The Earth is Weeping E-Book

Peter Cozzens

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1062

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Sunday Times' Best History Books of 2017 Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History Winner of the 2017 Caroline Bancroft History Prize Shortlisted for the Military History Magazine Book of the Year Award NOMINATED FOR THE 2017 PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN 'Extraordinary... Cozzens has stripped the myth from these stories, but he is such a superb writer that what remains is exquisite' The Times In a sweeping narrative, Peter Cozzens tells the gripping story of the wars that destroyed native ways of life as the American nation continued its expansion onto tribal lands after the Civil War, setting off a conflict that would last nearly three decades. By using original research and first-hand sources from both sides, Cozzens illuminates the encroachment experienced by the tribes and the tribal conflicts over whether to fight or make peace, and explores the squalid lives of soldiers posted to the frontier and the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies. Bringing together a cast of fascinating characters, including Custer, Sherman, Grant and a host of other military and political figures, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Red Cloud, The Earth is Weeping is the fullest account to date of how the West was won... and lost.

Leseprobe

For Antonia

If the lands of the white man are taken, civilization justifies him in resisting the invader. Civilization does more than this: it brands him a coward and a slave if he submits to the wrong. If the savage resists, civilization, with the Ten Commandments in one hand and the sword in the other, demands his immediate extermination.

— Report of the Indian Peace Commissioners, 18681

I remember that the white men were coming to fight us and take away our land, and I thought it was not right. We are humans too and God created us all alike, and I was going to do the best I could to defend my nation. So I started on the warpath when I was sixteen years old.

— FIRE THUNDER, CHEYENNE WARRIOR2

We have heard much talk of the treachery of the Indian. In treachery, broken pledges on the part of high officials, lies, thievery, slaughter of defenseless women and children, and every crime in the catalogue of man’s inhumanity to man the Indian was a mere amateur compared to the “noble white man.”

— LIEUTENANT BRITTON DAVIS, U.S. ARMY3

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Chronology

PROLOGUE Our Children Sometimes Behave Badly

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1 The Plains Aflame

CHAPTER 2 Red Cloud’s War

CHAPTER 3 Warrior and Soldier

CHAPTER 4 Hancock’s War

CHAPTER 5 The Last Treaty

CHAPTER 6 Of Garryowen in Glory

CHAPTER 7 The Bloody Policy of Peace

PART TWO

CHAPTER 8 Tragedy in the Lava Beds

CHAPTER 9 The Buffalo War

CHAPTER 10 No Rest, No Peace

CHAPTER 11 Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse

CHAPTER 12 The Thieves’ Road

CHAPTER 13 Guard Us Against All Misfortune

CHAPTER 14 Last Stand

CHAPTER 15 The Great Father’s Fury

CHAPTER 16 A Warrior I Have Been

PART THREE

CHAPTER 17 I Will Fight No More Forever

CHAPTER 18 The Utes Must Go!

CHAPTER 19 Return to Apacheria

CHAPTER 20 Like So Many Vultures, Greedy for Blood

CHAPTER 21 Once I Moved Like the Wind

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 22 A Clash of Visions

CHAPTER 23 The Place of the Big Killings

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

MAPS

  1. Tribes of the American West, 1866

  2. The Northern Plains

  3. The Southern Plains

  4. Apacheria

  5. Red Cloud’s War, 1866–1868

  6. Sheridan’s 1868–1869 Campaign

  7. The Modoc War, 1872–1873

  8. The Red River War, 1874–1875

  9. Crook’s Tonto Basin Campaign, 1872–1873

10. The Yellowstone and Black Hills Expeditions, 1873–1874

11. The Little Bighorn Campaign, May–June 1876

12. The Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25, 1876

13. Closing Out the Great Sioux War, July 1876–May 1877

14. The Cheyennes, November 1876–January 1879

15. The Nez Perce War, 1877

16. The Ute War, 1879

17. The Sierra Madre, 1883–1886

18. Lakota Reservations and Army Deployment, November–December 1890

19. Wounded Knee, December 29, 1890

CHRONOLOGY

1862

AUGUST–DECEMBER · Dakota (Sioux) Uprising, Minnesota.

1864

NOVEMBER 29 · Sand Creek Massacre, Colorado.

1865

JUNE 27 · General Sherman assumes command of the Military Division of the Missouri.

OCTOBER · Little Arkansas River Treaties negotiated with Southern Plains tribes.

1866

JULY · Red Cloud’s War on Bozeman Trail, Montana Territory, begins.

DECEMBER 21 · Fetterman Fight, Montana Territory.

1867

APRIL 19 · General Hancock burns Pawnee Fork villages in Kansas, initiating Hancock’s War.

JULY 1 · Kidder Massacre, Kansas.

AUGUST 1 · Hayfield Fight, Montana Territory.

AUGUST 2 · Wagon Box Fight, Montana Territory.

1868

FEBRUARY 29 · General Sheridan assumes command of the Department of the Missouri.

SEPTEMBER 17–19 · Battle of Beecher Island, Colorado.

NOVEMBER 4 · Chief Red Cloud signs Fort Laramie Treaty, ending Red Cloud’s War.

NOVEMBER 27 · Battle of the Washita, Indian Territory.

1869

JULY 11 · Battle of Summit Springs, Kansas. SUMMER · Sitting Bull elected head chief of non-reservation Lakotas.

1870

JANUARY 23 · Massacre of a Piegan village on the Marias River, Montana Territory.

1871

APRIL 30 · Camp Grant Massacre, Arizona Territory.

OCTOBER · Colonel Mackenzie’s first campaign on the Staked Plain, Texas.

1872

SEPTEMBER 28 · Battle of the North Fork of the Red River, Texas.

NOVEMBER 29 · Clash on Lost River, Oregon, beginning Modoc War.

DECEMBER 28 · Battle of Salt River Canyon, Arizona Territory.

1873

APRIL 11 · Modocs assassinate General Canby.

AUGUST 4 and 11 · Custer skirmishes with Sitting Bull’s Lakota coalition.

OCTOBER 3 · Modoc Captain Jack is hanged.

1874

JUNE 8 · Apache chief Cochise dies.

JUNE 27 · Battle of Adobe Walls, Indian Territory.

JULY– AUGUST · Custer discovers gold in the Black Hills.

SEPTEMBER 28 · Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, Texas.

