A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (84 page)

Ironically, the nomadic lifestyle at the same time protected the Plains tribes from diseases that ravaged more stationary eastern Indian tribes, although a few, such as the Assiniboin, picked up smallpox and other diseases in neighboring villages and carried them home. It took several encounters with European diseases before the Indians discovered that humans transmitted them. But by about 1800, the “village” Indians had been decimated by diseases, whereas the nomadic tribes were relatively untouched. Thus, not only had the transformation of Indian society by bison hunting actually saved many of the Indians from an early death, but some of the techniques they practiced on the buffalo—riding and shooting, maneuvering, teamwork—also proved valuable in a challenge of a different sort: their wars against the American soldiers.

In battle, these Plains Indians could be fierce warriors. They fought while galloping at full speed, dropping and rising at will and using their horses as shields. This combination of phenomenal horsemanship and skilled marksmanship (with bow, spear, and repeating carbine rifle) proved deadly. Ultimately, the U.S. government would expend incredible resources—$1 million and 25 U.S. soldiers—for
each one
of these fierce, courageous people killed, merely exposing the complex and often contradictory problems inherent in federal Indian policy.
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Philosophically, American policy makers were divided into camps of preservationists, exterminationists, and assimilationists, with the latter two dominating policy debates. Preservationists such as Helen Hunt Jackson, author of
Century of Dishonor
(1885), were idealists who proposed simply leaving the Indians alone and free to roam the Plains and continue their hunting and gathering lifestyle.
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Such romantics, of course, ignored violent Indian conquest and the documented expansion of such empires as the Lakota Sioux, who brutally smashed all opposition on the Great Plains.
⁴⁸

Equally unrealistic and less humane, intolerant exterminationists argued that preservation and assimilation were both impossible. Indians could never adjust to modernity, said exterminationists; they had to stand aside for progress because their day was done. According to this essentially racist view, any Indians who violently resisted reservation confinement should be killed, a sentiment that supposedly originated with General Philip Sheridan, who had allegedly said, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” In fact, Sheridan, as commander of the Division of the Missouri, supervised many reservations, and thought it important to the protection of the Indians to keep them on the agency lands, lest the whites kill them.
⁴⁹
Reality was that the closer one got to the frontier, the more likely one was to see such sentiments expressed. Cleanse the Plains, roared the Nebraska
City Press
, and “exterminate the whole fraternity of redskins,” whereas the Montana
Post
called notions of “civilizing” the Indians “sickly sentimentalism [that] should be consigned to novel writers….”
⁵⁰
If the hostiles did not end their barbarities immediately, “wipe them out,” the paper intoned.

Like his predecessor at the Division of the Missouri, General William Tecumseh Sherman, Sheridan had no qualms about ruthlessly punishing Indians who strayed off the reservation to commit atrocities, and he renewed efforts to enforce confinement of tribes on reservations.
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Certainly many soldiers, who had lost comrades in battles with the Sioux or Cheyenne, had no mercy for the Indian: “They must be hunted like wolves,” Brigadier General Patrick Conner told Major General Grenville Dodge.
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The third group, the assimilationists, however, had a realistic view that industrialization and progress made the preservationist ideal impossible, but any effort to exterminate the natives was not only uncivilized and un-Christian, but also unconstitutional. Assimilationists argued that Indians must be put on reservations and cured of their nomadic ways for their own protection. The tribes had to learn English, embrace Christianity, and adopt the farming and ranching techniques of whites in the hope that they or their children might one day become working men and women in mainstream American civilization. This reservation system was the only “alternative to extinction,” but it destroyed Indian culture as effectively as any military campaign, as critics rightly charged.
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A glaring weakness in the assimilationist position lay in the fact that many of the so-called civilized tribes had already been forced off their lands anyway, regardless of their level of civilization.

