Chapter 6
The most obvious geographical consequence of the Civil War was the reattachment of the South to the North, but a result scarcely less significant was the cementing of the West to the East. More than a few Northerners might have bid the South good riddance in 1861 had the South’s departure not threatened to carry away the West as well. Since the eighteenth century American leaders had understood that whoever controlled the lower Mississippi controlled the West. Benjamin Franklin said as much when he rejected a Spanish proposal that would have restricted American use of the lower Mississippi. “A neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street door,” Franklin explained. Thomas Jefferson reiterated this view when he declared, “There is on the globe one single spot the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.” Andrew Jackson acted on the same principle in treating the British attack on New Orleans in the War of 1812 as precisely what it was: the opening thrust of an attempt to sever the American West from the American East. Since then railroads had revised but hadn’t repealed the laws of gravity and precipitation that made the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers highways of commerce. When a relieved Lincoln declared, after Grant took Vicksburg, that “the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” he meant that the West would remain with the Union.1
Besides ensuring the political attachment of the West to the Union—an attachment reinforced, for the Far West, by the Pacific railroad—the Northern victory removed a principal hindrance to Western development. For four decades every effort to organize a Western territory or admit a Western state had run afoul of the slavery controversy. From the political fight over Missouri in the 1810s to the guerrilla war in Kansas in the 1850s, potential settlers had had to ask themselves whether, in addition to the normal hazards of life on the frontier, they wished to take on the slavery dispute. After the Civil War they didn’t have to.
In American history the West had always been a comparative concept. At the midpoint of the eighteenth century the West began fifty miles from Philadelphia; by the early nineteenth century it started just across the Appalachians. At the end of the Civil War the West consisted, for the most part, of the region beyond the 100th meridian, the line that runs roughly from Laredo to Bismarck.
Distance from the center of population had always characterized the West, and still did; but more salient than the remoteness of the postwar West was its dryness. With the exception of a strip along the Pacific, where ocean breezes moderated the regional drought, and the crests of the highest interior ranges, which caught what little moisture escaped the Cascades and Sierra Nevada, the new West was a desert. Nearly everything about preexisting American society and culture (and their European forerunners) had supposed ready access to water. Adjusting to desert life required new techniques and technology, to stretch the limited resource, and a new frame of mind, to stretch the received society and culture.
Settling the new West also required answering the Indian question more definitively than ever. Since the seventeenth century, English and then American policy toward the aboriginal peoples had supposed a relatively empty district to the west of the moving frontier of white settlement, to which the tribes might be lured or driven. By the late nineteenth century, the frontier had reached the Pacific, and there was nowhere left to move the Indians to. Moreover, the supposition had rested on the further premise that the Western territory allowed to the Indians would never attract much white interest. But the capitalist revolution overturned that premise, along with so much else. Railroads opened the plains and mountains of the postwar West to white hunters, miners, ranchers, and farmers. The Indians resisted this latest encroachment, with a desperation born of the knowledge that they were making their last stand. The fighting didn’t end until the Indians lacked the capacity to resist anymore.
The capitalist revolution shaped much else about the new West. To a far greater degree than in the East, settlement in the West reflected the influence of corporations and other institutions of capitalism. Eastern farms had rarely been self-sufficient; almost from the beginning, American farmers produced for market. But Western farms carried the commercial imperative to an extreme, in many cases becoming outdoor factories, specializing in particular crops with all the single-mindedness of the most highly organized Eastern mill. Eastern towns had been sited by God, as it were, where rivers joined, went over falls, or grew too shallow for oceangoing vessels. Western towns were sited by railroad corporations, along lines where their surveyors said the grading would be easiest and their accountants predicted the operation would be most profitable. Westerners were rugged individualists chiefly in their dreams (and the dreams of their Eastern and foreign admirers); in real life they were likely to draw paychecks for digging in corporate mines, plowing corporate fields, or chasing corporate cattle.
The settlement of the postwar West brought the frontier experience in America to an end. To those who applauded this latest conquest of nature and indigenous peoples, it seemed a triumph of American values. And so it was. But the values that mattered most by the waning years of the nineteenth century, and that figured most prominently on this final frontier, were the same capitalist values that were conquering the rest of the country.
IN 1865 the Sioux nation was somewhat more than a century into its own economic and social revolution, one triggered by the arrival of the horse. The western Sioux had split off from their eastern cousins, who occupied the forests of Minnesota, sometime before the beginning of the eighteenth century, largely in response to pressure from the neighboring Ojibwa, who in turn felt pressure from their own eastern neighbors and from whites. The western Sioux, also called Lakota, were a pedestrian people when they emerged onto the plains of the upper Missouri River. They traveled on foot and hunted on foot, devising elaborate strategies for killing the largest animal species they encountered, the bison, or buffalo. A favorite strategy entailed setting fire to the grassland behind a herd and then channeling the resulting stampede toward a cliff. Most of the herd would stop short, but a few beasts would fall or be pushed over the edge by those behind. Some of these would break their legs, and the Sioux hunters would dispatch them with arrows and spears.2
The Sioux encountered the horse about the time they reached the plains. The Spanish had reintroduced the horse to the Americas in the early sixteenth century (equines had roamed the Americas before the last Ice Age). Some escaped or were stolen; the descendants of these made their way north in the company of various Indians and on their own. The initial impact of the horse on the Sioux was modest. The horse increased their semi-nomadic range, but not till the mid-eighteenth century did they become an equestrian people.
The slow adoption of the horse resulted in part from the friction that attends any cultural transformation. Besides acquiring the animals, the Sioux had to learn how to train them, breed them, and care for them. All this took time. But the long lag probably also reflected an understanding that, in adopting horses, the Sioux were giving up other things. The Cheyennes told a story about their own adoption of horses, from the Comanches, and though the myth was peculiar to them, the lesson must have applied more broadly. According to this story, the Cheyennes’ god spoke to them through the oldest priest of the tribe:
If you have horses, everything will be changed for you forever. You will have to move around a lot to find pasture for your horses. You will have to give up gardening and live by hunting and gathering, like the Comanches. And you will have to come out of your earth houses and live in tents.… You will have to have fights with other tribes, who will want your pasture land or the places where you hunt. You will have to have real soldiers, who can protect the people. Think, before you decide.
Almost certainly the Cheyenne story showed the wisdom of hindsight, which may or may not have helped the Sioux appreciate what they were getting into. In any case the Sioux were riding seriously by the 1750s, when their own census records counted horse-borne warriors among their men of military age.3
At that point the Sioux might have become full nomads, following the buffalo herds for most of the year. But something else slowed the transition. From before the arrival of Europeans and Euro-Americans, the Sioux, like every other people in North America, were tied into various trade networks. Trade carried dried salmon from the Pacific Northwest across the mountains to the interior of the continent; trade brought turquoise from Mexico and flint from the Ozarks. And trade brought the first aspects of European civilization to the Sioux: horses from the Spanish lands to the south; knives, tobacco, and guns from the French and English to the east.
