How The West Was Lost

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the United States neither owned, valued nor even knew much about the Great Plains. This vast tract of grassland which runs across the centre of the continent was described as the ‘Great American Desert’, but by the end of the century the United States had taken it over completely. As the ‘new Americans’ (many of them black) pushed the frontier to the west, they established their culture at the expense of that of the indigenous peoples, then known to the incomers as ‘Indians’.

The great natural resource of the Plains was the buffalo, which migrated in vast herds. The peoples of the Great Plains hunted and ate the buffalo, made tepees from their hides and utilized most other parts to make tools, utensils and weaponry. Some of them, for example the Mandan and Pawnee, lived in semi-permanent villages; others, like the Lakota and Cheyenne, lived a nomadic life. When necessary, as in life or death situations of war or in securing food in the hunt or moving camp they could be very organized and disciplined, but normally life was very loosely structured. Different peoples or nations were distinguished by language or dialect and in variations of customs and beliefs. But all depended upon nature for survival and had a spiritual approach to it.

Before the arrival of the new Americans the native groups were often in conflict with neighbouring peoples for resources such as horses and land. The latter resulted in some movement in their patterns of settlement. Thus, the Cheyenne and Arapaho had divided into northern and southern groups in the 1820s. Some Cheyenne and Arapaho moved south, following reports of large numbers of wild horses and vast buffalo herds in the land south of the Platte River, while others remained north of the Platte near the Black Hills where they effectively became a separate group, closely allied with the Lakota. Other peoples, such as the Pawnee, Crow and Arikara (or Rees), had become enemies of the Lakota when supplanted by them earlier in the century. The northern Cheyenne and Arapaho were an exception, most other peoples in the northern Plains were enemies of the Lakota. Indeed the name for them adopted by the new Americans, Sioux, was the Ojibwe word for enemy. In the mid-eighteenth century the Lakota had moved gradually westwards from what was to be Minnesota, defeating other peoples as they went and pushing them into new hunting grounds.

In 1840, when the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri to the Pacific was first used, the frontier of the United States was roughly at the line of the Mississippi-Missouri, only about one third of the way across the continent. Just two generations later, by 1890, the indigenous peoples had been supplanted and the western frontier no longer existed. Apart from one or two later additions, today’s map of the United States was firmly in place.

To understand how this took place one needs to step outside the strict chronology of the events. The new Americans split the Plains environment and those who depended upon it into two. This began in the 1840s with the overland trails to Oregon and California, initiating the age of the Wagon Train, and was cemented by the completion of the transcontinental and Kansas Pacific Railroads in the late 1860s. A series of treaties were signed, confining the native Americans to ever-smaller areas, and every opportunity was taken for incursion into these areas by prospectors, hunters, and settlers, supported by soldiers.

Even before the trails were opened, trading posts were established at key communications points, such as at the confluence of the North Platte and Laramie rivers in Wyoming, where fur traders Robert Campbell and William Sublette built Fort William in 1834. In 1849 it was bought by the US military to protect and supply emigrants travelling the Oregon Trail and renamed Fort Laramie. In the early 1840s relationships between the travellers and the native Americans on the trail had been good, but as the decade wore on relations became more tense, especially as numbers of the emigrants escalated with the California Gold Rush in 1849. Numbers of those seeking a quick fortune far exceeded those steadier individuals who wished to raise crops in the western coastlands of Oregon and California. As these numbers increased so did incidents between the two cultures. The settlement of the Plains did not become a problem for the native Americans until later, especially in the post-Civil War expansionist mood, when the ‘sodbusters’ were spurred on by the offer of free land through the Homestead Act of 1862. In the late 1840s the concern for the native Americans was that traffic down the Oregon Trail was keeping the buffalo from their traditional habitat in this area. As the numbers of incidents increased the government sought to alleviate the problem by attempting to keep the native Americans away from the trail. In doing so they used a method already used to legitimize riding roughshod over the eastern native Americans: the Treaty.