While the assimilationist views finally prevailed, exterminationist voices remained loud in the halls of Congress, and at times federal strategy for dealing with the Indians incorporated all three viewpoints. Almost everyone, Indian and white alike, would have agreed that the approach to the Indians was confusing and contradictory. “Our whole Indian policy,” wrote the editor of
The Nation
magazine in 1865, “is a system of mismanagement, and in many parts one of gigantic abuse.”
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In many ways, that policy only reflected the irreconcilable differences among these three strategies for dealing with the Native Americans. And although the task of moving nomadic, warlike Indian people onto reservations without incident was, in retrospect, nearly impossible, the government nevertheless commited avoidable errors.

At the root of the problems with establishing any coherent Indian policy lay a conflict of interest between the two federal agencies authorized to deal with the tribes—the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the U.S. Army. The BIA reported to Congress, drafted Indian policy, and staffed the Indian reservation bureaucracy; the BIA planned for, governed, fed, clothed, medicated, and educated the nomads of the Plains. Created in 1824 as the Indian Bureau of the Department of War, Congress moved the agency to the newly created Interior Department in 1849. Civilian departments, which relied far less on merit than the military, by their nature spawned a thoroughgoing corruption. Christian denominations administered some agencies under the Grant Administration (and certainly they were not free from corruption either), but many other reservations landed in the hands of political hacks with get-rich-quick schemes to defraud the natives. The illegal sale of supplies, blankets, and food designated for the Indians not only deprived the tribes of necessities, but also provoked them to aggression that otherwise might have been prevented.

The other federal agency—the U.S. Army—was charged with rounding up the Indians, relocating them to their respective reservations, and keeping them there if they tried to leave.
⁵⁵
Thus the army emerged as the enforcement arm of BIA policy, which was a bad arrangement under any circumstance. Frontier military forces were heavy on cavalry and infantry, and light on artillery, as dictated by the fighting style of their enemy. Other nontraditional elements soon characterized the frontier military, including scout units of Crow and other Indians, often dressed in uniform, assigned to every command. Then there were the Buffalo Soldiers, companies of African American troops whom the Indians thought had hair like bison. Stationed with the Tenth Cavalry and other regiments, the black soldiers greatly troubled the Indians, although the most interrogators could learn from Native American captives was that “Buffalo soldier no good, heap bad medicine.”
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Despite its differences from previous armies, the U.S. Army on the frontier still had a simple mission: to engage and destroy any enemies of the United States. Fighting against the Western way of war, the natives could not win. The Native American style of war resembled the failed traditions of the Muslims at Tours or the Egyptians at the Battle of the Pyramids. It featured hit-and-run tactics, individual melee combat, personal courage in order to attain battlefield honor (as opposed to unit cohesion), and largely unsynchronized attacks.

Since most army commanders were in the exterminationist camp and most of the BIA officers espoused assimilation, there was bound to be confusion and violence. Sherman described the disconcerting tension exacted on the Indians by the policies as a “double process of peace within their reservation and war without.”
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Even before the conclusion of the Civil War, this “double process” began to take shape on the Great Plains, and it would conclude with some of the most shocking U.S. Cavalry defeats in the entire frontier period.

Sand Creek and Yellow Hair

Four major Indian wars ended once and for all the cycle of death that had characterized white-Indian contact for more than 250 years. The first, from 1864 to 1865, occurred when Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors fiercely battled U.S. troops in Colorado. During the summer of 1864, Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle led assaults on white miners, farm settlers, and travelers, but, weary of fighting, he surrendered in November. Black Kettle accepted a tribal land outside Pueblo, Colorado, and raised an American flag outside his tent, only to see his men, women, and children massacred by drunken Colorado militiamen (not U.S. regulars) in a sneak attack on November twenty-eighth at Sand Creek. One witness later testified that in this infamous Sand Creek massacre, Indians “were scalped…their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns [and] mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.”
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Fighting resumed until the fall of 1865, when again the Cheyenne agreed to go to a permanent reservation.

