Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  Americans could enjoy their prefabricated cigarettes while sipping another new treat, a refreshing soda made of extracts of coca leaves and cola nuts by an Atlanta, Georgia, pharmacist named John Pemberton, who dubbed his concoction Coca-Cola. For Americans, one new thing after another seemed ready to pop up for their convenience. Until, that is, they took a notion to go west and develop a farm in Dakota Territory.

  PLAINS PIONEERS BEGAN THEIR CAREERS on unbroken prairie with scarcely a rock under which to shelter.32Their first challenge was to stake a claim to potential farmland, no simple matter, as most pioneers were poor. Unable to buy the needed acreage, they generally took advantage of one of three federal programs—the homestead, preemption, and timber-culture programs— each of which sold land from the public domain in units limited to 160 acres per participant. Aspiring settlers usually made the claims in autumn, then went back to wherever they came from to await the spring plowing season.33During the Great Dakota Boom of 1878—87, settlers laid claim to most of the arable land in Dakota Territory, and offices in Huron, Aberdeen, Mitchell, and Watertown handled most of the claims. The busiest day ever for filing claims occurred in Huron on October 9, 1882, when the office there handled more than two thousand filings of one sort or another.34

  Each of these programs required that the claimant improve the land and settle on it for a certain amount of time. In the case of the timber-culture program, claimants were supposed to plant a specified number of trees. All three approaches to claiming land were rife with corruption. Many claimants were mere speculators who had no interest in farming but simply wanted to buy and hold cheap land so they could sell it later as prices rose. They might attempt to meet the development requirements by putting out a packing crate and claiming it was a house, or digging a hole and calling it a well.35William Sparks, head of the federal land office in President Grover Cleveland's administration, was convinced that half of all land patents were frauds. After a study of timber-culture claims, Sparks's inspectors concluded that a quarter of the land in central Dakota had been taken without any real attempt to meet the requirements of the law.

  Because of vagaries in land claims, the Homestead Act itself probably accounted for only 15 percent of all final patents to the total area on which claims were originally made. The historian Herbert Schell concluded: "Generally speaking, the actual settler who put permanent improvements upon his land and made it his home was a second- or even a third-comer, obliged to buy his farm on the market at a premium. The primary benefits from a government policy of free or cheap land thus accrued to the speculator. This was a perversion, if not an actual violation, of the spirit of the original homestead law."36

  Prices rose rapidly as available public lands disappeared, and competition for land grew intense. Would-be farmers were pouring into the state. Entire communities—such as a group from Kankakee, Illinois, who shared a French-Canadian heritage—moved as units, re-creating their central-midwestern social life on the northern plains. The speculator who bought early and, by bending the rules, often, could rack up handsome profits.37

  Although farming was the primary industry of the pioneer, the early settlers of Dakota Territory also felt the lure of a second calling: gold. The prospecting fields were centered in the territory's western reaches, particularly the Black Hills, and the men who made up the bulk of the population there were mostly single and mostly roughnecks. Western Dakota Territory soon became a haven for gunfighters, gamblers, gold seekers—people with a disdain for government and a belief in the equality bestowed by a six-shooter.38They contrasted sharply with the sodbusters of the eastern reaches of the territory, mostly family-oriented settlers more closely aligned with the civilizations of neighboring states and familiar with government largesse. So by the late 1870s the territory already had split into a conservative western portion and a more liberal eastern portion, a pattern that, in 1891, would affect the Plenty Horses trial.39

  Another key economic endeavor in Dakota Territory was ranching. The 1880s lay in the era of the open range, when cattle were allowed to roam freely across unfenced prairie. Calves were branded with marks indicating who owned them. When the time came to round up the cattle for market, the ranchers could separate their stock by brand.

