Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  And then reality struck. Harney could order all the farming equipment he wanted, but he could not make the Brulé farm. The Lakota were divided into two fundamental groups: the conservative "traditionalists," who resisted U.S. efforts to change Lakota culture, and the "progressives," who were willing to go along with federal plans and adapt to the new system. The traditionalists could take a very hard and effective approach to stifling government plans. For example, when farming instructors came to the reservation, the conservative faction kept them from teaching by letting them know they would be killed if they strayed from agency headquarters.3

  The life of a reservation agent in many ways was no better than that of their defeated charges. As political appointees, the agents often lacked managerial skills and knew nothing about Indians. For an annual salary of $1,500, they worked on isolated prairies surrounded by seasoned warriors who resented them. Some $2 million in government funds went yearly to the Lakota, and graft occurred often enough to damage the reputation of almost any man who became an agent, honest or otherwise. Chiefs used this situation to keep agents in line, sending letters to Washington officials accusing agents of theft when the chiefs wanted to get rid of them.4

  Nevertheless, the reservation administrators were the men in charge, and they were largely convinced that Indians were best dealt with by destroying their tribal system and turning them into farmers and ranchers.5The agents devised plans for achieving this goal. One of the first was to undermine the conservative chiefs, the most visible artifact of the old ways. These hardliners helped maintain tribal independence and served as authority figures through whom the Indians could demand concessions from the federal government. Initially, the government backed the chiefs, who offered some chance of keeping order among the warriors and the rest of the people. Agents turned over rations to these leaders, who would distribute the food to the people. This practice meshed with Lakota traditions of generosity and gift giving and helped preserve the tribal line of authority.6

  But when the agents finally realized that the chiefs were not always amenable to government plans, they set out to replace them with handpicked, malleable progressives who would do as told. The agents also changed the rules for distribution of rations, ordering that the head of each family come to the agency to receive goods personally. This arrangement posed a problem for Lakota who lived far from agency headquarters. They would have to ride in every two weeks, even if the trip took several days one way. While they traveled, they neglected the little farms that the agents had insisted they set up. For the Lakota, here was one more maddening aspect of life under U.S. government rule. Moreover, the agents succeeded in heightening the opposition between traditionalists and progressives, and the Lakota turned to fighting one another for influence on the reservation.7

  In 1883 the secretary of the Interior, Henry Teller, ordered the agents to ban ceremonial feasts and dances, including the sun dance, that brought the Lakota together for social as well as ceremonial purposes. The agents also established Indian police forces that reported to the agents rather than to the chiefs, diminishing the chiefs' authority and driving another wedge between progressives and traditionalists. Young Lakota were eager to sign up, because serving on an agency police force was a plum job that could ingratiate a politically astute warrior with his agent. The assignment not only paid hard cash but also echoed the role of the warrior in akicita societies, the Lakota men's clubs that often were assigned by the chiefs to keep order on hunts or when traveling.

  The government also sought to destroy Lakota culture by eroding the relationship between parents and children. Educating the offspring in reservation schools helped remove children from parental influence. An even better tool was the boarding school, where children could be kept for years, sometimes hundreds of miles from family and friends.

  The chiefs did not stand by idly and accept these changes, but some were more adept than others at evading the authorities. Spotted Tail's skills at running his agents was legendary. As late as 1879 he persuaded an agent not only to permit a sun-dance ceremony—the dance reservation administrators most wanted to forbid—but also to send out invitations to Lakota at other agencies.8He curtailed open rebellion among his people, too, even as he himself worked to preserve traditional ways. Crafty enough to ensure that the agency police were loyal to him, he strengthened his political base.