To pay for what they imported, the Sioux trapped beaver, which the Europeans and Americans coveted. The beaver trade employed the Sioux for generations after they acquired horses; as late as the 1790s a French trader saw the Sioux as trappers first of all. “The Sioux tribes are those who hunt most for the beaver and other good peltries of the Upper Missouri,” he said. “They scour all the rivers and streams.… They carry away every springtime … a great number of them, which they exchange with the other Sioux situated on the St. Peter’s”—Minnesota—“and Des Moines Rivers.”4
But the beaver declined from overtrapping, and the Sioux shifted more and more to the buffalo. The buffalo furnished meat for food, robes for clothing, hides for shelter, tendons for bowstrings, and horns for containers. Yet the buffalo was never solely an item of subsistence; it was also a commodity for commerce. The Sioux traded buffalo robes, buffalo pemmican, and buffalo tongues to their Indian neighbors and later to white merchants at the trade fairs that formed a regular feature of life on the plains from the eighteenth century till the middle of the nineteenth. In the spring of 1832 at Fort Pierre on the upper Missouri, George Catlin encountered a band of Sioux who unceremoniously dumped fourteen hundred fresh tongues on the ground of the fort, taking in exchange several gallons of whiskey, which they immediately consumed.5
The buffalo trade was competitive, and the Sioux and the other tribes didn’t confine themselves to competing on price and quality. From the late eighteenth century well into the nineteenth, the Sioux engaged their neighbors in a long series of conflicts that were, at their heart, economic wars. The Sioux sought to expand production by monopolizing the best hunting grounds; they tried to protect their markets by physically driving their rivals away from the trade fairs.
They achieved a success that would have made any robber baron proud. During the first half of the nineteenth century the Sioux established their dominance over the large region from the Minnesota River in the east to the head of the Yellowstone in the west, and from the Missouri in the north to the Republican River in the south.6
Their success owed to their ruthlessness—they destroyed entire villages of their enemies and made vassals of the survivors—and their mastery of the horse, but it also reflected an element of chance. As the Europeans and Euro-Americans did everywhere else in the Western Hemisphere starting in the fifteenth century, they unintentionally introduced exotic diseases among the indigenes of the North American interior. Smallpox, in particular, ravaged one community after another. In some cases the casualties were almost total; epidemics in the 1780s and 1790s killed almost 90 percent of the Arikaras and roughly the same proportion of Mandans and Hidatsas.
The Sioux, however, proved less vulnerable. The scattered nature of their camps and villages inhibited the spread of disease, and by the 1830s their American trading partners brought doctors to vaccinate them. As a result, while the population of nearly every other tribe was diminishing, slowly or swiftly, the Sioux numbers actually increased. By some estimates the Sioux population quintupled between 1800 and 1850, albeit to only 25,000.7
Until midcentury, the Sioux expansion had little effect on citizens of the United States. As the effort to vaccinate them indicated, at least some Americans saw the Sioux as allies. Yet others warned that the Sioux were getting too strong. “The day is not far off when the Sioux will possess the whole buffalo region, unless they are checked,” the federal agent to the Pawnees predicted in 1838. As this forecast came true, federal officials attempted to neutralize the growing Sioux power. The mass emigration of gold seekers to California in 1849 and after brought large numbers of Americans to the Sioux country for the first time, and although few attacks on the emigrants took place, the intrusion sufficiently disturbed the politics of the region that American officials felt obliged to call a peace conference at Fort Laramie in 1851.8
It was a grand event. Dozens of tribes sent representatives, and perhaps ten thousand Indians attended; their horses stripped the grass for miles in every direction. But no one, either Indian or white, doubted that the Sioux were the dominant force among the indigenes. The conference produced an exchange of gifts and promises of friendly relations, yet its more important result was to let the Sioux and the Americans take the measure of each other. When the American officials tried to persuade the Sioux to stay north of the Platte—the main emigrant route west—Black Hawk, an Oglala Sioux, refused. His people, he said, had conquered the territory from which the Americans wanted to keep them, as fairly as the Americans had conquered much of the rest of the continent. “Those lands once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we whipped those nations out of them,” Black Hawk said. “In this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians.” The conference broke up peaceably, but neither the Americans nor the Sioux, on parting, doubted that they would be fighting for control of the northern Plains, perhaps soon.9
THE FIGHTING MIGHT have started at once had the Americans not become distracted by their own internal troubles. But though the squabble over slavery in Kansas postponed the conflict over the region farther north and west, the discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858 refocused attention on the lands still held by the Sioux and the other Plains Indians. The Pikes Peak and Denver gold rushes weren’t as large as the rush to California, but they were more threatening to the indigenes, in that while the earlier argonauts had been passing through, these intruders came to stay. In 1861 the federal government created the Territory of Colorado, with a governor and other apparatus of permanent occupation.
The Indians responded to the new invasion variously. The Sioux launched raids against wagon trains, stagecoach roads, and isolated settlements, while the Cheyennes and Arapahos, less confident of their military prowess vis-à-vis the whites, generally acquiesced.
Yet their complaisance won them no protection. The Colorado governor, John Evans, and the commander of Colorado volunteers, Colonel John Chivington, contended that the Indians must be driven from Colorado. This view drew support from many whites, including those who had joined the Colorado volunteers to avoid the draft into the Union army. When the Cheyennes and Arapahos expressed their desire for peace with the whites, Evans balked. “What shall I do with the Third Colorado Regiment if I make peace?” he demanded of an officer who thought the governor ought to accept the Indians’ proposal. “They have been raised to kill Indians, and they must kill Indians.” Chivington was even more emphatic. “Kill all the Indians you come across,” he ordered his soldiers. Nor did he except women and children. “Nits make lice,” he explained to a Denver audience.10
Chivington’s troops carried out his orders in late November 1864 on the banks of Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. After an overnight ride, during which the soldiers fortified themselves against the cold—and evidently against their consciences—with whiskey, the regiment attacked a camp of Cheyennes and Arapahos. The camp comprised mostly women, children, and old men, as the young men were away hunting. This circumstance was perfectly clear to the soldiers, as an eyewitness later explained. “I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter,” he said. “When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy.” But mercy didn’t appear. “The soldiers shot them all.… There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection. They sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick. She had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed.… I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.” Death afforded no protection. “Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side.… I saw one squaw whose privates had been cut out.” Chivington’s own soldiers confirmed the atrocities. “I did not see a body of man, woman, or child but was scalped,” one said, “and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner—men, women, and children’s privates cut out, &c.; I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman’s private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick.… I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.”11
The Sand Creek massacre—or rather the response to it—revealed an abiding theme in American policy and attitudes toward Indians. For generations a sympathy gradient had existed regarding Indians, with greater sympathy emerging the farther one traveled east from the frontier. And so it did now. Many Westerners actively applauded Chivington and his men; the Rocky Mountain News asserted, “Colorado soldiers have again covered themselves with glory.” Other Westerners, with slightly more conscience, were willing to overlook the atrocities the militia committed, as necessary to the advance of civilization. But Easterners grew queasy at the reports and many expressed outrage. Eastern editors decried the massacre; Congress launched an investigation. Yet even the Easterners had a limited attention span for Indian affairs. In the final winter of the Civil War, other matters intruded and the investigation proceeded slowly.12
Meanwhile the Indians took matters upon themselves. The Cheyennes and Arapahos joined the Sioux in a general assault on white outposts and settlements in Colorado. In January 1865 the allies attacked the town of Julesburg, killing indiscriminately, scalping the victims, and setting the buildings on fire. They tore out telegraph wires and closed the road to Denver, threatening Colorado’s capital with starvation.13
Leading the Sioux was Red Cloud, a war chief of the Oglala band, who subscribed to a Sioux version of Manifest Destiny. “The Great Spirit raised both the white man and the Indian,” he explained. “I think he raised the Indian first. He raised me in this land and it belongs to me. The white man was raised over the great waters, and his land is over there. Since they crossed the sea, I have given them room. There are now white people all about me. I have but a small spot of land left. The Great Spirit told me to keep it.”
