Sitting Bull's War, page 11
Near the Arrow Creek or Baker’s battleground of 1872 the boatmen encountered a large camp of Mountain Crows headed for the buffalo country. The passengers told of seeing massive herds crossing the Yellowstone between the Tongue and Big Horn, migrating north into the rugged prairie of the Big Open. Inevitably, Sitting Bull’s presence entered the conversation, and the Crows spoke disparagingly of him and his people, emphatically asserting that the Big Horn country belonged to them and that they would fight the Sioux to keep it. One of the boatmen observed that the Crows were well armed with Sharp’s carbines, lately a military weapon. No Sioux were seen at any time on the journey, although the boat’s captain recalled having passed a hastily abandoned Indian camp among the trees at the mouth of the Tongue, tipi fires still smoldering. No Lakota or Cheyenne informant speaks of this steamboat incursion, perhaps simply because the interlopers came and went by water, and rather hurriedly.22
What came in the boat’s wake, however, was an invasion of yet another sort. Fellowes Pease of Bozeman was the government agent to the Crows from 1870 into 1873 and an ardent advocate for the opening of commercial prospects in the Lower Yellowstone Valley. In early June 1875 Pease led a party of like-minded promoters downriver aboard three mackinaws, hoping to connect with the steamboat then known to be plying the river toward them. They missed the steamer by days and misfortune befell two of their mackinaws when they snagged and sank, but they salvaged most of their property and continued to the mouth of the Big Horn. On the Yellowstone’s north bank just below the Big Horn confluence in a lengthy plain known ever after as the Pease Bottom, the party erected a log stockade some two-hundred-feet square with two corner bastions. They christened the outpost Fort Pease. Pease’s avowed intents were lofty, imagining at his little post a transfer trade with steamboats at this near head of navigation on the river. It would be an equivalent of Fort Benton on the Missouri, and also the opening of an amicable trade with the Crows and Sioux.23
But Fort Pease was doomed from the start, as if foreshadowed by the sinking of two of its boats so early on their outbound journey. The little fort and its imposing flagpole proved an enormous exasperation to Sitting Bull and his people, who resented this intrusion into the heart of the buffalo country just as they had every other incursion. As Pease erected his fort Sitting Bull’s people were fighting Crows nine miles downstream, likely the same Crows encountered by the steamboat a short while earlier and drawn here by their former agent. Sitting Bull may actually have visited the fort, too, if only to vent his wrath and demand that it be torn down. The chief and Pease had actually met face to face some years earlier at Fort Union during the infamous red shirt episode at Fort Buford. But Fort Pease endured a while longer, suffering what one newsman characterized as a perpetual state of war with the Sioux. Six of its forty original inhabitants were killed that season and another nine wounded. Pease, the dreamer, captured no Indian or transfer trade and brokered only occasional wolf skins. For the time being, however, he refused to abandon this dreamy if irritating thorn in the buffalo country.24
* * *
That spring 1875 word spread through the Northern Indian camps of a proposed Sun Dance on Rosebud Creek. In mid-June a phenomenal assembly of traditionals gathered at the mouth of Lame Deer Creek, a few miles above the revered Rosebud landmark Deer Medicine Rocks. They included Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas, Spotted Eagle’s Sans Arcs, Crazy Horse’s and Black Twin’s Oglalas, and Lame Deer’s and Spotted Elk’s Miniconjous. Notably present too were Little Wolf and his Northern Cheyenne followers, and the Cheyenne holy man, Ice, or White Bull, who later provided a detailed accounting of the gathering. The ceaseless intrusion of White people into the buffalo country was the common talk of the circles, evidenced yet again by the emergence of a trader’s fort at the mouth of the Big Horn. And those episodes atop the repeated movements of soldiers, surveyors, and miners on the Yellowstone in seasons past, and surveyors of another sort in the far north leaving behind the stone heaps, and last year’s soldier invasion of the Black Hills, with a tide of prospectors poking about those waters now. It was a time for unity, a survival instinct not yet demonstrated by the traditionals in their previous efforts at repelling the intruders and protecting a homeland.25
