Sitting Bull's War, page 12
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A successful Black Hills council might well have been a crowning achievement for the Grant Administration. It would climax peaceably an unforeseen and painful economic and political nightmare, and in consequence also forestall or even avert an expensive Indian war. Instead, Commissioner Allison was charged with achieving an outcome unattainable in Sioux Country, and the affair proved a blistering sore from the start. The gold country brimmed with miners, and the Sioux, agency dwellers and Northerners alike, were largely unwilling to yield any more of their current homeland. That homeland had already suffered a diminishing blow when the Republican River buffalo country was stripped from the Sioux. Impediments of other sorts also arose. After squabbling for days over where to conduct the commission’s business, whether at one or another of the White River agencies or somewhere between, the southern chiefs consented finally to meet on a plain above the White River nearer Red Cloud Agency, just north of Crow Buttes, a revered landmark from another day. Crowning the location was a singularly tall cottonwood tree, ever after heralded as the Council or Lone Tree.44
The gathering quickly proved to be no mere enclave of White River people. Allison estimated an attendance of 4,500. John Collins thought it was many thousands more, including agents and sizeable contingents from the distant Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Lower Brulé Agencies, plus scattered Yanktonais and Santees, and Cheyennes and Arapahos, atop thousands from the local agencies. In this midst, as well, were as many as four hundred Northern Indians, mostly Oglala adherents of Little Big Man, and all stalwart opponents of any sale. After his arrival Little Big Man alone sowed discord in all the camps and soon enough threatened the proceeding itself.45
The Lakotas counseled among themselves continuously. They knew what they faced and understood the fundamental questions: would they sell the Black Hills, and for how much? Spotted Tail’s views were commonly quoted. Yes they would sell, he often declared beforehand, for $6 million. Newspaper accounts and Allison’s report noted that figure, but other figures as well: $7 million, $30 million, $50 million. Plainly, some Lakotas were open to such a sale at the start, and others to long-term leasing arrangements, but those were views of agency people who understood accommodation as an accepted way of life. Little Big Man, present at many of the internal councils, continually threatened the chiefs, telling them that he would kill them if they signed any treaty. Plainly, his obstructive view was taking hold.46
The proceedings opened on September 20, the commissioners seated beneath a grand canvas awning facing northward, the council tree behind them. Opposite were representatives from the gathered agencies seated in a crescent. In Allison’s preliminary remarks he addressed both the mining ground in the Black Hills and the government’s oddly-timed desire for reclaiming the hunting lands west of there to the summits of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming—the unceded lands of the Fort Laramie Treaty. One chronicler later rightly labeled the Big Horn rhetoric as a “supremely stupid move,” particularly in light of the already nearly insurmountable obstacle at hand. Allison realized quickly that he faced two disparate audiences, one seemingly willing to sell the Hills if a large price could be obtained, and a smaller but resolute lot who opposed parting with the Hills whatever the consideration.47
Attitudes steeled on September 23 when Little Big Man, whom Agent Saville had earlier called the “most irreconcilable of the ‘Hostiles,’ ” led some fifty painted, armed, and mounted warriors into a gap in the council arena. Small, muscular and nearly naked, his scarred breast freshly painted, and with eyes that gleamed wickedly, Little Big Man lofted a Winchester in one hand and a belt of cartridges in the other and bellowed that he would kill any commissioner who would steal his land. Warriors behind him dashed right and left as if anticipating or even willingly provoking a fight, and some of them singing, “The Black Hills is my land and I love it, and whoever interferes will hear this gun.”48
One of the interpreters looked at Allison and blurted, it “looks like hell to pay here in a few minutes.” The small complement of troops guarding the commissioners deployed and faced down the challengers. Amazingly, no shots were fired, largely through the speedy intercession of Young Man Afraid of His Horses and an Oglala who also bore the name Sitting Bull. The two had ridden forward to challenge the Northerners, Sitting Bull gripping an engraved Henry rifle given him by President Grant just that spring for interceding in the so-called flag pole affair at the agency. He would kill “the first Indian who fired a shot,” he proclaimed. When Young Man Afraid and Sitting Bull positioned their own followers between the commissioners and their angry kinsmen, Little Big Man and the Northerners gave way, riding to a hill nearby. But the strident Northerner had succeeded in delivering a powerful message of opposition.49
