Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre

by Heather Cox Richardson

The Cheyennes’ problems with easterners began with the discovery of gold on the eastern edge of the Rockies in 1858, which sparked a rush of more than 100,000 Americans into land that the U.S. government had guaranteed to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho.

This arid piece of land could not support the Indians, many of whom ignored orders to move to Sand Creek and continued to hunt on lands now claimed by miners and settlers.37

Raids became battles, until in the summer of 1864 the governor of the Territory called for every Colorado citizen to “kill and destroy . . . all . . . hostile Indians.”

A group of volunteer soldiers took him at his word. On November 29, they opened fire on a friendly band of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, mostly women, children, and old men, camped for the winter under a flag of peace at the Sand Creek Reservation. The soldiers killed about 125 Cheyennes and Arapahos. Then they butchered the bodies, taking as trophies the scalps and genitalia of their victims.

The murder and mutilation of surrendering innocents sent a number of Cheyennes north to the Sioux.

“We were told that white men would not kill women and children, but now we have lost all faith in white men,” they explained. “We took pity on them in the past, but we shall never do so again. We plan to strike the whites all along the Platte, and after that the settlements to the west. Are you with us?” they asked Sitting Bull. He was. From this time on, Sitting Bull would stand firm against eastern incursions into Indian lands.

What was at stake was some of the best hunting land on the continent, land critical to the Sioux way of life. In 1864, John Bozeman had blazed the Bozeman Trail directly through the Indians’ prized Powder River hunting lands.

As prospectors headed to the Montana mines, the army was determined to protect the Bozeman Trail.40 The Indians were just as determined to keep the settlers out of the Powder River region.

By 1865, the U.S. government was eager to stop the Sioux’s successful campaign against interlopers.

Farmers and storekeepers, blacksmiths and carpenters were ready to build new, thriving communities on the Plains, but Indians clung to their ancient ways. Americans had fought and died for economic progress, and they were not going to be stopped by savages.

When the postwar nation was divided into five military divisions, General Grant placed William Tecumseh Sherman at the head of the Department of the Mississippi, charged with overseeing the volatile West. Sherman’s time in California and St. Louis had convinced him of the enormous value of western land for development, and he was determined to bring the West into the free labor economy he had just fought so hard to defend.

Sherman turned his attention to the Northwest. There, American incursions were so recent that there was no existing policy for Indian relations—and a policy was imperative, for Sioux fighters threatened the Bozeman Trail.

The death of his daughter was a blow indeed, driving Spotted Tail to the great length of appealing to an enemy to fulfill her final wish. Acceding to the request, the fort commander organized a fine funeral, and the brokenhearted father, who had been fighting the army for four years, agreed in exchange to listen to government proposals for a treaty.44 Spotted Tail was the first Sioux leader to consider peace, but others followed close behind.

Sitting Bull and the northern Teton Hunkpapas, who still lived a traditional life far from white settlement, did not attend, but important Oglalas closer to army forts did.

The talks broke down almost as soon as they began. With remarkably bad timing, army troops charged with reinforcing the Bozeman Trail marched into camp right after the council started. Red Cloud angrily accused the officers of bad faith, claiming to negotiate when they had already decided to take the land.

The army could claim to have achieved a signed treaty but, in fact, the warriors who posed the most danger to settlers had left the fort angrier than ever.

His confidence underestimated the powerful Red Cloud, who was marshaling his warriors into a resistance that would be so effective it would become known as Red Cloud’s War.

Although the Shermans took the precaution of traveling with a guard, they had no trouble with Indians on their journey. On the contrary, it seemed to the brothers that the region was peaceful and ready for intensive settlement.

General Sherman believed that the Indians would eventually give way to settlement, but it wasn’t happening as fast as he would like. In November 1866, he came up with a plan to speed things along. He proposed to push the Indians out of the way of railroad construction onto reservations to the north and south, leaving a corridor through the middle of the country “for our people exclusively. . . .”

Army officials insisted that the treaty with Spotted Tail and his kin permitting settlers to use the Bozeman Trail had established peace but, in fact, war was brewing. Red Cloud and his men had no intention of allowing eastern incursions into the Powder River region.

Soldiers doggedly marched up the Bozeman Trail and established forts to protect American migrants.

Ignoring orders to stay close to the wood train he was supposed to protect, Fetterman led eighty men into an ambush set up by Red Cloud and the wily American Horse. The Sioux killed Fetterman and all of his men.

This event, immediately dubbed the “Fetterman Massacre,” turned Sherman’s eagerness to push the Indians aside into an eagerness to kill them off.

“This massacre should be treated as an act of war and should be punished with vindictive earnestness,” General Sherman wrote, “until at least ten Indians are killed for each white life lost. . .

Sherman told the commander of the Department of the Platte to consider all Sioux in the Powder River region hostile, and to “punish them to the extent of utter extermination if possible.”

The Fetterman affair also galvanized government officials back East into finding a solution to the conflict with the hostile Sioux. Congressmen were eager to stop Indian attacks on settlers and on the train crews that were hammering west, but were not willing to follow General Sherman’s advice that the Indians be exterminated. Sherman, Grant, and indeed, army officers in general, demanded that the War Department be given control of Indian Affairs, but politicians refused.