  The Brulé adjusted slowly to the new order. In early 1869 some Brulé wanted to travel south to the Republican River to hunt. Spotted Tail warned them not to go, fearing they would be shot. They went anyway, and several were killed in fights with Pawnee army scouts. Also, Oglala Lakota who in 1868 had stayed on the southern hunting grounds, refusing to go north to the reservation, arrived in spring 1869 destitute after encounters with army troops who had shot them up and destroyed their tepees and other property. These developments supported Spotted Tail's contention that resistance could only fail.9During the early 1870s, when Spotted Tail attempted to have his agency moved onto the high plains around the White River, he pressed his plan diplomatically on his agent and on various federal bureaucrats during a trip to Washington, D.C.

  Meanwhile, life on the reservation established its own rhythm. Each year the Brulé received their annuities. A shipment for 1871 included 2,450 of the dark blue, dark green, or dark red blankets favored by Lakota men; cases of blue, red, and print cloth; forty-eight cases of camp kettles; 576 axes; cases of shirts, socks, pants; and boxes of tobacco.10Lakota who had no interest in these items would swap them with local traders for rifles, ammunition, and other goods. When annuities were handed out, the Indians would come in from their scattered prairie camps and gather at the agency, setting up tepees, staking out horses, and socializing much as they had at the old tribal gatherings they had held at various times of year.11

  On the reservation the Lakota also received rations at regular intervals— every ten days, or two weeks, or month. Rations included staples such as beans, coffee, and flour, even though the Lakota had little use for flour. The main attraction was the dispersal of beef on the hoof. The animals would be released from corrals, and Lakota men would chase them on horseback and shoot them down like bison.12

  The Brulé in the early 1870s continued to live in some strange twilight world in which old traditions and new ways shaded into one another. Spotted Tail even finagled permission for occasional buffalo hunts to the south.13But by 1875 the bison were nearly gone from the Republican and Platte, and the Brulé were sinking into the unmitigated despair of reservation life.

  Lakota women gather at the Pine Ridge Reservation agency for rations in 1891. (www.PictureHistory.com, Photo #1890.0134)

  By the mid-1870s, however, Spotted Tail had succeeded in getting his people moved away from the Missouri and up to the high plains around the White River. He had even won support for this relocation from white settlers in southern Dakota Territory, who thought they would make good money hauling supplies by wagon to the distant Brulé. The move was appealing to Spotted Tail and his people because it gave them a chance to uproot and wander, as they had all their lives, plus the land around White River was not suitable for farming—the earth itself would become an ally in the battle against agriculture.

  Meanwhile, the northern Lakota fought a defensive war against the military. These battles did not disturb the uneasy peace of the Brulé, although Spotted Tail did play an active part in the northern war as a peacemaker. In 1877 he tracked down one of the most inveterate of the Lakota war leaders, Crazy Horse, and persuaded him to give up the fight. The army rewarded Spotted Tail by turning over to him the 1,200 ponies that the surrendering Lakota had yielded to the military. Spotted Tail responded in generous chiefly fashion, returning many of the horses to the Indians he had talked into surrendering. 14

  Once Crazy Horse surrendered, the U.S. government told Spotted Tail that he had to move back east to Ponca Creek, a tributary of the Missouri River, where the government had already established a new agency. Reluctantly, the Lakota
set out.15While traveling near Wounded Knee Creek on the way east, some Sans Arc and Miniconjou who had recently surrendered and were traveling with the Brulé broke away to join Sitting Bull in Canada. At the same time, the Brulé balked, refusing to go farther east than Rosebud Creek, which fed into the south fork of the White River. Spotted Tail could not budge them, and so they wintered there, with supplies brought from the Missouri River one hundred miles away.16

  This move revealed deep political schisms within the Brulé people. Some wanted to move on to Ponca Creek. These were primarily Waglukhe and Corn Brulé, willing to try farming if the traditional Brulé would let them. In spring, after a grueling winter in which diphtheria and measles killed many Brulé children and elders, including, it seems, one of Spotted Tail's sons, some progressives headed for the Ponca.17Other Brulé wanted to join Sitting Bull, and another segment wanted to go on the warpath in Nebraska to punish cowboys who had stolen hundreds of Lakota ponies during the winter. Spotted Tail was consumed with keeping these various factions in one piece.

