6
THE INTERPRETER BILLY GARNETT was always among the first to know when the government in Washington wanted something, and beginning in the summer of 1874, Washington wanted the Black Hills of Dakota. Standing in the way were the Sioux Indians, who had been granted title to the hills by the Treaty of 1868. It was done casually. Few whites had ever seen the hills and some officials thought they were in Wyoming, outside of the reservation. But this indifference disappeared in a moment with a torrent of newspaper headlines in August reporting the discovery of gold.
Looking for gold had not been General George Armstrong Custer’s avowed purpose when he led an expedition of eight hundred men to the Black Hills in the summer of 1874. Custer said only that the government wanted to see the country and make a map. It was not Custer who wanted the map but General Philip Henry Sheridan, commander of the Division of the Missouri, which encompassed the whole of the plains and the mountain West. Very likely Sheridan’s desire for a map had been prompted by the official report of a previous expedition which had approached the hills under Lieutenant G. K. Warren in September 1857. The Hunkpapa Sioux chief Bear Ribs, with a large party out hunting buffalo, met Warren’s group on its approach to the hills and warned them away. He told Warren he thought the whites had an eye on the hills, wanted to build roads there, and were looking for the right place to establish a military post—all shrewd guesses. Bear Ribs said the Sioux had no more land to sell; he told Warren, “These Black Hills must be left wholly to [us].” In Warren’s report submitted later that year, he confirmed the suspicions of Bear Ribs:
There are so many inevitable causes at work to produce a war with the Dakotas before many years, that I consider the greatest fruits of the explorations I have conducted to be the knowledge of the proper routes by which to invade their country and conquer them. The Black Hills is the great point in their territory at which to strike all the Teton Dakotas … Here they can assemble their largest force, and here I believe they would make a stand.1
Warren then sketched in the outline of a military campaign, and urged that it be pressed hard till the Indians “are effectually humbled and made to feel the full power and force of the Government.” Such a campaign would require first of all a map.
The Black Hills were named for the pines that covered their slopes. From the plains to the east the hills first appeared as a kind of wavy black line on the horizon, then on closer approach as a formidable wall, so steep and abrupt that an entrance along a creek running east was known as Buffalo Gap. Through it buffalo passed into the hills for the winter, returning the same way in the spring. According to the winter counts the first Lakota to see the hills was Standing Buffalo (Tatanka Najin), who returned from a journey into the hills about the year 1775–76, bringing a bough from an unusual kind of pine tree.2 As the Sioux in subsequent decades made their way across the plains between the Missouri River and the Black Hills, other tribes gave way—the Kiowa moving south, the Crow north and west, the Shoshones west. The Sioux did not live there but instead visited occasionally, typically when they needed to cut the tall, slender pines that were ideal for use as lodgepoles.
There was something a little forbidding and frightening about the hills. Storms were severe and lightning was frequent, something feared by all Plains Indians. The Oglala Fast Thunder, who called Crazy Horse cousin, had been named for such storms. He told his children and his grandchildren that once, hunting with a friend in the hills, they were chased by a buffalo—probably a magic or sacred buffalo. Just as they were about to be gored or trampled, “a short little man with long hair came” and took them to a safe place—a kind of cave, a tight secret place in the rocks. Fast Thunder called it “a spirit hole”—they could feel and hear a moaning wind breathing in and out through the hole. They were frightened. The little man urged them to take refuge—“Just squeeze in, but don’t come any further.” Fast Thunder’s friend was crying with fear. “Don’t be scared,” said Fast Thunder—“pray!” In they went and were saved from the magic buffalo. Later, when they got home and told the people what happened, the wind hole became famous as a place of powerful spirits.3
In the summer of 1874 one of General Custer’s Sioux scouts—a Yanktonai known as Goose (Maga), then in his late thirties—told the whites about a similar spirit cave as the big expedition made its way south and west toward the Black Hills.4 Custer had marched out of Fort Abraham Lincoln on July 1, well supported by scouts—about forty Arickarees led by Bloody Knife and Bear’s Ears, along with thirty Santee and a few other Sioux, including the man named Goose. But among these seventy-five scouts only Goose had previously been to the Black Hills. It was Custer’s habit every evening on the trail to gather his officers and chief scouts to discuss the next day’s march. One evening in early July he spread out a military map prepared in 1859 by Captain William F. Raynolds when he passed by the northern fringe of the hills on his way to the Yellowstone. At first, Goose did not grasp what the large paper was. Custer pointed out some prominent features: the Missouri and Heart rivers, and Fort Lincoln, which they had just left. After a moment Goose turned the map around until it was comfortable to his eye, and then began to tell the interpreter, Louis Agard, how they had come and where they would be going on the next day. But this, he said, pointing to the Cannonball River, was not right; he took a pencil, corrected the river’s course, and added some tributaries. Then he came to the marking for Slim Buttes—off by fifty miles. He grunted dismissal at this gross error and pushed the map aside. Custer conceded Goose might be right. “That map,” he said, “was made before anybody ever went there, and the men didn’t know anything about it except what the Indians told them.”