NOVEMBER 8 · Battle of McClellan Creek, Texas.

1875

APRIL 23 · Slaughter of Southern Cheyennes at Sappa Creek, Kansas.

NOVEMBER 3 · President Grant convenes secret White House meeting to plan strategy for provoking war with the Lakotas.

1876

MARCH 17 · Battle of Powder River, Montana Territory.

EARLY JUNE · Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes hold joint Sun Dance at Deer Medicine Rocks, Montana Territory.

JUNE 17 · Battle of the Rosebud, Montana Territory.

JUNE 25 · Battle of the Little Bighorn, Montana Territory.

SEPTEMBER 9 · Battle of Slim Buttes, Dakota Territory.

SEPTEMBER · Reservation Lakota chiefs relinquish the Unceded Indian Territory.

OCTOBER 21 · Battle of Cedar Creek, Montana Territory.

NOVEMBER 25 · Destruction of Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyenne village on the Red Fork of the Powder River, Wyoming Territory.

1877

JANUARY 8 · Battle of Wolf Mountain, Montana Territory.

MAY 6 · Crazy Horse surrenders at Fort Robinson, Nebraska.

MAY 7 · Sitting Bull enters Canada.

JUNE 17 · Battle of White Bird Canyon, Idaho Territory, first clash of the Nez Perce War.

JULY 11– 12 · Battle of the Clearwater, Idaho Territory.

AUGUST 9– 10 · Battle of the Big Hole, Montana Territory.

SEPTEMBER 5 · Crazy Horse is killed at Fort Robinson.

SEPTEMBER 30– OCTOBER 5 · Battle of Bear Paw Mountain, Montana Territory, and the surrender of Nez Perce chief Joseph.

1878

SEPTEMBER 9 · Northern Cheyenne exodus begins.

1879

JANUARY 9 · Northern Cheyenne outbreak from Fort Robinson.

MARCH 25 · Chief Little Wolf surrenders, ending Northern Cheyenne exodus.

SEPTEMBER 29– OCTOBER 5 · Battle of Milk Creek, Colorado.

1880

AUGUST 6 · Battle of Rattlesnake Springs, Texas.

OCTOBER 15 · Apache chief Victorio killed at Tres Castillos, Chihuahua, Mexico.

1881

JULY 20 · Sitting Bull surrenders at Fort Buford, Dakota Territory.

AUGUST 30 · Battle of Cibecue Creek, Arizona Territory.

1882

JULY 17 · Battle of Big Dry Wash, Arizona Territory.

1883

MAY– JUNE · Crook’s Sierra Madre Campaign, Mexico.

MAY 10 · Sitting Bull becomes an “agency Indian” on the Great Sioux Reservation.

1885

MAY 17 · Geronimo breaks out of White Mountain Reservation, Arizona Territory.

1886

MARCH 25– 27 · Crook and Geronimo meet at Cañon des los Embudos, Sonora, Mexico.

SEPTEMBER 3 · Geronimo surrenders to General Miles at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona Territory.

SEPTEMBER 8 · Chiricahua Apaches removed from Arizona Territory.

1889

JUNE · Sioux Land Commission breaks up the Great Sioux Reservation.

1890

DECEMBER 15 · Sitting Bull is killed on the Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota.

DECEMBER 29 · Tragedy at Wounded Knee Creek, Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota.

1891

JANUARY 15 · Brulé and Oglala Lakotas surrender at Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota.

THE EARTHIS WEEPING

PROLOGUE

OUR CHILDREN SOMETIMES BEHAVE BADLY

PATRONS OF P. T. BARNUM’S American Museum in April 1863 were in for a treat. For twenty-five cents, they could gaze upon eleven Plains Indian chiefs just arrived in New York City from a visit to the “Great Father” President Abraham Lincoln. These were not the “random beggars or drunken red men from Eastern reservations” that Barnum normally presented to the public, The New York Times assured readers. They were Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches— “roamers of the remotest valleys of the Rocky Mountains.” Barnum promised three dramatic performances daily, but the engagement was strictly limited. “Come now, or you’re too late,” trumpeted the great showman. “They are longing for their green fields and wild forest homes, and must be seen now or not at all.”1

Barnum teased New Yorkers with extravagant previews. He rode through the streets of Manhattan with the Indians in an oversized carriage preceded by a marching band. The great showman and the chiefs made stops at schools, where children performed calisthenics and sang songs for them. Newspapers responded with amused derision, but the Indians captivated the public. Crowds flocked to the four-tier theater of Barnum’s Broadway Street gallery to see staged “pow-wows.” The Indians said little, but their painted faces, long braids, buckskin scalp shirts, and scalp-trimmed leggings delighted show goers. At the final curtain call on April 18, Chief Lean Bear of the Southern Cheyennes bade New Yorkers farewell on behalf of the delegation.2

Chief Lean Bear was a member of the Council of Forty-Four, the governing body of the Cheyenne people. Council chiefs were peacemakers, enjoined by tribal custom never to permit passion to displace reason and to always act on behalf of the tribe’s best interests, which in 1863 most elder Cheyenne chiefs construed as friendly relations with the mushrooming white population in the Territory of Colorado that crowded their already diminished hunting lands. But official Washington was troubled. Confederate agents were rumored to be circulating among the Plains Indians, trying to incite them to war. To counter the threat (which was in fact baseless) and smooth over differences with the tribes, the Indian Bureau had arranged for Lean Bear and ten other chiefs to visit the Great Father. The Indian agent Samuel G. Colley and their white interpreter accompanied them.

On the morning of March 26, 1863, two weeks before the opening of their New York extravaganza, the Indians, their agent, and their interpreter had filed into the East Room of the White House through a murmuring throng of cabinet secretaries, foreign diplomats, and distinguished curiosity seekers. “Maintaining that dignity or stolidity characteristic of the stoics of the woods,” a Washington journalist told his readers, “they quietly seated themselves on the carpet in a semicircle, and with an air of recognition to the destiny of greatness to be gazed at, seemed quite satisfied with the brilliancy of their own adornings and colorings.”3

After a fifteen-minute wait, President Lincoln strode into the room and asked the chiefs if they had anything to say. Lean Bear arose. As the crowd of dignitaries pressed closer, Lean Bear momentarily lost his composure. The chief stammered that he had much to say but was so nervous that he needed a chair. Two chairs were brought, and Lincoln sat down opposite the chief. Cradling his long-stem pipe, Lean Bear spoke, hesitantly at first, but with a growing eloquence. He told Lincoln that his invitation had traveled a long way to reach them and the chiefs had traveled far to hear his counsel. He had no pockets in which to hide the Great Father’s words but would treasure them in his heart and faithfully carry them back to his people.

