Indigenous Continent, page 47
The Lakotas were not alone in resisting U.S. encroachments. In 1857, the Dog Soldiers, members of a new militant Cheyenne division in the central plains, confronted Colonel Edwin Sumner, who was leading the First Cavalry to attack them. The Dog Soldiers threatened Americans’ access to western gold, which was simply unacceptable to the U.S. government and army. Sumner’s force burned two hundred lodges and killed several Dog Soldiers. Two years later, Thomas Twiss, the Bureau of Indian Affairs agent for the Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos, told those nations that the bison were “now all destroyed” and that the U.S. president would “send his white families to build houses and settle on farms in these valleys.” The Dog Soldiers claimed the western half of the central plains between the Arkansas and Platte Rivers as their sovereign domain, a safe haven that had been secured by truces, treaties, and kinship politics. Whereas the Cheyenne government, the Council of Forty-Four, focused on preserving peace, the Dog Soldiers went to war to keep their world inviolate. They shunned American traders and, if offered goods, burned them. The Sicangu and Oglala Lakotas, along with the Kiowas, often joined the Dog Soldiers in attacking settler convoys and gold seekers, expanding the alliance to cover much of the central and northern plains. Women from these nations entered into exogamous marriages, creating a broad kinship network to strengthen the military alliance.9
The Navajos, too, fought back against American incursions. In the fall of 1858, in a misguided campaign, U.S. soldiers invaded Canyon de Chelly, “the seat of the supreme power of the Navajo tribe.” The Navajos retaliated in April 1860 by sending nearly a thousand soldiers to attack Fort Defiance, the westernmost U.S. Army post in the New Mexico Territory. The battle ended in a draw, which was symptomatic: the U.S. Army was reacting to events rather than driving them, and the results were disastrous. The Navajos kept attacking U.S. Army columns, fending off U.S. troops, who in turn targeted horses and sheep in an effort to destroy the Navajos’ pastoral economy. At the same time, Coyotero Apaches attacked American ranches in the Sonoita Valley, facing feeble resistance and running off with oxen.
U.S. officials summoned the already famed Chiricahua leader Cochise to a parley from a nearby camp at the Apache Pass between the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains in early 1861. Outrageously, the Americans accused Cochise of the attacks on the ranches and imprisoned him. They put him in a tent; he slashed it and escaped. He was now determined to fight the Americans for as long as it took to defeat them. Making matters worse, U.S. troops attacked a Chiricahua stronghold in the Apache Pass, sparking a sporadic war with the Chiricahuas that would last twenty-five years. Cochise’s Chiricahuas went on the offensive, extending their operations deep into the West. The U.S. Army was overwhelmed by the seemingly multiplying small wars against Indigenous nations, even as a civil war seemed more inevitable by the day. In Texas, according to one anxious officer, “the whole frontier wishes to engage in expeditions against the Comanche.”10
ESTABLISHED IN 1849, the Minnesota Territory had experienced explosive growth, and it was home to 150,000 settlers less than a decade later. Dakota oyátes had ceded their richest farming lands along the Minnesota River in return for a reservation and fifty years of annuities. When Minnesota became a state in 1858, the 1849 treaty proved to be an illusion. Using hunger as a weapon, U.S. officials in Washington had forced Dakota ithˇáŋčhaŋs to sign a treaty that gave the richest portion of their reservation to Minnesota. A federal mandate assigned a small group of American traders to manage the Dakotas’ annuities, but the corrupt men pocketed most of the funds. When German settlers began to encroach on their lands, the Dakotas prepared for war in the shadow of the American Civil War. The Dakota leader Little Crow, in an apparent last-ditch effort to avoid bloodshed, approached trader Andrew Myrick and asked for help. The American refused. “So far as I am concerned,” he announced through an interpreter, “if they are hungry, let them eat grass.” The Dakotas went to war. Myrick was their first target. His severed head was found with its mouth filled with grass.11