The Little Big Man episode colored the proceedings from then on. In the days after, the commissioners heard from the leading chiefs of the various bands, and their responses were clearly shaped by Little Big Man’s rhetoric. Spotted Bear, a Miniconjou from Cheyenne River, called the Black Hills a “big safe. Our Great Father has one, and so have we. That is the reason we can’t come to a conclusion very quickly.” Red Dog, an Oglala, was slightly conciliatory, declaring that “we want to be taken care of for seven generations ahead,” and might give up the Black Hills, “where there is gold, in the center, [but] not to include the pine.” Stabber, the aged Oglala who had confronted Custer the year before, told Allison: “Give us as many millions as we have asked, [because] we know that those hills will support us for seven generation to come.” Even Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, plainly amenable to a sale before the council began, moderated their tone. Red Cloud demanded compensations of many confusing sorts—money, cattle, horses, wagons, clothing, arms, ammunition, mowers, scythes, furniture—and for generations. The demands baffled the commissioners. Plainly, enthusiasm for the sale was waning.50
The question of price, whether monetary or material support for generations, was never resolved. For their part, the commissioners played an illogically poor hand, variously offering $400,000 annually for the mining rights in an agreement running until the gold ran out, when the land would revert to the Sioux. Or perhaps they might receive $6 million, payable in fifteen equal annual installments. Amid sharpening frustration, the discussions drew to a close. Little Big Man and the hardliners had prevailed. Allison returned to Washington frustrated and bitter. In his report on the failed Black Hills purchase attempt, he angrily blamed the Northern Indians for the standoff and declared that the spirit and temper of the Sioux would never change until those people had felt the power of the government. Northern traditionals and agency residents alike only saw themselves as being robbed.51
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After his standoff with the Black Hills commissioners at the Lone Tree, Little Big Man and the other Northerners fled the Pine Ridge Country for Crazy Horse’s camp. It had moved northwestward in the intervening weeks, crossing the shallow divide from the hunting grounds in the Bear Lodge Butte country to the Powder River valley and then continuing farther west onto Otter Creek, a lush tributary of the Tongue. Along the way, Lone Horn or One Horn, a venerable old Miniconjou in the Northerners’ mix, separated and continued to Sitting Bull’s camp, then at the mouth of the Powder. During the proceedings in the south, Lone Horn had scolded Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and the others who seemed so willing to sell the Hills, calling them selfish and cheap. “We are not the only ones in the Sioux nation,” he implored. “Raise up your heads and look to the north and the west. There are Sioux still out.” Sitting Bull was pleased when he heard this and praised his friend. “Brother, it is well that you have said that; these hills are a treasure to us Indians.”52
Lone Horn died that winter. Some said it was on account of watching the Black Hills fall to the Whites. The purchase attempt had failed, but the Whites were not deterred. As Black Elk, the elder, told his young son, “the Black Hills would be just like melting snow held in our hands, because the wasicus would take that country anyway.” White possession did not occur quickly, but that fall and winter prospectors continually strengthened their presence in the gold country. Red Cloud and the others complained of this continually, and the Great Father and his soldiers did nothing about it.53
Little Big Man’s followers were not the only Pine Ridge people to depart the White River country that fall. Big Road, an Oglala traditional who often frequented Red Cloud Agency but preferred the Powder River buffalo country, led his followers to Crazy Horse’s camp. Primarily, he wished to hunt, but he also wanted to escape the frantic chaos in the Pine Ridge. Young Black Elk, an alert twelve-year-old Oglala in the band and much later an important informant of events associated with Sitting Bull’s War, provided his biographer with a careful description of the journey, measured as always by landmarks encountered along the way—Warbonnet Creek, Sage Creek, the Plains of the Pine Trees, Powder River, and the Tongue. He was describing a common pathway from the Pine Ridge to the buffalo country that others had labeled the Powder River Trail. Big Road’s people encountered buffalo when reaching the Powder and slowed their pace to lay in meat and robes, but in due course they continued to the Tongue and the Northern Oglala camp.54
