Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  Even people working to protect Indian rights liked this plan. Herbert Welsh, head of the Philadelphia-based Indian Rights Association, a group that monitored the reservations and lobbied for Indian interests in Washington, D.C., said that in terms of moving the Indians down the path of civilization, the Dawes Act was the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, and Emancipation Proclamation all rolled into one.18The law would replace tribal ownership with individual ownership, get the Indians to farm, and solve the problem of what to do with them.

  Dakota boosters jumped on this bandwagon with both feet, pushing through Congress the 1888 Sioux Act, which applied specifically to the Great Sioux Reservation. The bill also speeded the settlement of Lakota lands by calling for negotiations for the land even before it had been surveyed or Indian allotments made. According to government calculations, Lakota population figures indicated that land allotments to the Indians would leave more than half the reservation—some 9 to 11 million acres—up for grabs as "surplus." The government would buy the surplus for fifty cents an acre and open it immediately to settlement. The Lakota would receive clear title to the remaining land and would keep the proceeds of the sale, minus government expenses, for use in an interest-bearing account for educational programs. The land sale also would extend for another twenty years the educational benefits promised in the 1868 treaty and would provide the Lakota with livestock and farming equipment. 19

  The Lakota objected, contending they did not have more land than they required. In the future, they said, their children would need the land. And why, they asked, should the government buy the land for half a dollar an acre and sell it for a buck and a quarter? At Standing Rock, the proposal garnered only twenty-two signatures of approval from more than one thousand Lakota men, and it fared no better at the other agencies.20

  The secretary of the Interior in October received a delegation of more than sixty Lakota chiefs and men of influence who demanded more money for their land. In a sense, the Lakota had blinked. By suggesting that they had their price, they made the selling of the reservation negotiable.21

  And negotiate the government did. Congress enacted the Sioux Act of 1889, offering $1.25 an acre for any land sold to settlers during the first three years of the proposed agreement. Presuming that the best land would sell first, the bill called for a sliding scale in which land sold in the fourth and fifth years would go for seventy-five cents an acre, and the rest would go for fifty cents. In a further concession, the bill promised that the government would pay sale expenses, giving the Lakota all proceeds from the land. Heads of families would receive 320 acres—twice the originally proposed amount—and increased financing for improving the land. To safeguard Lakota property rights, the government would survey the borders of the six new reservations before opening the land to settlers and would find new sites for Lakota who lived on the land that was sold.

  And so in 1889 another commission visited the Great Sioux Reservation, headed by General George Crook. A seasoned fighter known to Indians throughout the West, Crook, on the one hand, cajoled key Lakota leaders, unsuccessfully offering two hundred dollars each to Red Cloud, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, and Little Wound if they would sign. He threw big parties with food in bulk and lifted the 1883 ban on traditional Indian dances. On the other hand, he explained the matter bluntly. "Last year," he told the Lakota, "when you refused to accept the bill, Congress came very near opening this reservation anyhow. It is certain that you will never get any better terms than are offered in this bill, and the chances are that you will not get so good."22Those who failed to sign would miss out on the benefits that accrued to those who did sign. It was now or never, take it or leave it.

  Nevertheless, at the Standing Rock agency, Sitting Bull opposed the allotment both to whites and to fellow Lakota. The Long Knives, he said, "will try to gain possession of the last piece of ground we possess. Let us stand as one family as we did before the white people led us astray."23Traditional Indians agreed with him, but other Lakota were prepared to sell out. Finally, Sitting Bull and twenty of his fellows mounted ponies and charged the commission, scattering the Lakota who had come to talk with Crook and his colleagues. The Standing Rock agent, James McLaughlin, however, had anticipated trouble and had on hand a unit of Indian police commanded by Lieutenant Bull Head, who once had fought beside Sitting Bull against the whites but who now was one of the most progressive of the progressives. When the riders were driven off, the commissioners resumed their work.

  While Crook and his committee toured the reservations, the agents strong-armed the Indians. McLaughlin, for example, warned his favorite progressive chief, John Grass, and other progressive leaders at Standing Rock that if the Lakota did not take the money offered, they would lose the land anyway and receive nothing for it. Given their history of dealings with the U.S. government, the Lakota were easily persuaded by this argument.24

  John Grass was among the first Lakota to sign the agreement, creating an avalanche of Lakota men eager to add their signatures. In the end, the land allotment was accepted by 4,463 Lakota, three-quarters of the 5,678 eligible voters.

  Sitting Bull and other hard-liners believed the U.S. government would not keep its promises, and subsequent events appeared to prove these skeptics right. Shortly after the land sale, the beef ration was halved. However, this reduction was not an act of duplicity. During the previous two years, the government had conducted a census of the Lakota reservation and concluded that Indian numbers were fewer than previously believed. Although this conclusion was wrong—uncooperative Lakota skewed the results by avoiding the census takers—the data gave Congress an excuse to slash annual funding for Lakota rations by roughly $1 million, a cut that did not go into effect until after approval of the land agreement. The result was that on Pine Ridge alone, the beef ration was reduced by a million pounds a year. Frederic Remington weighed in on the subject: "We are year after year oppressing a conquered people, until it is now assuming the magnitude of a crime. . . . The short ration which is issued to them keeps them in dire hunger, and if starving savages kill ranchmen's cattle I do not blame them. I would do the same under similar circumstances."25

  Then the other shoe dropped. President William Henry Harrison on February 10, 1890, announced that the "surplus" land would be opened immediately to settlers instead of being properly surveyed to protect the rights of Indians already living on it. The Lakota were furious, but there was nothing they could do.