Lean Bear addressed Lincoln as an equal. The president, he said, lived in splendor with a finer lodge, yet he, Lean Bear, was like the president, a great chief at home. The Great Father must counsel his white children to abstain from acts of violence so that both Indians and whites might travel safely across the plains. Lean Bear deplored the white man’s war then raging in the East and prayed for its end. He closed with a reminder to Lincoln that as chiefs of their peoples he and the other Indian leaders must return home, and Lean Bear asked the president to expedite their departure.4

Then Lincoln spoke. He began with good-humored but marked condescension, telling the chiefs of wonders beyond their imagination, of “pale-faced people” in the room who had come from distant countries, of the earth being a “great, round ball teeming with whites.” He called for a globe and had a professor show them the ocean and the continents, the many countries populated with whites, and finally the broad swath of beige representing the Great Plains of the United States.

The geography lesson over, Lincoln turned somber. “You have asked for my advice . . . I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race excepting living as they do, by the cultivation of the earth. It is the object of this government,” continued Lincoln, “to be on terms of peace with you and with all our red brethren . . . and if our children should sometimes behave badly and violate treaties, it is against our wish. You know,” he added, “it is not always possible for any father to have his children do precisely as he wishes them to do.” Lincoln said an officer called the commissioner of Indian affairs would see to their early return west. The chiefs were given bronzed-copper peace medals and papers signed by Lincoln attesting to their friendship with the government, after which Lean Bear thanked the president and the council concluded.5

The chiefs’ stay in Washington did not end with the White House meeting, however. As if the journey east had not sufficed to demonstrate the power of the white people, for ten days the commissioner of Indian affairs insisted on shuffling the delegation from one government building and army fortification to another. Then Agent Colley accepted P. T. Barnum’s invitation to New York. By the time the Indians boarded a train for Denver on April 30, 1863, they had been in the white cities nearly a month.6

President Lincoln’s peace pledge rang hollow in the Territory of Colorado, where Governor John Evans’s idea of interracial amity was to confine the Cheyennes on a small and arid reservation. Although they had signed a treaty three years earlier agreeing to accept reservation life, Lean Bear and the other peace chiefs were powerless to compel their people to relinquish their freedom. Cheyenne hunting parties ranged over eastern Colorado and the unsettled western Kansas plains as they had always done. They harmed no whites; indeed, the Cheyennes considered themselves at peace with their white neighbors, but Coloradans nonetheless found their presence intolerable. Governor Evans and the military district commander, Colonel John Chivington, who had political ambitions of his own in Colorado, took dubious reports of cattle theft by hungry Cheyennes as an excuse to declare war on the tribe. In early April 1864, Chivington ordered cavalry to fan out into western Kansas and to kill Cheyennes “whenever and wherever found.”

Lean Bear and his fellow peace chief Black Kettle had passed the winter and early spring quietly near Fort Larned, Kansas, where they traded buffalo robes. Now tribal runners brought word of the imminent danger. Recalling their hunting parties, Lean Bear and Black Kettle started their people northward to find protection in numbers among Cheyenne bands gathering on the Smoky Hill River. But the army found them first.

On the night of May 15, 1864, Lean Bear and Black Kettle camped on a muddy, cottonwood-fringed stream three miles short of the Smoky Hill. At dawn, hunting parties fanned out onto the open plain in search of buffalo. Before long, they were back, pounding their ponies to the lodge of the camp crier. They had spotted four columns of mounted soldiers on the horizon, and the troops had cannon. As the crier awakened the village, Lean Bear rode forward with a small escort to meet the soldiers. His medal from President Lincoln rested on his breast in plain view, and in his hand he carried the peace papers from Washington. From atop a low rise, Lean Bear saw the troopers at the same time they saw him. Their commander ordered his eighty-four men and two mountain howitzers into a battle line. Behind Lean Bear, four hundred warriors from the village assembled warily.7

Lean Bear rode forward, and a sergeant cantered toward him. All must have seemed well to the chief. After all, he and the Great Father had pledged mutual peace. Dignitaries from around the globe had greeted him at the White House. Army officers in the forts around Washington had been gracious and respectful. The people of New York City had honored him. He had his medal and peace papers to prove that he was the white man’s friend. But the Great Plains was a world unto itself.

Lean Bear was just thirty feet from the soldiers when they opened fire. The chief was dead before he hit the ground. After the smoke cleared, several troops broke ranks and pumped more bullets into his corpse. As Lincoln had cautioned Lean Bear, his children sometimes behaved badly.8

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

That a general would offer such a candid and forceful public defense of the Indians seems implausible because it contradicts an enduring myth: that the regular army was the implacable foe of the Indian.

No epoch in American history, in fact, is more deeply steeped in myth than the era of the Indian Wars of the American West. For 125 years, much of both popular and academic history, film, and fiction has depicted the period as an absolute struggle between good and evil, reversing the roles of heroes and villains as necessary to accommodate a changing national conscience.

In the first eighty years following the tragedy at Wounded Knee, which marked the end of Indian resistance, the nation romanticized Indian fighters and white settlers and vilified or trivialized the Indians who resisted them. The army appeared as the shining knights of an enlightened government dedicated to conquering the wilderness and to “civilizing” the West and its Native American inhabitants.

In 1970, the story reversed itself, and the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme. Americans were developing an acute sense of the countless wrongs done the Indians. Dee Brown’s elegantly written and passionately wrought Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and, later that same year, the film Little Big Man shaped a new saga that articulated the nation’s feelings of guilt. In the public mind, the government and the army of the latter decades of the nineteenth century became seen as willful exterminators of the Native peoples of the West. (In fact, the government’s response to what was commonly called the “Indian problem” was inconsistent, and although massacres occurred and treaties were broken, the federal government never contemplated genocide. That the Indian way of life must be eradicated if the Indian were to survive, however, was taken for granted.)