Others headed north that fall as well. Agent Saville reported to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in mid-October that many Indians were leaving his agency for the Tongue and Yellowstone, supposedly to hunt. Most were leaving their families behind, he noted. “There appears to be no hostile feeling,” he thought. Cheyennes and Arapahos were among those fleeing, including Little Wolf’s people. Little Wolf had come from the north when summoned in August and attended the great council, telling Commissioner Allison that the Cheyennes also had an interest in the Black Hills. He wanted guns, ammunition, and money. The White man would become rich. “We want him to make us rich also.” He was ignored.55
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The Black Hills matter reverberated throughout the Northern Indian camps that winter but for the most part the people seem to have taken the intrusion in stride. By now Lakota and Cheyenne traditionals had experienced White duplicity for generations, and the cycle of events in the 1870s were merely its present form. Sitting Bull and his followers wished only to be left alone, to live an independent existence mirroring a time when the Lakotas maintained firm control of their homeland, when their buffalo culture flourished, and when traders and trading posts in Sioux Country were just enough to satisfy their wants. But some among them could also be prophetic. Late in life, Eagle Elk, an Oglala traditional customarily in one of the northern camps, likened his world to a big island, with the wasicus like great waters washing all around it, nibbling off the edges, and the island getting smaller, smaller, smaller. This notion may have been his own, or perhaps it was the metaphorical contrivance of the old man’s biographer, but it was apt. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the Lakotas and Cheyennes huddled through another bitter northern plains winter likely with no sense of the enormous political storm then gathering against them. The reservation and its agencies, the new military posts, the succession of railway surveys, the persistent invasion of Sioux Country by explorers and traders and most recently by miners, and now the theft of their “Heart of the Earth,” all this was surely foreboding.56
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In Washington on November 3, a gathering at the White House sealed the Northerners fate. Present that day was President Grant, who called the meeting, his Secretary of War, William Belknap, Secretary of the Interior, Zachariah Chandler, one of Chandler’s assistants, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Edward P. Smith, and two army generals, Sheridan from Chicago, and George Crook, newly arrived in Omaha and commanding the sprawling Department of the Platte encompassing the entire southern half of Sioux Country. The Black Hills gold rush weighed heavily on Grant, as did treaty obligations with the Sioux. The nation’s interests, still embroiled in the devastating Panic of 1873, welcomed the complete opening of the Black Hills. Until now, Grant had stood with the Indians and was the one who imposed the army’s interdiction efforts. While that was proving a near impossibility, the removal orders remained in place.57
If official minutes or notes of the meeting were taken, none are known to survive. But chatter afterward from several of the attendees and orders rippling through War Department channels in subsequent weeks make abundantly clear what was discussed that day.
Certainly, the president and his attendees addressed the Black Hills situation head-on. The country needed this economic boost, both to its financial markets and the relief a gold rush afforded an underemployed population. Crook brought the most current news, having visited the gold country in August where he met with miners, saw actual placer gold, and orchestrated his own removal effort. Even now troops remained in the midst of the French Creek diggings ensuring that miners were not working that ground. Grant acknowledged that he could not openly ignore the guarantees and prohibitions in the Fort Laramie Treaty and would not rescind previous orders forbidding this occupation by miners. But he finessed the matter by ordering the withdrawal of troops from their policing and interdiction duties, thus quietly permitting the rush to ensue. The thinking may simply have been that in light of the failed Black Hills purchase attempt at Red Cloud Agency, perhaps a flood of prospectors would induce the Sioux to negotiate a sale after all. Within days interdiction activities in both the Departments of Dakota and Platte ceased, evidenced most directly when the complement of troops on French Creek withdrew and returned to Fort Laramie. The army would not impede the Black Hills gold rush any longer.58
