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Introduction: Part III

• Cultural Survival Strategies
• Clearing the Land of Indians
• The "Five Civilized Tribes" and the Civil War
• The Tragedy of the Western Indians
• Resistance on the Great Plains
• Wounded Knee

Cultural Survival Strategies 

As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the Indians east of the Mississippi faced a fundamental challenge: how to preserve their cultures and heritage in the face of declining populations and a loss of land. As the historian Gary Nash has shown, these people met this challenge by adopting two basic survival strategies. One strategy, physical resistance, was pursued by the Shawnees and other tribes in Indiana and the Creeks in northwestern Georgia and Alabama. The other strategy, cultural adaptation and renewal, was embraced by the Iroquois and the Cherokees. 

Few people better illustrate the process of cultural adaptation than the Iroquois. Displaced from their traditional lands and suffering the psychological and cultural disintegration brought on by epidemic disease, rampant alcoholism, and dwindling land resources, the Iroquois reconstituted and revitalized their culture under the leadership of a prophet named Handsome Lake. The prophet endorsed the demand of Quaker missionaries that the traditional Iroquois sexual division of labor emphasizing male hunting and female horticulture be replaced. He argued that men should farm and women rear children and care for the home. He also called for modification of the Iroquois system of matrilineal descent, in which the tie between mothers and daughters had been strong and the bond between spouses had been fragile. Handsome Lake emphasized the sanctity of the marriage bond, and said that marriage should take precedence over all other kinship ties. 

As a result of Handsome Lake's religious movement, the Iroquois abandoned their matrilineal longhouses and began to dwell in male-headed households in individual log cabins. They modified their system of matrilineal descent to allow fathers to pass land to their sons. And Iroquois men took up farming, even though this was traditionally viewed as women's work. By adopting those aspects of the encroaching white culture that were relevant to their lives and fitting them into traditional cultural patterns, the Iroquois were largely able to maintain their culture, values, and rituals. 

The Cherokees also demonstrated the ability of Native Americans to adapt to changing conditions while maintaining their tribal heritage. During the early nineteenth century, these people developed a written alphabet, opened schools, established churches, built roads, operated printing presses, and even adopted a constitution. 

The alternative to cultural revitalization was armed resistance. Between 1803 and 1809, William Henry Harrison, Indiana's territorial governor, acquired thirty-three million acres in cessions from Indians in the Old Northwest. Two Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa ("the Shawnee Prophet"), to resist further encroachments, created a pan-Indian alliance, consisting of the Kickapoos, Menominis, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Shawnees, Winnebagos, and Wyandots. In 1811, when Tecumsah was in the South attempting to rally support, Harrison forced a confrontation with the Shawnee Prophet at the battle of Tippecanoe. The Indian stronghold, Prophetstown, was burned, and Indian supplies were destroyed. During the War of 1812, Tecumseh fought in support of the British. But he was killed at the battle of the Thames in 1813, ending effective Indian resistance in the Old Northwest. 

The military power of the Creek Indians was also broken during the War of 1812. During his trip to the South, Tecumseh encouraged the Creeks to defend their land from encroaching whites. In retaliation for a Creek attack on an American fort, in which some 500 whites were killed, Andrew Jackson and a force of 4,000 surrounded the chief Creek village at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. In the ensuing battle, more than 800 Creeks were killed, against 49 white deaths. 

The War of 1812 marked a crucial dividing line in the history of the eastern Indians. No longer would they have European allies capable of supplying guns or slowing the advance of white settlers. In the Old Northwest, Britain agreed to abandon its forts on American soil. In the South, Spain ceded part of Florida in 1810 and the rest in 1819, leaving the southeastern Indians, like the Seminoles, without a secure refuge. Abandoned by their British and Spanish allies, the eastern Indians would have to confront a new policy: removing all eastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi River.

Clearing the Land of Indians

At the time Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, 125,000 Native Americans still lived east of the Mississippi River. Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek Indians--60,000 strong--held millions of acres in what would become the southern Cotton Kingdom stretching across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The political question was whether these Indian tribes would be permitted to block white expansion. By 1840, Jackson and his successor, Martin Van Buren, had answered this question. All Indians east of the Mississippi had been uprooted from their homelands and moved westward, with the exception of rebellious Seminoles in Florida and small numbers of Indians living on isolated reservations in Michigan, North Carolina, and New York. 

