An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (23 page)

As noted above, at the end of the Civil War the US Army hardly missed a beat before the war “to win the West” began in full force. As a far more advanced killing machine and with seasoned troops, the army began the slaughter of people, buffalo, and the land itself, destroying the natural tall grasses of the plains and planting short grasses for cattle, eventually leading to the loss of the topsoil four decades later. William Tecumseh Sherman came out of the Civil War a major general and soon commanded the US Army, replacing war hero Ulysses S. Grant when Grant became president in 1869. As commanding general through 1883, Sherman was responsible for the genocidal wars against the resistant Indigenous nations of the West.

Sherman's family was among the first generation of settlers who rushed to the Ohio Valley region after the total war that drove the people of the Shawnee Nation out of their homes, towns, and farms. Sherman's father gave his son the trophy name Tecumseh after the Shawnee leader who was killed by the US Army. The general had been a successful lawyer and banker in San Francisco and New York before he turned to a military career. During the Civil War, most famously in the siege of Atlanta, he made his mark as a proponent and practitioner of total war, scorched-earth campaigns against civilians, particularly targeting their food supplies. This had long been
the colonial and US American way of war against the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi. Sherman sent an army commission to England to study English colonial campaigns worldwide, looking to employ successful English tactics for the US wars against Indigenous peoples. In Washington, Sherman had to contend with the upper echelons of the military that were under the sway of Carl von Clausewitz's book
On War
, which dealt with conflict between European nation-states with standing armies. This dichotomy of training the US military for standard European warfare but also training it in colonial counterinsurgency methods continues in the twenty-first century. Although a man of war, Sherman, like most in the US ruling class, was an entrepreneur at heart, and his mandate as head of the army and his passion were to protect the Anglo conquest of the West. Sherman regarded railroads a top priority. In a letter to Grant in 1867 he wrote, “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop the progress of [the railroads].”
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An alliance of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Nations was blocking the “Bozeman Trail,” over which thousands of crazed gold seekers crashed through Indigenous territories in the Dakotas and Wyoming in 1866 to reach newly discovered goldfields in Montana. The army arrived to protect them, and in preparation for constructing Fort Phil Kearny, Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman led eighty soldiers out to clear the trail in December 1866. The Indigenous alliance defeated them in battle. Strangely, this being war, the defeat of the US Army in the battle has come down in historical annals as “the Fetterman Massacre.” Following this event, General Sherman wrote to Grant, who was still army commander: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” Sherman made it clear that “during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”
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In adopting total war in the West, Sherman brought in its most notorious avatar, George Armstrong Custer, who proved his mettle right away by leading an attack on unarmed civilians on November 27, 1868, at the Southern Cheyenne reservation at Washita Creek in Indian Territory. Earlier, at the Colorado Volunteers' 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, the Cheyenne leader Black Kettle had escaped
death. He and other Cheyenne survivors were then forced to leave Colorado Territory for a reservation in Indian Territory. Some young Cheyenne men, determined to resist reservation confinement and hunger, decided to hunt and to fight back with guerrilla tactics. Since the army was rarely able to capture them, Custer resorted to total war, murdering the incarcerated mothers, wives, children, and elders. When Black Kettle received word from Indigenous spies within the army ranks that the mounted troops of the Seventh Cavalry were leaving their fort and headed for the Washita reservation, he and his wife rode out at dawn in a snowstorm, unarmed, to attempt to talk with Custer and assure him that no resisters were present on the reservation. Upon Black Kettle's approaching the troops with a hoisted white flag, Custer ordered the soldiers to fire, and a moment later Black Kettle and his wife lay dead. All told, the Seventh Cavalry murdered over a hundred Cheyenne women and children that day, taking ghoulish trophies afterward.
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Many of the intensive genocidal campaigns against Indigenous civilians took place during the administration of President Grant, 1869–77. In 1866, two years before Grant's election, Congress had created two all–African American cavalry regiments that came to be called the buffalo soldiers. Some four million formerly enslaved Africans were free citizens in 1865, thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect in January 1863. The legislation was intended to have a demoralizing effect on the CSA, but it gave belated official recognition to what was already fact: many African Americans, especially young men, had freed themselves by fleeing servitude and joining Union forces.
²⁷
Up to 1862, Africans had been barred from serving in their own capacity in the army. Now the Union Army incorporated them but at lower pay and in segregated units under white officers. The War Department created the federal Bureau of Colored Troops, and one hundred thousand armed Africans served in the unit. Their courage and commitment made them the best and most effective fighters, although they had the highest
mortality rate. At the end of the Civil War, 186,000 Black soldiers had fought and 38,000 had died (in combat and from disease), a higher death toll than that of any individual state. The state with the highest casualty count was New York, with troops comprising mostly poor white immigrant soldiers, largely Irish. After the war many Black soldiers, like their poor white counterparts, remained in the army and were assigned to segregated regiments sent west to crush Indigenous resistance.

