The Real Custer (50 page)

The debate over whether gold existed, and in what amounts, was overcome by circumstances. Gold fever had taken hold as the Panic of 1873 deepened into a depression. “The country is now restless and full of men out of employment who will not be curbed,” the
Bismarck Tribune
noted, “men who are infatuated with the idea of sudden wealth, and who will stake life, home and all they hold dear to reach this new Eldorado.”
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“In vain have the cool-headed warned the adventurous youth of the land not to snap at the gilded bait,” one newspaper observed. “A tale of gold has always been a potent spell and centuries of bitter experience have not been sufficient to teach people that hunting the yellow sham does not pay.”
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Miners and speculators flooded into the Black Hills, and outfitters founded a town that they named after Custer. There was also a Custer Peak, Custer Gap, and Custer Crossing, and gold was being sought in a valley called Custer's Gulch.
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The military could not stop the influx, and the
Bismarck Tribune
said it “would require a larger army than it would take to guard the Rio Grande, were every Mexican determined to supply himself with American stock.”
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By the spring of 1875, Custer's main preoccupation was finding ways to stem the gold rush he had helped start. In an interview in May 1875, he said the government was determined to “labor faithfully in protecting the Indians in their undoubted right, at present, to that portion of the Black Hills included in the treaty.”
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Custer thought it would be wise to vacate the Indians' treaty rights however possible, for example by purchasing the Black Hills. He said that the time had come when “it must
be decided whether the dog-in-the-manger mode of the Indians will be tolerated.”
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The
New York Herald
described Custer around this time as “tall, lithe, well-formed, with soft, light hair, a blonde moustache and a smooth face. A person unacquainted with him would little suspect that he is the terror of the bloodthirsty Sioux.” They said his “keen blue eyes look straight into the eyes of the listener, and his courteous and sincere manner puts one at ease on first entering the room. When animated, his eyes flash and his nerves seem touched with fire.”
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But for now the mission of the “terror of the bloodthirsty Sioux” was to keep miners out of the Black Hills. Some were removed by force; others were interdicted while heading into the area.
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Custer warned that just because some prospectors made it to the area did not mean others would survive the trip, especially once the Indians decided to take matters into their own hands. “It is the height of folly for parties to imagine that [miners] can march across the Plains after the Indians are on the warpath,” Custer cautioned. Whites trying to slip into the Black Hills would either be “killed outright” or, if they reached the area, would be “prevented from leaving their strongholds or places of concealment.”
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“We have at once the declarations that the miners must stay away but that they will secure plenty of gold if they will come,” a Pennsylvania paper wrote. “Bayonets and gold are respectively the repelling and inviting influences. Which will be the most potent remains to be seen.”
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Another Black Hills survey was planned to settle the gold question, hopefully debunking the more outlandish claims of riches and stemming the tide of miners. Custer assumed he would lead the expedition; in May 1875 he told the press that he was departing Fort Lincoln June 1, and if there were large numbers of miners in the hills, “it will probably take the whole summer to drive them out and keep out the intruders.”
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But Custer had become too controversial, and instead the mission was given to Lieutenant Colonel Richard I. Dodge of the 23rd Infantry.
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Columbia University mining geologist Walter P. Jenney and Henry Newton of the Interior Department conducted rigorous surveys at various locations in the Black Hills. They were escorted by four hundred soldiers and shadowed by miners hoping to make immediate use of their findings. “The yield of gold thus far has been quite small and the reports of richness of the gravel bars are greatly exaggerated,” Jenney said in an early report. “The prospects at present are not such as to warrant extended explorations in mining.”
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Yet such was the intensity of the gold mania that even this pessimistic report was read as confirming that gold could be found. “Prof. Jenney reports to Indian Commissioner Smith that the yield of gold is not sufficient to make it pay well,” one paper noted, “but the great body of miners, always waiting for an excitement, will not hesitate to go on and prospect for themselves, on the assurance that there is gold there at all.” The paper noted that “assurance was early and deliberately given by General Custer and never taken back. Resting on his word alone, it has been sufficient to attract several thousand miners to the outskirts of the Black Hills.”
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The
Oakland Tribune
wrote that “nothing can now prevent the invasion of the new El Dorado by thousands of men who have been held back by the uncertainty of the reported wealth of the Black Hills.”
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Since the government could not stop the invasion, it opened negotiations to purchase the land from the Sioux. The idea had been floated since the first reports of gold. Members of Congress, government experts, pundits, and advocates from all sides debated which lands should be sold, what price was fair, and how the money could be distributed to the Indians without falling into the hands of unscrupulous Indian agents, politicians, lawyers, thieves, and swindlers.

But while politicians and newspaper editors debated the finer details of implementing the Black Hills purchase, they overlooked one important fact: the Sioux had little interest in making a deal. As soon as the 1874 expedition returned, a group of chiefs, including Running
Antelope and Fire Heart of the Blackfoot Sioux, had an audience with Custer and “strongly protested against the violation of the treaty of 1868 by the white men going to the Black Hills.”
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In May 1875, a Sioux delegation led by Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, Lone Horn, and an Oglala leader named Sitting Bull (sometimes called “the good Sitting Bull” to differentiate him from the more famous Hunkpapa leader) came to Washington to discuss a variety of issues, including the invasion of lands guaranteed them by treaty, the desecration of their holy places in the Black Hills, insufficient rations and annuities, and corruption in the Indian agencies. They met with President Grant, acting Secretary of the Interior Cowen, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Smith, but received little in the way of assurances, especially regarding food. In fact, the government was subtly creating the food shortage as a means of leverage. This prompted Chief White Swan to observe sarcastically that “the worse an Indian behaves the more he gets.”
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Commissioner Smith was mainly interested in settling the Black Hills question. Congress had authorized $25,000 to buy out the tribal hunting rights guaranteed under the Fort Laramie Treaty and also proposed to allocate funds to move the Sioux to much better lands elsewhere. But the chiefs would not bargain. “Look at me!” Red Cloud told one of Grant's emissaries. “I am no dog. I am a man. This is my ground, and I am sitting on it.”
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Spotted Tail told Smith that he wanted nothing to do with lands outside those he was born in, and “if it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there, and let us alone.”