Goose replied, “The Indians were white Indians, I guess. You can make another map when you go there with me.”
“Yes, that is what we are going for,” said Custer. “I will give you a map if you would like one.”
Goose pointed to his head. “My map is here,” he said with pride.5
During their first ten days of travel across the plains, Goose told Custer a story much like Fast Thunder’s, about a spirit cave and an old man with a long white beard, “without beginning of days or end of years,” who lived in the cave and occasionally emerged. The cave was in the side of a butte north of the Black Hills which the Sioux called “the place where the man was killed by the cow,” meaning a buffalo cow. On the walls of the cave, he said, were sacred writings and drawings; people went there to pray and to make sacrifices. Sometimes northern Indians going south to hunt left offerings in the hope of success in the chase.6 Goose called the cave by the Lakota word wasun, which whites understood to mean either “hole in the ground” or “spirit cave.”7 A hole it was, but not just any hole.
About midday on July 11, Goose pointed out the butte in the distance and then led Custer and a party of officers and scouts a final ten miles across open prairie until they came to some wooded slopes. Some of the other scouts—Bloody Knife, Bear’s Ears, Cold Hand—rushed up one ravine after another looking for the cave until Goose halted, wordless, and pointed down toward a dark recess. Custer and the others rushed up excitedly but were disappointed. What they saw wasn’t a cave exactly but a kind of narrow crevice reaching back a few hundred feet into the mountain. There were drawings on the walls of the crevice and numerous small objects left among the rocks: beads, arrows and arrowheads, a knife, a gold ring with the initials “A.L.” It was the report of drawings and writings which had excited the whites in Goose’s account. Perhaps they were expecting something like Egyptian hieroglyphics. What they found was classic Indian rock art. It struck the newspaper correspondent William Curtis as being
like the tracery of school children on the walls of a country school house. There were pictures of deer, elk, and antelopes, bears and wolves, ponies and dogs … About eight feet high on one of the walls was the impression of a child’s foot, half an inch deep in the stone, and as perfect as if it had been molded by a skillful sculptor. Near it were a couple of hands in the same style … There were other marks quite as singular … but nothing that could be attributed to anything more than average human skill.
Curtis was not alone in his disappointment. Another correspondent, James B. Power, writing in the St. Paul Daily Pioneer, found the drawings “all rather rude in design and execution.” The whites were much more interested in a skull found nearby with what appeared to be a bullet hole in the forehead. The surgeons accompanying the expedition, Doctors S. J. Allen and J. W. Williams, concluded that it was the skull of a white man.8 A lively debate followed about the circumstances of the victim’s death—doubtless a pioneer or soldier, some said, brought here by Indians to be tortured. Others said no; Indians tortured their victims by burning them. Soon they were making jokes.
Goose said nothing. In his view, the drawings and markings on the walls of the cave were wakan—mysterious and powerful—but the whites only shrugged. “He stood at the entrance a few moments,” wrote Curtis, “and looked at them silently, then turned away and never came near the place again.”