  Good news came in March 1878, when federal officials in Washington, D.C., told Spotted Tail that his people themselves could choose a new agency site. The Brulé promptly picked a place along Rosebud Creek, near the Nebraska border, and wanted to move immediately. However, Spotted Tail's remaining progressives preferred Ponca Creek and abandoned the traditionals to go there. Spotted Tail countered by moving his full-bloods down to the Ponca, too—some six thousand Lakota living in seven hundred lodges that extended for fifteen miles along Ponca Creek.18These traditionalists strong-armed the progressives into agreeing to move back to Rosebud.19But officials in the Department of the Interior delayed the departure until July. By then the Brulé had had enough. On July 22 a portion of them headed for Rosebud. A week later, all were gone.

  While the Brulé traveled, more dissension arose. Having thrown off the federal yoke, if only temporarily, some warriors did not want to reinstall it. They headed north and joined Sitting Bull. The government by then had given implicit approval to the Rosebud plan: The Brulé agent, a seasoned westerner named W. J. Pollock, hired wagons, at the cost of $1.25 for each one hundred pounds hauled one hundred miles, to transport old or poor Brulé who lacked horses.20He also sent rations and beef to the camps and asked the Brulé to let two cavalry troops shadow them. He tried to visit the camps but initially was rebuffed. The Brulé believed they had to settle this move on their own.21

  Pollock finally got into the camp on August 28. After giving Spotted Tail and another chief, Hollow Horn Bear, silver medals from President Rutherford B. Hayes, Pollock went to work trying to set up the new agency at the site Spotted Tail and his people had chosen: a bowl of land along Rosebud Creek, surrounded by pine-speckled hills. The Corn Brulé and Loafers settled close to the agency, and Spotted Tail encamped several miles to the north.

  The new agency was about two hundred miles from the Missouri, where annuity and other goods for the Lakota were shipped by steamboat to a site the whites called Rosebud Landing and the Lakota called Black Pole. Getting the goods from Rosebud Landing to the new agency proved a boon to the Brulé, who discovered a task that, unlike farming, they enjoyed: They became teamsters, hauling freight in wagons. While traveling they camped, setting up tepees along streams as in the old days. At the end of the trip they were paid in dollars. Such work required strong horses, and so the Brulé began to cut hay for their ponies, keeping them well fed even in winter, rather then letting the animals fend for themselves on snowy prairies. The hauling business combined cash commerce with the Lakota yen for travel and horses.22

  And so the free-ranging days as plains nomads were over, the wars were over, and the hunting of the buffalo was over. Nevertheless, the Great Sioux Reservation was a huge patch of land. Covering all of what is now South Dakota west of the Missouri River, its forty-three thousand square miles of prairie seemed big enough to insulate the Lakota from the schemes and plans of the United States.23

  BY THE LATE 1880s SOME four hundred thousand immigrants had settled in the parts of Dakota Territory that were not designated as Indian reservations. They came from surrounding states in search of new land and new hope, and they came from across the sea, primarily from Scandinavian countries and from Germany as well as Russia. Most came to farm, but many to ranch or to mine for gold.24

  They were a new breed of pioneer. They arrived at their destinations more quickly than did their predecessors in the 1840s, traveling "in the cars," which is to say by railroad, or churning along rivers in steamboats. One Iowan wrote: "I bought a ticket for Aberdeen, and entered the train crammed with movers who had found the 'prairie schooner' all too slow. The epoch of the canvas-covered wagon had passed. The era of the locomotive, the day of the chartered car, had arrived. Free land was receding at railroad speed. The borderline could be overtaken only by steam, and every man was in haste to arrive. 25