This reality strikes many as tragic, as if oppressed former slaves and Indigenous peoples being subjected to genocidal warfare should magically be unified against their common enemy, “the white man.” In fact, this is precisely how colonialism in general and colonial warfare in particular work. It is not unique to the United States, but rather a part of the tradition of European colonialism since the Roman legions. The British organized whole armies of ethnic troops in South and Southwestern Asia, the most famous being the Gurkhas from Nepal, who fought as recently as Margaret Thatcher's war against Argentina in 1983.
²⁸
The buffalo soldiers were such a specially organized colonial military unit. As Stanford L. Davis, a descendant of a buffalo soldier, writes:

Slaves and the black soldiers, who couldn't read or write, had no idea of the historical deprivations and the frequent genocidal intent of the U.S. government toward Native Americans. Free blacks, whether they could read and write, generally had no access to first-hand or second-hand unbiased information on the relationship. Most whites who had access often didn't really care about the situation. It was business as usual in the name of “Manifest Destiny.” Most Americans viewed the Indians as incorrigible and non-reformable savages. Those closest to the warring factions or who were threatened by it, naturally wanted government protection at any cost.
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Many Black men opted for army service for survival reasons, as it gave them food and shelter, pay and a pension, and even some glory. The United States had its own motives for assigning Black troops to the West. Southerners and the eastern population did not want thousands
of armed Black soldiers in their communities. There was also fear that if they demobilized, the labor market would be flooded. For US authorities, it was a good way of getting rid of the Black soldiers
and
the Indians.

The Civil War also set the template for the rapid “Americanization” of immigrants. Jewish immigrants fought on both sides in the war, and as individuals they earned a level of freedom from US bigotry they had never experienced before.

Indian scouts and soldiers were essential to the army as well, both as individuals and as nations making war on other Indigenous nations. Many decades later, Native Americans have continued to volunteer in US wars in percentages far beyond their populations. Wichita Nation citizen Stan Holder appeared in a 1974 documentary film on the Vietnam War,
Hearts and Minds
, in which he explained his volunteering for service. While growing up he had heard the older people's stories about Wichita warriors, and, looking around, the only warriors he could identify were marines, so he enlisted in what he considered a warrior society. It is no accident that the US Marine Corps evokes that image in angry young men. As with Black men who volunteered in the Indian wars and enlisted and served in other wars, Native men seized the security and potential glory of the colonialist army.