Red Cloud served notice of his vision at a council called by American officials during a lull in the fighting. The Americans hoped to negotiate rights for a road across the Sioux lands to Bozeman in Montana Territory, where gold had been discovered in 1862. Red Cloud attended the council but denounced the road as a pretext for further land grabs. “The white men have crowded the Indians back year by year until we are forced to live in a small country north of the Platte,” he said. “And now our last hunting ground, the home of the People”—the Sioux—“is to be taken from us. Our women and children will starve, but for my part I prefer to die fighting.”14
The whites went ahead with the Bozeman road, building forts along the route. Red Cloud gathered warriors from his fellow Sioux and from the Cheyennes and Arapahos. During the summer and autumn of 1866 Red Cloud’s men harassed federal soldiers who were traveling the road, cutting trees for construction, and provisioning the forts.
Red Cloud’s most active lieutenant was a young Oglala named Crazy Horse, who delighted in taunting the whites and drawing the unwary into ambushes. In late December Red Cloud and Crazy Horse laid a trap. A small company of Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Sioux struck a wagon train on the Bozeman road. They did enough damage to anger the soldiers stationed at Fort Phil Kearny, where the second in command was Captain William Fetterman, a Civil War hero who couldn’t believe Indians could fight nearly as effectively as the Confederates he had defeated. “A single company of regulars could whip a thousand Indians,” he boasted. “A full regiment could whip the entire array of hostile tribes.” On another day he declared, “With eighty men I could ride through the Sioux nation.”15
With eighty-one men Fetterman galloped forth in pursuit of Crazy Horse and the Indian raiders. Fetterman’s explicit orders were to halt at Lodge Trail Ridge, several miles from the fort, lest he outrun reinforcements. But he ignored the orders, intent on crushing the savages. Just beyond Lodge Trail Ridge waited two thousand Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Sioux; as Fetterman rode past they sprung their trap, cutting off the federals’ retreat. Though Fetterman’s men, better armed than the Indians and now fighting for their lives, put up a desperate resistance, they were annihilated. Not one escaped. Fetterman’s body was found with a bullet through the temple; powder burns indicated that it was fired at close range, either by himself or by a fellow officer, in order that the captain not be taken alive. Many of the bodies were mutilated.16
TILL WILLIAM SHERMAN was nine he went by his middle name, Tecumseh, chosen by a father who admired the Shawnee chief responsible for the best organized and most nearly successful counteroffensive—in the early 1810s—in the history of the long struggle between whites and Indians for mastery of North America. Even after his father died and his mother adopted him out to a family that insisted on employing his Christian name, Sherman was “Cump” to his friends. If he noted the irony, after he inherited command of the war against the Indians of the Plains, he never let on.
Sherman could have entered politics at the end of the Civil War. In the celebrations that marked the Union victory he was the hero second only to Grant, and not always second. “The acclamation given Sherman was without precedent,” a reporter covering the Washington review of the Union army declared. “The whole assemblage raised and waved and shouted as if he had been the personal friend of each and every one of them.… Sherman was the idol of the day.” Happiness had never come easily to Sherman; depression trailed him for years. His brooding, even scowling, demeanor put people off. But now that he was the vindicator of liberty his sternness simply made him more appealing. Young women rushed to kiss his red-bearded cheek; he gained a reputation as “the great American soldier who whipped every foeman who stood before him and kissed every girl that he met.” The young ladies couldn’t vote, but their husbands and fathers could, and, by all evidence, many would have been delighted to vote for the man who drove Dixie down.17
But Sherman knew himself well enough to realize he wasn’t meant for politics. He didn’t suffer fools, and crowds made him testy. “At first he was affable,” an observer at one of Sherman’s ceremonial outings recalled. “Then he grew less cordial as the crowds crushed. He pushed down the steps, step by step, and refused proffered hands, finally exclaiming, ‘Damn you, get out of the way, damn you!’ ” A voice called out asking whether Sherman would lead an army against French forces then occupying Mexico. Sherman shouted back, “You can go there if you like, and you can go to hell if you want to!” On another occasion he explained his political philosophy to a reporter: “When I speak, I speak to the point, and when I act in earnest, I act to the point. If a man minds his own business, I let him alone, but if he crosses my path, he must get out of the way.”18
Sherman’s admirers refused to be discouraged, and his disavowals of interest in politics merely titillated popular feeling. But meanwhile he accepted a new assignment from his old commander, Ulysses Grant. General orders issued in June 1865 divided the United States into nineteen departments and five divisions; Sherman received command of the Division of the Mississippi, comprising the Departments of the Ohio, Missouri, and Arkansas. The Ohio department was soon transferred to another division, and Sherman’s command was renamed the Missouri Division, leaving him responsible for the entire West north of Texas.
From his headquarters in St. Louis he observed with concern the escalating hostilities on the Plains. Sherman initially blamed the white settlers, who wanted the army to “kill all the Indians,” as he explained to Grant in the summer of 1866. The Indians, he said, were “pure beggars and poor devils more to be pitied than dreaded.” Sherman determined to resist the white pressure for an army offensive. “I will not permit them to be warred against as long as they are not banded together in parties large enough to carry on war.”19
Sherman was imposing an impossible condition. The Sand Creek massacre demonstrated that the Indians couldn’t rely on the goodwill of whites for their survival (many of those killed at Sand Creek had huddled beneath a flag of the United States), and so they had little choice but to band together. Yet Sherman declared this unacceptable.
And after the destruction of Fetterman’s force, he responded as might have been expected of the avenging angel of the Union army. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination: men, women, and children,” he told Grant. The power of the Plains tribes must be broken. “Both the Sioux and the Cheyennes must die, or submit to our dictation.”20
Sherman delivered his ultimatum personally to the Indians at a council at the forks of the Platte in September 1867. President Andrew Johnson had appointed a “peace commission” to seek an end to the fighting on the northern Plains. Johnson offered the Sioux a reservation consisting of the western half of the modern state of South Dakota. In addition the Sioux would receive hunting grounds along the Powder River, and the federal government would abandon the Bozeman road. Finally, the government would supply the Indians with rations and money payments for thirty years.