The Dakotas were in a fight for survival. Their soldiers moved along the Minnesota River, butchering domesticated animals, burning farms, taking hostages, and killing about five hundred settlers. Major General John Pope, fresh from having lost the Second Battle of Bull Run, where more than fifteen thousand soldiers under his command had been killed, wounded, or captured, or were missing, sought to redeem himself by exterminating the Dakotas. Denying their humanity, he announced that “they are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts.” The Dakotas, hoping to appease the Americans, released 269 captives. The gesture was to no avail. Pope imprisoned almost two thousand Dakota women, children, and men at Fort Snelling. Four hundred Dakotas were indicted for atrocities against Whites. Ad hoc military tribunals condemned 303 to death, but Abraham Lincoln allowed only those found guilty of rapes or massacres to be executed. On December 26, 1862, in the frontier town of Mankato, thirty-eight Dakotas and biracial persons were escorted onto a collapsible platform, where they were noosed and dropped. In that same year, Congress passed the Homestead Act, which entitled every U.S. citizen to 160 acres of federal land west of the Mississippi—an accelerator of Indigenous dispossession.12
The mass roundups and the mass execution were a warning: Indigenous nations now faced an administrative behemoth capable of inflicting enormous harm. The hangings, the termination of treaties, and the sheer ethnic hating galvanized the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Seven Council Fires—the Sioux alliance—to rebel. As an empire themselves, the Lakotas were the sharp edge of the Sioux resistance. Allied with the Cheyennes and Arapahos, the Lakotas confronted invading U.S. soldiers in a vast theater of war between the Red and Minnesota Rivers to the east and the Little Missouri to the west. Inkpáduta, a Wahpekute Dakota, along with the Hunkpapa leaders Sitting Bull and Gall, assembled an army of sixteen hundred horse soldiers that moved swiftly from target to target, keeping U.S. troops in a state of uncertainty. The first clash took place at the thickly forested Killdeer Mountain just north of the Little Missouri River. To the Lakotas, it was the “first fight with white men.” The U.S. Army had been thwarted, but the Americans claimed victory nonetheless.13
Sioux warfare followed a logic that was strange to the Americans, who aimed simply to kill Indians. By contrast, for the Lakotas every fight that did not result in large-scale loss of life for their side increased their odds of winning. The Americans were operating in an alien environment, struggling to sustain themselves, and Lakota maneuvers drew them farther and farther from their forts. Eventually, the allied Indians lured the Americans into the Little Missouri Badlands, a bone-dry labyrinth of rock, where they could pick off soldier after soldier from buttes and side canyons. The U.S. Army had not only failed to subdue the Lakotas; it had also created an enemy that it could not afford to face. In the summer of 1864, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho horse soldiers attacked Americans—soldiers, overlanders, prospectors—across a massive war zone extending from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains, much of it uncharted by the Americans. A frustrated Colonel John Chivington attacked a peaceful Cheyenne village at Sand Creek with seven hundred Colorado Volunteers. They murdered more than 150 people, mostly women, children, and elderly. One American killed a pregnant woman, cut her open, and scalped the fetus. Others decorated themselves with body parts. When later asked about the brutality, Chivington deadpanned, “Nits make lice.” Soon after, U.S. troops attacked the Shoshones in Utah without an official order and killed more than two hundred people. It was not the first massacre that the Shoshones had suffered at American hands. From the Indigenous perspective, the Civil War seemed more and more like a war of empire.14
During the period between the incidents at Mankato and Sand Creek, the United States had become a genocidal regime. In early 1865, the Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Lakotas retaliated, burning nearly every ranch, way station, and settlement along the South Platte. The Lakotas also attacked steamboats and unauthorized forts in the upper Missouri Valley, warning that they would “destroy all the whites in the country.” With the Civil War still raging, the War Department, at long last, accepted that there was no military solution to the crisis. U.S. officials proposed treaty talks, hoping to reconstruct the horse nations. But while treaties were being negotiated along the Missouri, the War Department began to build forts north of the Platte along the Bozeman Trail in the summer of 1866: gold had been discovered in the Montana Territory. Red Cloud, a noted Oglala shirt wearer emerged as the leader of resistance alongside They Fear Even His Horses, a prominent Oglala civil leader. Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho soldiers systematically harassed the U.S. troops who were building the forts along the exposed trail. But the soldiers would not leave, and Red Cloud prepared for war.