The May meetings went nowhere. Episcopal Bishop William H. Hare of the Missionary District of Niobrara, which included the Sioux reservation, prophetically warned that “we should not be surprised if, insisting now upon buying with money what the Indian does not wish to sell, we drive him to frenzy, our covetousness ends in massacre, and we pay for the Indians' land less in money than in blood.”
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But the Grant
administration and Congress were still eager to buy their way to a solution to the Black Hills problem.

In September 1875, a delegation was sent to Red Cloud Agency to reopen negotiations after reports that Spotted Tail might be willing to make a deal. Commissioners included General Terry, Senator William B. Allison of Iowa, and retired General Albert Gallatin Lawrence, among others. They were escorted by two companies of cavalry. Terry was very much in favor of fair play with the Indians and letting them stay unmolested in the Black Hills if they wanted. Custer said that “the Indians have no better friend than Gen. Terry. When I say friend, I mean a man that will see that they are justly dealt with.”
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The delegation arrived to find a massive gathering of perhaps twenty thousand Indians, mostly Sioux, but also some Cheyenne and Arapaho. Any deal would require three-quarters of the adult male Sioux voting in favor for it to take effect, according to the Fort Laramie Treaty, and the mood among the assembled Indians was bitter. The chiefs, under pressure from their own people, at first snubbed the government delegation. But as the whites prepared to leave after a few days, Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and other chiefs consented to talk, and the session opened.

The Brulé and Oglala leaders were willing to listen, but others actively opposed any negotiations. By this time Spotted Tail and Red Cloud were considered “peace chiefs” and had lost their authority over the more warlike factions, who looked to Sitting Bull for leadership. This is particularly ironic in the case of Red Cloud, who had successfully prosecuted a war against the whites. As the two delegations began the talks, thousands of armed, mounted Indians formed a crescent around the meeting tents. The two cavalry companies, led by Colonel Anson Mills and Captain James Egan, were deployed at the rear and flanks of the meeting area, and soon every cavalryman had a warrior with a loaded rifle behind him.

A few dozen warriors rode around whipping up excitement, while others were creeping closer in some nearby bushes. Then a Sioux warrior named Little Big Man, one of Crazy Horse's lieutenants, rode into the circle with a rifle and threatened to shoot any Indian leader who agreed to sell the Black Hills.

The situation was tense; the commissioners and their escort could well have been massacred, with a fair number of Indians also killed. Sitting Bull the Good said aside to a friend, “There will be trouble here, and I will kill the first Indian that tries a shot. You stand by and watch me.”
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But Oglala leader Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses had planned for trouble. At a prearranged signal, one hundred of his men moved quickly between the hotheads and the commissioners, and three grabbed Little Big Man and led him away. This temporarily defused the crisis, and Spotted Tail suggested moving the negotiations to the relative safety of nearby Camp Robinson. At the reconvened meeting, Terry proffered the government's offer for the Black Hills: a leasing arrangement at $400,000 per year, or purchase for $6 million. But again the Indians were not interested, and the commissioners returned home.
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The Black Hills issue continued to simmer into the fall. Anger over the invasion of their sacred lands, along with insufficient supplies and mismanagement on the agencies, drove increasing numbers of Indians to join Sitting Bull's band living in the traditional manner in the unceded lands to the west of the Sioux reservation. With the Black Hills incursion out of control and winter approaching, the government began to discuss a military solution.

In late November, William E. Curtis of the
Chicago Inter-Ocean
, who had accompanied the Yellowstone expedition and was now Washington bureau chief for the paper, reported that planning was under way for a winter campaign against Sitting Bull. The purpose of the campaign was to “whip the hostiles into subjection for protection to whites, and the benefit of friendly Indians, and as winter is the only time to fight Indians
successfully, preparations are being made accordingly.”
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The
Bismarck Tribune
, noting rumblings in favor of possible American intervention to support an anti-Spanish uprising that had broken out in Cuba, said that “the American people would prefer a war with Spain, but any kind of war will satisfy those panting for a fight, if it is nothing more than a winter campaign against poor old Sitting Bull, which seems to have fully been determined upon.”
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War was indeed determined upon; all it needed was a pretext. On December 3, 1875, Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler—who as senator from Michigan had invited Libbie on the boat trip to City Point, Virginia, in July 1864 to visit her Autie—ordered all Sioux to return to the reservation by the end of January, or be sent back by force. The sixty-day timeline was unrealistic given the poor state of communications with the renegade bands and the severity of the winter. Runners did not even set out from the agencies seeking Sitting Bull until the second week in January. Like the similar return order before Washita, Chandler's demarche was really intended to establish a rationale for military operations.

Sitting Bull's people were not going to return to the reservation, and the miners, then numbering around 1,200, were still seeking the elusive Black Hills gold.
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William Courtenay, who traded with the Indians along the Yellowstone and was sometimes robbed by them, wrote in an open letter, “Will the Government never undertake the chastisement of Sitting Bull and his band of murderers, refugees and outlaws?” He said that Rain-in-the-Face, Blade Moon, and Low Dog were “a few of the Indian outcasts and ruffians” who compose this “camp of cut throats, who for years have indulged with impunity in rapine and murder, and laughed at the Government.”
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