to restrain his troops in battle, promising to fend off in Washington anyone who tried to chastise the military for any excesses. "I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charge of cruelty or inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all the power confided in me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not. . . carry on their barbarous warfare."48Shortly after the Fetterman battle, he wrote President Ulysses S. Grant specifically about the Lakota: "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children."49

  But he was at least partly thwarted by the civilian Department of the Interior, which was responsible for Indian affairs. Interior officials contended that hostile actions by the military had incited the Lakota to attack at Fort Phil Kearny. Congress reacted to the conflicting views by appointing a commission to go west and investigate.

  The Lakota leader with whom the commission most wanted to speak was Red Cloud, widely credited with planning the Fetterman battle. He was also well known to the government because of his long association with Fort Laramie. Nevertheless, the commissioners failed to get him to attend the 1866 council. They traveled to various parts of Lakota territory, but only lesser chiefs would meet with them. One exception was Spotted Tail.

  Spotted Tail was regarded around this time both by his people and by the U.S. military as the head Brulé chief. On June 27, 1866, he and other peace-seeking chiefs signed a treaty with the whites. The Powder River Lakota, particularly Red Cloud, refused to sign and continued fighting in the north, but Spotted Tail had to make peace if he and his people were going to live in their homeland. Unlike the Powder River region, the Brulé hunting grounds were studded with forts and lay along one of the main U.S. wagon-train thoroughfares. His choice was to sign or to starve, so he signed, and then, with his people, he went home.50

  Despite the treaty, Brulé warriors continued to join Red Cloud in fighting the whites, causing Spotted Tail to worry that the army would ride in and punish even his peaceful people.
But he was in for a surprise. When the commissioners returned to Washington, they urged the government to stop the war against the Indians and to send yet another panel to talk with the Lakota. In response, Congress in July 1867 created the Indian Peace Commission, authorized to seek peace not just with the Lakota but with Indians throughout the plains.51This commission, which gathered in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 7 for its organizational meeting, was composed of three civilians who wanted peace with the Indians and three soldiers who leaned more toward extermination. 52

  The most prominent of the soldiers was General Sherman himself, who had troops out in the field trying to find Lakota with whom to fight even as the commission was being assembled. His hope was that, by marching large units of soldiers into the heart of Lakota hunting grounds, he would entice equally large numbers of warriors into battle. In this way he planned to wipe out the Lakota in sizable gulps, rather than piecemeal in skirmishes with individual war parties.53Even while serving on the commission and meeting with the Lakota, he wrote to his wife, "I don't care about interesting myself too far in the fate of the poor . . . Indians, who are doomed from the causes inherent in their natures, or from the natural & persistent hostility of the White Race."54

  Sherman notwithstanding, the panel's desire to negotiate an end to hostilities was a harbinger of a revolution about to sweep down on the plains and the Lakota. Protecting settlers was not the government's only goal in terminating hostilities. Perhaps even more important, the government did not want an Indian war to derail one of America's most-ambitious nineteenth-century undertakings: construction of the transcontinental railroad. Everyone well knew that the Union Pacific railroad would cross Lakota lands in the Nebraska area and that further construction would bring steel track to the northern parts of Lakota territory as well.

  This development would introduce change on a scale the Lakota could scarcely imagine. Wagon trains carrying settlers to California and Oregon had alarmed the Indians, but those settlers were just passing through. The railroad would create new towns from which goods could be shipped to market.55The milahanska would follow the iron trail more swiftly and in greater numbers than ever before, and they would make their homes on Lakota lands. The last of the game herds would vanish as sport and commercial hunters took advantage of the railroads. Under these circumstances the 1868 treaty would be not so much a permanent solution to Lakota hostilities as a delaying tactic abating Indian aggression until the United States was poised to take over in the West.

  But completing the railroad was not the only challenge for the government. The Civil War had just ended, and rebuilding the South required funds and troops. Consequently, the government lacked the personnel and the money needed to protect both the Union Pacific and the Bozeman Trail.56Compared to the need to put America on rails and the South on its feet, fighting the Lakota over the Bozeman paled in significance.

  Lakota reservations and important sites of the Lakota Wars of the 1860s and 1870s. (Copyright ©iggj by the Oklahoma University Press)

  To settle these issues, the Indian Peace Commission intended to move the Lakota to reservations and to teach them to farm, blithely ignoring the fact that reservations and farming were anathema to nomadic plains hunters. Using steel plows to tear the flesh of Mother Earth also carried dark religious overtones for the Lakota. For such evil, traditional Lakota presumed, the spirits would punish them.57Even among the few Brulé who had learned to farm, growing crops was considered women's work and was performed on the scale of a home vegetable garden. And those who planted crops risked being policed by other Lakota, who might destroy the would-be farmers' homes, horses, and other possessions.

  Although some army officers and most western settlers still favored killing off the Indians, or at least subduing them, the federal government was in no mood for protracted battle and sided with the more peaceful of the peace commissioners. 58Red Cloud, however, continued to take a hard line in negotiations, refusing to meet or to sign a treaty unless the United States first closed not only a chain of forts along the Bozeman Trail but also the trail itself.