Sherman warned the Sioux to accept the president’s offer. “If you don’t choose your homes now,” he said, “it will be too late next year.” The Indians might drive the white soldiers back momentarily, but the soldiers would be followed by white settlers. “You can see for yourselves that travel across the country has increased so much that the slow ox wagons will not answer the white man. We will build iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotives any more than you can stop the sun or the moon.” The Great Father at Washington wanted to assist his Indian children. “Choose your homes and live like white men, and we will help you,” Sherman said. Yet the Great Father’s kindness was matched by his strength. “Our people in the East hardly think of what you call war out here, but if they make up their minds to fight, they will come out as thick as the herd of buffaloes, and if you continue fighting you will all be killed.”21
The Sioux leaders refused to heed his advice, and they rode defiantly away from the council. Sherman increased the pressure. He directed General Phil Sheridan, his principal subordinate, to adopt whatever measures seemed necessary to bring the Sioux into compliance with the president’s wishes. “Go ahead in your own way and I will back you with my whole authority,” Sherman said.
If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians, it is but the result of what they have been warned of again and again.… I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry out their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext they may choose to allege.22
Sheridan hardly needed the encouragement. The Union cavalry commander from the Civil War held all Indians in disdain; when a Comanche leader surrendered his force to Sheridan and identified himself as a “good Indian,” Sheridan muttered, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead Indians.” Reported and repeated, Sheridan’s characterization became a catchphrase of annihilation.23
As it happened, the extermination policy Sherman authorized wasn’t implemented just yet. Red Cloud, recognizing that the Sioux couldn’t hold out against the whites forever, led a delegation to Fort Laramie, where in November 1868 he signed a treaty accepting the reservation the Sherman commission had offered.24
Red Cloud’s surrender won him a trip to Washington and New York, where he was applauded for his statesmanship by federal officials and for his foresight and sincerity by those Easterners who counted themselves friends of the Indians. “His earnest manner, his impassioned gestures, the eloquence of his hands, and the magnetism which he evidently exercises over an audience, produced a vast effect on the dense throng which listened to him yesterday,” the New York Times observed after a rally in Red Cloud’s honor in Manhattan.25
LIKE OTHER PLAINS tribes, the Sioux practiced a form of democracy that verged on anarchy. The various bands acknowledged no central authority, and the leader of one band held sway only so long as his arguments convinced the rest of the band. This feature of Indian governance consistently vexed Indian relations with federal authorities, for Washington might negotiate an agreement with one set of leaders only to have the agreement repudiated by other leaders and much of the Sioux nation.
The American government was hardly blameless in this. Federal negotiators regularly found compliant chiefs—often made deliberately drunk—who were willing to sign agreements the federals knew other members of the tribe would reject, and then treated those agreements as though they bound the whole tribe. When those other members did reject the agreements, Washington claimed willful violation and released itself to take what it wanted.
The Fort Laramie pact was an agreement that split the Sioux. Crazy Horse, Red Cloud’s lieutenant, rejected the reservation the federals offered and determined to fight on. About the time Red Cloud was touring the East, Crazy Horse met a charismatic medicine man of the Hunkpapa Sioux named Sitting Bull. From youth Sitting Bull had been known for his visions, which frequently appeared to predict events that subsequently befell the Sioux. Of late he had gained a reputation for his vehement refusal to accept the reservation policy—“peace policy,” it was called by its advocates in the U.S. government—embraced by Red Cloud. Crazy Horse similarly rejected what he considered Red Cloud’s defeatism, and an affinity emerged between Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, each determined that the Sioux should hold their territory against further white encroachment or die trying.26
They launched their defense of their homeland with a campaign against the construction crews of the Northern Pacific Railroad, then inching west from the Missouri River. During the summer of 1872 Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull sniped at surveyors and clashed more seriously with the military escorts sent to guard them. The Sioux resistance inspired Sherman to dispatch reinforcements, including the Seventh Cavalry, led by a longhaired hero of the Civil War battle of Richmond, George Armstrong Custer.
By the time Custer reached the Sioux country, construction on the Northern Pacific had been halted—not by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull but by the Panic of 1873. Another development, however, no less linked to American capitalism, ensured that the struggle for the Plains would continue and indeed intensify. Gold prospectors had skirted the Sioux region while less dangerous environs remained unexplored, but as they ran out of promising territory farther west, they were drawn to that easternmost island of Rocky Mountain topography, the Black Hills of Dakota. The Black Hills had long been holy to the Sioux, partly because their beetled ridges and dark canyons, contrasting so starkly with the open aspect of the plain that surrounds them, seemed an obvious home to spirits and other ethereal beings, but also because those canyons and their forests provided game in summer and shelter in winter.
The Sioux knew the Black Hills contained gold, but they wrapped their knowledge in a veil of enforced mystery. Decades earlier some Sioux had shown a Catholic missionary gold nuggets taken from the region; the missionary, warning them what the whites would do if they learned of the gold, advised them to bury the nuggets and suppress the knowledge. A Sioux council subsequently decreed death for anyone who told whites of the gold in the Black Hills.27
The mystery shrouding the area simply fired the imagination of the prospectors. With the possible exception of stock speculation, with which it shares many traits, no livelihood is more prone to rumor than gold prospecting. The slightest hint of gold in a new region can prompt a stampede to that place. This became the truer as the likely spots to look for gold dwindled. In the early 1870s reports of gold in the Black Hills surfaced periodically; by 1874 they had produced a groundswell of western demand that the Black Hills be opened to serious exploration. A Dakota editorialist spoke for many when he condemned the Fort Laramie treaty as an “abominable compact” that gave savages a veto over gold mining and other forms of economic development. “They will not dig the gold or let others do it,” he wrote. “They are too lazy and too much like mere animals to cultivate the fertile soil, mine the coal, develop the salt mines, bore the petroleum wells, or wash the gold. Having all these things in their hands, they prefer to live as paupers, thieves and beggars; fighting, torturing, hunting, gorging, yelling and dancing all night to the beating of old tin kettles.”28
As the depression in the East deepened, characterized by falling prices and other symptoms of shrinkage in the money supply, the Grant administration couldn’t resist the opportunity to show it was taking steps to rectify the problem. It authorized an expedition to the Black Hills to determine whether the region was as rich as the rumors suggested.
