Today Is a Good Day to Fight: The Indian Wars and the Conquest of the West

appreciated.

INTRODUCTION

I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for Eagles to be Crows. We are poor … but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die … we die defending our rights.

Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Sioux

Sun-blackened and bloated corpses lay spread across the dusty hillsides over several square miles. Colonel John Gibbon’s infantry column had arrived on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. It was 27 June 1876, and officers and men of the 7th Infantry, accompanied by survivors of the more famous 7th Cavalry, walked slowly among the prostrated bodies. Many were clustered together, others lay in stark isolation. All around the sun glinted off thousands of expended cartridge casings clustered in little piles in the short dry grass, and every so many yards a dead horse lay on its side, its legs stiff in the air. Some horses were still alive, an animal standing here and there, black flies swarming over their bleeding wounds, heads down and bridles trailing on the ground.

The human bodies were unrecognisable, both from lying out in the hot sun for two days, and for the furious assaults they had sustained from their enemies, both in life and after death. Heads were missing from some, arms and legs from others. Some were missing noses, eyes or ears, others a finger or a hand. Most had been scalped, many had cut throats, and most had been gutted from sternum to crotch, stinking guts lying in fetid piles beside their bodies. Many of the soldiers’ bodies were shot so full of arrows that they resembled porcupines. All were naked, save for scraps of blood-soaked underwear or an odd sock, their uniforms and equipment long since carried off the field as trophies and spoils of war.

Atop a conical hill above the river valley the corpses were particularly thick, many lying in tight groups beside dead horses, marking a long retreat from the river to high ground. A ring of six dead horses atop the hill marked the final redoubt in what had evidently been a grim fight to the death, and behind the horses lay seven more corpses in various states of undress and decomposition. Gibbon’s men and the cavalry officers went from body to body with handkerchiefs clamped over their faces to ward off the stench of decay, vainly attempting to find friends and colleagues. This battle, and its bloody aftermath, has come to symbolise the struggle for the American West. Its legacy was used as a reason to eradicate the Indians from their ancestral lands, lands the Indians had inhabited for millennia.

A Lakota Sioux story tells of two men who were on a hunting trip when they noticed a beautiful young woman walking towards them across the prairie. She was dressed in white buckskins and carried a bundle on her back. One of the men had bad thoughts about her and threatened her with his bow, but the moment he approached her he was suddenly surrounded by a white mist. When the mist dispersed, nothing of the man remained but his skeleton. The beautiful woman turned to the other warrior and told him to go home and prepare a big tepee for her. The man ran home and did exactly what she had told him to do. When the woman walked into his village, he had already completed his task. She then told the people of the village that she came from heaven and was here on earth to teach them how to live and what their future would be. She gave the people maize, showed them the use of the pipe and taught them the seven sacred ceremonies. Furthermore, she gave them colours for the four winds or directions. When she was finished she turned into a white buffalo calf, then turned its colour black, then red, then last she turned yellow, representing the colours of the four directions. Then she disappeared.¹ This story explained to the Sioux how their society was formed in the past. It was a creation story. At the centre of that society was the buffalo, the symbolic animal of the American West that white people almost made extinct, along with the Indians who depended upon it to survive.

The American West can mean many things to many people: it can be the story of hardy pioneers going west in covered wagons; it can be the ‘Frontier’ culture of cowboys, one-horse towns and range wars; it can be the Gold Rush and the intrepid 49ers with their picks and pans; it can be hunters, fur trappers and backwoodsmen living with nature and overcoming immense physical challenges. It can be any of these and more. In the case of this book it is the wars that ceaselessly ravaged the American West throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as white Anglo-American culture clashed with the indigenous culture of the region’s original inhabitants, the American Indians.