Since Jefferson's presidency, two conflicting Indian policies, assimilation and removal, had governed the treatment of Native Americans. One policy, assimilation, encouraged Indians to adopt white American customs and economic practices. The government provided financial assistance to missionaries in order to Christianize and educate Native Americans and convince them to adopt single family farms. Proponents defended the assimilation policy as the only way Native Americans would be able to survive in a white-dominated society. According to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, "There is no place on earth to which they can migrate, and live in the savage and hunter state. The Indian tribes must, therefore, be progressively civilized, or successively perish." 
The other policy--removal--was first suggested by Thomas Jefferson as the only way to ensure the survival of Indian cultures. The goal of this policy was to encourage the voluntary migration of Indians westward to tracts of land where they could live free from white harrassment. As early as 18l7, James Monroe declared that the nation's security depended upon rapid settlement along the southern coast and that it was in the best interests of Native Americans to move westward. In 1825 he set before Congress a plan to resettle all eastern Indians upon tracts in the West where whites would not be allowed to live. Initially, Jackson followed the dual policy of assimilation and removal, promising remuneration to tribes that would move westward, while offering small plots of land to individual Indians who would operate family farms. After 1830, however, Jackson favored only removal. 

The shift in federal Indian policy came partly as a result of a controversy between the Cherokee nation and the state of Georgia. The Cherokee people had adopted a constitution asserting sovereignty over their land, and the state of Georgia responded by abolishing tribal rule and claiming that the Cherokee fell under its jurisdiction. The discovery of gold on Cherokee land triggered a land rush, and the Cherokee nation sued to keep white settlers from encroaching upon their territory. In two important cases, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831 and Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not pass laws conflicting with federal Indian treaties and that the federal government had an obligation to exclude white intruders from Indian lands. Angered, Jackson is said to have exclaimed: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." 
The primary thrust of Jackson's removal policy was to encourage Indian tribes to sell all tribal lands in exchange for new lands in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Such a policy, the President maintained, would open new farm land to whites while offering Indians a haven where they would be free to develop at their own pace. "There," he wrote, "your white brothers will not trouble you, they will have no claims to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty." 

Pushmataha, a Choctaw chieftain, called on his people to reject Jackson's offer. Far from being a "country of tall tress, many water courses, rich lands and high grass abounding in games of all kinds," the promised preserve in the west was simply a barren desert. Jackson responded by warning that if the Choctaw refused to move west, he would destroy their nation. 

During the Winter of 1831, the Choctaw became the first tribe to walk the "Trail of Tears" westward. Promised government assistance failed to arrive and malnutrition, exposure, and an epidemic of cholera killed many members of the nation. In 1836, the Creek suffered the hardships of removal. About 3,500 of the tribes 15,000 members died along the westward trek. Those who resisted removal were bound in chains and marched in double file. 

The Cherokee, emboldened by the Supreme Court decisions that declared that Georgia law had no force on Indian territory, resisted removal. Fifteen thousand Cherokee joined in a protest against Jackson's policy: "Little did [we] anticipate that when taught to think and feel as the American citizen...[we] were to be despoiled by [our] guardian, to become strangers and wanderers in the land of [our] fathers, forced to return to the savage life, and to seek a new home in the wilds of the far west, and that without [our] consent." The federal government bribed a faction of the tribe to leave the land in exchange for transportation costs and $5 million, but the majority of the people held out until 1838, when the army evicted them from their land. All totalled, 4,000 of the 15,000 Cherokee died along the trail to Oklahoma. 