  The government was so eager to bargain that on March 2, 1868, President Grant ordered General Sherman to close the three forts that offended Red Cloud. The new treaty also promised that the government would close the Bozeman Trail, which after all would be less important once the railroad was built. These concessions to Red Cloud did not please Spotted Tail, even though he had helped to negotiate them.59Spotted Tail sensed that the government was rewarding the warring Lakota while his own peace-seeking people were beleaguered by settlers and soldiers along the Platte. He and other peace chiefs knew that if this ironic state of affairs persisted, they would lose authority among their own people, including their ability to restrain eager young warriors.

  In the fall, after months out west, the Indian Peace Commission gathered in Chicago without ever getting Red Cloud to sign the treaty. Sherman, as commander of the army's Division of the Missouri, which included the plains region of the Lakota, pushed through his own policies.60He not only took the lead in dissolving the commission itself but also succeeded in getting the Bureau of Indian Affairs transferred from the Interior Department to the War Department, where the military could take more direct control of the Indians. Although civilians would remain in charge of Indian reservation agencies— the administrative offices for specific Lakota groups—military commanders were to monitor the activities of the civilian agents and to serve as agents for Indians who did not live on reservations.61Sherman also initiated a policy in which Indian tribes would no longer be treated as separate nations, ensuring that in the future Indians would be held individually responsible for obeying U.S. laws.

  By this time the U.S. government had largely met Red Cloud's demands. The forts were closed around the end of July 1868, and Red Cloud and his warriors burned two of them to the ground almost as soon as the army left.62Nevertheless, Red Cloud did not come to Fort Laramie to sign the treaty until November, a month after the Indian Peace Commission had ceased to exist. Despite his intransigence, the commissioners had hammered out a treaty that met his wishes, surrendering to the Lakota their Powder River hunting grounds and other sites above the North Platte River. The treaty labeled these regions "unceded territory," where the Lakota could hunt but not settle and where the United States could build roads and railroads.

  The treaty also established the Great Sioux Reservation, composed largely of South Dakota west of the Missouri and off-limits to white settlement. Reservation agencies would be built to supply the Indians with rations and annuities and to teach them to farm. Another provision allowed each Indian family to lay claim to 320 acres within the reservation, along with other considerations designed to encourage them to grow crops. Even after signing the treaty, Red Cloud refused to go to the reservation. He and his people headed back to Powder River, where they continued to engage in occasional shootouts with white interlopers.

  Spotted Tail had signed the new treaty on April 29, 1868. In the absence of Red Cloud, he had played a leading role in treaty negotiations. He had stressed the need for firearms and ammunition for hunting but generally had acceded to white demands in the belief that he and his people would then be allowed to return safely to their Platte River homeland.63He had failed to notice that the treaty required his people to move to the new reservation in southern Dakota Territory.

  CHAPTER 3

  Freedom's Final Days

  NONE OF THE LAKOTA TRIBES understood that the 1868 treaty required them to move to a reservation. The first to learn of this plan were the Waglukhe, the Loafers who had lived around Fort Laramie for a quarter of a century. Shortly after the signing, army officers ordered the Waglukhe to move to a reservation on the Missouri River in southern Dakota Territory. The Loafers had abandoned the old ways so long ago that many of them did not even own horses for travel. The U.S. government had to supply wagons for transport, and the Waglukhe went along docilely if unhappily.1

  The military then tur
ned its attention to the Brulé hunting along the Republican River in southern Nebraska. When the army told Spotted Tail's people they must move northeastward to the Missouri, the Indians could scarcely believe what they were hearing. They had acquiesced in everything the U.S. government had asked of them, while their wilder northern counterparts had fought back. Now the Brulé were to be rewarded by being put on a reservation in a land exhausted of game, while the warring northern Lakota remained on their hunting grounds leading the old life.

  But the chiefs knew that they were not in the northern Lakota's enviable position on the pristine Powder River. Brulé hunting lands were pressed on all sides and divided within by white encroachment. Some Brulé warriors might slip off to join northern brethren in fighting, or might raid settlements along the Platte, but the chiefs knew, and persuaded most of the Brulé to believe, that warfare against the whites could not be won. And so the Brulé packed up and headed for the Missouri River, the boundary they had crossed one hundred years earlier when they had swept as conquerors onto the high plains. They were back in the lowlands, and they despised it.

  The Brulés' assigned home lay along Whetstone Creek, which flowed into the Missouri from the west about twenty-five miles above the Nebraska border. The agent was General William Harney, who in 1855 had fought the Lakota on the Bluewater, capturing Spotted Tail's wife and child. In 1868 he had served on the Indian Peace Commission and had endorsed informal promises to provide the Lakota with food and other goods in addition to what the treaty offered. But when he prepared to take charge as the Brulé agent, he told a newspaper reporter in Sioux City that he would avoid spending any time with the Lakota, because he did not want them to ask him where all the horses, cows, chickens, and other promised gifts were to be found.2Instead, he ordered thousands of acres along Whetstone plowed, so the land would be waiting for the Lakota to sow it. He also ordered all manner of agricultural equipment: rakes, plows, corn planters, threshing machines, harrows, even a mill for making flour.