Farther north the mighty Lakota Sioux also resisted white incursions. Their struggle began in 1862–63 in Minnesota, a theater of the war that ended when U.S. Army General John Pope achieved victory and hanged 38 Sioux warriors as punishment. Farther west, in 1866, Lieutenant Colonel William J. Fetterman, who had once boasted that he could “ride through the whole Sioux nation with 80 men,” was leading a detachment of 80 men (ironically) to the relief of a wood-gathering train when a party of Oglala Sioux led by Red Cloud, and including a young warrior named Crazy Horse, annihilated his command in a precursor to the Custer massacre.
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To anyone paying attention, the signs at the Fetterman debacle were ominous: tribes that had scarcely gotten along in the past and that controlled different regions of the Plains—Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho—had simultaneously begun to resist, and to do so over vast expanses of territory. Yet during the twenty-minute Fetterman slaughter, two civilians wielding 16-shot Henry repeaters accounted for dozens of Sioux casualties. Had the Sioux appreciated the lethality of rapid-fire weapons, they would have known that even a moderate advantage in numbers would not be sufficient against similarly armed well-disciplined bluecoats.

Two years after the destruction of the Fetterman party, Sioux attacked engineers constructing a road to Fort Bozeman, in Montana. Red Cloud, by then a leading Sioux warrior, had led the incursions, but army counterattacks and subsequent promises to cease construction of the road persuaded him to retire to a Sioux reservation in the Dakotas. Following further incidents of corruption at the reservation agency, where delay in the delivery of food and supplies further antagonized the Sioux, they again bolted the reservation and renewed hostilities. By that time, a more or less constant state of war existed on the Plains, with one tribe or another constantly menacing, or being menaced by, the army. From 1868 to 1874 in the Southwest, Kiowa, Commanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne all engaged in a series of battles against military units. Despite the number of engagements, Indians still had failed to act in concert on a large scale, allowing the army to achieve tactical superiority and feeding its overconfidence.

All this changed in June 1875. Northern Cheyenne and Sioux were once again driven to warfare by fresh white encroachments on their land. A gold rush in the Black Hills of South Dakota combined with the arrival there of the Northern Pacific Railroad to spark renewed warfare. Making matters worse in this case, the Sioux viewed the Dakota Black Hills as sacred ground, and they considered any white intrusion an act of sacrilegious trespass. Sioux leaders Sitting Bull, the diplomat father figure, and Crazy Horse, the cunning, eccentric tactician, assembled a substantial and impressive collection of tribes who reluctantly left the reservation to once again fight American soldiers. Acting as commander in chief, Sitting Bull planned the strategy.
⁶⁰
Crazy Horse, whose bravery none questioned, was one of the few Indians to perceive that the Western way of war had powerful—even insurmountable—advantages: he was the only Indian observed by soldiers to dismount in order to fire his rifle, and while still a young man he had forsaken scalping.

The army knew the tribes had gathered at a general location below the Yellowstone River and its Bighorn River tributary in what is southeastern Montana. Commanding General Sheridan devised a plan to pincer the Indians south of the Yellowstone between a three-pronged American force. From the south, General George Crook would move from Wyoming Territory; from western Montana, Colonel John Gibbon would march with his men eastward along the Yellowstone River; and a third force under General Alfred Terry, supported by the entire Seventh Cavalry, would attack from the Dakotas. Since no one knew exactly where the Indians were encamped in June of 1876, the army’s elaborate plan immediately began to unravel when Indians attempted to engage each wing separately. Crook was beaten in mid-June and returned to base. In late June, to find the Sioux, Terry dispatched Colonel George Custer and nearly 700 cavalry.
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Custer, who as a Civil War hero had once held the wartime rank of brigadier general, wanted to reclaim both his former rank and glory. Attired in his famous buckskin coat with his golden locks flowing, the colonel cut a dashing figure. His wife, Elizabeth Bacon, assumed the role of his official publicist, subtly massaging the record of events in Custer’s career to present him as the gallant hero at all times. Indians knew him as Son of the Morning Star or Yellow Hair, and he had impressed them in previous battles as fearless. Regular army commanders had a different opinion, considering him reckless and undisciplined. One time he rode alone into an Indian encampment to free two white female hostages; another time he’d been court-martialed for leaving his post and abusing his troops in order to return home to see his Libby.