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee still deeply influences the way Americans perceive the Indian Wars and has remained the standard popular work on the era. It is at once ironic and unique that so crucial a period of our history remains largely defined by a work that made no attempt at historical balance. Dee Brown gave as the stated purpose of his book the presentation of “the conquest of the American West as the victims experienced it,” hence the book’s subtitle, An Indian History of the American West. Brown’s definition of victims was severely circumscribed. Several tribes, most notably the Shoshones, Crows, and Pawnees, cast their fate with the whites. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee dismissed these tribes as “mercenaries” with no attempt to understand them or explain their motives. These Indians, like the army and the government, became cardboard cutouts, mere foils for the “victims” in the story.

Such a one-sided approach to the study of history ultimately serves no good purpose; it is impossible to judge honestly the true injustice done the Indians, or the army’s real role in those tragic times, without a thorough and nuanced understanding of the white perspective as well as that of the Indians. What I have sought to do in this book, then, is bring historical balance to the story of the Indian Wars. I hesitate to use the word “restore” when speaking of balance, because it is the pendulum swings that have defined society’s understanding of the subject since the closing of the military frontier in 1891.

Of inestimable benefit to my work has been the wealth of Indian primary sources that have become available since the publication of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. They have enabled me to tell the story equally through the words of Indian and white participants and, through a deeper understanding of all parties to the conflict, better address the many myths, misconceptions, and falsehoods surrounding the Indian Wars.

A myth as enduring as that of an army inherently antagonistic toward the Indians is that of united Indian resistance to white encroachment. No tribe famous for fighting the government was ever united for war or peace. Intense factionalism ruled, each tribe having its war and peace factions that struggled for dominance and clashed, sometimes violently, with one another. One of the most committed advocates of peaceful accommodation with the whites paid for his convictions with his life; a disgruntled member of the tribe’s war faction poisoned him.

Unanimity existed only among tribes that accepted the white invasion. Influential chiefs such as Washakie of the Shoshones saw the government as guarantors of his people’s survival against more powerful tribal enemies. The Shoshones, Crows, and Pawnees all proved invaluable army allies in war, following the adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Not only did the Indians fail to unite in opposing the westward expansion of “civilization,” but they also continued to make war on one another. There was no sense of “Indianness” until it was too late, and then it came but dimly through a millennial faith that brought only bloodshed, horror, and broken hopes.

Intertribal conflict was in part the consequence of a fact that has never been appreciated but that will become apparent as this book unfolds: that the wars between Indians and the government for the northern plains, the seat of the bloodiest and longest struggles, represented a displacement of one immigrant people by another, rather than the destruction of a deeply rooted way of life. A decade after Lean Bear’s murder, an army officer asked a Cheyenne chief why his tribe preyed on their Crow neighbors. He responded, “We stole the hunting grounds of the Crows because they were the best. We wanted more room.”10 That was a sentiment that the Coloradans determined to rid their territory of the Cheyennes could readily appreciate.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

THE PLAINS AFLAME

PRESIDENT LINCOLN vastly understated the case when he told Lean Bear that his white children sometimes behaved badly. In the two and a half centuries between the settlement of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and Lincoln’s cautionary words to the Cheyenne chief, a relentlessly expansionist white population had driven the Indians westward without regard to treaty obligations or, sometimes, even simple humanity. The government of the young American Republic had not intended to exterminate the Indians. Nor had the founding fathers simply coveted Indian land. They had also wanted to “enlighten and refine” the Indian, to lead him from “savagery” to Christianity, and to bestow on him the blessings of agriculture and the domestic arts—in other words, to destroy an incompatible Indian way of life by civilizing rather than by killing the Indians.

The “civilized” Indians would not live on their homeland, which the federal government meant to purchase from them at the best possible price by means of treaties negotiated on the legal premise that tribes held title to their land and possessed sufficient sovereignty to transfer title to the true sovereign; that is to say, the United States. The federal government also pledged never to deprive the Indians of their land without their consent or to make war on them without congressional authorization. To prevent settlers or individual states from infringing on Indian rights, in 1790 Congress enacted the first of six statutes collectively known as the Nonintercourse Act, which prohibited the purchase of Indian land without federal approval and carried stiff punishments for crimes committed against Indians.

Not surprisingly, the punishment provision of the law quickly proved toothless. 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. Once sucked into the fray, the small American army spent two decades and nearly all its limited resources in wresting the Old Northwest from powerful Indian confederations in undeclared wars. That set a dismal precedent; henceforth, treaties would be a mere legal veneer to conceal wholesale landgrabs that Congress tried to palliate with cash annuities and gifts of merchandise.

After George Washington, no president lost much sleep over Indian rights. Indeed, the executive branch led the way in divesting the Indians of their homelands. In 1817, President James Monroe told General Andrew Jackson that “the savage requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life, and must yield to it.” As president in the 1830s, Jackson took Monroe’s injunction to its harsh but logical extreme. With the authority granted him under the Removal Act of 1830, and by employing varying degrees of duress, Jackson swept the roving tribes of the Old Northwest beyond the Mississippi River. When southerners pressured him to open Indian lands in Alabama and Georgia, Jackson also uprooted the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles—and resettled them west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory, an unsustainably large tract spreading over several future states, which was gradually reduced to comprise solely present-day Oklahoma. Most of the “civilized” Indians went peaceably, but it took two long and bloody conflicts for the army to dislodge the Seminoles from their Florida strongholds, and a handful ultimately were allowed to remain.1

Jackson never doubted the justice of his actions, and he truly believed that once beyond the Mississippi River the Indians would be forever free from white usurpation. Fur trappers, traders, and missionaries would be permitted to pass through the Indians’ new home and venture out onto the Great Plains, or into the mountains beyond, but there assuredly would be no further upheaval because army explorers had reported the Great Plains as unsuited to white settlement, and the public took them at their word.

But already there were pressures on the periphery. A burgeoning fur trade on the Missouri River expanded white contact with the western tribes. Also, the removal treaties bound the federal government to protect the relocated tribes not only from acquisitive whites but also from hostile Plains Indians, who had no desire to share their domain with newcomers, be they Indian or white. Meanwhile, white Missourians and Arkansans demanded protection from the dispossessed Indians in the event they found their new land somewhat less than the Eden they had been promised (which they did). The government’s answer was to build a chain of nine forts from Minnesota southward to northwest Louisiana between 1817 and 1842, creating a tantalizing abstraction known as the Permanent Indian Frontier.