The members of the party all picked up souvenirs from the offerings left by the Indians and then wandered back down the hillside. Custer took the rusty remains of a flintlock pistol, the wood long since rotted away. He abandoned his plan to devote a whole day to exploring the cave and decided instead to press on. But in Custer’s mind Goose had proved himself all the same: he told them where the cave was and then he led them directly to it.
Among the scouts Goose was something of an anomaly—older than the rest, long separated from his own people. There was talk of some rift or crime; the newspaper correspondents with Custer were unsure of the details. Something at any rate had persuaded Goose to join the Hunkpapas at the Standing Rock Agency near Fort Yates. His exile from the Yanktonai gave him something in common with Bloody Knife and Bear’s Ears, who had both at different times left their own people to live with traditional enemies. Bloody Knife, whose father was Hunkpapa, had gone to live with his mother’s people in the mid-1850s, the Arickarees, commonly called the Rees. Bear’s Ears, fleeing humiliation in love, spent seven years with the Sioux before returning to the Rees.9 Both men had fresh reason to be bitter enemies of the Sioux; in mid-June, shortly before Custer’s expedition set out for the Black Hills, a Sioux war party from Standing Rock had attacked the Ree village at Berthold on the upper Missouri, killing a Mandan and five Rees. Among the dead were a son of Bloody Knife and a brother of Bear’s Ears.10
But these recent losses only suggest the depth of enmity felt by Rees generally for the Sioux, who had attacked them relentlessly since the 1780s, until a surviving remnant was confined to a single village of earth-mound houses on the Missouri. The Rees on the expedition with Custer had come seeking war; when signs of a small Sioux band were discovered in the Black Hills on July 26, they excitedly stripped for battle, painted themselves and their horses, and began to sing their war songs.
“General Custer caught Bloody Knife’s eye,” Curtis wrote, “and gave him a significant nod.”
But a significant nod was not enough. “In fact,” wrote James Power, “it was with the greatest difficulty that they could be restrained from an attack on the village at once, and [they] gave every indication of being in a bad humor with the general … ‘Do not dare to fire a shot unless the Sioux attack you,’ was General Custer’s reply to their mutterings.”11
Soon a wisp of smoke suggested a camp ahead; Custer sent Bloody Knife and twenty-five Rees to reconnoiter with explicit orders to avoid a fight. The Rees restrained themselves, found and reported a small camp of five lodges, and waited for Custer to come up with his interpreter, Louis Agard.
There had been much talk in the newspapers that Custer’s expedition was violating the Treaty of 1868 and would trigger a big fight. Vague reports suggested that thousands of warriors were waiting in the hills to attack him, and it was generally believed by everyone riding with the general, soldiers and civilians alike, that a fight was more likely than not. But what Bloody Knife found was only a small group of Oglala, twenty-seven in all, hunting and cutting lodgepoles in the Black Hills before going back to the Red Cloud Agency a hundred miles to the south. They had no idea soldiers were near. Aris Donaldson, observing with binoculars, described a scene of peaceful serenity:
I must confess that the encampment looks beautiful, as we saw it through our glasses. The white buckskins newly tanned, that covered the lodge poles, were as white as an officer’s tent before it comes in contact with storm or sunshine. The squaws seated on the ground cutting up deer meat, others eating and some beading moccasins, the young Indians lying around in every attitude enjoying their freedom and the sunshine, and the dogs, lying in the shade of a teepee, were happy.
The approach of Custer’s interpreter, followed by some of the scouts, sent the Indians running. The only man in the camp when Custer arrived was Slow Bull, “a tall, slim fellow, with sharp features and piercing gray eyes.” One of his two wives was a daughter of Red Cloud.12 Curtis and the others agreed that Slow Bull resembled to an amazing degree a Democratic politician of the day named Dan Voorhees.
