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The government grew adept at exploiting these rivalries, giving the army a potent fifth column in its battles to bring the “hostile” Indians to heel.
European gifts of horses, guns, and disease had radically altered Plains and Rocky Mountain Indians’ cultures.
A 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.
Second only to Ulysses S. Grant in the pantheon of Northern war heroes, Sherman brought to the job a profound love of the West, where, he wrote to a friend, his “heart has always been.”
retired warrior became a counselor to young warriors, a trainer of boys, or, if his career had been distinguished and his medicine powerful, a council chief or senior war leader (like Red Cloud) responsible for planning strategy and guiding large encounters.
In the absence of a coup stick, any handheld object would do; the less lethal the object, the greater the honor.
Lesser war honors included the capture of a shield or gun and the taking of a scalp, which served several purposes.
the Indians believed that disfiguring an enemy’s corpse protected the killer from the dead man’s spirit in the afterlife.
Fear of ridicule notwithstanding, no warrior would risk battle without the protection of his sacred power, commonly translated as “medicine,” upon the strength of which his courage, competence, and very survival were believed to depend.
Repairing to a lonesome and dangerous place, a vision seeker spent a prescribed period—normally four days and nights—without food or water, praying for a helper from nature or the bird or animal kingdom to visit him.
A creature or element of nature revealed in a vision became a man’s medicine.
some warriors went into battle intending to die, be it to gain glory at any price or to end the pain of a terminal illness or personal tragedy.
to confine the Indians on reservations well removed from the travel routes and settlements.
Its premise was simple: the buffalo would eventually become extinct, leaving the Indians no alternative but to settle down and farm.4
“I was born upon the prairies, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I live like my fathers before me, and like them, I live happy.”
“The more I see of these Indians, the more I become convinced that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers,” he told his brother Senator John Sherman. “Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous.”19
Red Cloud’s forbearance in the face of government chicanery set in motion the wheels of white conquest of the northern plains.
The eastern press delighted in Red Cloud’s “plain, bold words,” calling them an eloquent expression of the government’s “faithlessness and gross swindling” that precipitated Indian wars.
“Hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract a treaty.” Indians were now legal wards of the government.
When the war party brought home the young man’s body, Lone Wolf cut off his own hair, killed his horses, burned his lodges, and vowed revenge.
“The white man is strong, but he cannot destroy us all in one year. It will take him two or three, maybe four years. And then the world will turn to water or burn up. It is our mother and cannot live when the Indians are all dead.”25
“The buffalo is our money,” he explained. “It is our only resource with which to buy what we do not receive from the government. Just as it makes a white man feel to have his money carried away, so it makes us feel to see others killing and stealing our buffalo.”
Hide hunters, he told Texas legislators contemplating a buffalo-conservation bill, “had done more to settle the Indian problem in two years than the army had done in thirty.
It would be reservation life on government terms or death by bullets or by starvation.
Sappa Creek was the last clash of what the army called the Red River War.
“I have taken the white man’s road, and am not sorry,” the dying Kicking Bird whispered to the surgeon. “Tell my people to take the good path.”20
The Red River War was decisive because it deprived the Indians of the means to make war.
The circle had closed. A way of life had ended. The wild tribes of the southern plains had been conquered, and they knew it.
The Apache, said a captain who fought them, “would prefer to skulk like the coyote for hours, and then kill his enemy rather than, by injudicious exposure, receive a wound, fatal or otherwise. The precautions taken for his safety prove that he is an exceptionally skillful soldier.”
Army doctrine, with its emphasis on conventional combat, was useless to officers waging counterguerrilla warfare in the desert.
Wichasha Wakan, a holy man with the gift of prophecy obtained from dreams, visions, and direct communication with Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, source of all seen and unseen.
the four Lakota cardinal virtues of bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom.
Crazy Horse was an outstanding warrior, perhaps the ablest of his generation on the northern plains.
In 1869, few questioned the importance of transcontinental railroads in settling the “Indian question.”
It had “totally changed the conditions under which the civilized populations of the country come in contact with the wild tribes. Instead of slowly advancing the tide of immigration, making its gradual inroads upon the circumference of the great interior wilderness, the very center of the desert has been pierced.”10
For all Cheyennes, the Paha Sapa truly was holy ground, the home of Noahvose, the “Sacred Mountain.” Cheyenne tradition held that in the distant past, in a cave deep within Noahvose, the Creator himself had given the Cheyenne people the revered Sacred Medicine Arrows.
In effect, Grant was forced to choose between the electorate and the Indians.
It is a sad reflection of the moral cesspool into which the Grant administration had sunk that the first instance of real cooperation between the War Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs involved the most egregious treachery ever contemplated by the government against the Plains Indians.
All appeared neatly in order to commence a war of naked aggression.13
As always, aspiring warriors, ever in search of honors and prestige, marched to a different drum—the war drum. Reining them in was a constant challenge for the chiefs.10
Atop the butte, he prayed, meditated, and then drifted off to sleep.
In appreciation of the chief’s goodwill, the army named the military post near his reservation Fort Washakie, the only fort ever named for an Indian.
“Because,” he answered, “you and I are going home today, and by a trail that is strange to us both.”3
The Indians, however, were in no hurry. This was a day for deliberate killing, not reckless mounted dashes to prove one’s courage.
The Lakota warrior Iron Hawk later explained why he had pounded a trooper’s head into jelly. “These white men wanted it, they called for it, and I let them have it.”16
the asymmetry in losses largely a consequence both of Custer’s splitting his outnumbered command in the face of a much larger force and of the Indians’ having refrained from exposing themselves unnecessarily.
General Sheridan wanted three things, all of which were unimaginable before the Little Bighorn: a larger army, two permanent forts on the Yellowstone River in the heart of the Unceded Indian Territory (a request Sheridan had made repeatedly), and military control of the Indian agencies.
The Lakotas, in effect, were to be given the choice of ceding or starving.
Whatever the white people ask of us, wherever we go, we always say Yes—yes—yes! Whenever we don’t agree to what is asked of us in council, you always reply: You won’t get anything to eat! You won’t get anything to eat!12
As had been the case on the southern plains, disunity among the northern tribes would greatly facilitate their physical conquest and ultimately the demise of their way of life. It is ironic that the absolute freedom to decide one’s destiny so cherished by the Indians would prove to be a deciding factor in their inability to preserve it. None of this, however, was yet apparent to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who clung to the old ways with fierce tenacity.