In December 1866, Captain William J. Fetterman allegedly announced that he would ride through the entire Sioux Nation with eighty men. When Fetterman moved to attack, Crazy Horse, a lucid tactician and a shirt wearer, formulated his battle plan. He led a decoy party that lured Fetterman and his eighty-one soldiers into a trap on a high ridge near Fort Kearny. There the allied Indians converged on the U.S. forces and killed every one of them in a fluid and punishing running fight. “They killed 100 white men at Phil Kearney [Fort Kearny],” records the Oglala winter count for the year. Later, when Americans inspected the battleground, they found ears, noses, teeth, fingers, hands, and feet placed on rocks. It was a warning, issued by the Lakota Empire.15
The Lakotas and their allies had won what became known as Red Cloud’s War. The United States proposed peace talks, now as a defeated party. In April 1867, U.S. envoys approached the Lakotas. Red Cloud waited until all forts along the Bozeman Trail were dismantled before agreeing to a cease-fire. The Americans were negotiating from a position of weakness, and the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie reflected that. It recognized Lakota hegemony in the northern Great Plains, transferred tens of thousands of square miles that had belonged to other Native nations, and granted the Lakotas generous hunting privileges outside the Great Sioux Reservation, which covered roughly forty-eight thousand square miles. The treaty also designated the lands east of the Bighorn Mountains and north of the North Platte as “unceded Indian territory,” but it did not define the northern boundary of this unceded territory, leaving the door open to further Lakota expansion.16
In October 1867, the Cheyennes, led by Black Kettle, signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty with U.S. representatives. Only a month later, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, burning with ambition, attacked Black Kettle’s village on the Washita River, killing dozens of solders and women and children. U.S. Indian policy was misguided, vicious, and incompetent all at once, entangling the nation in unnecessary wars that only weakened its authority in the critical midsection of the continent. All in all, it was a massive miscalculation that would quickly come to haunt the U.S. Army. The central plains became dangerous to Americans, and soon a U.S. official complained that the Kiowas and Comanches “have been doing much of this wrong. I shall however, continue to exert myself to prevent these acts of violence.” The Americans were making far too many enemies.17
BY THE EARLY 1870S, the Lakotas were raiding horses in Crow country, purchasing guns and ammunition from Canadian Métis traders, and, most urgently, searching for bison. The herds were dwindling rapidly under intense commercial hunting by both Americans and Indians, driving the Lakotas to expand their empire. They pushed simultaneously into Canada and far to the south, where they clashed again with the Pawnees. But their main thrust was to the west. There, they kept the U.S. Army away from the Powder River Country, extending their empire all the way to the Little Bighorn River. They denounced the U.S. president as a “white fool and a dog, without eyes and brains,” because he did not seem to know how to listen. Frightened U.S. agents began channeling annuity goods earmarked for the Crows to the Lakotas. Soon the Lakotas dominated “the larger part of” the Crow reservation—a stinging embarrassment to the U.S. authorities.18
If the Lakotas were becoming increasingly assertive, so, too, was the United States. While the U.S. Army was fighting the Lakotas, Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Shoshones, Colonel Kit Carson applied constant pressure on the Jicarilla Apaches in the upper Rio Grande valley. The Jicarillas retaliated by killing livestock for food and capturing intruders. In 1863, Carson led the New Mexico Volunteers against the Mescalero Apaches, defeating them and forcing them into a reservation in Bosque Redondo in the Pecos Valley. He then targeted the Navajos for removal and marched three-fourths of them into Bosque Redondo in the “Long Walk”—which was actually a series of removals. Like the South and the North, the West, too, had a removal era that extended into the 1860s. Nine thousand Navajos became prisoners of war, and U.S. officers confiscated one hundred thousand sheep from Navajo rancherías. The Navajos spent four harrowing years in internment next to their Mescalero enemies, while the Southwest remained a tinderbox. The Utes and Apaches ignored their treaties with the United States and kept raiding New Mexico, now a U.S. territory. In 1868, a high-powered Indian Peace Commission was assigned to pacify the American West by negotiating treaties with the Native nations. Moved by Navajo suffering and alarmed by the “very great expense to the government” of the internment, the commissioners allowed the Navajos to return to their traditional homeland, Dinétah, in the Four Corners region, amid their four sacred mountains.