The various treaties between the US and the indigenous peoples of the west were of as little value as they had been in the east. In 1851 the US Indian agent Thomas Fitzpatrick invited all of the peoples of the Plains to a meeting in the vicinity of Fort Laramie. It was attended by members of the Lakota (Sioux), Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, Assiniboine, Crow, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations. All these peoples still ranged widely across the central Plains, whereas the Comanche and the Kiowa, who did not attend the Fort Laramie meeting, were far in the south, in the vicinity of the Santa Fe Trail, and a separate treaty was signed at Fort Atkinson with them two years later.

By the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the government bound ‘themselves to protect the aforesaid Indian nations against the commission of all depredations by the people of the said United States’  and promised annuity goods for fifty years (later amended by the Senate to fifteen years). The native American chiefs guaranteed safe passage for settlers along the Platte River, and accepted responsibility for the behaviour of their followers in specified territories  and recognized ‘the right of the United States government to establish roads, military and other posts’. However, military posts already existed on the Oregon Trail: Fort Kearny had already been established in Nebraska as a stopping-off point and garrison in 1848, Fort Bridger in Wyoming as a fur-trading post in 1843, as well as Fort Laramie itself. Nor was the United States army a disciplined force: as emigrant William Kelley commented on the troops at Fort Kearny:

A most unsoldierly looking lot they were: unshaven, unshorn, with patched uniforms and a lounging gait. The privates being more particular in their inquiries after whiskey, for which they offered one dollar the half-pint; but we had none to sell them even at that tempting price.

It is not surprising that conflicts arose with native Americans.

Also, noble words meant little when the arbiters of ‘justice’ attempted to mete it out in a summary manner. Only three years after the treaty, Lieutenant Grattan attempted to bully Conquering Bear’s Lakota into giving up a visitor who was accused of helping himself to a lame cow. His troops were annihilated, which led to retaliatory action by the Army, when any available native Americans were punished, regardless of whether they had been involved in the original action. This approach reflected the Army’s attitude generally, as indeed had Grattan’s action in the first place.

However little value could be placed on the promises in the treaties, their terms stand as clear indicators of the new Americans perceptions of how to deal with what they called the ‘Indian Problem’, at any one point. The Treaty of 1851 was an attempt to protect travellers on the Oregon Trail, which had become of high importance as a result of the discovery of gold in California in 1848. However, the commitment to protecting ‘Indian nations’ from ‘depredations’ by US citizens was of far lower priority to the new Americans and was never properly enforced.

Similarly in a treaty signed in 1861 at Fort Lyon in the southern Plains, the Cheyenne promised to remain in the vicinity of the Arkansas River and not to interfere with the gold-miners along the Smoky Hill Trail from Kansas City to Denver attracted to the area from 1858 onwards. Yet only three years later, in November 1864, an estimated 200 peaceful men, women and children of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho were massacred by the Third Colorado Regiment of volunteers and regular troops at Sand Creek. The leader of the outrage, John Chivington, fed the bloodlust of his troops, and was fond of the chilling phrase which rationalized the killing of infants: ‘Nits make Lice’.

The idea of limiting to set areas peoples accustomed to a free-ranging existence following their source of life – the buffalo herds – was as unrealistic as it was racist. The concept of the native Americans’ land being restricted to a reservation dated from the earliest treaties, and was consolidated in the ‘removal’ of eastern peoples into Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) in the 1830s under the direction of President Andrew Jackson. The National Park concept is generally credited to artist George Catlin, known for his paintings of native Americans. In 1832 he advocated that the wilderness might be preserved, ‘by some great protecting policy of government... in a magnificent park... A nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!’ In 1864, Congress donated Yosemite Valley to California for preservation as a state park. The second great Park, Yellowstone, was founded in 1872, during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, who developed an ‘Indian Peace Policy’ at this time which aimed to ‘civilize’ them. By 1876 this policy had increased the number of houses sevenfold, the acres under cultivation sixfold, the ownership of livestock by fifteen times, and tripled the number of teachers and schools. The concept of the reservation was surely similar to that of National Parks and as such was recognition that the new Americans saw the native Americans as no more or less significant than the flora and fauna.