The White House conferees certainly also discussed the Northern Indians. Little Big Man’s disruptive behavior at the Allison Commission proceedings was chilling and begged a reflection on the similar repeated obstructions exhibited by the non-treaty people since the time of the Fort Laramie Treaty. As the Washington conferees saw it, they were one Lakota people. No one distinguished traditionals from non-traditionals or Northerners from agency people, although figureheads like Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and now Little Big Man stood out. Furthermore there existed an established reservation for the Sioux people, with individual agencies for each of the subtribes. The questions now were simply how and when to make the non-treaty people embrace the reservation. A precedent already existed. Sheridan’s army had just waged a successful war on the southern plains against the Southern Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas, forcing them onto reservations in the Indian Territory. The conferees easily agreed that the time had come to force the non-treaty people living in the Yellowstone Country to submit. Crook later quoted Grant as saying that the Sioux must go to the reservation “or be whipped.” On this point there was no disagreement in the White House.59
Figuring in this growing call for war was a report received by Commissioner Smith on November 9, submitted by Erwin C. Watkins, an Indian Service inspector working directly for the Commissioner. Watkins was a long-time roving agent for the Indian Service. In this instance, he was charged with investigating “the attitude and condition of certain wild and hostile bands of Sioux Indians in Dakota and Montana.” Almost certainly before embarking on his tour into Sioux Country Watkins was briefed on or more likely read a communication from the commanding officer at Fort Ellis, near Bozeman. Dated March 8, 1875, it had subsequently circulated widely in the War and Interior Departments. The Fort Ellis commander’s letter was a scathing indictment of Sitting Bull and his followers, noting the country the chief and traditionals occupied, the identities of the various bands and band leaders who rallied with him, their collective open hostility toward Whites, their ease of trade for arms and ammunition, their ability to lure agency warriors to their fold, always fully armed and mounted, and in all a people proving a perfect obstacle to peace from north of the Platte to the British line. The letter seethed with invective in an oddly similar manner to Watkins’s report eight months later. Watkins, it seems, knew how to frame his questions, and already knew the answers.60
While Jenney was surveying the Black Hills gold country and Allison attempted to buy that land, Watkins traveled the Upper Missouri country interviewing agents and agency residents. His report of November 9 was explosive, especially when coming on the heels of the disastrous purchase effort in September and the consequential White House meeting that had just occurred. Watkins pointed fingers, calling Sitting Bull and the other chiefs and head men following him as “untamable and hostile.” They roamed freely over Western Dakota and Eastern Montana, he noted, including the rich valleys of the Yellowstone and Powder Rivers in what was “probably the best hunting ground in the United States, [and] a Paradise for Indians.”61
Those Sitting Bull Indians “have never accepted aid or been brought under control,” Watkins lamented, and they boast that “United States authorities are not strong enough to conquer them.” And they claimed, moreover, to be the “Sovereign Rulers of the land,” and to “own the wood, the water, the ground, and the air.” Watkins plainly gathered his information from agency Indians living along the Missouri in Dakota and Montana, people largely at odds with their tradition-minded kin in the buffalo country, and whose anxiety was palpable. Sitting Bull’s people were rich in horses and robes, Watkins observed, and thoroughly armed with breech-loading guns, pistols, and bows and arrows. “Fortunate indeed is the man who meets them [and] escapes with his scalp.”62
At one point Watkins branded the Sitting Bull Indians “as uncivilized and savage as when Lewis and Clark first passed through their country.” But it was plainly apparent, even then, that Watkins never understood the venerable forty-five-year-old Hunkpapa, his followers, or their world, at one critical point assuring Commissioner Smith that those “Indians number, all told, but a few hundred warriors, and these are never all together, or under the control of one chief.” “One thousand men under the command of an experienced officer, sent into their country in the winter,” he wrote, “would be amply sufficient for their capture or punishment.” Agents at Cheyenne River, Fort Yates, and Fort Peck certainly knew better, and so would have Saville at Red Cloud Agency, whom Watkins never spoke with. A knowledgeable contemporary later called the inspector’s work simple “fiction.” But in the end it was Watkins’s vitriol and numbers… a few hundred warriors… one thousand men under the command of an experienced officer… and notions of finally ending Lakota nomadism that captivated the Washington elites. His admonition to “send troops against them in the winter, the sooner the better, and whip them into subjection,” circulated widely and quickly, including to Sheridan and Crook, with whom Watkins apparently met personally.63