  In 1884 South Dakota harbored nearly eight hundred thousand cattle. Then came the winter of 1886-87, which actually kicked off in autumn with subzero temperatures and heavy snow. By spring, ranchers in South Dakota had lost as much as half their stock. Farther north, in Montana and North Dakota, peak losses hit 90 percent.40

  The ranchers realized that they had put too much stock out on the range, allowing the animals to graze the native grasses so heavily that they had no reserves for surviving a harsh winter. Moreover, farmers and sheep growers were moving into cattle range and putting up fences. The cattle interests knew they had to revamp their industry, a perception that would soon lead to fenced ranches. But meanwhile, still adhering to the old ways of doing business—not unlike the more conservative members of the Lakota community—the ranchers could see that they needed more land even as settlers were moving onto the plains. And they noticed that the Lakota people had millions of acres tied up in their Great Sioux Reservation.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Coming of the Ghosts

  THE TREATY OF 1868 LEFT the Lakota holding a large portion of Dakota Territory, virtually the entire area west of the Missouri River in what today we call South Dakota as well as a small portion of south-central North Dakota.1Farmers, ranchers, and townspeople began turning covetous eyes toward that land by the early 1870s, leading to the last grab of Lakota lands. The confiscation began in 1874, when Congress, at the behest of the Dakota territorial legislature, sent army troops on an exploration of the Black Hills of western Dakota Territory. The project also enjoyed a little push from General Philip Sheridan, who wanted to set up a fort in the Black Hills to keep tabs on the Powder River Lakota.

  In the mid-1770s an Oglala band led by the chief Standing Bull became the first Lakota to explore the Black Hills, which they called Paha Sapa.2Other peoples, notably the Crow, Kiowa, and Cheyenne, were already making use of the area, but the Lakota summarily pushed out the first two and, after a few battles with the Cheyenne, allied with them even while laying claim to the region. Essentially a spur of the Rocky Mountains named for their cloak of dark pines, the Black Hills became a sanctuary in which the Lakota could escape harsh winter winds and blistering summer heat and find the pines they needed for making lodgepoles. The hills also offered a reservoir of deer and other game that the Lakota could rely on when bison were scarce. The Black Hills were their meat pack, their special reserve, and hard-liners such as Sitting Bull contended that Paha Sapa should never be relinquished to anyone.

  But the U.S. government was highly interested in the Black Hills. Rumors of gold there had echoed since at least the 1830s.3The U.S. Army had tried for years to suppress the reports in order to avoid a gold rush that would have triggered war with the Lakota. The army also may have been trying to keep soldiers with gold fever from deserting.

  The congressional mandate for a military exploration of the Black Hills threatened the army's cautious handling of the region. It also raised ethical questions. Bishop William Hare, who founded missions among Indians throughout the West, protested to President Grant that the expedition would infuriate the Lakota and drive them to war as wall as stand out as "a violation of national honor."4Grant ignored him.

  The president's action may have been compelled in part by a financial crisis that struck the nation in 1873. The first of several banks collapsed on September 18, followed by a crashing stock market and the emergency closing of Stock Exchange doors. The Panic of 1873 had begun and would not end for four years. Everything seemed to go wrong all at once. Yellow fever swept down the Mississippi Valley, grasshoppers destroyed midwestern crops like a vengeful Egyptian plague, and a million urbanites—a fifth of nonagricultural workers—had no jobs. Factory wages fell 25 percent, but food prices d
ipped only 5 percent. A gold rush might be just the thing to make people feel better, especially as the politicians were committed to a gold standard that made money harder to come by. "The government's role in the economy, as they saw it, was to pour money into industry . . . but otherwise to keep hands off," wrote historian Stephen Ambrose.5"The nation's leaders were as hidebound about the functions of government as they were innovative about business." Their political views, Ambrose concluded, "remained stuck in the eighteenth century."