The explicit purpose of the buffalo soldiers and the army of the West as a whole was to invade Indigenous lands and ethnically cleanse them for Anglo settlement and commerce. As Native historian Jace Weaver has written: “The Indian Wars were not fought by the blindingly white American cavalry of John Ford westerns but by African Americans and Irish and German immigrants.”
³⁰
The haunting Bob Marley song “Buffalo Soldier” captures the colonial experience in the United States: “Said he was a buffalo soldier / Win the war for America.”
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The army of the West was a colonial army with all the problems of colonial armies and foreign occupation, principally being hated by the people living under occupation. It's no surprise that the US military uses the term “Indian Country” to refer to what it considers enemy territory. Much as in the Vietnam War, the 1980s covert wars in Central America, and the wars of the early twenty-first century
in Muslim countries, counterinsurgent army volunteers in the late-nineteenth-century US West had to rely heavily on intelligence from those native to the land, informers and scouts. Many of these were double agents, reporting back to their own people, having joined the US Army for that purpose. Failing to find guerrilla fighters, the army resorted to scorched-earth campaigns, starvation, attacks on and removals of civilian populations—the weapons of counterinsurgency warfare. During the Soviet counterinsurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees called the effect “migratory genocide”—an apt term to apply retrospectively to the nineteenth-century US counterinsurgency against Indigenous peoples.
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The US Army's search-and-destroy missions and forced relocations (ethnic cleansing) in the West are well documented but perhaps not normally considered in the light of counterinsurgency.

Mari Sandoz recorded one such story in her 1953 best-selling work of nonfiction
Cheyenne Autumn
, on which John Ford based a 1964 film.
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In 1878, the great Cheyenne resistance leaders Little Wolf and Dull Knife led more than three hundred Cheyenne civilians from a military reservation in Indian Territory, where they had been forcibly confined, to their original homeland in what is today Wyoming and Montana. They were eventually intercepted by the military, but only following a dramatic chase covered by newspaper reporters. So much sympathy was aroused in eastern cities that the Cheyennes were provided a reservation in a part of their original homeland. A similar feat was that of the Nimi'ipuu (Nez Perce) under Chief Joseph, who tried to lead his people out of military incarceration in Idaho to exile in Canada. In 1877, pursued by two thousand soldiers of the US cavalry led by Nelson Miles, Nimi'ipuu led eight hundred civilians toward the Canadian border. They held out for nearly four months, evading the soldiers as well as fighting hit-and-run battles, while covering seventeen hundred miles. Some were rounded up and placed in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, but they
soon left on their own and returned to their Idaho homeland, eventually securing a small reservation there.

The longest military counterinsurgency in US history was the war on the Apache Nation, 1850–86. Goyathlay, known as Geronimo, famously led the final decade of Apache resistance. The Apaches and their Diné relatives, the Navajos, did not miss a beat in continuing resistance to colonial domination when the United States annexed their territory as a part of the half of Mexico taken in 1848. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico, which sealed the transfer of territory, even stipulated that both parties were required to fight the “savage” Apaches. By 1877 the army had forced most Apaches into inhospitable desert reservations. Led by Geronimo, Chiricahua Apaches resisted incarceration in the San Carlos reservation designated for them in Arizona. When Geronimo finally surrendered—he was never captured—the group numbered only thirty-eight, most of those women and children, with five thousand soldiers in pursuit, which meant that the insurgents had wide support both north and south of the recently drawn US-Mexico border. Guerrilla warfare persists only if it has deep roots in the people being represented, the reason it is sometimes called “people's war.” Obviously, the Apache resistance was not a military threat to the United States but rather a symbol of resistance and freedom. Herein lies the essence of counterinsurgent colonialist warfare: no resistance can be tolerated. Historian William Appleman Williams aptly described the US imperative as “annihilation unto total surrender.”
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Geronimo and three hundred other Chiricahuas who were not even part of the fighting force were rounded up and transported by train under military guard to Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida, to join hundreds of other Plains Indian fighters already incarcerated there. Remarkably, Geronimo negotiated an agreement with the United States so that he and his band would surrender as prisoners of war, rather than as common criminals as the Texas Rangers desired, which would have meant executions by civil authorities. The POW status validated Apache sovereignty and made the captives eligible for treatment according to the international laws of war. Geronimo and his people were transferred again, to the army
base at Fort Sill in Indian Territory, and lived out their lives there. The US government had not yet created the term “unlawful combatant,” which it would do in the early twenty-first century, depriving legitimate prisoners of war fair treatment under international law.