George Custer headed the expedition, which included sufficient soldiers and armaments to discourage attack, a cadre of scientists to assay the mineral resources of the region, a photographer to make a visual record of the journey, and four newspapermen to publicize the fine work Colonel Custer was doing for his country. The correspondents doubtless wished for a scrape with the Indians to enliven their dispatches, but they had to make do with Custer’s confirmation of gold in the Black Hills. In a letter to the War Department, Custer reported finding “40 or 50 small particles of pure gold, in size averaging that of a small pin head, and most of it obtained today from one panful of earth.” The newsmen amplified Custer’s words for their lay readership. “Here, in Custer’s Valley, rich gold and silver mines have been discovered, both placer and quartz diggings,” the reporter for the Bismarck Tribune declared. “This immense section bids fair to become the El Dorado of America.” The Yankton Press and Dakotan headlined, “Struck It at Last! Rich Mines of Gold and Silver Reported Found by Custer. Prepare for Lively Times! … The National Debt to Be Repaid When Custer Returns.”29
The news set off a gold rush to the Black Hills, despite the Fort Laramie treaty and despite initial efforts of the federal government, in keeping with the “peace policy,” to stop it. “You are hereby directed to use the force at your command to burn the wagon trains, destroy the outfits, and arrest the leaders,” Phil Sheridan wired General Alfred Terry, the commander of the Dakota district, regarding the gold rushers. But neither Terry nor other officers in the field took more than rhetorical action against the miners. Even these efforts were undercut by Grant’s decision to try to purchase the Black Hills from the Sioux. Red Cloud was ready to deal, reckoning that what the whites wanted they sooner or later would get and that the Indians ought at least to receive something in return. But negotiations stuck on price (in part because a translator miscast the Indians’ demand for $7 million as $70 million). And in any event, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull denied the authority of Red Cloud or anyone else to barter away their sacred patrimony.30
Meanwhile the rush for gold continued. By the spring of 1876 some fifteen thousand miners and camp followers had occupied the riverbanks and gravel bars of the Black Hills. Their presence remained illegal, and in public comments to persons critical of the government’s unfair treatment of the Indians, Grant reiterated that the region was off-limits to white settlement. Yet he made no effort to remove the intruders.
Instead he authorized a campaign to bring Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the other holdouts—“non-treaty Indians”—to acknowledge the authority of the federal government. Their acknowledgment, Grant believed, would facilitate the negotiations with Red Cloud. Crazy Horse and the others were said to be in the valley of the Yellowstone; the president gave the order to pursue them there.
The planning for the campaign was complicated by the impeachment trial of War Secretary William Belknap, on charges of corruption. At a time when Custer should have been in Dakota preparing to march, he had to be in Washington testifying to Congress. Custer’s military record, his theatrical good looks, and his willingness to court reporters made him a favorite of the press and, through the press, of the American people. With scandal swirling about the War Department and the Grant administration generally, the dashing colonel commanded the nation’s attention.
The nation followed his progress from Washington, after his testimony, to Chicago, where he intended to catch another train, to Bismarck. But to his astonishment and that of the watching public, he was arrested at Chicago, on orders of the president. Grant hadn’t appreciated Custer’s revealing testimony before Congress, nor did he like the attention being lavished on the young officer. Custer, eager to rejoin his regiment, hadn’t received proper authorization before departing Washington, and Grant took the opportunity to remind him who commanded the army.
Grant’s critics, whose ranks were growing by the week amid the political scandals, employed the arrest to lambaste the administration yet again. Custer was lionized as the truth teller whom the administration sought to muzzle; the Democrats denounced the administration for playing politics with the security of the frontier and the lives of American soldiers.
The criticism forced Grant to release the colonel. Custer was allowed to continue west, although the War Department insisted that disciplinary action remained a possibility. When the Seventh Cavalry rode out of Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri River below Bismarck in May 1876, Custer rode at their head, more famous than ever.
Custer reveled in his heightened celebrity. By one account, he told some Arikara and Crow scouts, enlisted for the campaign against their traditional Sioux enemies, that this would be his last western expedition. If they helped him defeat the Sioux, he would return to Washington and become the Great Father there. He added that he would remember his Indian friends. Whether Custer conjured a race for the presidency from thin air or was prompted by mischievous Democrats is unclear. But either way his mission against the Sioux acquired an importance a mere Indian fight would have lacked.31
“I WAS BORN in the Moon of the Popping Trees on the Little Powder River in the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed,” Black Elk remembered. Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux, the Moon of the Popping Trees was December, and the four Crows were killed in 1863. “I was three years old when my father’s right leg was broken in the Battle of the Hundred Slain”—the ambush of Fetterman’s column. “I had never seen a Wasichu”—a white man—“then, and did not know what one looked like, but everyone was saying that the Wasichus were coming and that they were going to take our country and rub us all out and that we should all have to die fighting.” Black Elk was too young to fight, but he felt the presence of the invaders. “All this time I was not allowed to play very far away from our tepee, and my mother would say, ‘If you are not good the Wasichus will get you.’ ” He also felt the hardship the white pressure caused. “We were going away from where the soldiers were, and I do not know where we went, but it was west. It was a hungry winter, for the deep snow made it hard to find the elk, and also many of the people went snowblind. We wandered a long time, and some of the bands got lost from each other.”32
Black Elk’s father was a medicine man, as were several of his uncles. The boy suspected he shared their gift and on occasion heard voices from beyond the mortal realm. But not till the summer when he was nine and fell ill with fever did he experience a full-blown vision. He felt himself being carried up and out of his body, high among the clouds. The clouds became snowy hills. “I looked and saw a bay horse standing there, and he began to speak.” The bay horse told him to look to the west. “I looked, and there were twelve black horses yonder all abreast with necklaces of bison hoofs, and they were beautiful, but I was frightened because their manes were lightning and there was thunder in their nostrils.” The bay horse guided him to a council of the Grandfathers of the North, East, South, and West. “Younger brother,” said the Grandfather of the South, “with the powers of the four quarters you shall walk, a relative. Behold, the living center of a nation I shall give you, and with it many you shall save.” The Grandfather of the South extended his arm.
He was holding in his hand a bright red stick that was alive, and as I looked it sprouted at the top and sent forth branches, and on the branches many leaves came out and murmured, and in the leaves the birds began to sing. And then for just a little while I thought I saw beneath it in the shade the circled villages of people and every living thing with roots or legs or wings, and all were happy. “It shall stand in the center of the nation’s circle,” said the Grandfather, “a cane to walk with and a people’s heart, and by your powers you shall make it blossom.”
The horses began to speak to Black Elk, explaining what the Grandfathers had done. “They have given you the sacred stick and your nation’s hoop.… In the center of the hoop you shall set the stick and make it grow into a shielding tree, and bloom.”
The horses carried Black Elk among the clouds again. They came to a village filled with the sounds of mourning. “When I looked around I saw that in nearly every tepee the women and the children and the men lay dying.” Black Elk wanted to weep. But a voice told him to plant the stick and the hoop.
I took the bright red stick and at the center of the nation’s hoop I thrust it in the earth. As it touched the earth it leaped mightily in my hand and was a waga chun, the rustling tree, very tall and full of leafy branches and of all birds singing. And beneath it all the animals were mingling with the people like relatives and making happy cries. The women raised their tremolo of joy, and the men shouted all together: “Here we shall raise our children and be as little chickens under the mother sheo’s wing.”… Then, when the many little voices ceased, the great Voice said: “Behold the circle of the nation’s hoop, for it is holy, being endless, and thus all powers shall be one power in the people without end.”33
Black Elk’s vision of the nation’s hoop became the theme of his life. Others respected his vision, though they reserved judgment of its significance till he grew older and proved its power. In the meantime they were more impressed with Crazy Horse, Black Elk’s second cousin. Crazy Horse had a vision, too, one that convinced him that the real world existed behind the shadow world of everyday life. When Crazy Horse stepped into his real world, nothing in the shadow world could touch him. “It was this vision that gave him his great power,” Black Elk said, “for when he went into a fight, he had only to think of that world to be in it again, so that he could go through anything and not be hurt.” And in fact he never was hurt in battle.