  The Black Hills expedition began on July 2,1874, when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer rode out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, and moved southwest at the head of ten cavalry companies and two infantry companies—a total of about one thousand men that included geologists and other scientists as well as newspaper reporters and experienced miners.6In the Black Hills at the end of July, the miners panned for gold along French Creek. "The result was the discovery of a good bar, yielding from five to seven cents per pan, which could easily be made to pay if water were more plentiful here," reported the New York Tribune.7

  At the end of August news of Black Hills gold broke nationwide. Miners began filtering into the mountains. The military at first turned them back, because the hills were Lakota land under the 1868 treaty. But the invaders whom soldiers escorted to nearby forts merely made a beeline back to the hills upon release. Local newspapers supported them. The Yankton Daily Press and Dakotaian for June 5, 1875, pronounced the theft of the Black Hills a matter of divine right: "That portion of Dakota occupied by the various bands of Sioux belongs not to them, but to the representatives of an advancing civilization. The romance of the Indian right to hereditary possession of all or portion [sic] of the domain over which the United States now claims jurisdiction is the veriest bosh. A power beyond that which takes to itself the right to make and unmake treaties between men long ago decreed that the American continent should be given over to the progress of enlightenment and the temporal advancement of those who are willing to make use of God's best gifts while they are on earth."8

  Miners laid claim to the area by summer 1875, plotting out a town site on French Creek and naming it Custer. The Lakota were increasingly incensed. Spotted Tail and Red Cloud were among the leading chiefs who attended meetings in September with a federal commission sent to the reservation to buy the hills. No fewer than five thousand warriors from the northern plains, none of whom had signed the 1868 treaty, came to the meetings decked out in full war regalia. They were so menacing that the commissioners were forced to meet in a military stockade and limit their contact with the Lakota to twenty chiefs.9In the end, the commissioners offered $400,000 yearly to lease the Black Hills or $6 million to buy the area outright, and the Lakota turned them down.

  In the wake of the Indians' refusal, a determined President Grant on November 3 held a secret meeting with his senior generals and officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and came to two conclusions: The government would maintain the ban on mining in the Black Hills but would not enforce it, and the army would demand that the northern Lakota give up life in the Powder River country and adjacent areas and come to live on the reservations. A month later, Edward Smith, the commissioner of Indian affairs, told his agents to order all the Lakota to go to the reservation by January 31, 1876. If the Indians ignored the dictum, they would be considered hostile and treated accordingly.

  If ever a government policy was created purposefully to fail, this order was it. The Lakota were ensconced in their winter camps and were not about to journey across frozen, windswept prairies. The northern Lakota did not recognize the government's authority over them, anyway, and if they even deigned to heed the arbitrary deadline they would have seen it as a mere suggestion that they show up in, say, early spring.

  When the northern Lakota failed to appear, the army launched attacks, one of which was Custer's charge into an encampment along the Little Bighorn River in what today is southeastern Montana. Custer divided his eleven companies of soldiers—about 450 men—into three groups and bore down on a combined Lakota and Cheyenne village that harbored as many as 1,800 warriors, who promptly wiped out Custer and the 200 some soldiers under his direct command.

  That battle was a huge victory for the Lakota as well as a blow to American egos, if not to the military's strategic position. But the Lakota were on the anvil of civilization, and the hammer of American destructive power fell full force upon them. The battles of 1876 and 1877 led even Crazy Horse to give up. Only Sitting Bull, who had believed ardently in keeping the Black Hills under Lakota control, refused to surrender and live on a reservation. A tough but compassionate warrior, chief, and holy man, barrel-chested and round-faced, he slipped away and took his people into Canada, where he held on as the last wild Lakota. Four years later—abandoned by most of his people, unwanted by Canadian authorities, suffering a severe eye infection—he finally gave up and returned to the United States. Wearing a worn and dirty calico shirt and blanket, with a calico kerchief round his head like a turban, he led his equally threadbare tribal remnant to Fort Buford, Montana, where he surrendered on July 20, 1881. He handed his rifle to his four-year-old son, Crow Foot, and had him turn it over to the post commander. "I surrender this rifle to you through my young son, whom I now desire to teach in this manner that he has become the friend of the Americans," Sitting Bull said. "I wish him to learn the habits of the whites and to be educated as their sons are educated. I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living." A few days later, after reflecting on his fate, Sitting Bull wrote this song: "I have been a warrior. / Now it is all over. / I have a hard time."10

