The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

by Peter Cozzens

A newspaperman once asked George Crook, one of the preeminent generals in the West, how he felt about his job. It was a hard thing, he replied, to be forced to do battle with Indians who more often than not were in the right. “I do not wonder, and you will not either, that when Indians see their wives and children starving and their last source of supplies cut off, they go to war. And then we are sent out there to kill them. It is an outrage. All tribes tell the same story. They are surrounded on all sides, the game is destroyed or driven away, they are left to starve, and there remains but one thing for them to do—fight while they can. Our treatment of the Indian is an outrage.”9

President George Washington attempted to intercede on behalf of the Indians, to whom, he insisted, full legal protection must be afforded, but his admonitions meant nothing to land-hungry whites living beyond the government’s reach. In order to prevent a mutual slaughter, Washington sent troops to the nation’s frontier.

For one thing, the Indians did not perceive the white onslaught for the apocalyptic threat to their way of life that it was. But even if they had, the Indians of the American West had no common identity—no sense of “Indianness”—and were too busy fighting one another to give their undivided attention to the new threat.

Nearly every tribe broke into two factions, one advocating peaceful accommodation with the whites

In 1630, no tribe was mounted; by 1750, all of the Plains tribes and most of the Rocky Mountain Indians rode horses.

in 1849 alone cholera carried off half the Indian population of the southern plains.4

grand irony of the Great Plains is that none of the tribes with which the army would clash were native to the lands they claimed. All had been caught up in a vast migration, precipitated by the white settlement of the East. This Indian exodus had begun in the late seventeenth century and was far from over when the Oregon Trail opened in 1843. As the dislocated Indians spilled onto the plains, they jockeyed with native tribes for the choicest hunting lands. In a very real sense, then—and this cannot be overemphasized—the wars that were to come between the Indians and the government for the Great Plains, the seat of the longest and bloodiest struggles, would represent a clash of emigrant peoples. A way of life was lost, but it had not been of long duration. The most powerful newcomers before the whites spilled onto the plains were the Sioux, formerly a woodlands people of the present-day upper Midwest.

In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act. Beginning January 1, 1863, any U.S. citizen or intended citizen, including free slaves and female heads of household, would receive title to 160 acres of federal land west of the Mississippi River, provided the claimant had improved the property, had resided on it for five consecutive years, and had never taken up arms against the United States.

but they were also poorly uniformed. Clad in woolen navy-blue blouses and sky-blue trousers, the troops roasted in the summer and, because their overcoats were too thin, froze in the winter. Footwear was so crude that the right shoe could hardly be distinguished from the left. Regulation hats fell to pieces quickly, forcing many soldiers to buy civilian headwear out of their meager salaries. Shirts were blue, gray, or checked as suited the wearer. Cavalrymen wore loose handkerchiefs knotted under the neck. Most either padded the seats of their trousers with canvas or donned canvas pants or corduroy breeches for greater comfort, and some wore Indian moccasins instead of regulation boots. A visiting English war correspondent thought the casually dressed frontier soldiers bore “a suspicious resemblance to banditti.”12

Good food might have helped morale, but army rations were as monotonous as a soldier’s day, the mainstays of the garrison menus being hash, baked beans, a watery meat stew called slumgullion, coarse bread, and stringy beef from range cattle.

The entire system was rigged against black soldiers. The Quartermaster Corps shortchanged black regiments in both quality and quantity of supplies, equipment, and horses. The War Department relegated black regiments to service in particularly disagreeable sectors of the frontier, especially Texas, where civilians harassed, insulted, menaced, and sometimes murdered black soldiers. The killers invariably escaped punishment.

The document that Henderson handed the chiefs on October 21 was a grandiloquent guarantee of eternal harmony between Indians and whites that offered the Indians houses, farm implements, and schools—the very things they had rejected in council. And it boxed them in. The Comanches and the Kiowas were to share a 2.9-million-acre tract in Indian Territory comprising the southwestern half of present-day Oklahoma. It was good land in traditional Comanche territory, but it represented only a fraction of the country that had been Comancheria at its apex.

“Suppose we find more Indians there than we can handle?” To which Custer replied, “All I am afraid of is we won’t find half enough. There are not Indians enough in the country to whip the 7th Cavalry.”

As planned, Custer struck the village first. Riding stirrup to stirrup with him was his reliable chief of scouts, twenty-six-year-old Ben Clark, married to a Cheyenne girl, and Captain Louis H. Hamilton, the popular and capable grandson of Alexander Hamilton. A single shot struck Hamilton in the chest, killing him instantly. Custer galloped on, shooting an Indian at point-blank range. Then he and Clark drew off from the column and climbed a lone knoll three hundred yards south of the village to watch the unfolding action.7