Slow Bull had heard nothing about the expedition. Over a pipe, Custer said he had been sent by the Great Father not to fight, but to look around while making a map of the Sioux country. Slow Bull offered to help and called out to the women and children, who cautiously emerged from their hiding places in the brush. He sent one of them after the other men out hunting and soon they appeared, too—Long Arm, Long Bear, Young Wolf, and the chief of the band, One Stab, “an old man with a dilapidated felt hat which would have branded him as a pauper anywhere, a breech-clout and colored cotton agency shirt,” according to Samuel Barrows, one of the reporters. Curtis agreed that One Stab was old, “at least 70, I should think.” Soon the other men appeared. All gathered to talk with Custer in Slow Bull’s lodge, where Red Cloud’s daughter gave them cool springwater to drink. “A not uncomely squaw she was,” wrote Barrows, who later became a minister, “with a broad full face and a straight nose, a little hooked at the end, long black hair braided into a pair of ‘tails,’ dark bright eyes, and a fine set of teeth, which just then were composedly chewing the gum of the pine tree.”13
The conversation which followed was friendly in a stiff and cautious way. All the realities of frontier life were in play. Custer was intruding on Sioux land, not the other way around, and he came with nearly a thousand men, a hundred wagons, a rifled cannon, and three Gatling guns. A Gatling was a primitive form of machine gun, clumsy but lethal, with multiple barrels that fired rapidly with the turn of a hand-driven crank. Through his interpreter Custer said he came in peace, but he wanted Slow Bull and the other men to act as guides, and he expected them to snap to.
Just beneath the polite talk were suspicion and fear—by the Sioux of attack by Custer’s Rees, by the whites that the Indians would run off. None of the whites knew anything about the Indians. Two years earlier the “pauper” One Stab and Slow Bull had both gone with a delegation led by Red Cloud to Washington, where they met President Grant and were photographed by Alexander Gardner. In addition, One Stab, more generally known as Stabber, was a noted chief and a leading man at both of the agencies on the White River in Nebraska. The American Horse and Cloud Shield winter counts both record the death of a probable grandfather about 1783 and it was likely Stabber’s father who met Lewis and Clark on their overland journey in 1804.14 Born before 1810 (if Curtis’s guess at his age was right), Stabber met Francis Parkman near Fort Laramie in August 1846, but irritated the young traveler by telling him, “as vaguely and as unconnectedly as a child,”15 of an American victory over “the Spaniards” in the Mexican war. Parkman was usually astute and sympathetic, but on this occasion he failed to note what was remarkable: Stabber brought his news from the Santa Fe Trail along the Arkansas River, hundreds of miles to the south, and he was reporting the outcome of an opening battle of the war with Mexico before officials at Fort Laramie knew anything about it. Twenty years later, at Fort Phil Kearny in January 1868, now a chief in his own right, Stabber addressed white officials negotiating an end to the Bozeman Trail War:
Send word to the Great Father to take away his warriors with the snow, and he will please us … We are talking today on our own grounds. God Almighty made this ground, and … he made it for us. Look about you, see how he has stocked it with game … Your homes are in the east, and you have beef cattle to eat. Why then, do you come here to bother us … If you will go away to your homes and leave us, then we will be at peace; but if you stay, we will fight. We do not go to your homes; then why come to ours?16
In the Black Hills in 1874, Stabber, an old man half naked (as the whites saw it) in his shirt and breechcloth, did his best to placate Custer, proceeding through the litany of assurances often cited by Indians upon meeting whites in force.
[I]f you want me to send one of my young men today I can do it, I can show you the way clear up this creek here; and then you can go yourselves. I do not want to have any trouble with the white man; I have always been with the white man; I never stayed with the hostiles … When I meet a big chief like you I always tell him the best I can. My children were all much scared today because the Rees came; they would not have been afraid of the whites.17
Later that day the Oglala men all came to Custer’s camp, where they were given sugar, coffee, bacon, and hardtack. But midway through the visit Slow Bull slipped away and did not return. Custer wanted the Oglala as scouts and announced he would send a detail of a dozen men back with the others “to protect their camp.”18 But Stabber and the Oglala named Long Bear19 mounted and started off before the guard detail was ready to move. Custer immediately dispatched Goose and one of the Santee, a man named Red Bird, to overtake the three men and bring them back. On reaching the Oglala, Red Bird grabbed the bridle of Long Bear’s horse, insisting he return to Custer’s camp. The Oglala seized the Santee’s gun, saying, “I may as well be killed today as tomorrow.”20
They wrestled for the gun; the Santee fell or jumped to the ground and the young Oglala took off at a run. The Santee had time for one shot, but Long Bear disappeared into the trees.