Of the 275,000 Indians whose homelands lay outside Indian Territory and beyond the newly constituted military barrier, the government cared little and knew even less.2 White conceptions of the Indians of the American West were simplistic and tended toward extremes; Indians were either noble and heroic or barbaric and loathsome. But when the “Permanent Indian Frontier” crumbled less than a decade after its creation, a cataclysmic chain of events suddenly brought whites and Indians face-to-face west of the Mississippi.

The first crack in the permanent frontier appeared in 1841. Lured by the promise of fertile land in California and the Oregon Country, a few lumbering caravans of white-topped prairie schooners ventured tentatively onto the plains. The trickle soon became a torrent, and the rutted wagon road thus created along the shifting sands of the dreary Platte River became etched in the nation’s psyche as the Oregon Trail.

Then came the annexation of Texas in 1845, and a year later the United States and Britain settled a contentious dispute over the Oregon boundary. In early 1848, the War with Mexico ended in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which Mexico ceded California, the Great Basin, and the Southwest, as well as its claims to Texas, recognizing the Rio Grande as the international border. In just three years, the United States had grown by nearly a million square miles and become a continental nation. Expansionist orators exhorted Americans to fulfill the nation’s Manifest Destiny by emigrating to Texas, California, or the Pacific Northwest. (No one as yet considered the Great Plains other than a vast and tedious obstruction.) In January 1848, gold was discovered in California’s American River. The following year saw a mass migration unequaled in the young nation’s history. Within a decade, there were more whites in California than there were Indians in the entire West. Genocidal gold seekers decimated California’s peaceable small tribes, and the growth of white settlements in the newly organized Oregon Territory alarmed the stronger northwestern tribes.

As yet there had been no open conflict with the Indians in the West, but the peace was tenuous, warned the commissioner of Indian affairs. The Indians, he said, had abstained from attacking emigrant trains out of an expectation of reward from the government and not from fear, because they had not felt “our power and know nothing of our greatness and resources.”3

They would not feel that power for some time to come; the government lacked anything resembling a coherent Indian policy, and the small regular army needed time to build forts in the West. In any case, the commissioner of Indian affairs need not have feared any great, concerted resistance to the white deluge. 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.

And this was their Achilles’ heel. Only in the Pacific Northwest were the Indians able to unite against the sudden and vigorous white expansion. Few tribes in the West proved able to maintain the internal unity necessary to oppose the white advance. Nearly every tribe broke into two factions, one advocating peaceful accommodation with the whites and adopting white ways, the other holding fast to the traditional ways, resisting the government’s enticements to go peaceably onto reservations. 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. The army would also come to benefit immeasurably from the intertribal warfare that lay at the very foundation of the culture of the Indians of the West. That the army needed Indian allies in order to prevail would prove axiomatic.

In the relations between tribes, there was nothing subtle; outsiders were either allies or enemies. The most intense intertribal conflict occurred on the northern plains, where warfare was fluid and continuous, as tribes struggled to conquer or protect hunting grounds. Tribes everywhere in the West survived and prospered by entering into alliances; those that went it alone suffered horribly. Open battles were rare; wars normally took the form of endless small raids and counter-raids that chipped away at the loser’s domain.

On the Great Plains, the foundation of the Indian way of life was the American bison, commonly known as the buffalo. Buffalo meat was a staple. From the hide, the Indians fashioned robes for warmth and trade, containers for transport and storage, and skins for the distinctive conical tipi—also known as a lodge. No part of the animal was wasted. Not only did the buffalo undergird the economy, but it also shaped the Plains Indians’ religion and culture.

Well before the first American ventured beyond the Mississippi River, the European gifts of horses, guns, and disease had radically altered Plains and Rocky Mountain Indians’ cultures. In the sixteenth century, the Spaniards had introduced the horse to the New World. As the Spanish frontier pushed into the present-day southwestern United States, horses fell into the hands of Indians. Afterward, through theft and barter, the horse culture spread rapidly from tribe to tribe. In 1630, no tribe was mounted; by 1750, all of the Plains tribes and most of the Rocky Mountain Indians rode horses. The horse did not create the buffalo culture, but it made hunting infinitely easier. Horses also increased the frequency and fury of intertribal clashes, because warriors were able to range over distances previously unimaginable on foot. The gun, introduced to the Indians by French trappers and traders, made the hostile encounters far more deadly. White man’s diseases were deadlier yet, decimating western tribes just as they had ravaged those east of the Mississippi. No one knows precisely how many succumbed, but in 1849 alone cholera carried off half the Indian population of the southern plains.4

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. 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. As it shifted west, the Sioux nation separated into three divisions: the Dakotas, a semisedentary people who clung to the Minnesota River; the Nakotas, who settled east of the Missouri River; and the Lakotas, who wrestled their way onto the northern plains. The Lakotas were the true horse-and-buffalo Sioux of popular imagination, and they constituted nearly half the Sioux nation. The Lakotas in turn divided into seven tribes: the Oglalas, Brulés, Miniconjous, Two Kettles, Hunkpapas, Blackfeet, and Sans Arcs, of which the Oglalas and the Brulés were the largest. In fact, these two tribes alone outnumbered all the non-Lakota Indians on the northern plains.

In their westward march across present-day Nebraska and the Dakotas during the early nineteenth century, the Lakotas gradually allied themselves with the Cheyennes and the Arapahos, who had been pushed onto the northern plains in advance of the Lakotas and had already forged an enduring bond, albeit an odd coupling. Their languages were mutually unintelligible, an impediment they overcame with a sophisticated sign language, and their characters could not have been more dissimilar. The Arapahos tended to be a kindly and accommodating people, whereas the Cheyennes evolved into fearsome warriors. The first contact between the Lakotas and the Cheyenne-Arapaho combination was hostile, because they competed for the game-rich Black Hills country. “Peace would be made,” a Cheyenne chief recounted. “They would hold out the pipe to us and say, ‘Let us be good friends,’ but time and again treacherously broke their promises.” Not until the 1840s did the Lakotas keep their word. By then, many of the Cheyennes and Arapahos, fed up with the duplicity of the Lakotas and lured by white traders, had migrated south, forming the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho tribes and leaving the Lakotas the undisputed suzerains of the northern plains.