‘Cowboys and Indians,’ a children’s game and a euphemism for the ‘American West,’ has entered the consciousness of generations around the world. Hollywood has wholeheartedly embraced it, and recycled the story of Indian–white interaction and reaction endlessly, losing the original history along the way and supplanting a new history in the minds of the watching public. In the Hollywood version of the American West the whites represent righteousness, progress and civilisation, while the Indians are the bogeymen waiting in the shadows to do foul deeds to the settler or soldier, a people trapped in a prehistoric world of sun worship, ritual mutilation and subsistence hunting and gathering. The Indians are mysterious, other-worldly and dangerous, more akin to wild animals than to human beings. Their cultural destruction, though unfortunate, was necessary, according to the old history of the American West, to save them from themselves. It would allow Americans to complete their national Manifest Destiny of controlling the whole landmass of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or ‘from sea to shining sea’ as the founders of Virginia termed it.

The real history of the American West is not nearly as noble, courageous or glorious as Hollywood movies and generations of Americans have portrayed it. The real history is the story of white people imposing their will upon the Indians by whatever means at hand in order to gain control over the Indians’ land and resources. In order to subjugate the Indian, whites stooped very low indeed. Every treaty that the Americans made with Indian peoples, 371 in total, was fraudulent and subsequently broken by the US Congress. The US Army was regularly unleashed to attack peaceful villages and butcher men, women and children in cold blood, and other methods, such as killing off the Indians’ food sources to induce starvation, were also practiced very effectively on the orders of the American Government. In various combinations these methods, allied to the spread of epidemic diseases to which the Indians had no natural resistance, were hugely successful strategies for the United States and by 1891 the last gasps of Indian resistance had been swept aside at Wounded Knee in South Dakota: the usurpation of the American West from its rightful occupiers was virtually complete.

It is not possible to encapsulate the entire bloody and brutal history of the American West in a single book, but what this account tries to do in an intentionally limited way is to highlight some of the more prominent campaigns the United States undertook against Indians during its march to the West, and to show how the Americans overcame Indian resistance. These are only glimpses into a dark and violent history, and of course ignore the steady Americanisation of the West by generations of white settlers who prospered between the storms of war. Think of American expansion into the West in terms of a gradual erosion of ‘Indianness’ until only little islands of aboriginal culture remained in the form of today’s reservations.

There was nothing intrinsically special about Native Americans. They were humans that had adapted their lifestyles to meet the particular challenges of their existence, and the cultures that sprang up throughout the continent of America were diverse and unique mainly because of geography, climate and resources. No-one knows for certain how long Indians have been in North America, and current thinking suggests anywhere from 9,000 to 35,000 years. It is believed that their ancestors crossed the frozen Bering Strait from Asia, but even this theory has been contested. They had prospered and multiplied, creating multitudes of languages, tribes, nations and modes of living long before the first Europeans tentatively began exploring the eastern seaboard, the first known white visitors being a small group of Vikings who arrived in Newfoundland in ad 1000. After the arrival of Columbus and the Spanish in 1492, contact between the Indian inhabitants of North America and Europeans was sporadic for over a hundred years, as the Spanish turned their attention and energy to plundering the great Indian city-building civilisations in Central and South America, like the Aztec and the Maya. The first European settlement in the West came not from the east, but from the south, when a Conquistador named Juan de Onate led a group of settlers north from Mexico across the Rio Grande in 1598. Onate established the first European settlement in North America at Santa Fe a few years later. Spanish soldiers, settlers and missionaries pushed farther north into southern Arizona in the 1690s, south-eastern Texas in 1716 and finally into California in 1769, with the establishment of a settlement they named San Diego.

As the Spanish moved north, French settlers and fur traders moved south-west from Canada’s St Lawrence Valley. Beginning at Quebec in 1608, by 1718 French settlements stretched thinly along the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River to New Orleans, but numbered fewer than 50,000 people. All of this was achieved long before English or American colonial explorers began to range west of the Appalachian Mountains. The English colonies in the east had begun at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. By 1700 the colonial population was only 250,000 people, but boomed in the decades that followed, pushing forward expansion into the West. By the 1740s there were a million English-speaking settlers stretching from Maine to Georgia, and by the time Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that figure had reached 2.5 million. This huge population began to spill over the old colonial boundaries into Indian lands across the Appalachians in Kentucky, Tennessee and the upper Ohio Valley. The settlers followed long-established practices in trading with Indian peoples, forming alliances with them to use their manpower in the incessant struggle with France for control of eastern America, and when Indians outlived their usefulness they ruthlessly killed them, infected them with diseases or pushed whole tribes further west at the point of a musket. Indians were not to form a significant part of the new English-speaking landscape east of the Mississippi; they would disappear almost entirely from the future southern states and almost cease to exist in New England.

