The Wild Frontier (37 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
Two similar estimates of the total number of settler dead came from reliable sources—one was President Lincoln, who thought at least 800 settlers lost their lives;
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the other was historian William Brandon, who believed the Sioux “murdered some 700 settlers and killed 100 soldiers before they were driven out of Minnesota.”
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The Santee Sioux Uprising was the greatest Indian atrocity of the war.
Only a week after the Battle of Wood Lake, a military tribunal sentenced 303 Sioux to be hanged for participating in the uprising. The condemned men passed through the town of New Ulm, where the greatest settler losses occurred, on the very day the bodies of town defenders were being taken from temporary graves in the street to permanent graves in the cemetery. The townspeople, especially the women, attacked the Sioux with everything from hot water to pitchforks. The militia had to use bayonets to drive them back. Soldiers as well as prisoners were injured.
President Lincoln personally reviewed all the death sentences and reduced them substantially. One was given a reprieve, 2 Indians not on Lincoln’s death list were hanged by mistake,
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and 38 were hanged simultaneously at Mankato, Minnesota. It was the largest simultaneous hanging in United States history.
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The hangman was William Duley, who had escaped at Lake Shetek. Three of his children were still lying dead on the frozen prairie, and his wife and 2 other children were still Sioux captives.
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The bodies were buried, but not for long. After dark a number of doctors dug up the bodies so they could use the skeletons.
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One of the doctors was William W. Mayo. Later he and his 2 physician sons, William and Charles, founded the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Little Crow fled to Canada. He returned to Minnesota in 1863 to
steal a few horses, according to his son, and was shot and killed stealing berries from farmer Chauncey Lamson.
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I
N DECEMBER 1863
, a party of soldiers found
15
Poncas people camped at night about
12
miles from their reservation. They were returning from a visit to Omaha. The soldiers offered the women money for sex, with revolvers in hand. The Poncas fled, and the soldiers destroyed their camp. The soldiers came upon them again the next morning, and wounded
3
as they were crossing the frozen river. Three women and a little girl hid, but their barking dog revealed their presence, and the soldiers killed all of them. Some of the Indians escaped, but the soldiers were never identified. The army called it “a very unfortunate occurrence.”
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T
HE SANTEE
Sioux remained active after the uprising. Captive Fanny Kelly was forced to retreat with them after they were attacked by General Alfred Sully’s army in
1864.
An Indian came to her to read a letter he had taken from a soldier whom he had killed. The soldier had written that after an army topographical engineer had been killed, the soldiers had caught the Indians responsible, had cut their heads off, and stuck them on poles.
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The Sioux later captured a settler who had been hunting on the prairie. They took off all his clothing, tied him hand and foot, and left him there to starve.
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One of the Sioux drew a picture of a white soldier for Fanny Kelly, representing him as a coward and an inferior being. Kelly grabbed it from him, tore it apart, and said the soldiers were her friends and she loved them. The Sioux became enraged and burned her severely with firebrands and the heated points of arrows.
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Shortly before Kelly finally escaped from the Sioux, they attacked a flatboat carrying about
20
people on the Yellowstone River. The bodies of those who were killed were at once thrown into the river. The women and children who survived were tortured to death that same day. The scalp of a woman whose red hair was
4
feet long struck Kelly. “Her glorious locks were needed to hang on the chief’s belt.”
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In
1864
, Arizona rancher and Indian fighter King S. Wolsey had a peace council with the Apache. He (apparently by himself) massacred
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of them. The territorial legislature congratulated him, gave him the rank of colonel, and tried to raise a militia to wipe out the rest of the hostile Indians.
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In January of that same year, Colonel Kit Carson won a decisive victory over the Navajo at their stronghold of Canyon de Chelly. By the middle of March, nearly 6,000 had surrendered to army bases and another 2,000 surrendered by the end of 1864. Soldiers took 2,400 prisoners across New Mexico. Dysentery caused 126 deaths even before the march started at Fort Canby. About 74 died on the way. There were reports that an unknown number not able to walk were shot by the soldiers.