The Lakotas and the Cheyennes and Arapahos who remained on the northern plains had the same tribal enemies—the badly outnumbered but hard-fighting Crows of present-day central Montana and northern Wyoming and the semi-agricultural Pawnees who dwelled along the Platte River in Nebraska. The basis of the rivalry was both a relentless drive by the Lakota–Northern Cheyenne–Northern Arapaho alliance to expand their hunting lands and the warrior culture common to all Plains tribes. Geographically separated from each other, the Crows and the Pawnees never formed an alliance, but being badly in need of friends—or enemies of their enemies conceived of as friends—both tribes instead eventually cast their fate with the whites.5

Similar jostling had occurred on the southern plains. The Kiowas, expelled from the Black Hills by the Lakotas, had retreated southward into the country known as Comancheria, where they first fought and then concluded an alliance with the Comanches. The uncontested lords of the southern plains and the most accomplished horsemen in the West, the Comanches were a fierce and cruel people who roamed and raided at will from the Arkansas River deep into Texas. They warred sporadically with Mexico but got along well enough with the Americans until settlers threatened their hunting grounds. The Republic of Texas treated the Comanches even worse than had the Mexican government, pursuing a policy of betrayal and brutality that culminated in the slaughter of a Comanche peace delegation. The Comanches afterward counted Texans as their bitterest enemies, and they regarded depredations against Texas settlers as both just retribution for the murder of their peace chiefs and good sport.

The Southern Arapahos and Southern Cheyennes availed themselves of their proximity to Comancheria to raid Comanche and Kiowa horse herds until 1840, when the four tribes concluded a permanent peace, forming a potentially potent combination to contest the advancing whites.6

All but the most dull-witted federal official understood that the quiet along the overland roads, which had so pleasantly surprised the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1849, was temporary. As emigrants depleted timber, grass, and game at an alarming rate, Indians along the travel routes were reduced to near starvation. Recognizing that the Indians must eventually either stand and fight, ally themselves with the whites, or perish, the government accepted three responsibilities: to provide military protection to the emigrant roads and to the burgeoning white settlements; to extinguish Indian land titles; and to develop a humane policy to provide for the divested Indians. That the government would meet its responsibilities looked doubtful. The small frontier army had barely enough men to defend its small forts, much less protect emigrants. Negotiation appeared the only viable short-term strategy, and to treat with the Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs called on Tom Fitzpatrick, a former mountain man turned Indian agent. Enjoying the implicit trust of the Plains tribes, Fitzpatrick had proven more capable than any other agent of performing the herculean duties of the office as it was then defined. As the federal government’s representative to one or more tribes, an Indian agent was required to work to prevent conflict between settlers and Indians, cooperate with the military as needed to keep the peace, and distribute government annuities honestly and promptly.

In 1851, Fitzpatrick assembled ten thousand Northern Plains Indians at Fort Laramie for a council of unsurpassed magnitude. The chiefs signed an agreement called the Fort Laramie Treaty—which, as was nearly always the case, the Indians understood only dimly, if at all—and then joyously accepted gifts for their people from the Great Father. Two years later, Fitzpatrick concluded a similar accord at Fort Atkinson with the Southern Plains tribes. The dual treaties were models of brevity, their provisions seemingly unambiguous. The Indians were to refrain from warring among themselves or against Americans; to accept formal tribal boundaries; to permit the government to build roads and forts in their territories (it already had); and to not molest pioneers transiting their country. In exchange, the government promised to shield the Indians from white despoilers of their lands (which it lacked either the capacity or the will to do) and to pay the tribes annuities for fifty years (which the Senate subsequently slashed to ten years).

Fitzpatrick had done his job, but he condemned the treaties as mere temporizing. “The policy must be either an army or an annuity,” he argued with uncommon prescience. “Either an inducement must be offered to them greater than the gains of plunder, or a force must be at hand able to restrain them and check their depredations. Any compromise between the two systems will only be liable to all the miseries of failure.” Fitzpatrick also disapproved of the custom of extinguishing Indian title for the simple reason, he said, that the Plains Indians held no title beyond a “vagabond right,” amounting to the privilege of occupancy by conquest. Few Indians would have argued with him, and none seriously considered halting raids on tribal foes simply because the government willed it. Nor would they accept tribal boundaries. “You have split my land and I don’t like it,” declared a Lakota chief. “These lands once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we whipped these nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians.”7

Despite the treaties, conflict often arose between the army and the Indians, though seldom purposely. Sometimes it resulted from a single rash or foolish act committed by hot-blooded young warriors or blundering junior army officers. Such was the case on the northern plains in August 1854, when John L. Grattan, a cocky lieutenant fresh from West Point who had boasted that he could crush the entire Lakota people with a handful of infantry and a howitzer, picked a fight with the peaceable Brulé chief Conquering Bear over an emigrant’s stray cow that a warrior had butchered. Conquering Bear offered to make restitution, but Grattan instead fired on his village. When the smoke cleared, Conquering Bear lay mortally wounded, and Grattan and twenty-nine soldiers were dead.

Grattan’s foolhardy act had constituted naked aggression. Certainly it was provocation enough for the Brulés to declare open war on the whites. Nonetheless, the Brulés demonstrated remarkable restraint. A war party attacked a stagecoach and killed three passengers; otherwise, emigrant trains continued to pass through the Brulé country unimpeded. But that did not satisfy the War Department, which refused to concede that Grattan’s foolish actions had precipitated the clash. Determined to avenge what it called the Grattan Massacre, the War Department ordered Colonel William S. Harney to administer the Indians a sound “thrashing.” He did so two years later, obliterating a Brulé camp near Blue Water Creek in the Nebraska Territory in September 1856, killing half of the warriors and taking most of the women and children captive. The humbled Brulé chiefs surrendered the perpetrators of the stagecoach raid, among whom was a daring war leader named Spotted Tail. Held at Fort Leavenworth for a year, Spotted Tail found the white man’s power so impressive that he became a lifelong peace advocate, or—as some Lakotas put it—he returned from incarceration “fat, soft, and supine.” Beefy he might have been, but Spotted Tail was hardly supine, and he would rise meteorically to a position of unparalleled power over the Brulé tribe.