With the usual deliberation, a circular Sun Dance arbor was erected, with a great cottonwood pole at its center strewn with various religious offerings. On the appointed day and time people from the camps gathered to witness a special dance by Sitting Bull, one consciously resonating with the theme of unity. The great Hunkpapa’s entry was stirring. He dressed plainly that day in a breechcloth and moccasins but was painted strikingly, his body smeared over with yellow clay, his face painted black, with two black bands painted around each of his wrists and ankles, a black disc representing the sun ornamenting his chest, and a black crescent representing the moon covering his right shoulder. He approached the scene astride a black horse, a gift from Ice.26
After entering the arena Sitting Bull dismounted and danced around the center pole, pressing forward and back several times. After dancing a full circle he turned to the people and called out, “I wish my friends to fill one pipe and I wish my people to fill one pipe,” respectively inviting Cheyennes and Sioux to each fill pipes in an act of intertribal unity. From Black Crane, a Cheyenne, he took a pipe in his right hand, and from a Hunkpapa he took a Sioux pipe in the left, and invited the two to join him at the center pole. With the people around all singing, Sitting Bull held both pipes in front of him, the bowls directed toward the pole, and he again danced forward and back, as though, White Bull retold, he were approaching an enemy.27
Three times Sitting Bull advanced on the pole, one time declaring, “I have nearly got them.” After a fourth approach, he spread his arms and swept them through the air and closed them over his chest. He then lifted his hands to the sky and offered the pipes to the Great Spirit, proclaiming, “We have them. The Great Spirit has given our enemy into our power.”28
When Sitting Bull finished the dance, he sang out the full meaning of his vision, exclaiming: “The Great Spirit has given our enemies to us. We are to destroy them. We do not know who they are. They may be soldiers.” The thronging Lakotas and Cheyennes were mesmerized. Hundreds of onlookers joined Sitting Bull in his song of triumph and thanksgiving, a massed crescendo rising above the camp and filling the people with a new hope that they could endure in the buffalo country.29
* * *
In the Black Hills, mining parties continued to evade the army’s porous cordon and were scouring nearly every rivulet in the central Hills, and they had Sioux agencies and agents on edge. If an answer existed to this growing crisis, it apparently only existed in Washington. Already a delegation was forming at the White River agencies to visit the Great Father and discuss these concerns. Whites conveniently believed such a visit might soften the Indians on the question of relinquishing the gold country, a point alluded to by John Collins barely a month earlier. In preliminary talks with Saville at Red Cloud Agency, Red Cloud himself insisted that Crazy Horse be included in the delegation. Acknowledging Crazy Horse’s outsized influence in Oglala affairs, the agent sent messengers to the Northern Oglala camp, as if believing that the chief and an ally, Black Twin, might somehow be induced to participate. Crazy Horse’s reply was curt, urging only that the delegation be heavily weighted with traditionals. Ultimately thirteen Oglalas and six Brulés traveled to Washington in May 1875, where they joined representatives from Cheyenne River and Grand River. All were agency people but not necessarily accommodationists, and none were amenable to opening the Black Hills. The effort was a resounding failure.30
In a twist of fate, as the Sioux delegation passed Cheyenne headed east it encountered government surveyors assembling for a second exploration of the gold country. This one was to assess the merits of the Black Hills mineralization more carefully and perhaps even determine a fair value. The effort seemed of little relevance to the Indian delegates, however. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail told the scientists they only wanted the miners removed.31
The ensuing exploration was commonly known as the Newton-Jenney Expedition, after its principal geologists Henry Newton and Walter P. Jenney, both late of the Columbia School of Mines. Supporting the pair was a sizeable corps of scientists and engineers, plus customary newsmen and yet another photographer. An infantry and cavalry escort assembled at Fort Laramie, this one much smaller than the one accompanying Custer in 1874. Custer’s was foremost a military expedition. Doubtless, the simple fact that Custer had traveled so largely unthreatened also was a factor in this planning. Departing Fort Laramie in late May the Newton-Jenney Expedition threaded its way northward to a point near present-day Newcastle, Wyoming, where it turned into the Hills and eventually reached the same streambeds that Custer’s prospectors had worked the year before.32