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Not all Indians supported the wanton murder and torture of women and children. Shawnee chiefs Tecumseh and Black Hoof took the position, quoted by Bil Gilbert, that
the occasional, slow, painful execution of an enemy warrior was one thing, an act of public policy, but burning women and children, torturing purely for pleasure, dishonored ancient traditions and was a sport for degenerates.
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The historian Thomas Goodrich has gathered together diaries, letters, and memoirs concerning soldiers and the Plains Indians during the years 1865-79. His book is called
Scalp Dance.
Some of these reports can be fixed in time; those that cannot are discussed first.
Lieutenant Charles Springer’s diary told of a skirmish with the Sioux:
5 of our men were killed by arrow shots from the Indians, and one of them scalped, two were wounded, and one of them very severe…. Some of our men ran upon them killed two, and in the heat and excitement (also thirst for revenge) scalped the Indians.
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Goodrich said that Captain Henry Palmer
found the bodies of three little children who had been taken by the heels by the Indians and swung around against the log cabin, beating their heads to a jelly. Found the hired girl some fifteen rods from the ranch staked out on the prairie, tied by her hands and feet, naked, body full of arrows and horribly mangled.
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Indians often dug up the bodies of soldiers to scalp them, but soldiers sometimes desecrated Indian graves as well. Lieutenant Edward Godfrey reported that soldiers robbed an above-ground Indian burial site in Montana.
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Soldiers Jack Peate and Sigmund Shlesinger admitted they also had done the same thing.
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Captain Albert Barnitz wrote that during an Indian charge “Sergeant
[Frederick] Wyllyams … was killed. The Indians stripped, scalped, and horribly mutilated his body.”
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After the Civil War, a Cheyenne
*
named Porcupine and his friends “tied a big stick” across the Union Pacific railroad tracks, hoping to salvage something valuable after the wreck. A handcar with 5 maintenance workers on it struck the big stick. The Indians scalped all 5, but one lived and escaped.
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A
LTHOUGH THE
Santee Sioux Uprising was the most murderous against settlers, only 2 years later the Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne and Arapaho by Colorado militia became the greatest atrocity against the Indians in American history. The Cheyenne love of warfare was described by Duane Schultz, who has written the best and most recent detailed account of the massacre,
Month of the Freezing Moon:
Cheyenne boys were taught to fight and die gloriously, and their goal was to become the bravest of warriors…. To enjoy life fully, to feel satisfied, they needed someone to fight, and in their wanderings across the plains, it was seldom difficult to find strangers to attack. To the Cheyenne, anyone who was not of their own tribe was an enemy…. Scalping might be just a way of keeping score, but mutilation was also practiced out of tradition and habit. It was not uncommon for a Cheyenne warrior to cut off the arms of an enemy and preserve the severed limbs as trophies. Strangers captured by the Cheyenne faced a gruesome fate. Captives were stripped and spread-eagled over anthills, their hands and feet lashed to pegs driven deep into the ground. There they were abandoned, to go blind from staring at the sun, insane from hunger and thirst, and eaten by ants and wild animals. Sometimes the Indians heaped twigs and branches atop their victims and burned them alive.
One Cheyenne brave recalled the killing of an old Shoshone man. “We cut off his hands, his feet, and his head. We ripped open his breast and his belly. I stood there and looked at his heart and his liver. We tore down the lodge, built a bonfire on it and its contents and piled the remnants of the dead body upon this bonfire. We stayed there until nothing was left but ashes and coals.”
A captured woman became the common property of the war party, to be raped by all until they returned to camp, where she would belong exclusively to the man who first seized her. Treated as a slave, she would often be beaten and mutilated, eventually to be killed or traded into slavery with another tribe.
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The prelude to the massacre began in 1856, when an army officer tried to arrest some Cheyenne who were arguing with a trader about the ownership of a horse. Soldiers opened fire and a warrior was killed. The Cheyenne panicked and fled. A trapper was killed at that time. Two months later, Cheyenne looking for their ancient enemies, the Pawnee, killed a settler. The Cheyenne then tried to flag down a stagecoach, claiming they wanted tobacco. The situation escalated, as described in
Chapter 3
, and at least 33 died.
