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Expounding on larger themes of war and peace, Sitting Bull soon struck at the heart of the matter. He told Miles that there could be no reconciliation between the races, because “the white man never lived who loved an Indian, and that no true Indian ever lived that did not hate the white man.” Boldly, he declared that “God Almighty made him an Indian and did not make him an agency Indian either, and he did not intend to be one.”
Compassionate and selfless, a gallant warrior and superior tactician, Little Wolf was the Sweet Medicine Chief, the human embodiment of the Cheyenne faith.
He had, however, three important advantages that Custer had lacked: a large force of friendly Indians thirsty for Cheyenne blood, the protective cloak of a dull winter dawn, and superior numbers.
They were dying. The weekly beef issue scarcely sufficed for two days. Malaria cut through them like a scythe. During the winter of 1877–1878, a measles epidemic killed fifty Northern Cheyenne children already weakened by hunger. Mosquitoes, heat, and homesickness enervated those whom disease spared.
There has been an insufficiency of food, and as the game is gone, hunger has made the Indians in some cases desperate, and almost any race of man will fight rather than starve. The question of justice and right to the Indian is past and cannot be recalled. We have occupied his country, taken away his lordly domain, destroyed his herds of game, penned him up on reservations, and reduced him to poverty. For humanity’s sake, let’s give him enough to eat and integrity in the agent over him.29
“It is true that we must die,” they told one another, “but we will not die shut up here like dogs; we will die on the prairie; we will die fighting.”
Crazy Horse had embarked on a vision quest. Perhaps the spirits would tell him how he might yet save his people and their country.
“All I wanted was to be left alone.”
The Nez Perce country was beautiful and bountiful, embracing twenty-five thousand square miles of natural magnificence in what is today southeastern Washington, northeastern Oregon, and north-central Idaho. The Bitterroot Mountains marked the eastern boundary, and the Blue and Wallowa ranges traced much of the western limit of Nez Perce country.
Gold, the great despoiler of Indian lands and beacon to avaricious whites, changed everything.
In what was to become an all-too-familiar pattern, the Nez Perces made fools of the army, chasing the terrified troopers and their citizen auxiliaries until the chiefs commanded, “Let the soldiers go! We have done them enough!” The Nez Perces, in fact, had done them more than enough.
We had ample time for reflection, and I for one could not help thinking that this inhuman task was forced upon us by a system of fraud and injustice which had compelled these poor wretches to assume a hostile attitude towards the whites.17
The Nez Perces even won over the exterminationist western press, which conceded that their war making “has been almost universally marked by the highest characteristics recognized by civilized nations.”
The road to statehood had been dark and bloody, stained by the slaughter of innocent Indians at Sand Creek and scores of miners and settlers killed in retaliation.
“The Western Empire is an inexorable fact. He who gets in the way will be crushed.”
the chief understood the “utter hopelessness of the Indians against the progress of civilization [and] that nothing was left to them but to accommodate themselves to civilized ways or perish.”
Like the Modoc chief whose name he shared, Jack had died a violent death in the poisoned aftermath of a war that he had tried to prevent.25
The decade of the 1870s, which had opened hopefully with President Grant’s conciliatory Peace Policy, closed with ironfisted intolerance of tribes that did not unconditionally indulge the United States’ limitless appetite for land and confine themselves to the limits of their reservations.
In the future, he would talk to white men only through the muzzle of his rifle.9
“Those who come among you feel the fact that they are not only in a land of promise, but that the flag of our common country floats over them, guaranteeing liberty and independence and awakening a feeling of love and patriotism known only to America.”20
Apache unrest was bad for business, frightening off big mining interests and wealthy cattlemen, and the territorial press helped orchestrate his removal.
“In warfare with the Indians it has been my policy—and the only effective one—to use them against each other,” he told a reporter before leaving on the expedition. “Nothing breaks them up like turning their own people against them.”
As so often happened, overeager Indian scouts spoiled what would otherwise have been near-certain surprise.
Cleveland forbade any attempt at diplomacy: unconditional surrender or extirpation were the only terms Miles was authorized to offer.
In 1876, more than two million buffalo had blanketed the river valleys of Wyoming and Montana. Six years later, a rancher traveling across the northern plains said he was “never out of sight of a dead buffalo and never in sight of a live one.” In the bison’s place came cattle by the hundreds of thousands. By the mid-1880s, at the peak of the beef bonanza, there were more open-range cattle in the Lakota country than there had ever been buffalo.
The Indian reform movement of the 1880s, then, held something for everyone—be they humanitarians, philanthropists, investors, pioneers, politicians, or land-grabbers—everyone, that is, except those Indians who wanted to remain true to their traditions.2
“White man wants all. He will have it all, but the red man will die where his father died.”4
President Grover Cleveland signed into law the General Allotment Act—also known as the Dawes Act—opening huge swaths of Indian reservations to homesteaders.
In plain language, the Dawes Act provided the legal framework for dismantling treaties.
The agents had lied: white men did not hold the Great Father sacred. On the contrary, Sitting Bull told them, “half the people in the hotels were always making fun of him and trying to get him out of his place and some other man into his place.” As for members of Congress, “they loved their whores more than their wives.” And like most white men, they drank too much.
Accommodation had failed. War had failed. And the bullet-riven Ghost Shirts buried with their wearers in the mass grave on the lone knoll above Wounded Knee Creek were ample proof that religion too had failed the Indians. There was no room left for the Indians in the West but what the government saw fit to permit them.
“The [government] made us many promises,” he told a white friend, “more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”