  BACK IN DAKOTA TERRITORY, IN the fall of 1876 a new government commission came to the reservation and told leading chiefs such as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail that if they did not agree to sell the Black Hills, rations for the Lakota would be cut off, and the Lakota would be removed to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Neither proposition appealed to the agency Indians. With the northern Lakota being trounced by the military, and with the military taking effective control of the reservations, the Lakota wavered and finally collapsed. They gave up the Black Hills as well as the unceded lands. As one chief, Standing Elk of the progressive Corn Brulé, complained to the commissioners: "My friend, your words are like a man knocking me in the head with a club. By your speech you have put great fear upon us. Whatever you white people ask of us, wherever we go, we always say Yes, yes, yes! Whenever we don't agree to what is asked of us in council, you always reply, You won't get anything to eat! You won't get anything to eat!"11The threats were effective. Red Cloud signed an agreement turning over the Black Hills to the white men, and Spotted Tail and the other chiefs, recognizing that they could no longer hope to resist, also signed.

  Sitting Bull, a leading Lakota chief and holy man. His death at the hands of Indian police set off events leading to the Wounded Knee massacre. (Library of Congress)

  The opening of the Black Hills triggered a gold rush. Three months after President Grant in November 1875 ended military enforcement of the ban on travel into the hills, the town of Custer mushroomed to six thousand residents where only eighteen months earlier no one had lived permanently. Some ten thousand people poured into the hills between November 1875 and March 1876.12"The country looks as though it had been settled ten years instead of three," wrote Zimri White, a New York Tribune correspondent who traveled in the Black Hills in 1879. "Good roads have been built in every direction over and around the Hills, and travel is as safe upon them as upon a New England or New York turnpike. Two years ago (in 1877) camping equipage was a necessity for the traveller, now there are comfortable wayside inns every twenty-five miles, and frequently at shorter intervals. The game that abounded in the hills has disappeared, and civilization has already gained the mastery."13

  Miners scratched $3 million worth of gold a year out of the Black Hil
ls in 1878 and 1879. In 1880 they dug out $5 million worth before the figure returned to about $3 million a year for several decades.14

  The Lakota who did not sign the treaty giving up Paha Sapa continued to skirmish with the newcomers. The commissioners of the newly organized Lawrence County responded by offering a $250 bounty on any Indian brought in dead or alive.15

  But the biggest land grab was still on the way.16In 1882 Dakota Territory's delegate to Congress, Richard Pettigrew, successfully sponsored a bill that called for sending a commission out to the Great Sioux Reservation to see if the Lakota would give up about half their remaining land, breaking their unified chunk of territory into disjointed reservations. The head of the commission, former Dakota Territory governor Newton Edmunds, subsequently claimed that he had worked out a deal with the Lakota, but in the end his bargain ran afoul of the 1868 treaty, which required that three-fourths of all adult Lakota men sign an agreement in favor of selling before Lakota land could change hands. Edmunds had collected the signatures of only 384 chiefs. The deal fell through.

  Four years later, Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes, who favored plans designed to turn Indians into land-owning farmers, shepherded through the Senate a bill called the General Allotment Act, or simply the Dawes Act. This law allowed the heads of Indian families all across the country to apply for allotments of 160 acres of reservation farmland, just like a homesteader. Single adult men could apply for 80 acres and minors for 40. Those who wanted grazing land would receive acreages twice the size of farmland. After four years the government would select land for any Indian who failed to apply for a plot, just to be sure that all the land was assigned. After twenty-five years the land would belong to the applicant, who then would be given U.S. citizenship. The "surplus" land left over after all the allotments had been made would be sold to settlers under the various homestead arrangements that had turned eastern Dakota Territory into a patchwork of farms.17