The native Americans unleashed a robust raiding campaign in response to the massacre at Sand Creek which interfered with the US government’s wish to expand and consolidate economically after of the Civil War (1862-65). The Union-Pacific and Kansas-Pacific railroads were built across the Plains in the 1860s. To confine the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho and to protect the settlers, travellers, railroad workers and miners, the US government perceived the need for another treaty later in the decade and despatched a ‘Peace Commission’. This resulted in the treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, signed in 1867 between the US Army and 5,000 Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache. Under its terms the indigenous peoples gave up their claims to 90 million acres in return for reservations in central Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Yet just four years later, after a method of tanning the buffalo hides to produce a good-quality leather was developed, the buffalo- hunters moved in. They annihilated the buffalo, in a wasteful and devastating manner, in a few short years. In 1872-73 three million buffalo perished and by 1874 the hunters had moved so far south that the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek was a dead letter. All the land given to the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been stripped of the buffalo on which they depended. This was recognized by General Philip Sheridan when he said of the buffalo hunters:

These men have done (more) in the last two years, and will do more in the next year to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years.

The sorry remnants of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho united with the Comanche and Kiowa, and fought back in a last-ditch attempt at resistance: the Red River War (1874-75). Now without the animal that had long been their prime source of existence, they were harried and starved into submission. They were encircled in the Texas Panhandle by five columns of troops, who came at the native Americans from all directions, keeping them on the move, giving them no rest. The troops burned and destroyed whatever possessions they left behind, including tepees and winter food stores, as they hastily withdrew their families to safety. A small group of a few dozen warriors still roaming free despite constant harassment came into Forts Sill and Reno in Oklahoma in 1875, where they were humiliated, and seventy-one men and one woman, many indiscriminately chosen, were transported to prison in Miami, Fort Marion.

As the land available to the native Americans shrank, some chiefs refused to accept this and fought back against the Army. This allowed the new Americans to claim that the native American leaders could not control their followers and any agreements were therefore broken. This development supported the new American claim to Manifest Destiny whereby they justified their behaviour as the act of ‘taming’ a savage wilderness. Later commentators refined this argument to suggest that the native Americans had no cultural tradition of commitment to a permanent system of leadership and government.

It was undoubtedly true that the indigenous peoples functioned with loose social structures based on respect being given to an individual based on their qualities rather than on the office they hold, with no lasting obligation to follow their leaders’ directives. However, the new Americans did not show themselves to be any more committed to acting upon agreements or attempting to enforce the rule of law. For as long as the land was seen as a useless desert, the new Americans were content to leave it to the native Americans. However, as soon as something of value was discovered – usually precious metals but, also the buffalo once the market had been established for their hides – the new Americans themselves violated the treaties with impunity. Thus when buffalo-hunters went to Fort Dodge in 1872 to ask if they could hunt south of the Cimarron, thereby violating the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, Colonel Irving Dodge had replied,

Boys, if I were a buffalo hunter, I would hunt where the buffalo are.

While in the southern Plains the native Americans were driven south, confined to ever-smaller areas and ultimately defeated, those in the north were more successful at repelling the invaders in the short term. The Lakota were themselves usurpers, for they had moved into the northern Plains in the late eighteenth century from the north and displaced peoples such as the Crow, Pawnee and Arikara, who remained so hostile to them that they proved willing to ally with the Army against the Lakota. As in the south, miners moved into the area, despite the Treaty of 1851 and this resulted in armed conflict. When gold was discovered in Virginia City, Montana, in 1862, Forts Phil Kearney and C.F. Smith were built to protect miners using the Bozeman Trail taking them north from the Oregon Trail. Helped by Crazy Horse, the Lakota chief Red Cloud led his Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors in a war in the Powder Valley of Wyoming in 1866-68 which culminated in these forts being evacuated and burned. A second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) followed, very much on terms dictated by the native Americans which reaffirmed the principles set out in the earlier treaty of 1851. It granted the Lakota a large area in western Dakota including the Black Hills, important for hunting, a source of lodge poles and an area sacred to them: the US army withdrew from the forts they had built and they were burned by the exuberant Lakota and northern Cheyenne.