Black Elk remembered Crazy Horse’s strange charisma. “He was a small man among the Lakotas and he was slender and had a thin face and his eyes looked through things and he always seemed to be thinking hard about something.” He would walk among the people of his village like a man in a trance. “In his own tepee he would joke, and when he was on the warpath with a small party he would joke to make his warriors feel good. But around the village he hardly ever noticed anybody, except little children. All the Lakotas like to dance and sing, but he never joined a dance, and they say nobody ever heard him sing.” Yet he obviously cared for his people. “He never wanted to have many things for himself, and did not have many ponies like a chief. They say that when game was scarce and the people were hungry, he would not eat at all.” His people loved and respected him. “They would do anything he wanted or go anywhere he said.”34
DURING THE SPRING of 1876 Crazy Horse led his people to the Yellowstone country. They hunted and recovered their strength from the winter, and Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull gathered warriors for the fight against the Wasichus. Some of those who joined them were Cheyennes and Arapahos; others were Sioux who wintered on the reservation but now came north for what might be a last summer living the old, free life. Many were drawn by the reputation of Sitting Bull, who promised a Sun Dance for the month when the grass returned to the hillsides.
Perhaps Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull thought they could defeat the white soldiers. Unlike Red Cloud, who had been to the East and seen that the whites were a thousand times as many as the Sioux, neither Crazy Horse nor Sitting Bull had any clear idea what they were up against. Crazy Horse had his vision of the Wasichus as shadow soldiers, while Sitting Bull, after days of fasting, dancing, and self-mutilation (with the loss of considerable blood), reported a vision of his own, in which an army of white soldiers rode toward an Indian camp, but upside down, their horses’ hooves clawing the sky and the soldiers’ heads scraping the earth. This meant they would die, he said.35
The white soldiers had their own notions. During the first two weeks of June they hunted along the Yellowstone for Crazy Horse and the Indians. One column of troops, under General George Crook, made contact with a band of Sioux and Cheyennes on Rosebud Creek and fought a sharp battle there. But then they lost the trail. The officers argued among themselves as to how many warriors Crazy Horse had. Custer thought fifteen hundred; Crook said many fewer than that. In fact Crazy Horse had about three thousand. Custer meanwhile commanded about six hundred troops, while Crook had perhaps a thousand, as well as two or three hundred Crow and other Indian allies. But neither Custer nor Crook thought the numbers mattered much. The white soldiers were more powerfully armed than the enemy Indians, more stoutly mounted, and presumably more thoroughly disciplined. Custer in particular believed that if he could somehow corner Crazy Horse, he would certainly prevail.
In the last week of June, Custer’s Crow scouts spotted Crazy Horse’s camp on the west bank of the river the whites called the Little Big Horn and the Indians the Greasy Grass. The scouts warned Custer that the Sioux were far more numerous than he had guessed; Bloody Knife, the leader of the scouts, said Crazy Horse had more warriors than Custer’s men had bullets. Custer dismissed the warning as counsel expected of a people terrorized for generations by the Sioux. His only concern was that the Sioux might escape, and to prevent this he pushed forward with all speed. He ordered Major Marcus Reno to attack the Sioux camp from the south while he looped north to cut off the Indians’ escape. The trapped Indians would be forced to fight.36
BLACK ELK WAS thirteen now, and with several other boys he was tending horses along the Greasy Grass on the morning of June 25, 1876. His father had told him to be careful. “If anything happens,” he said, “you must bring the horses back as fast as you can.… Keep your eyes on the camp.” But nothing happened as the sun rose in the summer sky, and the boys grew hot and restless. They persuaded one of their number, a cousin of Black Elk, to mind the horses while they cooled off in the river. “I did not feel well,” Black Elk remembered afterward. “I felt queer. It seemed that something terrible was going to happen. But I went in with the boys anyway.” The river, running full with the snowmelt from the Bighorn Mountains, was bracingly cold, and Black Elk forgot his odd feeling. He and the others stayed in the water longer than they had planned; his cousin, impatient in their absence, brought the ponies down to the river’s edge.
“Just then we heard the crier shouting in the Hunkpapa camp, which was not very far from us, ‘The chargers are coming! They are charging! The chargers are coming!’ ” Black Elk remembered. The alarm spread to the other bands.
The crier of the Oglalas shouted the same words, and we could hear the cry going from camp to camp northward clear to the Santees and Yanktonais. Everybody was running now to catch the horses. We were lucky to have ours right there just at that time. My older brother had a sorrel, and he rode away fast toward the Hunkpapas. I had a buckskin. My father came running and said: “Your brother has gone to the Hunkpapas without his gun. Catch him and give it to him. Then come right back to me.” He had my six-shooter too, the one my aunt gave me. I took the guns, jumped on my pony and caught my brother. I could see a big dust rising just beyond the Hunkpapa camp and all the Hunkpapas were running around and yelling, and many were running wet from the river. Then out of the dust came the soldiers on their big horses. They looked big and strong and tall and they were all shooting.37
As the women and children of the Hunkpapa camp scrambled to escape the bullets of the white soldiers, Gall, also called Pizi, an orphan whom Sitting Bull had adopted as a younger brother, rallied the Hunkpapa warriors for a counterattack. Eight years earlier Gall had spoken for the Hunkpapas to the Sherman peace commission. “We were born naked and have been taught to hunt and live on the game,” he said. “You tell us that we must learn to farm, live in one house, and take on your ways. Suppose the people living beyond the great sea should come and tell you that you must stop farming and kill your cattle, and take your houses and land. What would you do? Would you not fight them?” Gall’s words, and his actions since then, had won him the following of most of the Hunkpapas, who respected him behind only Sitting Bull.38
Reno’s attack killed several members of Gall’s immediate family. “It made my heart bad,” he explained later. “After that I killed all my enemies with the hatchet.” Gall’s example bolstered his comrades. “In the Hunkpapa camp a cry went up,” Black Elk remembered. “ ‘Take courage! Don’t be a woman! The helpless are out of breath!’ ” For several moments confusion covered the battlefield. “It was all dust and cries and thunder,” Black Elk said. “The women and children were running.… The warriors were coming on their ponies.”
Gall’s counterattack drove Reno’s column into the trees along the river, where the federal soldiers dismounted to fight afoot. “The valley went darker with dust and smoke,” Black Elk recalled.
And there were only shadows and a big noise of many cries and hoofs and guns. On the left of where I was I could hear the shod hoofs of the soldiers’ horses going back into the brush, and there was shooting everywhere. Then the hoofs came out of the brush, and I came out and was in among men and horses weaving in and out and going upstream, and everybody was yelling, “Hurry! Hurry!” The soldiers were running upstream and we were all mixed there in the twilight and the great noise. I did not see much, but once I saw a Lakota charge at a soldier who stayed behind and fought and was a very brave man. The Lakota took the soldier’s horse by the bridle, but the soldier killed him with a six-shooter. I was small and could not crowd in to where the soldiers were, so I did not kill anybody. There were so many ahead of me, and it was all dark and mixed up.