From 1710 the English-speaking population of America would double every twenty-one years, while the Indian population that had stood at perhaps 2 million in North America when Columbus had arrived continued to decline. The unsettled lands of the West appeared limitless to Americans and full of opportunity for those hardy, brave and resourceful enough to abandon the overcrowded east. The peace treaty that ended the American War of Independence in 1783 generously awarded the new United States control over all lands east of the Mississippi, and the Louisiana Purchase of French territory in America from a cash-strapped Napoleon in 1803 doubled that area. By 1848 the United States had annexed the Republic of Texas, the entire south-west after defeating Mexico in a short war and all of present-day Oregon as well. Hundreds of thousands of Indians had already perished since the whites had first arrived, most wiped out by European diseases, and the survivors had either been enslaved by the Spanish (later the Mexicans) or herded onto reservations by the Americans. The West, however, remained a barely touched island surrounded by white lands, and settlers contented themselves with merely passing through the Great Plains to get to California and Oregon. Conflicts arose over the emigrant trails, and the United States moved to control the Indian peoples who lived on the Plains and remove their power to impede settlement. Soon, whites began to settle upon the Plains themselves, bringing railroads, towns, military posts, ranching and gold prospecting with them from the 1850s onwards. Above all, the whites wanted land upon which to thrive, and the American government was ruthless in the methods it employed to rid the vast lands of the West of their aboriginal inhabitants. What was at stake was the development of the United States from an under-populated agricultural society into a vast, industrial world power, a transition that was made extremely quickly in comparison with the old countries of Europe.

It was not difficult for Americans to justify to themselves removing Indians from their tribal territories. Whereas white Americans seemed to stand for progress, technology and science, American Indians appeared to hail from entirely different millennia. Their cultural practices were extraordinary and disagreeable to nineteenth-century whites. The nineteenth century was the high point of imperialism across the globe and the Americans, like the British and the French, were no less prone to labelling anyone who was not white as a ‘savage’ or a ‘heathen’. The American West was the great experiment in ‘backyard imperialism’ for the United States, and we tend to forget today that the Indian tribal groups that America attacked, subjugated and stole land from were as independent as African tribes subjugated by the British or Pacific islanders whose atolls were usurped by the French. In all these cases for one group of people to take the lands of another by force or deception did not make it right, moral or legal. The United States was founded on the ideas of freedom, equality and the rule of law. When America sallied westwards in the mid-nineteenth century these principles were largely abandoned or ignored in the quest for wealth and hegemony. America confronted a dizzying variety of Indian nations who had spent perhaps 30,000 years or more migrating around the continent, fighting with each other over resources and developing specialised modes of living to suit their geographical circumstances. The Americans looked hard and saw peoples who were not ‘civilised,’ that reminded the industrial-agricultural progressive people of the east of their own humble beginnings millennia before as hunter-gatherers. It seemed fair and reasonable to most Americans that the more advanced should supplant the ignorant and backward as masters of the land, and that the ‘savage’, no matter how noble he might be, give up his right to the bountiful lands of the West to the white man. It was not only a clash of cultures – it was race war.

The United States followed a clear agenda with regard to the Indian peoples it encountered as it expanded west. When the great Sioux leader Sitting Bull was only an infant in the 1830s

white attitudes in the time of Andrew Jackson … centered on the idea of progress, a conception rooted in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment but given a distinctly American cast by the westward expansion. Progress demanded the conquest of the wilderness, an imperative fortified by God’s command to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.²

Americans viewed Indians as part of that wilderness, merely as something else to be tamed or eradicated. Human history, according to whites of the time, was a linear path of progress from ‘savagery,’ as demonstrated by Indian society, to ultimate Christian civilisation embodied in the United States. The Indians had no right to the land they occupied because they had not improved it, and therefore their societies must give way to a higher civilisation. It was an idea originally espoused by John Locke, and had been brought to America by the Pilgrims in the seventeenth century.