Stabber was not so quick and was forcibly returned to the soldiers’ camp, where Custer was now angry. He accused Stabber of being a liar after learning that the rest of the Oglala broke camp and disappeared while the chief and his men were eating hardtack and drinking coffee with Custer. All pretense of peace was now abandoned and Bloody Knife was sent off with a body of scouts to find the fleeing Indians. Five hours later they were heard returning, howling with anger and disappointment at coming back empty-handed, with neither men nor scalps.
Wrote Barrows,
The next day our scouts while out hunting discovered the saddle, blankets, and equipments of the Indian at whom our Santee had shot. He had evidently thrown them off to lighten his pony. The saddle and blanket were covered with blood … The ball had probably entered the man’s thigh and passed out in front of the saddle, inflicting possibly only a flesh wound.21
It was possible, but not likely. The heavy lead bullet of the 1873 caliber Springfield trapdoor carbine which the scouts carried was flattish on the nose and big enough to leave a wound you could plug with a corn cob. Chances are that Long Bear was lucky to live. But he did; two years later he was drawing pay as a scout for the U.S. Army.
The fleeing Oglala hurried south to the agencies with alarmed reports of their encounter with Custer’s expedition in the Black Hills. During the first week of August word reached Fort Laramie from the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies that “large numbers of Indians coming in from the north … say that Stabber … and several others were killed by Custer’s men.”22 The reports were wrong. It appears that no one was killed. Stabber was held prisoner for three days to serve as guide, then released by Custer’s order to rejoin his people. What really hurt and lingered was not the casualty count, but the sense of violation. Whites, accustomed to putting a price on things, never understood the intensity of Sioux feeling for the Black Hills. Lieutenant G. K. Warren had been right in 1857: the Sioux would fight before they would give up the Black Hills.
The prospect of a big fight with the Sioux did not trouble Custer. On the way back across the plains to Fort Abraham Lincoln, when the expedition reached the Little Missouri River, they discovered “the abandoned camp of an immense village of Indians,” according to Luther North, who rode most days alongside the young Yale student George Bird Grinnell. North had shown up Custer once or twice in shooting matches with Grinnell as witness. “I don’t think he liked it very well,” North wrote later. The night they reached the Little Missouri a small group was conversing in front of the general’s tent. “It was perhaps just as well that they [the Indians] were gone before we got there,” said North to the company—“there were a lot of them.”
Custer dismissed the remark. “I could whip all the Indians in the northwest with the Seventh Cavalry,” he said.23
——
Custer was irritated by his unsatisfactory encounter with the Sioux, and naturally insisted it wasn’t his fault: “[T]he Indians have their own bad faith as the sole ground for the collision,” he wrote in his official report.24 The expedition pressed on. The going was not easy. In later years Goose described the trek to a young mixed-blood woman, Josephine Waggoner:
The road was very difficult to travel over … As I talked with Goose about this trip, he told me that many times the expedition had to stop to make a road up and down impassable gulches, ditches and river banks, sometimes letting the wagons down steep banks with chains hitched to mules … The scouts had to do a lot of hard riding, back and forth to pick out the best places for the wagons to follow … but Goose had been in the hills before and he knew where the travois trails led into the heart of the hills.25
What was the goal of all this effort? The young paleontologist George Grinnell was looking for fossils, the geologist N. H. Winchell was looking for interesting rock formations, the engineer and topologist Captain William H. Ludlow was making the map of which Custer spoke so frequently, the botanist Aris B. Donaldson was cataloging plants (fifty-two along Cold Spring Creek alone), the correspondents were hoping for a story, and everybody was seeking game, which abounded. What gave this extended ride in the park a place in American history was the desire for gold, subject of speculation and rumors for years.
“I was talking to an old miner the other day about the probabilities of finding gold here,” Curtis wrote wistfully in the Inter-Ocean in late July, “and he thinks they are small.”