During a lull in the fighting, Black Elk saw his people stripping dead and wounded white soldiers of their arms and uniforms. “There was a soldier on the ground and he was still kicking. A Lakota rode up and said to me, ‘Boy, get off and scalp him.’ I got off and started to do it. He had short hair and my knife was not very sharp. He ground his teeth. Then I shot him in the forehead and got his scalp.”
Black Elk was old enough to mutilate an enemy but young enough to want his mother to be the first to know about it. He rode through the camp carrying the bloody prize till he found her on a hill overlooking the battlefield, where the women were singing encouragement to their husbands and sons. “My mother gave a big tremolo”—the song of celebration—“just for me when she saw my first scalp,” he said.39
By now the center of the battle had shifted. Custer’s column had appeared below the Indian camp, where the colonel expected to cut off the Indians he thought would be fleeing Reno’s attack. But he discovered to his shock that Gall had broken Reno’s attack and that Crazy Horse commanded twice the army he had guessed. The Sioux chief hurled his warriors against the federal cavalry, with himself in the lead. “Hokahey!”—Take courage!—he cried. “It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die!” Others echoed the cry. “They were yelling ‘Hokahey’ like a big wind roaring, and making the tremolo, and you could hear eagle bone whistles screaming,” Black Elk remembered.40
Custer found himself beset on all sides. He led his men to the highest point in the area, later called Custer Hill, where they dismounted and dug in. He might have thought his chances good, for though badly outnumbered he had better arms and the better position. And while Indians were known for their ambush and skirmishing abilities, they had shown little stomach for frontal assault. Custer knew that federal reinforcements were coming; if he and his men could hold out for several hours or overnight, they might escape.
Crazy Horse likewise knew there were other federals in the area. He also knew he would never have another such chance to strike a blow against the Wasichus. He probably couldn’t have restrained his warriors anyway; they were as eager as he to avenge past wrongs and forestall future injuries.
The warriors charged before Custer’s men were able to form a compact body. The Indian ponies slashed through the federal lines, such as they were. The bluecoats fell to bullets, arrows, lances, clubs, and hatchets. “The country was alive with Indians going in all directions, like swallows, yet the great body all the time moving down on Custer,” an Oglala warrior remembered. An Arapaho recalled Crazy Horse that day as “the bravest man I ever saw. He rode closest to the soldiers, yelling to his warriors. All the soldiers were shooting at him, but he was never hit.”41
The Indians knew Custer as “Long Hair,” for his flowing reddish-blond locks. But he had cut them recently, and so he was hard to pick out from the other white soldiers. “We did not know till the fight was over that he was the white chief,” one Indian warrior explained. All the bluecoats fought stubbornly. “They kept in order and fought like brave warriors as long as they had a man left,” Crow King, one of the Sioux leaders, said.42
Custer’s command survived for less than half an hour. He and 225 of his men died that afternoon above the Little Big Horn. Reno’s column, pinned down in the woods by the river, survived an overnight siege till Crazy Horse, learning of the approach of federal relief, abandoned the siege and moved the camp.
“We could not see much of the battle for the big dust,” Black Elk recalled of Custer’s last moments. “But we knew there would be no soldiers left.” The boy left his mother and the other women to scavenge the field with his peers.
We rode across the Greasy Grass to the mouth of a gulch that led up through the bluff to where the fighting was. Before we got there, the Wasichus were all down, and most of them were dead, but some of them were still alive and kicking. Many other little boys had come up by this time, and we rode around shooting arrows into the Wasichus. There was one who was squirming around with arrows sticking in him, and I started to take his coat, but a man pushed me away and took the coat for himself. Then I saw something bright hanging on this soldier’s belt, and I pulled it out. It was round and bright and yellow and very beautiful, and I put it on me for a necklace. At first it ticked inside, and then it did not any more. I wore it around my neck a long time before I found out what it was and how to make it tick again.… There was a soldier who was raising his arms and groaning. I shot an arrow into his forehead, and his arms and legs quivered.
Many Indians had been killed or badly wounded; the latter included one of Black Elk’s cousins. “His father and my father were so angry over this that they went and butchered a Wasichu and cut him open. The Wasichu was fat, and his meat looked good to eat, but we did not eat any.”
The celebration of the battle was postponed till the camp had moved safely beyond the reach of the new federal column. But the Sioux composed kill-songs as they traveled, and when they reached a resting place they feasted far into the night. Black Elk remembered some of the songs:
Long Hair has never returned,
So his woman is crying, crying,
Looking over here, she cries.…
Long Hair, where he lies nobody knows.
Crying, they seek him.
He lies over here.43
CRAZY HORSE COULD defeat Custer, but he couldn’t hold back the westering tide of capitalism. Conceivably the Sioux might have made peace with the presence of gold miners, but their way of living couldn’t survive the activities of commercial buffalo hunters. During the centuries they had hunted afoot, the Sioux and other predatory Plains tribes had lived in rough equilibrium with their principal prey. The equilibrium could indeed be rough, not least since the buffalo themselves depended on resources—grasses, primarily—that in turn depended on resources—the various forms of precipitation—that fluctuated dramatically over the short and longer term. Drought was a recurrent feature of the climate of the Plains, and in periods of drought the grass withered and the buffalo dwindled. Tree-ring patterns and other forms of evidence indicate that drought afflicted the central Plains from 1761 to 1773, from 1798 to 1803, and from 1822 to 1832. Farther north the timing and duration of the droughts were different, with the worst patch being a fifteen-year shortfall in moisture from 1836 to 1851. During the driest spells, as much as 90 percent of the prairie grass died.44
Deaths among the buffalo were certainly not as great, as the buffalo possessed a mobility the grasses didn’t. But the high reproductive rate of the buffalo—20 percent per year in optimal circumstances—suggests an evolutionary need to rebound from drastic mortality in bad times. Of course the increased buffalo mortality wasn’t simply due to starvation. Wolves had evolved along with the buffalo, and though a strong adult buffalo could withstand a wolf attack, sick or malnourished buffaloes often couldn’t. Nor could weakened adults defend their calves. The result was that during times of climatic stress the buffalo population could plunge. Neither were buffalo numbers guaranteed by adequate rainfall. Due to the potential for rapid population growth, during wet spells the herds could multiply exponentially and outstrip the ability of the range to support them. The resulting population crashes could be even more dramatic than those induced by drought.45
As long as the Plains tribes had remained pedestrian, they depended on the buffalo only in part. They hunted other game, gathered roots and berries, and planted beans and squashes. Though inadvertently, perhaps, they thereby insulated themselves from the worst effects of the buffalo crashes. But in acquiring horses they allowed themselves to become almost completely dependent on the buffalo, which in good times provided an easier living than their previous resource base but which in bad times forced them to share the buffalo’s hardship. Meanwhile their horses (and the large herds of feral horses) competed with the buffalo for forage, intensifying the pressure on the range.
Like the buffalo, the Indians and their horses migrated during droughts away from the most severely stricken areas. The resulting contact with neighboring tribes and peoples often led to war. The Sioux raided the Pawnees, Hidatsas, and Arikaras to the east and the Crows and Blackfoots to the west. The Comanches, the dominant people of the southern Plains, thrust aside the Apaches and constantly threatened the Texas outposts of Mexico.