For a decade, the specter of Harney “the Butcher” haunted the entire Lakota nation. There was much loud talk in council lodges but no action—just a gnawing hunger for revenge. Harney empathized with the Indians. Taking no pleasure in his victory over the Brulés, he reminded Washington that “the Indians had been simply defending their rights.”8

In the spirit of injustice engendered by the “Grattan Massacre,” the government also decided that the Cheyennes, who had caused emigrants no real trouble and had no intention of doing so, nonetheless merited punishment. An army attack on an unsuspecting Cheyenne village on the Solomon River in the Kansas Territory in the summer of 1857 killed few warriors but scored a psychological victory, teaching them, according to the Cheyenne Indian agent, the futility of opposing the white man.

It was a bad moment for the Cheyennes to concede defeat. The year after the Solomon River fight, white prospectors found gold in present-day eastern Colorado. Almost overnight, the city of Denver sprang up. Miners and farmers elbowed their way onto Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting grounds, overrunning most of the huge tract promised the tribes under the Treaty of Fort Laramie negotiated by Tom Fitzpatrick a decade earlier. In February 1861, ten Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs—Black Kettle and Lean Bear among them—signed the Fort Wise Treaty, which committed their tribes to live on a pitifully small reservation on the arid plains of southeastern Colorado Territory. Although most Cheyennes and Arapahos disavowed the chiefs’ pledges and continued to inhabit their traditional hunting grounds, they committed no acts of violence. None of the Indians could foresee the horrible consequences their passive resistance would soon engender.

Meanwhile, farther south, efforts to subdue the Kiowas and the Comanches proved worse than useless. Neither tribe molested the emigrant trails, but they continued to attack Texas settlements. That Texas now constituted part of the United States was of no consequence to them. When regular army protection proved wanting, the Texas Rangers took the lead in whipping the Comanches in three engagements that inflamed the Indians, who not only visited unprecedented devastation on the Texas and Mexican frontiers but also struck at westbound travelers.

The military was largely powerless to stop them. Much of the antebellum frontier army’s limited resources were devoted to quashing Indian uprisings in the Pacific Northwest that dragged on for three bloody years. At the conclusion of the last war in 1858, the vanquished Indians signed treaties that fixed their reservation boundaries. The herding of the Pacific Northwest tribes onto carefully prescribed tracts and the Fort Wise Treaty three years later were the first steps in what was gradually to become known as the policy of concentration. Indians would be removed from land that whites wanted or had already taken and relocated as far as possible from the contaminating influence of the invaders. Then would begin the noble experiment of converting the Indians into Christian farmers. Of course, because most Indians were not interested in the blessings the white man wished to bestow, government attempts at concentration usually meant war.9

The whites were coming now, in numbers incomprehensible to the Indians. They assaulted Indian lands from every direction. Settlers rolled in from the east, while miners poked at the periphery of the Indian country from the west, north, and south and simply overran it when new mineral strikes were made. In westerners’ parlance, Indians who resisted the onslaught were to be “rounded up” and rendered harmless on reservation land too miserable to interest the whites. It would be a grand encirclement and a slow strangulation that would require three decades to choke the life out of recalcitrant Indians.

During the tumultuous 1850s, only the Southwest remained quiet. The vast region, which embraced not only present-day Arizona and New Mexico but also northern Mexico, was called Apacheria after its dominant Indian occupants, the Apaches. Far from being a distinct tribe, the Apaches were a loose conglomeration of bands divided into two great divisions, the Eastern and the Western.10 Two groups of the Western Division—the Western Apaches and the Chiricahuas, neither of which had much use for the other—would cause the government the greatest difficulties.

By the time the first Americans ventured into Apacheria in the 1820s, the Western Apaches and the Chiricahua Apaches had been at war, first with Spaniards and then with Mexicans and their Indian collaborators, for nearly two centuries. Confounding troops, laying waste to haciendas, and levying tribute on towns, the Apaches rendered the Mexican presence in Apacheria tenuous at best. The Apaches initially greeted Americans warmly as fellow enemies of the Mexicans, but tension quickly mounted after the United States obtained much of Apacheria under the Gadsden Purchase Treaty of 1853, which obligated Washington to prevent Apache raids into Mexico. This the Apaches could not comprehend. The Mexicans remained their enemies and had been the enemies of the Americans; why, then, should they cease raiding south of the border as long as they behaved themselves north of it?

Then, in 1860, prospectors discovered gold in the mountainous western reaches of the Territory of New Mexico, the heart of the Chihenne (Eastern Chiricahua Apache) homeland. When the Chihenne chief Mangas Coloradas attempted to broker a peaceful accommodation, prospectors horsewhipped him, whereupon he declared war on the Americans. Even more egregious was the mistreatment accorded Cochise, chief of the Chokonens (Central Chiricahuas), who was on friendly terms with settlers in his desert homeland in present-day southeastern Arizona. George H. Bascom, another blundering lieutenant cut from the same West Point mold as Grattan, squandered the goodwill in February 1861 when he arrested Cochise and several of his warriors under the mistaken impression that the chief had kidnapped a boy from a distant ranch. Cochise escaped and took hostages of his own. After several days of fruitless parleying, Cochise killed his hostages, and Bascom hanged the Chiricahuas, including Cochise’s brother. With that, Arizona exploded in an orgy of violence.

And then, in the spring of 1861, the regular army vanished from the frontier. Indians puzzled over the abrupt departure of the soldiers. The Chiricahuas, concluding they had beaten the army, stepped up their depredations. But the Plains Indians hesitated and in so doing missed a brief, unique opportunity to slow the white tide.

The Plains Indians’ moment to strike passed, and soon new soldiers came—westerners who thought no more of shooting an Indian than they did a deer. They were a tougher caliber of men than the regulars, and there were far more of them. Fifteen thousand volunteers, drawn from the nearly three million eventually raised by the federal government to combat the Southern rebellion, saw duty in the West during the Civil War, double the strength of the antebellum frontier regular army. Most hailed from California, which was to be expected, because the state’s population stood at nearly half a million and continued to climb. In fact, the Civil War caused no drop in emigration to the West. On the contrary, despite the momentous upheaval that absorbed the energies and resources of the North and the South, mineral strikes throughout the West enticed whites in ever greater numbers into previously undisturbed Indian lands.

Indeed, despite the seemingly endless need for more troops to defeat the Confederacy, the Lincoln administration encouraged people to hit the trails west. 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. Families looking for a fresh start farming on the prairie filled the emigrant roads, already swollen with fortune seekers, and the pressure on Indian lands intensified.