All knew it was a possibility; all felt it was fading away. Custer, some said at his own expense, had recruited two miners to accompany the expedition, old hands named Horatio Ross and William McKay. Both men, Curtis wrote, “have been worth fortunes as many times as they have toes.” They got lucky again on the morning of August 2 when they washed out traces of gold in the gravel bed of French Creek.
Goose was a witness. He had watched the whites shrug off the mysteries of the spirit hole. That bored them. Now he saw the reaction of the whites to the discovery of gold—a few yellow specks at the bottom of a pan of water and gravel:
One very hot day a lot of the soldiers went in the creek to cool off. Goose said he was repicketing his horse. Just then, the soldiers started yelling. Some of them threw up their hats. Some laughed. Some were crying. Others were running in circles. Others were jumping up and down. There was the greatest confusion he ever saw. One man had something in his hand. As fast as this man showed what he had to the others they went just as crazy as the others. Goose could not understand for a long time that these men had discovered gold.26
Curtis soon added details about the first strike:
[T]he two persevering men … came into camp with a little yellow dust wrapped carefully up in the leaf of an old account book. It was examined with the microscope; was tried with all the tests that the imagination of fifteen hundred excited campaigners could suggest, and it stood every one. It was washed with acid, mixed with mercury, cut, chewed and tasted, till everybody was convinced and went to bed dreaming of the wealth of Croesus. At daybreak there was a crowd around the “diggins” … And those were few who didn’t get a “showing”—a few yellow particles clinging to a globule of mercury.27
Reports varied as to the richness of the find; some said it was ten cents to the pan, some fifteen, some even more. But it was Curtis who coined the phrase that swept the country when it appeared under a one-word headline—GOLD!—in the Inter-Ocean on August 27: “From the grass roots down,” he wrote, “it was ‘pay dirt.’ ”
An aide-de-camp sent on the expedition by General Sheridan was also struck by the phrase; Ross and McKay must have used it. From Bear Butte on Saturday, August 15, Major George Forsyth wrote Sheridan, “The two miners we have with us tell me … that, in their opinion, when the eastern hills are rightly prospected, gold will be found there in abundance. I am inclined to think so, for the very roots of the grass would pan 5 cents to the pan in our camp near Harney’s Peak.”28
Times were hard in the United States; the Panic of 1873 had triggered a depression which lingered. “Gold from the grass roots down”—wealth to be picked up as easily as a coin in the street—a way out for desperate men: it was clear where this was going. Before year’s end prospectors, speculators, dreamers, and the merely out-of-work were hurrying their way in thousands to Fort Pierre east of the Black Hills on the Missouri River; to Sidney, Nebraska, directly south of the hills on the Union Pacific Railroad line; and to Cheyenne, Wyoming, called by its boosters “the magic city,” which was the most direct jumping-off place for the new goldfields.
One awkward fact stood in the way of a full-scale gold rush. The Fort Laramie treaty had given the Black Hills to the Sioux in perpetuity, and all whites were barred from entry. For a year after Custer’s expedition the military tried, vigorously at first, to block whites from the hills or to expel those who had slipped through. But then a different approach was conceived: to buy the hills from the Sioux, or, failing that, to rewrite the Treaty of 1868, compelling the Indians to sign whether they wanted to or not. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were summoned to Washington in May 1875 to hear the president’s views. The Cheyenne Daily Leader, which expected boom times as soon as the hills were opened to whites, stated the matter plainly:
If they decide in conformance with the suggestions of the president, all will be well. They will be voted good Indians and will be voted appropriations to buy food and clothing for years to come … But there is no more foolishness to be tolerated in red men. They might as well … agree to sell out and go south. If they will not do this, then look out for lively times with the Indians … Of the result all may feel sanguine. The Indians will have to accept the president’s terms.29
“I do not like General Custer and all his men going into the Black Hills,” Red Cloud said within days of the first newspaper headlines. He was a careful, thoughtful kind of man. The invasion of the Black Hills remained on his mind all that fall. He did not like or trust the Oglala agent, J. J. Saville, so he told the commander at Fort Laramie privately that he wanted to visit Washington to talk about the hills. The commander was already finding difficulty in keeping whites out of the area. He passed on Red Cloud’s request with his endorsement, and Washington, with its own agenda taking form, soon responded with an invitation. When Saville gave Washington’s invitation to Red Cloud it was Billy Garnett, about to turn twenty, who did the interpreting.30
Red Cloud, always conscious of the danger of getting out in front of his people, now told Saville he wanted a big group of chiefs to go, perhaps as many as fifty, and urged that even Black Twin (Holy Bald Eagle) and Crazy Horse be included. General Sheridan in Chicago had never heard the name of either man. Red Cloud sent couriers to the north and Saville soon wrote Washington that both chiefs were promising to come, although neither one, he believed, had ever been to an agency or attended a council with whites. As spring approached Crazy Horse and Black Twin did not say no, but they did not show up, either, and the delegation left in May without them. With the chiefs went a large contingent of interpreters—not just the men working for the agents, Billy Garnett, Leon Palladay, and Louis Bordeaux, but also several men whom Red Cloud and Spotted Tail wanted as interpreters, Louis Richard, Nick Janis, and Todd Randall.