  They were in a hurry because they saw the promise of fortune ahead of them, because they felt the thrust of progress all around them. Their century had arrived on horseback and under sail, but now they crossed the country by rail and sailed by steam. They felt inside them the power they had created around them, and their power seemed boundless. Within a generation or two, they had industrialized their world, and miracles were happening everywhere. They had grown accustomed to the way photography, an invention of the 1830s, had almost humbled the passage of time, preserving the image of the distant and the dead. And then, in the 1870s, along came Thomas Edison with his recording machine, which preserved voice, song, and music. These Americans were a people whose images would be remembered long after they were gone, as if fate itself were marking their passage on Earth for all eternity, and they knew it, just as they knew they were giving birth to a new era for humankind. Even the boundaries of night and day were being blurred. In 1879 Thomas Edison lit up his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, with the world's first incandescent electric lightbulb. Despite early fears about electricity in the home—that it caused freckles,26for example—no-soot, no-fumes, no-wicks electricity in the 1880s began to outcompete gas fixtures and kerosene lamps for lighting.

  Nothing better signified the changes that were engulfing their lives than did the imminent decline of the horse as a universal source of power for such things as transportation and agriculture.27In the 1880s the horse was still an important beast of burden, but it was edging toward obsolescence—a major development in human history, in which the horse had played a critical role for thousands of years. In 1887 in Richmond, Virginia, an electrical engineer named Frank Sprague, who had worked previously for Thomas Edison on such projects as the lightbulb, opened the first urban electric streetcar system, the Union Passenger Railway. By the time of the Wounded Knee shoot-out, more than forty U.S. cities hosted electric streetcar lines. That number would increase more than twenty fold in the following five years, and cities would grow larger as the power of electricity expanded commuter range. Life would move more quickly, too, as the age of the horse waned. One New York City baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, was named for the artful agility of its fans in ducking streetcars, which ripped along at a blurring twenty miles an hour. Other forms of horseless transportation were already in the works. In the United States, France, and Germany, inventors were tinkering with early models of the automobile, and within twelve years of Wounded Knee the horseless carriage would be on its way to revolutionizing transportation and turning the horse into a plaything.28

  Even something as fundamental as the Euro-American diet was changing, and in the process creating a new impetus for farmers to cling ardently to plows. In the 1870s an American was likely to begin the day with a breakfast of steak, bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, pancakes, sausage, oatmeal, donuts, and fruit.29But late in the 1880s health-food faddists John Kellogg and C. W. Post began promoting cereals as the proper food for modern Americans, including such now-familiar products as Grape Nuts, Post Toasties, and Kellogg's Corn Flakes.30Critics mocked the new boxed cereals—dub
bing them Eata Heapa Hay, Gripe Nuts, Shredded Doormats—but by 1915 the average American was likely to breakfast on a bowl of boxed cold cereal. With growing markets for grain, the farmer's yen for new land and the resolve for claiming it grew too.

  How Americans related to these changes was summed up by Mark Twain, the era's most widely recognized celebrity writer, in an 1878 speech in which he urged his listeners to examine the century in which they lived: "Look at steam! Look at the steamboat, look at the railway, look at the steamship! Look at the telegraph, which enables you to flash your thoughts from world to world, ignoring intervening seas. Look at the telephone, which enables you to speak into affection's remote ear the word that cheers, and into the ear of the foe the opinion which you ought not to risk at shorter range. . . . Look at all these things, sir, and say if it is not a far prouder and more precious boon to have been born in the nineteenth century than in any century that went before it."31

  Not every new thing under the Victorian sun functioned on the vast scale of steam power, but even the small changes suggested that life was growing more comfortable. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, H. J. Heinz was founding a company that mass-produced canned goods, taking the canning process out of the home and nationally marketing factory-made and factory-packaged products such as beans and ketchup. In 1884 James Buchanan Duke, a twenty-eight-year-old manufacturer from North Carolina, developed a plan to mass-produce cigarettes, already rolled and neatly packaged, replacing the roll-your-owns that had been the vogue in America since the 1860s. Within five years his factories were responsible for half the country's total production, using machines that could turn out fifteen thousand packaged cigarettes each during a sixty-five-hour workweek.