This book is essentially the story of how Americans tried to make good on God’s command to ‘fill the earth and subdue it.’ The wars against the Indians were not unique to nineteenth-century America. Wherever white men trod they sought to bring the purported benefits of Western ‘civilisation’ with them, and everywhere they labelled indigenous peoples ‘savages’ or worse. The plight of the Aborigine in Australia, the Maori in New Zealand and the Zulu in South Africa are excellent examples. But perhaps nowhere else has a nation succeeded so succinctly in making glorious the dark deeds of the past. The ‘Hollywood history’ of the American West that has been current for several generations is a lie. It took the United States about forty years to fully subdue Indian resistance in the West and cost the lives of thousands of people on both sides. It would also leave a legacy of pain, anger, hatred, mistrust and sadness among the Indian peoples of the region who were crushed in a struggle that remains raw to this day. The conflict would lead many on both sides to question the morality behind the methods used to solve the ‘Indian Problem.’ Occasionally, the painful wounds of conquest and subjugation were reawakened in modern America. The last time gunfire was exchanged between Indians and the forces of the American government was at the time of writing only thirty-five years ago in 1973 at a place called Wounded Knee. And in a sense the ‘Indian Wars’ have never really ended, the fighting instead having been transposed to the courtroom, the rifles exchanged for lawsuits and statute books. In the new battlefield of the law the Indians remain the losers, and the United States remains implacable in refusing to address the wrongs of the past.

Notes

1. James R. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).

2. Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (London: Pimlico, 1993), 42.

1

THE LONG WALK

‘You have deceived us too often, and robbed and murdered our people too long, to trust you again at large in your own country. This war shall be pursued against you if it takes years, now that we have begun, until you cease to exist or move. There can be no other talk on the subject.’

Brigadier General James H. Carleton to the Navajo, 1863

March 1864. A long line of Indians stretched away across the broken terrain for miles. Many were women and children. Bundled in blankets and carrying their few possessions the line shuffled along slowly, led by a group of warriors wearing distinctive headbands that marked them out as Navajo. Along the flanks of the great column, so long that it would take several hours for it to pass a single place, soldiers, their blue uniforms covered in a thick layer of dust, rode slowly on equally dirty horses, many carrying Navajo women or children behind them on their saddles. Grinding along the dusty trail the occasional army covered wagon drawn by a team of horses bounced on its crude springs, the box stacked high with provisions and overflowing with Navajo who were too exhausted, pregnant, sick or lame to walk.

There were insufficient soldiers to guard the long column from the predators that congregated to the rear, waiting for an opportunity to swoop down on hapless victims. Many of the Navajo, hungry and exhausted, fell behind the footsore column, and each day a few more people disappeared. The predators were Ute Indians, closely trailing the column armed with rifles and hatchets, and Mexicans. Both groups would accost those who left the column and sell these unfortunates into slavery or kill them where they stood and rob them of their few possessions, like wolves trailing a wounded buffalo. This great column of defeated and disillusioned Indians was the culmination of a concerted American campaign to rid the south-west of the bigger and more troublesome Indian tribes. A few months earlier the destruction of the Navajo way of life had reached a terrible and terminal crescendo.