Reformers wanted to devote resources to “civilizing” the Indians. For their part, army officers dismissed the reformers as starry-eyed idealists who created problems with the Indians that the army then bore the brunt of cleaning up.54

The Interior Department managed Indian affairs, meaning that its officers—themselves appointed by the administration in power—dispensed the valuable government jobs and lucrative contracts for Indian supplies to political supporters. By siding with reformers on the issue of managing the Indians, politicians kept this significant patronage power in their own hands.55

It charged the commissioners with pushing the Indians onto reservations in the northern and southern Plains to open up a corridor through the country, as Sherman wished. At the same time it asked them to find a way to “civilize” the Indians by turning them into farmers, a sop to reformers.56

The reformers on the commission wanted to “civilize” the Indians by providing them with agricultural instruction and tools, churches, schools, and the provisions to help them make the transition to self-sufficiency. The military men wanted a military solution to “the Indian problem.”

The commission had its work cut out for it, for by the summer of 1867, the traditionalist Sioux controlled the Bozeman Trail and the Powder River country, keeping the resident troops holed up in their raw forts.

General Sherman insisted to Senator Sherman that the government must take responsibility for pushing the Indians out of the way of economic development. Existing treaties meant that Indians had the right to hunt across the lands the railroads wanted, and they kept doing so, he complained. It was ridiculous to suggest that the railroad companies should defend themselves.

The act of granting the charters and giving away land that the Indians claimed was “an implied promise” that the government would provide military protection for the construction of the roads. Certainly, he wrote, everyone knew that Congress could not simply “surrender the country to a few bands of roving Indians.”59

Spotted Tail complained about settlement along the Bozeman Trail and asked for ammunition and guns for his people to continue to live as hunters. Sherman answered him with a warning that the railroads and whites were coming, and they must either cooperate or be killed.

October the commissioners persuaded many southwestern Indians to sign a series of treaties, known collectively as the Treaty of Medicine Lodge. Under its terms, the Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe exchanged their claims to about 90 million acres of their lands for firm titles to about 3 million acres of land in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma.

In return, the government promised annual distributions of clothing and food; the provision of a doctor, a blacksmith, a miller, an engineer, a carpenter, a farmer—to show Indians how to grow crops—and teachers; and the construction of schools.

Red Cloud and his people refused to have anything to do with the negotiations. The chief sent word that he had every intention of protecting the Powder River valley, and that he would talk only when troops were removed from Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith.62

Red Cloud’s warfare and determination finally won his main point. Tired of the expense of the war and convinced they could not protect both the Union Pacific and the Bozeman Trail, government officials reluctantly agreed to abandon the troublesome forts—Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith—and to permit those Indians unwilling to live on a reservation to continue to live untrammeled, following the buffalo so long as they should last.

Red Cloud had won. He had proved that he had the upper hand over the U.S. Army, and his power was at its zenith. He signed the treaty with only a vague understanding of what was in it, ignoring the provisions about farming and reservations because his people flatly refused to have any part of that sort of lifestyle.

He announced that, while he would stop killing settlers, he had no intention of changing his way of life.66

The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie ended “Red Cloud’s War” with Red Cloud in charge, but it also established what became known as the Great Sioux Reservation, where horse warriors would be forced into farming. The reservation was a 22-million-acre tract of land that was essentially the western half of what later became the state of South Dakota, divided along the Missouri River, along with a piece of Nebraska.

The Indians had never known a life without bison and, while they knew the herds were getting smaller, did not understand the extraordinary rate of their extinction. They believed them to be a permanent fixture of the landscape. Confident that bison would be around forever, Red Cloud and his people undoubtedly believed that the hunting rights guaranteed in the treaty would last forever.

will not be long before all the buffaloes are extinct near and between the railroads, after which the Indians will have no reason to approach either railroad,” he wrote. Three months later, with railroad men complaining about the roving hunting parties that made them fear for their lives, his views had hardened. “All who cling to their old hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off.”

Sherman and the other commissioners had every intention of ending the traditional world of hunting. They planned to turn the Sioux into farmers in the American model. In exchange for the Sioux’s acceptance of limits on their land, the government promised to underwrite each Indian family willing to take its chances on a reservation to be established somewhere along the Missouri River.

The Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed that the treaty could not be changed without the signatures of three-quarters of the men of the Sioux tribe.

The same Republican free labor vision that had condemned the economy of the free Sioux had brought the Shermans and their kin to wealth and national prominence.

The Treaty of Fort Laramie bought a few years’ peace in the westward march of the new American economy but, far from resolving the incompatibility of the two economies, it simply set the stage for a showdown.

Government officials sided with the settlers over the Sioux. They tried to force Red Cloud’s people to get their supplies and annuities from an agency next to Fort Bennett on the Missouri River, but the Oglalas were high hill Sioux and wanted no part of moving east to a reservation on the low-lying Missouri River. Red Cloud also expected to trade at Fort Laramie, while Sherman wanted to make sure he would not.

Red Cloud repeatedly insisted on his rights, but to no avail. Finally, in the summer of 1870, he took the drastic step of leaving the Plains and taking his complaints directly to the president.

the city, he met up with Spotted Tail of the Brulés, who had been summoned to the capital by government officials to try to undercut Red Cloud. The two leaders buried their differences over the treaty and the past years of war in their mutual desire to protect their people.74