Jenney’s assessments of gold were disheartening. French Creek was at best an intermittent stream with little grade and inconsequential water. Mining prospects did improve somewhat as the scientists ventured northward onto Spring, Castle, and Rapid Creeks. Jenney thought those placers would pay but probably not sufficiently to cover the costs of hydraulic mining. While Jenney found gold enough to prompt the settlement of the Black Hills, he believed that after the placers were exhausted stock raising would become the principal livelihood of the inhabitants. But the newsmen threw Jenney’s cautions aside, trumpeting GOLD FOUND IN ABUNDANCE, one account declaring that prospectors were taking “gold at the rate of from $5 to $25 a pan.”33
While Custer had encountered Stabber’s small band of Oglalas in the Hills in 1874, a year later the Newton-Jenney Expedition chanced onto no Indians at all, just occasional abandoned hunting camps. Instead, Spotted Tail found them. Sitting Bull and the Northern Indians had long been contemptuous of Spotted Tail, who so pragmatically embraced Whites and the cultural transformations inherent in the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the wily fifty-two-year-old Brulé had never forsaken the interests of his people. That summer after returning from Washington he persuaded his agent, Edwin Howard, to join him and other Brulé chiefs on their own exploration of the gold country. Their purpose was not to pocket riches but to satisfy their own curiosity about the richness of the country and the extent to which the government was fulfilling its promise of keeping the Hills clear of miners.34
In early August Spotted Tail’s small entourage, including Agent Howard, several interpreters, and twelve Brulé chiefs and headmen, plainly traveling under a fluttering American flag, reached French Creek, which they found alive with miners. They passed the reoccupied stockade erected the previous winter by the first invaders to enter the Hills (and who were summarily evicted). Now, they found endless miners’ shelters scattered along the creek bottom. The scene was disturbing and clearly showed the hollowness of the government’s claim of removing trespassers. Spotted Tail met with some of the miners one evening and scolded them roundly for invading the Hills. He also watched men working the sluices and panning dirt. The gold recovery he viewed was miniscule, but for a few small particles in a pan. The chief was sure that the miners were deceiving him and letting much of the gold wash over with the sand. He and his entourage then posed for two stereographic images taken by the exploring expedition’s photographer.35
Before departing French Creek, one of the Newton-Jenney newsmen sought an interview with the chief. The two had encountered each other before, apparently in Cheyenne, and the exchange was cordial but to the point. “I have come to see the White man dig gold,” Spotted Tail declared. “I want to see so as to know for myself. There is much talk about this country. The Whites want it. I want to see it before I let them have it.” Spotted Tail acknowledged that he previously had known of gold in the Black Hills and was afraid of Whites going there and finding it. The reporter pressed the matter of the Indians selling the Hills, and Spotted Tail’s reply first touched the duplicity evident everywhere. “I would like for the Great Paper Man to give one of his papers to the Great Father. Tell him to come here so that he can see for himself that there are miners here; that his government, in letting them come and stay here, is violating the treaty, and failing to keep the promises made to the Sioux.” 36
The reporter pressed the sale issue again. “Are you willing now to sell the country to the Great Father for a just price?” “Of course, the Sioux are going to sell the Black Hills,” Spotted Tail replied, but “if the Great Father wants it, he must pay a big price.”37
An army officer witnessing the interview added a compelling detail in an account he provided a different newspaper. Asked whether there will be a war with the Northern Indians, Spotted Tail spoke realistically and from the heart. “I don’t want to go to war on either side. I want to be at peace. [But] the Indians are all angry because the miners are in this country.”38
* * *