  In the wake of the land sale and the breakup of the reservation, Indians already suffering from cultural fragmentation suffered further from geographic fragmentation. Lakota from the Pine Ridge reservation, for example, could no longer ride exclusively on reservation land to reach kin and friends at Standing Rock. Now Pine Ridge and Standing Rock were separate reservations, and to get from one to the other, the Lakota had to cross lands claimed by settlers. And in order to travel off the reservation, they had to apply to the agents for permits.

  The Lakota were utterly disheartened, their land gone, their bellies empty. Their troubles had been compounded when, late in 1889, South Dakota entered the Union as a state, giving land grabbers there an even stronger voice in Congress. One of the newly elected senators was Richard Pettigrew, who had been pushing to take Lakota land for a decade. Defeat was total, and hopelessness infused the reservation. As one bitter Indian said of the whites, "They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it."26

  For the Lakota, news out of Washington and on the prairie itself grew worse. Congress cut the $1 million usually earmarked for Lakota subsistence by $50,000. In addition, the Lakota who had attended the land-allotment discussions had been kept away from their farms so long that when they returned, they found their livestock in many cases had been stolen or killed. Problems mounted. Dakota Territory in the late 1880s was plagued with drought, so the Lakota's meager attempts to grow crops failed. Whooping cough and measles hit the rese
rvation, especially children.27At Pine Ridge, disease killed as many as forty-five Lakota per month the year of the allotment sale, although Bishop Hare contended that they died "not so much from disease as from want of food."28

  Even General Nelson Miles weighed in on the side of the Indians, declaring that their lack of sufficient food was especially onerous following a series of crop failures.29He added that the Lakota were forced to live on as little as half rations and that, to make matters worse, they were not paid for the surrendered lands. For the Lakota, the future looked as bleak as the present. Small wonder that one Indian complained that "their children [were] all dying from the face of the earth, so they might as well be killed at once."30

  Reduction of the Great Sioux Reservation, 1868-90. (Yale University Press)

  And then from the desert West came whispers of new hope for all Indians, a spiritual rebirth that would resurrect the old ways, and the Lakota were eager to listen.

  FOR THE LAKOTA, THE SPIRITUAL world and the material world were virtually one and the same, and they believed that certain holy men—wicasa wakan—possessed supernatural powers. Sitting Bull, for example, believed that he could speak with birds and foresee the future. His people believed he could, too. This belief that individuals could have direct contact with the spiritual world would, in 1890, shake the Indian tribes of the West.

  The tremors began on New Year's Day 1889, when a Paiute Indian, known as Jack Wilson to his white friends and as Wovoka among the Indians, fell ill with fever as he worked cutting wood in the desert near Pyramid Lake, Nevada.31He went to his wickiup, a domelike dwelling made of shrub branches, and lay delirious. In his fever he had a vision in which he went to heaven and talked with God and Jesus, who told him they were angry with the white men for killing Jesus the last time he visited the Earth. God told Wovoka that he was going to sweep the white man from the continent in spring 1891 and bring back to life all the dead Indians and all the vanished wildlife, and the old ways would return, and the Indians would be happy again. God told Wovoka to preach this new religion to the Indians, to tell them to be peaceful with the whites but to give up all white ways and materials. He showed Wovoka a special dance, the ghost dance, and told the Paiute that if the Indians did this dance, and kept peace with the Americans, and gave up the use of things from the whites, they soon would live again as they had before the arrival of the pale intruders.

  Wovoka, who became known as the Messiah, preached ardently, and word of his new religion spread across the West. He was considered a spiritually credible source, a holy man well known to his people for his magical powers. It was said that he could make ice fall from the July sky over his desert homeland, that he lit his pipe merely by pointing it toward the sun, that he could make water appear in an empty container during a drought.32And so his word started a spiritual movement, the messiah or ghost dance religion (wana 'ghi wa 'chipi in Lakota).33

  Religions such as the ghost dance often arise in cultures oppressed by outside forces and tottering toward collapse. A similar nativist religion had swept earlier through Indian tribes in the eastern United States, beginning with a dream that came in November 1805 to a Shawnee soon to be known as the Prophet.34In his dream he saw that most Indians after death were going to a place much like hell. He awoke determined to lead his people to the right path. He called on his followers to give up whiskey and other things from the whites, including livestock of any kind except horses. He urged them to go back to traditional Indian clothing, ornamentation, and grooming, such as shaven heads and painted faces for the men. He told them to "never think of war again" and to treat everyone with kindness.