The scarring Bosque Redondo experience had pushed the Navajos to reinvent themselves as the Navajo Nation in order to present a unified front to Americans. Upon returning to Dinétah, the Navajos thrived almost immediately. They revived their pastoral economy of sheep-, goat-, and horse-herding, and by 1870 their population had reached fifteen thousand. In stark contrast to the Dakota experience in Minnesota, they expanded their reservation. Between 1878 and 1886, five additions quadrupled the Navajo territory, and the Navajo Nation was never targeted for allotment, the forced subdivision of communal landholdings. At more than twenty-seven thousand square miles, the Navajo Nation reservation remains North America’s largest Indigenous domain by a wide margin.
While the Navajos secured their own relative safety, the numerous Apache groups relied on traditional raiding economies and descending on American settlements for livestock and captives. The few and scattered U.S. forts in the Southwest were powerless to stop them, and distressed American officials relied on whippings, hostage-taking, and hangings, turning peaceful leaders such as Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, and Geronimo into staunch enemies. Geronimo hated the Mexicans, who had killed his wife, mother, and three children in an attack on their camp. Cochise complained that he had lived with unfulfilled U.S. promises for fifteen years.
Like the Comanches, the Apaches sent war expeditions deep into Mexico, taking captives, stealing food, attacking towns and mining camps, ambushing mail stagecoaches, and evading U.S. troops, who tended to struggle on the unfamiliar terrain south of the border. Local U.S. officials lacked the power to negotiate binding treaties with the Apaches, and the U.S. Army was too weak to subdue the decentralized nation; U.S. troops were forced to chase the Apaches under the doctrine of hot pursuit. It was a stinging humiliation for the Americans. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States had agreed to prevent Native incursions into Mexico. Unlike the Comanches, the many Apache nations never unified into a single alliance or empire, but their localized organization served them well: their raids would continue.19
The Civil War was officially over, but Texas remained in a rebellious mode—yet another embarrassment to the United States. The overwhelmed Lone Star State had fought both northern armies and Indians, and the largest U.S.-Indian battle during the Civil War had taken place at Adobe Walls, the Bent family’s satellite post in Texas, where some thirteen hundred Comanches and Kiowas led by Quanah Parker, the galvanizing mixed-blood war leader, and Isatai, a young medicine man, routed Kit Carson’s troops and Ute scouts. It was the Kiowas’ first major engagement with the U.S. Army. Desperate to end the fighting, the Indian Peace Commission opened treaty talks with the Comanches. Since the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, the Comanches had gone into a steep decline owing to a catastrophic drought in the southern plains: grasses withered, and their empire vanished into hot air. Taking advantage of the Comanches’ plight, U.S. agents made an offer: cede 140,000 square miles, accept a fifty-five-hundred-square-mile reservation in the Indian Territory, and allow military forts to be built in Comanchería in return for annuity payments. It was an insult and a betrayal. The Comanches rejected the land cession but signed the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867, which recognized their traditional hunting privileges in the southern plains. To the Comanches, hunting privileges were ownership. Although diminished, they were still a force that Americans could not ignore. U.S. officials expected the Comanches to grow crops and live in peace; the Comanches made their Mexican captives do most of the tilling. They also raided Navajos, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Lenapes in the Indian Territory. Like the Iroquois before them, even in decline the Comanches could terrify outsiders and impose their will.20
U.S. officials failed to see that, and the American colossus crashed, all but blindly, against a nomad wall. The Civil War and its staggering number of casualties had relegated Native Americans to a secondary threat. Capitalizing on the suffering and distracted American state, the Comanches were able to recover in peace. The Southwest was suddenly up for grabs. The Comanches revived their raiding economy, and soon they were taking horses and captives across Texas and into Mexico. By the late 1860s the Comanche sphere of influence stretched eight hundred miles from north to south and five hundred miles from east to west. The Comanches sold massive numbers of stolen Texas longhorns to Comancheros, reaping huge profits that enabled them to arm themselves against the Americans. A U.S. agent deemed the Comanches “the most, wild, treacherous, warlike, and brutal of all other Indians.” Had the contemporaries placed the Comanches and the Lakotas in the same frame, they may have realized that they raided—separately—from the Mexican tropics to the Canadian border.21