The population boom led to the creation of six territories between 1861 and 1864: Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Montana, Dakota, and Colorado, which grew the fastest of them all. A direct road to Denver was laid. Called the Smoky Hill Trail, it ran through prime Indian hunting ground. Soon stagecoach and telegraph lines crisscrossed the Indian country, while the states of Nebraska and Kansas pushed their borders deeper onto the plains. Although their anger at the white interlopers mounted, the Southern Plains tribes kept the peace, even as the circle of their world grew smaller.

Despite the quiet on the southern plains, there was enough violence elsewhere for two volunteer generals, James H. Carleton and Patrick E. Connor, to achieve fame in the Civil War West. In July 1862, part of Carleton’s “California Column” drove several hundred Chiricahua warriors under Cochise and Mangas Coloradas from Apache Pass, a strategic defile in the heart of Chokonen country. Mangas Coloradas was wounded in the encounter; six months later, a Carleton subordinate lured the chief into camp under a flag of truce and then murdered him. Despite the twin blows, the Chiricahuas were hardly beaten; on the contrary, after Carleton left, Cochise redoubled his effort to depopulate southeastern Arizona.

Continuing east, Carleton vanquished the small Mescalero Apache tribe of the New Mexico Territory. Next he crushed the powerful Navajo nation, which had been engaged with New Mexicans in a long war of raids and retaliation, in a scorched-earth campaign led by his old friend the legendary frontiersman Kit Carson. While Carleton waged war in the Southwest, General Connor cleared the travel routes between California and Utah and then decimated a renegade Shoshone band that had made war on Rocky Mountain gold miners.11

While the Southwest bled and the Rocky Mountains trembled, relative calm prevailed on the northern plains until 1863, when warfare erupted on an unprecedented scale. The cause was indirect—a brutal uprising of the Dakota Sioux, whose once ample Minnesota reservation had shrunk to a sliver of land along the Minnesota River while the white population of the state had soared. Predatory traders plied the Dakotas with liquor and separated them from their annuity money, and missionaries harassed them. Nearby farmers prospered, while hunger and hopelessness stalked the reservation. On August 17, 1862, young warriors returning empty-handed from a hunt murdered six settlers. There was no premeditation, but there was also no containing a decade of accumulated rage. Faced with certain government retaliation, the chiefs chose to fight, and Dakota war parties butchered hundreds of settlers before Union troops drove them onto the plains and into the arms of their Nakota kinsmen. In pitched battles in 1863 and 1864, the army crippled the Dakotas and the Nakotas, who—less a small number who escaped to Canada or joined the Lakotas—afterward submitted to reservation life.

The Minnesota uprising also sent shock waves across the relatively quiescent southern plains. Coloradans, already uneasy at sharing the territory with the Southern Cheyennes and Arapahos, were horrified. They construed the slightest Indian offense—there had been precious few, and those that did occur consisted of bloodless horse and cattle raids—as portending a similar massacre on their soil. Preemptive strikes against the tribes made sense to many Coloradans, including the military district commander, Colonel John Chivington. Indeed, it was Chivington’s policy of preemptive war that had cost Lean Bear his life. After Lean Bear was murdered, Chief Black Kettle had restrained the warriors from wiping out the small army detachment responsible for the atrocity. But neither he nor any other chief could long prevent wrathful warriors from retaliating against the overland routes and isolated ranches in southern Nebraska and western Kansas. No longer merely stock-stealing enterprises, their raids were now grim and gory affairs, replete with rape and butchery. Although most attacks in the summer of 1864 were perpetrated by the Dog Soldiers—an unfailingly belligerent Cheyenne band—young men from Black Kettle’s band were also guilty of some of the more notorious atrocities.

In August, Governor Evans and Colonel Chivington recruited a short-term regiment, the Third Colorado Cavalry, composed of rowdies, ruffians, and gutter trash eager to kill Indians. Before they could act, Black Kettle sued for peace. Evans had invited friendly Indians to separate themselves from the hostiles, and now Black Kettle was doing just that, but the public clamored for revenge. Evans passed the problem to Chivington, whose principal concern was ensuring that his Colorado cavalrymen saw action before their enlistment expired. At daybreak on November 29, Chivington swept down on Black Kettle’s unsuspecting village at Sand Creek. As Chivington deployed for the attack, Black Kettle raised first the American flag and then a white flag over his tipi. But Chivington wasn’t interested in displays of patriotism or truces. He wanted no prisoners taken, and none were. Two hundred Cheyennes, two-thirds of them women and children, were massacred in a manner reminiscent of the Minnesota uprising. They “were scalped, their brains knocked out,” an army interpreter later testified. “The [Coloradans] used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, and mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.” Black Kettle, however, escaped along with his wife, who somehow survived nine wounds. Wanting only to avoid the inevitable cycle of war and retribution, he took the survivors well south of the Arkansas River. Meanwhile, Colonel Chivington and the “Bloody Third” rode into Denver to a hero’s welcome.12

As Indian fury over the Sand Creek Massacre scorched the snow-covered southern plains, Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota chiefs agreed to “raise the battle-axe until death.” That meant not a fight to the finish, as the ominous words suggested, but rather a massive raid followed by a return to customary pursuits like hunting buffalo and sparring with enemy tribes. In January and February 1865, warriors ravaged the Platte River Road and threw Denver into a panic. Then the allied tribes headed north to the Black Hills to escape retribution and recount their exploits to their northern kinsmen, who in turn staged a “war” of their own. As many as three thousand warriors, constituting the largest war party the Great Plains had ever seen, attacked Platte Bridge Station, a strategic but weakly garrisoned military post, mangling a cavalry detachment and ambushing a wagon train. With that, the Indians considered the soldiers sufficiently chastised, and they scattered for the fall buffalo hunt.

In the army’s view, however, the conflict had scarcely begun. In February, the War Department created a sprawling new geographic command called the Military Division of the Missouri to encompass the Great Plains, Texas, and the Rocky Mountains. Headquarters were in St. Louis, Missouri. The division commander, the bombastic but capable major general John Pope, had fashioned plans for a concerted offensive in the early spring of 1865 before Indian ponies recovered from the harsh plains winter and raids resumed on the emigrant routes. Three expeditions were to strike the recalcitrant Plains tribes simultaneously. Pope predicated his strategy on two premises: that Civil War veterans would be available in large numbers for duty in the West, and that he would have authority to deal with hostile tribes as he saw fit.