  The Prophet suggested that game animals, declining throughout the East, would recover if the people heeded his warning against the commercial hunting that the whites had initiated. In a record left by one of his disciples, the Prophet spoke from the persona of the Great Mystery: "My children, you complain that the animals of the forest are few and scattered. How shall it be otherwise? You destroy them yourselves for their skins only, and leave their bodies to rot or give the best pieces to the whites. I am displeased when I see this, and take them back to the earth that they may not come to you again. You must kill no more animals than are necessary to feed and clothe you."35

  Speaking through the Prophet, the Great Mystery also touched on the subject of eastern woodlands: "I made all the trees of the forest for your use, but the maple I love the best because it yields sugar for your little ones. You must make it only for them, but sell none to the whites. They have another sugar which was made expressly for them. Besides, by making too much, you spoil the trees and give them pain by cutting and hacking them, for they have feeling like yourselves. If you take more than is necessary for your own use, you shall die, and the maple will yield no more water."36

  Like the ghost dance, the Prophet's nativist religion was not the first to breathe hope into beleaguered Indian peoples. In the 1760s a Delaware Indian named Neolin had preached a similar creed and had predicted that the whites would be wiped out by spiritual powers.37Neolin had lived among the Shawnee in 1764, so the Prophet likely heard of this religion from his own people. A Munsee Indian also had preached much the same thing up and down the Allegheny and Susquehanna valleys from 1752 to 1775. From 1740 to 1775 eight nativist prophets, including two women, had carried such beliefs around the East.

  The Lakota heard about the ghost dance from nearby tribes farther to the west and in autumn 1889 secretly sent a delegation of eleven men to Nevada to learn about it.38The following March they brought back details of the new religion, just as representatives of other tribes spread the word in other parts of the West.

  Not all tribes accepted Wovoka's preaching. The Navajo and Hopi, peoples of the Southwest, largely ignored it. The Kiowa, on the southern plains, and some other tribes adopted and then abandoned the religion after they saw the trouble that followed the dance to the Lakota reservations.39But the Lakota of the Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River reservations proved a willing audience for ghost dance apostles. Many Lakota may have agreed with Little Wound's view of the ghost dance when he said: "My friends, if this is a good thing we should have it; if it is not it will fall to the earth itself. So you better learn this dance, so if the Messiah does come he will not pass us by, but will help us to get back our hunting grounds and buffalo."40

  Chief among the Lakota apostles were Kicking Bear and Short Bull, who had visited Wovoka as part of the Lakota delegation. Kicking Bear had been born around 1849 and as a young man, had earned a reputation as a fine warrior, taking many Crow ponies and fighting bravely in such key battles as the Little Bighorn.41A close friend of Crazy Horse, he also was married to a niece of Big Foot, renowned among the Lakota as a peacemaker. The Lakota knew Kicking Bear as something of a mystic with a hatred of whites and of the new life forced upon his people.

  Short Bull, three or four years older than Kicking Bear, was a Brulé medicine man admired as a warrior and as a steadfast nonprogressive and esteemed for his kindness and generosity. Given the traditional warrior values of the two apostles, it is no surprise tl at in Short Bull's and Kicking Bear's hands, the ghost dance religion took on bellicose overtones. They reported that the Great Mystery had told them in dreams that if the whites fought the Lakota, the whites' gunpowder would not work, while the Lakota's would. Kicking Bear was credited with development of a belief in ghost shirts that would make wearers bulletproof. When Wovoka heard about the ghost shirts, he responded that they had no place in his religion.42But he had no control over what the Lakota chose to believe, and, as a people who had spent the past century or so running other Indians out of the northern plains, fighting whites, and even wiping out Custer, they were inclined to believe in ghost shirts.

  Lakota ghost dance prior to the Wounded Knee battle in December 1890. The dance was supposed to induce trances that took the dancer into the land of the dead for meetings with lost loved ones. (George Trager, Minnesota Historical Society)

  Among
the first Lakota bands to adopt the religion was that of Kicking Bear's in-law, Big Foot. Soon hundreds, perhaps thousands, were dancing. Believing that within a few months the whites would be gone—washed away by a flood or buried under fresh earth—the dancers took their children out of reservation schools. They abandoned crops and livestock. They danced, chanting special ghost songs, until they fainted from exhaustion and hunger. The songs they sang spoke of a return of the dead or of the buffalo. One of them went like this:

  The father says so, the father says so.

  Over the whole Earth they are coming.

  The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming,

  The father says so, the father says so.

  Many who fainted reported that they had visited the afterworld and met dead wives, husbands, children, parents—the lost relatives of the lost world in which they had grown up. The Lakota found hope in this dance that mingled Indian aspirations with Christian religious symbols.

  Meanwhile, the reservation agents and the residents of nearby towns and farms were increasingly alarmed by the dancing. Failing to understand that the religion preached peace, at least initially, the settlers saw a war dance in every step and chant. It probably did not help that Kicking Bear and Short Bull's preaching was becoming increasingly aggressive and hostile, not quite Wovoka's message of peace. At one point, Short Bull even said he was going to advance the date for the destruction of the whites to get the job done sooner.