Had the Plains Indians exploited the buffalo for their own use alone, the pressure on the herds might have been sustainable. But a few decades after the equestrian revolution transformed life in the North American West, the capitalist revolution began transforming life in the North American East, and its influence could be felt even upon the Plains. Steamboats plied the Missouri by the 1820s, carrying traders of the American Fur Company and its rivals. Till then the fur trade had focused on beaver pelts, but changing tastes and the depletion of the resource caused the traders to seek a replacement. Although buffalo robes (for blankets and carriage throws) served a different fashion purpose than the beaver pelts (which had been made into hats), from the standpoint of company profits they were interchangeable. During the latter half of the 1820s, traders shipped nearly 800,000 buffalo robes through New Orleans. White hunters secured some of the robes, but the principal suppliers were the Plains tribes, who traded the robes (and sometimes the tongues of the buffalo) for guns, ammunition, blankets, steel knives, and liquor.46
Before long the hunting made noticeable inroads upon the herds. A traveler along the Missouri reported in 1849 that the buffalo—“the robes of which constitute by far the most important article of traffic” in the region—“are now not near as numerous as a few years since, and the number is every year diminishing.”47
As it happened, the intensification of commercial hunting coincided with deepening drought in certain areas. It also overlapped the introduction of competing species and the pathogens they bore. Introduced disease wasn’t a problem for the human species alone in North America; the animals the humans brought with them carried bacteria and viruses that sickened the native animal species. Anthrax was a particular scourge, and as the cattle herds of the settlers pushed up against the buffalo herds of the Indians, the anthrax bacterium jumped species. Because the buffalo had no inherited immunity to the disease, its progression could be devastating. “It destroys the bison in a kind of slow explosion,” one authority later wrote. For reasons that remain unclear but doubtless involved climate, the effect was most acute on the far northern Plains, in Canada. But the impact rippled south into the United States.48
The disease and drought magnified the effect of the commercial hunting and accelerated the decline of the herds, threatening not merely the Indians’ trade with the fur companies but the Indians’ very existence. As early as 1855 the federal Indian agent at Fort Laramie declared, “The buffalo is becoming scarce and it is more difficult from year to year for the Indians to kill a sufficient number to supply them with food and clothing.”49
The intrusion of the railroads onto the Plains sealed the doom of the buffalo culture. The construction gangs of the railroads required large quantities of meat, which buffalo hunters provided. Upon completion, the railroads dramatically reduced the transportation costs of buffalo products, including, for the first time, meat for Eastern markets. After tanners in Europe discovered the secret of curing buffalo hides, buffalo leather became a staple for the belts that spun the pulleys and flywheels of European and American factories. Chemical engineers learned to reduce buffalo bones to fertilizer and pigments. The railroads brought recreational hunters to the Plains, individuals who paid for the opportunity to kill the biggest game in North America.50
American arms makers designed special weapons for use against the buffalo. The most famous of the buffalo rifles was the Sharps “Big Fifty,” which could drop the biggest bulls at long range. The use of the weapons required skill and experience; seasoned hunters knew, among other things, not to waste time on a head shot. “Against the frontal bone of the bison’s skull, the lead falls harmless,” declared an astonished hunter, who proceeded to explain:
I once approached a buffalo which stood wounded in a ravine. I took position upon the hillside, knowing that he could not readily charge up it, at a distance of only fifteen yards. I fired three shots from a Henry rifle full against the forehead, causing no other result than some angry head-shaking. I then took a Spencer carbine and fired twice with it. At each shot the bull sank partly to his knees, but immediately recovered again. I afterward examined the skull, and could detect no fracture.51
Yet once the hunters mastered their art, the killing proceeded with industrial efficiency. In the 1870s John and Wright Mooar roamed the Plains with a fleet of sixteen prairie schooners. On the outbound voyage the wagons carried ingots of lead and barrels of powder, besides the tools necessary to service the Mooars’ arsenal of Sharps rifles. Inbound they replaced the lead and powder with buffalo hides, four to five thousand per season. Joe McCombs’s outfit was even larger and more destructive; in 1877 his crew came home with nearly ten thousand hides.52
As with other resources of the West, the opportunity to profit from the buffalo engendered a gold-rush mentality. Because no one held legal title to the herds, no one had material incentive to preserve them. Rather, the incentives all pointed the other way: toward a frenzy of exploitation, lest others capture the prize first. The killing climaxed in the first years of the 1880s, when hundreds of thousands of buffalo were killed annually.53
Within a few years it was all over. The young Theodore Roosevelt traveled to western Dakota Territory in 1883 expressly to hunt buffalo, but where a decade earlier the herds had been immense, that September Roosevelt had to search for a week to find a single specimen—whose rarity didn’t prevent his adding it to the slaughter’s total.54
BY THEN the war for the Plains was over, too. Word of Custer’s destruction on the Little Big Horn reached the East almost upon the hundredth anniversary of American independence. Some who heard the news sympathized with the Sioux in their desperate struggle to remain free, but more responded to the heroic myth that instantly sprang up about “Custer’s Last Stand”: how the valiant colonel and his men held out against overwhelming odds till the sheer weight of the savage attack brought them down. Not that it mattered much in the end, but the very magnitude of Crazy Horse’s victory probably cost him support among that minority of Americans disposed to treat the Indians leniently.
At the War Department, William Sherman was bombarded with demands to capture or kill Crazy Horse and his warriors. The governor of Montana Territory called on Congress to authorize a volunteer corps of Indian fighters. Sherman didn’t relish dealing with volunteers, who would be beyond the discipline of the regular army, and anyway he thought the volunteer bill a boondoggle chiefly designed to provide work—at a rate far higher than Sherman could pay his own soldiers—for the flotsam of the frontier. He managed to deflect the volunteer corps but only by promising swift action by his own men.55
Sherman sent reinforcements to George Crook, who chased the Sioux around the upper Missouri during the summer of 1876. Crook’s men burned Sioux villages and food stores, relying on hunger to succeed where direct force had failed. The Sioux occasionally counterattacked, but their lack of ammunition prevented them from inflicting serious damage on their pursuers. To the federals’ surprise and perhaps their own, the Sioux held out through the winter of 1876–77, but by the following spring they could stand no more. Crook sent Red Cloud to offer Crazy Horse a reservation on the Powder River if he would stop running and fighting. Crazy Horse saw no alternative. His people were starving, those horses they hadn’t eaten were barely able to stand, and his warriors lacked powder and bullets. He accepted the offer and led his people into what they all considered captivity.
But Crazy Horse wasn’t meant for reservation life. The federals distrusted him, as did some of the reservation Sioux, who resented the way his long holdout had intensified the repression they lived under. When the federal government procrastinated on its promise of a Powder River reservation and some of the Sioux grew restive, Crazy Horse’s Indian enemies spread stories that he intended to resume the fight. Crook ordered him arrested; as he was being transported to jail, he tried to break away. His guards mortally wounded him.56