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The Santee Sioux Uprising of 1862 in Minnesota had alarmed the people of Colorado, where the Cheyenne lived. The Sioux had been docile much longer than the Cheyenne and Arapaho,
*
yet the Sioux had gone wild. Even worse, Denver was unprotected. All the soldiers had gone east to fight in the Civil War.
A new Colorado territorial governor, John Evans,
†
arrived in the summer of 1862.
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Evans received 3 reports indicating that the Cheyenne and other tribes were going to attack.
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John M. Chivington
†
was appointed commander of the Colorado military district by Evans in 1863, and it was he who led Colorado volunteers against the Cheyenne. Chivington got a report that some drunk Indians had terrorized a rancher. He sent Major Jacob Downing to investigate. Downing reported he had found a half-Cheyenne, half-Sioux Indian and had questioned him by “roasting his shins.” He finally guided Downing to the Cheyenne camp in Cedar Canyon, which Downing found to be peaceful and almost defenseless. The warriors were away hunting. He attacked anyway on the theory that the settlers were already at war with the Cheyenne. He reported that the attack lasted 3 hours. Twenty-six Indians were killed, 30 wounded, and everything burned.
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Lieutenant George S. Eayre and his men were also looking for Cheyenne under orders from Chivington to burn lodges and kill Indians wherever they found them. They found Lean Bear’s band of 400 Cheyenne. The militia version and the Cheyenne version of what happened differ greatly. Eayre said he was attacked by the Indians and defeated them in a 7-hour battle, killing 28. The Indian version is that Lean Bear went to the militia with the medal President Lincoln had given him to show he was friendly. When he got within 20 feet of Eayre, the lieutenant ordered his men to open fire. They killed Lean Bear at once, then riddled his body with bullets. Eayre fired his howitzers on the camp. Black Kettle,
*
the Cheyenne peace chief, came out and insisted that the fighting stop. After Lean Bear was killed, the angry Cheyenne raided up and down the stagecoach line, but they found no victims because all the settlers had fled.
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Captain Parmeter was commander of Fort Larned. Arapaho peace chief Left Hand had warned Parmeter that some Kiowa Indians were going to steal his horses. Parmeter paid no attention to this. When the Kiowa arrived, he was drunk, and the dancing of the Kiowa women distracted the soldiers. No less than 240 horses and mules belonging to Eayre’s men were stolen. Left Hand, bearing a white flag, arrived at the fort to offer his help in recovering the horses. Parmeter ordered his soldiers to fire on Left Hand and his men. The Arapaho weren’t hurt, but they were mad. They terrified the settlers in their area to such an extent that they left their homes. Major General Samuel R. Curtis, the commander at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, sent Major T. I. McKenny to investigate. He was seriously worried about the situation and made this accurate prediction:
If great caution is not exercised on our part, there will be a bloody war. It should be our policy to try and conciliate them, guard our mails and trains well to prevent theft, and stop these scouting parties [of Chivington’s men] that are roaming over the country, who do not know one tribe from another and who will kill anything in the shape of an Indian. It will require only a few more murders on the part of our troops to unite all these warlike tribes.
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Even as McKenny was writing his report, Cheyenne and Arapaho war parties were rumored to be searching out settlers along the Platte and Arkansas trails.
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Evans asked Curtis to send soldiers “in strong force,” but got no reply. He sent a second, more urgent message, which concluded, “I would respectfully ask that our troops may be allowed to defend us and whip those redskin rebels into submission at once.”
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On June 11, 1864, 4 Arapaho killed the Ward Hungate family 25 miles from Denver. The father’s body was found with more than 80 bullets in it. The bodies of the wife and 2 young daughters, ages 6 and 3, were mutilated, and the throats of the girls cut so deeply that their heads were almost severed. All 3 had been tied together and thrown into a well. Martial law was imposed in Denver.
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