July 1863. Colonel Kit Carson sat on his horse and stared blankly at the scene of destruction unfolding around him. Hither and thither ran his soldiers with torches blazing, igniting the fields of crops that stretched away along the canyon floor. Beneath the brim of his campaign hat Carson’s face was deeply tanned after forty years on the Frontier, his eyes narrowed, around which deep crow’s feet stood out after years of squinting in the harsh south-western sunlight, hair parted on top and worn below the collar of his blue officer uniform. Carson was in his fifties and a living legend. In the pre-movie era he had become the equivalent of today’s Hollywood celebrity – a genuine all-action hero whose exploits had been retold countless times in the most lurid prose by eastern journalists and hack writers. There would be other ‘heroes’ of the West, men like Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp, but Carson’s exploits had been largely genuine and his reputation well earned. Hence he was now overseeing a scorched-earth policy in New Mexico Territory in the midst of the terrible Civil War in the east, aimed at solving the Navajo Indian problem once and for all. Denying the Navajo their food supplies by destroying their crops inside the sheltered and fertile canyons was one method for ridding the south-west of Indians. Carson determined to starve them out and force their surrender.

The traditional homeland of the Navajo stretched from north-western Arizona through western New Mexico, and north into Utah and Colorado. They had lived in bands for generations, cultivating crops and raising livestock in the numerous canyons. Inter-tribal warfare and trading was common in the south-west, and the Navajo rubbed along uneasily with the Apache, Pueblo and Comanche peoples, as well as Spanish and later Mexican settlers who came up from the south. After 1846 contact with Americans suddenly and dramatically increased after the United States and Mexico went to war. America was victorious, gaining the former Mexican territories of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and Colorado as the spoils of that victory in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, including an extension of the border down to the Rio Grande. All Mexicans living in these territories automatically became American citizens, but the Indians did not. For the region’s Indians victory in the Mexican–American War signalled a new and aggressive master quickly attempting to control them through treaties and military force. The Americans wanted nothing less than the corralling of the Navajo and the other tribes onto reservations as quickly as possible, where they could no longer interfere with the orderly settlement of the new territories. They ordered that the Navajo immediately cease all raiding on Americans and Mexicans. The Navajo method of raising livestock, primarily sheep, would be pushed aside by white cattle and horse ranchers moving in from the east and from Texas. The American government had quickly identified the Navajo and the Apache as the strongest and best-organised Indian groups that had to be conquered before real progress could be made in turning the wild territories into new states.

The Navajo had signed their first treaty with the Americans in 1846, and this had swiftly been followed by an agreement in 1851 permitting the United States to construct military posts on Navajo land in return for promised peace and presents from the Indian Department. In 1855 Colonel Edwin Sumner boldly led military forces into the centre of Navajo lands at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona Territory, and constructed the first post there, which he appropriately named Fort Defiance. The Navajo elders signed another treaty that same year which decreased their lands to 7,000 square miles, of which only 125 square miles was actually cultivatable. The upshot of such American short-sightedness was a food supply problem for the Navajo which could only be satisfied by warriors making periodic raids on other Indian or American settlements. Armed conflict followed, as American greed for Navajo land drove the Indians into armed resistance merely to secure the basics of life.

Fort Defiance was located amid some of the best Navajo grazing areas. Indian horses and sheep lived contentedly upon these ancient lands, most of which were under the control of a band led by Chief Manuelito. In 1858 Major William Brooks, the post commander, decided to graze his command’s horses on the local Navajo lands, and Brooks arrogantly issued instructions to Manuelito to remove his animals or see them shot. When Manuelito refused Brooks sent out a party of troops who proceeded to kill sixty Navajo horses and over one hundred sheep. Manuelito’s band was furious at their leader’s treatment by the Americans. In retaliation the Navajo killed Brooks’ black slave, who had recently raped a local Indian woman. Brooks’ response was to order the Navajo to turn in the murderer for punishment or the soldiers would attack them. Manuelito’s band and others suffered several months of intermittent fighting with American troops from Fort Defiance after failing to heed Brooks’ instruction. Eventually, having grown tired of the disruption to their economic life the Navajo chieftains went to Fort Defiance and signed another treaty promising to remain on their assigned lands in the future. The army could claim a victory, of sorts.

The Navajo simmered with anger and resentment at the high-handed and unfair treatment dished out to them from the fort, and they bided their time. Then, quite suddenly in 1861, the soldiers began to leave the fort and New Mexico and Arizona. The outbreak of the Civil War in the east witnessed a