Yet the advantage was to be short-lived; once again the discovery of gold by an expedition led by George Armstrong Custer in 1874, was to result in the rules being rewritten. Attempts to hoodwink the native Americans into selling the Black Hills in 1875 met with a rebuff: commissioners were told by Red Cloud that the asking price was $600,000,000, a figure so far in excess of the Commissioners’ valuation that it rendered negotiation futile. Tactics rehearsed in the southern Plains were now re-enacted in the north. Lakota and Northern Cheyenne were given notice to ‘come in’ to Fort Robinson in Nebraska: those not doing so would be deemed ‘hostile’. Three encircling columns under Generals Gibbon, Crook and Terry were assembled to harry and destroy. However, the Lakota chose to fight. This surprised the arrogant Custer who commanded Terry’s troops but who underestimated his foe and chose to ride the glory trail in defiance of all logic. In the south the tactics of relentless pursuit had worked, not because of fatalities experienced by the native Americans, but because when their homes were attacked the priority of the warriors was to get their families to safety. Their abandoned possessions could then be commandeered or destroyed. The choice of Custer fitted with the expectation that the Lakota and northern Cheyenne would try to escape as had happened in the south. In September 1867 he had been court-martialled for deserting his command, ordering deserters to be shot, damaging army horses, failing to pursue Indians attacking his escort and not recovering bodies of soldiers killed by Indians; but it was his reckless direct approach appealed to his superiors.

However the Lakota and their allies proved more than a match for their enemies. At the battle against General Crook at the Rosebud River in June 1876, it was only a rearguard action fought by a Crow contingent  supporting the Army which enabled General Crook to withdraw, and ten days later Custer’s force was wiped out at the Little Big Horn by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors.

When the news of Custer’s defeat hit the newsstands in the east, the country was in the midst of centenary celebrations. A shocked nation recoiled; public opinion hardened and resources were found to put more troops in the field. The victors of the Little Big Horn were driven north into Canada.

While in most cases incursions onto land ‘granted’ to the native Americans in both areas was linked in both northern and southern Plains to the discovery of gold, the eventual supplanting of groups in the south was not. Here it was as a result of the native Americans fighting back after their source of life, the buffalo, had been decimated on the very land that had been promised to them less than a decade previously. The defeat in the south came at the end of a long line of losses that followed each discovery by the new Americans that the land of the Great Plains was not as useless as they had first thought. The native Americans were driven south by the slaughter of the buffalo. The buffalo had been wiped out by 1878 in the south, and two years later the hunters moved in on the northern herd, protected by the post-Little Big Horn US military campaign against the victors. By 1884 few buffalo remained, and in 1885 they were virtually extinct. On the northern Plains, although the Lakota and their allies achieved some military successes, they were ultimately to suffer the same fate: the loss of land promised to them. They were driven further away from the heart of the Great Plains. The Oregon Trail and the railroad which carried travellers, information and goods to link east and west of the nation, was also the dividing line between north and south for the vast buffalo herd and the native Americans who relied on them.

The result for all native Americans of Plains was the same: confinement on reservations. A law was passed in 1871 which formally ended the practice of treaties which had considered the native Americans to be separate nations from the United States. Native American culture was undermined by the practice of removing young children from their families to be ‘educated’ in residential schools where they were beaten if they spoke their native tongue. Finally in 1887 a law was passed under which the president of the United States was given the power to divide up the reservations, which resulted in another boom-time for the land speculators. Gold, the bison and protecting travellers provided short term reasons for conflict, but ultimately in the clash of cultures, as Red Cloud, Oglala Lakota, observed:

The white man made us many promises, more than I can ever remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land and they took it.

Chris Smallbone is an education consultant and website designer.