By now the government had evolved its own preferred if predictable solution. Instead of futilely attempting to exclude Whites from the Black Hills it would aggressively pursue negotiating a new agreement with the Lakotas for the purchase of the gold country. In southern Sioux Country the notion was timeworn, having been broached repeatedly, as with Collins in March, in the meetings with Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and the others in Washington in May, and by the newsman in the face-to-face encounter with Spotted Tail most recently. In the wake of the failed negotiations in Washington, President Grant authorized the appointment of a commission to treat with the Sioux for the relinquishment of the Black Hills as well as other lands and entitlements farther west. By late August seven commissioners led by Senator William Allison of Iowa passed through Fort Laramie, where they were joined by John Collins as the commission’s secretary, all bound for the White River agencies.39
* * *
As the Black Hills tempest erupted in the south, the Northern Indians enjoyed a certain normalcy in the Yellowstone country. When not tormenting the Crows or the little Fort Pease traders hovel, they performed the Sun Dance and went hunting. But such reverie was interrupted when some seventy-five Oglalas and Brulés from the White River agencies found their way to the summer camps then sprawled along the Tongue River. The entourage was led by Young Man Afraid of His Horses, a distinguished warrior in the days of the Bozeman Trail War and an individual much like Red Cloud with great influence in Oglala affairs. Within the delegation were two agency interpreters, one of them Louis Richard (known as Reshaw in Indian Country), plus Frank Grouard, the puzzling Sandwich Islander who had recently surfaced at Red Cloud Agency after living several years in the Northern camps. Bearing gifts of tobacco, Young Man Afraid had come to encourage the Northern people’s participation in a council convening soon at Red Cloud Agency. The council’s purpose was to discuss ceding the Black Hills to the government.40
The wheedling took place both individually and in a massive council, with Young Man Afraid and his cohorts extending and explaining the government’s invitation. Everything about the intent seemed abhorrent to the Northern people. Grouard, the lone observer offering an account of the episode, remembered that Crazy Horse told him face to face that he had no intention of going but would not oppose any of his people doing so. Ultimately, as many as a thousand people attended the internal council and no one favored making a treaty. Big Breast, a Brulé in the Oglala camp, was among the first to speak, telling everyone that he did not want to part with the land, but if anyone present was “in favor of selling their land from their children, let them go.” Sitting Bull’s was the most strident voice of all. In a long harangue directed principally at Louis Richard, he said that he was not going in. He was no agency Indian. He told Richard to “tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell or lease any land to the government.” Reaching down for a pinch of dirt, he said with a dramatic flourish, “not even as much as this.” Over the next few hours nearly one hundred more Indians expressed similar resolve.41
The great summer camp dispersed soon after Young Man Afraid’s delegation departed. For the most part the Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, and Hunkpapas preferred remaining aloof in the Yellowstone Country, as did some Oglalas and Cheyennes. But two sizeable bands of Cheyennes and Oglalas separated from the northern fold. After Young Man Afraid’s departure the Cheyennes counseled separately and many embraced visiting the White River Agency, drawn less by the Black Hills matter as the prospects of being fed. Hunting had been difficult for the Cheyennes that season and government food was always a lure. While Little Wolf and Morning Star led their followers to the Pine Ridge, other Cheyenne notables, including Old Man Chief Old Bear and council chiefs Box Elder and Black Eagle, opted to lead their people to familiar northern haunts, a decision with devastating consequences a few months hence.42
The Northern Oglalas had a different strategy. Young Man Afraid and interpreter Louis Richard reported to Agent Saville that attitudes about the Hills were divided in the Oglala camp and that some were coming in, notably among them the avowed traditional, Little Big Man, and perhaps Crazy Horse and Black Twin, too. Those Oglalas “will agree to any treaty… made by the Indians at this agency,” Saville ecstatically reported to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Saville was delusional. He and the messengers had entirely misunderstood the Oglala’s intent. Those people ventured southward from Tongue River toward Bear Lodge Butte—Devil’s Tower—to hunt in the midst of favored ground, and to monitor the coming summit at Red Cloud Agency. From there Little Big Man would lead followers to the agency, but not to embrace any treaty action ceding the Black Hills. Rather, his intent was to obstruct the proceedings in any way possible.43