The problem facing President Grant’s administration was brutally simple at the core: how to extinguish, in the preferred word of officials, Sioux title to the Black Hills before white miners simply flooded into the gold country, treaty be damned, and sparked a general Indian war. But the government had a political flank it needed to watch. An alert audience in the east of clerics, “friends of the Indian,” and former abolitionists, ready to take up a new cause, closely scrutinized the Indian Department. The government tried at first to buy or lease the hills, but from whom? This was never quite thought through. The 1868 treaty granted possession of the hills to “the Sioux,” but that included the northern bands who had never signed the treaty, never lived at an agency, never took government rations or annuities. These northerners insisted nobody else had the right to sell their claim to the hills. And what about the price? The Indians all understood why the whites were eager to buy the hills—gold had been found there. Those willing to sell wanted to get a lot for the hills, without really knowing what “a lot” might be.
But the difficulty with the deepest roots was Washington’s ambivalence about the true nature of a sale or a lease. An owner, if he is really the owner, is free to say no, or to ask a price no buyer will meet. This freedom the government was not actually willing to concede to the Sioux. Grant was not sentimental about Indian rights. He did not recognize any Sioux right to hold on to the Black Hills. He had made up his mind, and to the Indians he made his views plain. As soon as they reached Washington they were informed that the government wished to remove them to Indian territory. The southern Cheyenne had already been forced to settle there, and the Sioux understood this would mean complete loss of freedom and their hunting way of life. It was Grant, personally, who uttered the fatal “or else” looming behind the government’s offer to buy the hills. In the White House on May 26 he told the Indians that Washington had not promised to feed them forever. If the Indians refused to sell the hills, if white gold seekers poured into the area, if fighting followed, then inevitably the government would stop delivering beef to the agencies. Grant and the chiefs both knew that meant the Indians would starve. The threat in his words was unmistakable: sell the hills or starve.
“I want you to think of what I have said,” Grant concluded. “I don’t want you to say anything today. I want you to talk among yourselves … This is all I want to say to you.”31
But the Indians refused to be bullied into signing a treaty. The chiefs dug in their heels and would not even discuss selling the Black Hills until they had a chance to talk to the people left at home. Back they went in mid-June. Congress, meanwhile, created a commission to press for sale of the hills and appointed Iowa Senator William Allison to run it.32 A legal sale would require agreement by three-quarters of Sioux men, including those who lived in the north. Hoping to strike a deal within the rules, the Allison commission in the summer of 1875 sent out a delegation to invite the northern Indians to a grand council on the White River in September. Led by Young Man Afraid of His Horses, the delegation of about seventy-five Oglala and Brulé men left the agencies in July, following the well-established road north to the Buffalo Gap and through the hills to the hunting grounds along the Powder and Tongue rivers. With the delegation went two interpreters, evidently as official observers in order to report after their return to the Allison commission. One of the two was the mixed-blood son of old John Richard, Louis Richard, a man called nephew by Red Cloud. With him was a man new to the whites but well known to the northern Indians—the long-haired, dark-skinned, Sioux-speaking, still-buckskin-clad, just-arrived-from-nowhere Sandwich Islander, Frank Grouard.