Warfare and Destruction

At Fort Laramie, in 1851, Thomas Fitzpatrick assembled the principal leaders of the Sioux, Gros Ventres, Assiniboins, Crows, Blackfeet, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes for the purpose of assigning reservations and obtaining permission to construct roads and military posts on the Plains. Assurances that no more land would be taken proved meaningless, particularly after the discovery of gold on the east slope of the central Rockies brought nearly 100,000 miners to Colorado in 1859.

The Cheyennes and Arapahoes were in an especially difficult position. By 1859 Kansas Territory was moving rapidly toward statehood, and squatters were invading Indian lands with impunity. Caught between the agrarian and mineral frontiers, certain Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders were encouraged to sign an even more restrictive treaty in 1861 - one that simply was unacceptable to the rank and file. Predictably, the situation led to acts of violence on both sides. The culmination was the infamous Chivington Massacre of 1864, one of the great tragedies of modern Indian history. In November of that year, Colonel John M. Chivington (an ordained Methodist Episcopal minister) with nearly 1,000 Colorado Volunteers attacked a peaceful Cheyenne village in southeastern Colorado. Before the smoke had cleared several hundred Cheyenne lay dead on frozen ground, mostly women, children, and the elderly. Taken in conjunction with the bloody Sioux uprising in Minnesota two years earlier - an incident resulting from the inequitable Sisseton-Wahpeton Treaty of 1851, white land speculation, and the division of the Indians into "farmer" and "blanket" factions, the decade of the 1860's witnessed the full determination of the Plains Indians to prevent any further white encroachments.

The discovery of gold in Montana and Idaho during the Civil War only strengthened this determination. So long as the prospectors traveled over the Oregon Trail via Fort Hall, skirting the edge of Sioux country, the situation remained reasonably stable. But when a more direct road across Sioux country was opened in 1865 the occasional skirmish gave way to calculated warfare. Following significant Indian victories near Fort Phil Kearny in 1866 and 1867, the government agreed to abandon the Bozeman Trail, and to return the Powder River hunting grounds to the Sioux.

Sioux leader: Sitting Bull (Tatanka lyotake), warrior and medicine man of the Hunkpapa Sioux.

A near peace returned to the northern Plains for the next eighty years. But the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the dwindling supply of buffalo, the government's failure to provide adequate supplies as promised by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, led to the bloody confrontation on the Little Big Horn in 1876, between Colonel George Armstrong Custer's Seventh U.S. Cavalry and a well-disciplined army led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Coming as it did on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence , the complete annihilation of Custer's force was difficult for white Americans to accept or understand. On the other hand, the victory profited the Sioux very little. Stalked down without mercy by other federal troops, some Sioux warriors fled to Canada, while the majority gradually made their way back to their bleak Dakota Territory reservations.

The tragic finale in this region came at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. Faced with poverty and impending cultural destruction, the Sioux turned to the messianic Nevada Paiute, Wovoka. Also known as "Big Rumbling Belly," Wovoka taught that the performance of the Ghost Dance would prompt the return of the buffalo, dead Indians would come back to life, and the white man would be swallowed up by the earth. Even more important, the true believer who wore a "Ghost Shirt" would be invulnerable to the white man's guns and bullets. It was, in short, a shockingly fatalistic theology.

On December 28, 1890, an attempt to disarm a group of Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge reservation led to a bloody confrontation. Responding to the belligerent posture of a band of Hunkpapas, federal troops opened fire with their devastating guns, and in a few minutes over 150 Indians lay dead or dying. Twenty five men of the Seventh Cavalry were also killed. A macabre climax to decades of white exploitation, the remembrance of this tragedy is one of the most important rallying point in contemporary Sioux nationalism.

Arapaho Chief: Little Raven (Oh-has-tee) signed the peace treaty with the white man just north of Wichita in 1865.

Following the Chivington Massacre of 1864, conditions on the south-central Plains were no better. In October, 1865, on the banks of the Little Arkansas River just a few miles above the site where today Blackbear Bosin's Keeper of the Plains gazes at the Wichita skyline, federal negotiators met with the Southern Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the Kiowas and Comanches, and a small band of Plains Apaches. With the usual promises of annuities and other commodities of the white man's culture, these tribes agreed to reservations south of the Big Arkansas River. Continued difficulties, however, neutralized this agreement. The Indians were still allowed to hunt in the Arkansas and Smoky Hill valleys; construction of the Kansas Pacific Railroad to Denver brought more squatters into the region, and the government's insistence that the Indians become farmers and ranchers almost overnight was simply unrealistic. The failure of the Senate to ratify the Little Arkansas Treaty was indicative of more trouble to come.

Sporadic raids in western Kansas in the spring of 1867 prompted the government to send General Winfield Hancock and a large military force to make a demonstration of power among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes. It was a complete farce. The Indians understood only too well the military might of the United States, and Hancock's senseless destruction of an entire Cheyenne village near Fort Larned was adequate proof that the government was determined to have its way. Later that same year, at Medicine Lodge Creek in southern Kansas, the frustrated Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche leadership were obliged to accept even more limited reservations in present western Oklahoma.

The Medicine Lodge Treaty was a response to the government's "Peace Plan" - a plan conceived by President U.S. Grant and his Christian consultants - and the findings of a blue-ribbon Congressional investigation committee. In Indian country, however, the situation was not all that simple. Not all members of these tribes accepted the Medicine Lodge accord. In fact, some of the more disciplined war bands brazenly announced they would fight for control of their traditional domain, no matter what the consequences.

Trouble broke out in the Smoky Hill, Solomon, and Saline valleys between white ranchers and sodbusters, and Black Kettle's Cheyennes. Bands of Kiowas and Comanches soon joined in the raids. The predictable response was a military campaign headed by General Phil Sheridan in November 1868. Just east of the Texas Panhandle on the banks of the Washita, Colonel George Custer, then Sheridan's subordinate, surprised Black Kettle's village and within a few hours the aged Cheyenne leader, his wife, and three dozen of his followers were dead. One thousand buffalo were seized and destroyed, 500 pounds of lead were confiscated, and more than 700 Cheyenne ponies were slaughtered. This encounter, which in the public view was so important that Kansas Governor Samuel Crawford resigned his office to take the field against the "savages," was considered decisive. For awhile it was, but six years later, when the Red River War started, the situation proved otherwise.

Quanah Parker: Probably the most distinguished Comanche Chief during the second half of the nineteenth century.

The real problem was the buffalo. Many of the Plains Indians believed that with the disappearance of these life-sustaining animals their people would be eliminated as well. The discovery of a new tanning process in 1869 that made it possible to use buffalo skins in the manufacture of saddles, shoes, and hats proved disastrous, as did the methodical killing by professional hunters employed by railroad construction firms. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, for example, in an eight-month period during the winter of 1867-1868, killed over 4,000 of the shaggy animals for the Kansas Pacific. The Kiowas and Comanches perceived the long-range implications, and in the early 1870's, under the leadership of Satanta and Quanah Parker, fought back with a vengeance in the Texas Panhandle area.

It was a losing effort. Satanta, the distinguished Kiowa chief, was eventually incarcerated in jail in Jacksboro, Texas, where in an act of suicide, he attacked his guards and was shot to death. Nearly three thousand troops under the command of Colonel MacKenzie finally cornered the Comanches in desolate Palo Duro Canyon, and forced the followers of Quanah Parker to return to their Wichita mountain reservation north of the Red River. By the end of 1875 Native American resistance on the south-central Plains had been broken, and like the northern Plains following Wounded Knee, the area was in control of the invader. What was left was to decide the future of the vanquished.