A number of tribes organized resistance against removal. In the Old Northwest, the Sauk and Fox Indians fought the Black Hawk War to recover ceded tribal lands in Illinois and Wisconsin. At the time that they had signed a treaty transferring title to their land, these people had not understood the implications of their action. "I touched the goose quill to the treaty," said Chief Black Hawk, "not knowing, however, that by that act I consented to give away my village." The United States army and the Illinois state militia ended resistance by wantonly killing nearly 500 Sauk and Fox men, women, and children who were trying to retreat across the Mississippi River. In Florida, the military spent seven years putting down Seminole resistance at a cost of $20 million and 1,500 troops, and even then only after the treacherous act of seizing the Seminole leader Osceola during peace talks. 
By twentieth-century standards, Jackson's Indian policy was both callous and inhumane. Despite the semblance of legality--ninety-four treaties were signed with Indians during Jackson's presidency--Indian migrations to the west usually occurred under the threat of government coercion. Even before Jackson's death in 1845, it was obvious that tribal lands in the West were no more secure than Indian lands had been in the East. In 1851 Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act, which sought to concentrate the western Native American population upon reservations. 

Why were such morally indefensible policies adopted? The answer is that many white Americans regarded Indian control of land and other natural resources as a serious obstacle to their desire for expansion and as a potential threat to the nation's security. Even had the federal government wanted to, it probably lacked the resources or military means to protect eastern Indians from the encroaching white farmers, squatters, traders, and speculators. By the 1830s, a growing number of missionaries and humanitarians agreed with Jackson that Indians needed to be resettled westward for their own protection. But the removal program was doomed from the start. Given the nation's commitment to limited government and its lack of experience with social welfare programs, removal was doomed to disaster. Contracts for food, clothing, and transportation were let to the lowest bidders, many of whom failed to fulfill their contractual responsibilities. Indians were resettled on arid lands, unsuited for intensive farming. The tragic outcome was readily foreseeable. 

The problem of preserving native cultures in the face of an expanding nation was not confined to the United States. Jackson's removal policy can only be properly understood when it is seen as part of a broader process: the political and economic incorporation of frontier regions into expanding nation states. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, European nations were penetrating into many frontier areas, from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Argentina, the veldt of South Africa, the outback of Australia, and the American West. In each of these regions, national expansion was justified on the grounds of strategic interest (to preempt settlement by other powers) or in the name of opening valuable land to settlement and development. And in each case, expansion was accompanied by the removal or wholesale killing of native peoples.

The "Five Civilized Tribes" and the Civil War

There is a tragic postscript to the story of the Trail of Tears. In 1861, many Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles decided to join the Confederacy, in part because some of the tribes' members owned slaves. In return, the Confederate states agreed to pay all annuities that the U.S. government had provided and let these tribes send delegates to the Confederate Congress. A Cherokee chief, Stand Watie, served as a brigadier general for the Confederacy and did not formally surrender until a month after the war was over. Some of these people supported the Union, however, including a Cherokee faction led by Chief John Ross. 

After the war, the tribes were severely punished for supporting the Confederacy. The Seminoles were required to sell their reservation at 15 cents an acre and buy new land from the Creeks at 50 cents an acre. The other tribes were required to give up half their territory in Oklahoma, to become reservations for the Arapahoes, Caddos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Iowas, Kaws, Kickapoos, Pawnees, Potawatomies, Sauk and Foxes, and Shawnees. In addition, the tribes had to allow railroads to cut across their land. 

The Tragedy of the Western Indians

It took white settlers a century and a half to expand as far west as the Appalachian Mountains, a few hundred miles from the Atlantic coast. It took another 50 years to push the frontier to the Mississippi. By 1830, fewer than 100,000 American soldiers, missionaries, fur trappers, and traders, had crossed the Mississippi. 

By 1850, pioneers had pushed the edge of settlement all the way to the Pacific Ocean. When Americans ventured westward, they did not enter virgin land. Large parts of the West were already occupied by Indians and Mexicans, who had lived in the region for hundreds of years and established their own distinctive ways of life. 

In 1840, before large numbers of white pioneers and farmers crossed the Mississippi, at least 500,000 Indians lived in the Southwest, California, the Great Plains, and the Northwest Pacific Coast, divided into more than two hundred tribes. The single largest concentration of Indians was in California, where some 275,000 lived in the early nineteenth century. 

The California Indians had little contact with Europeans before the late eighteenth century, when Spanish explorers, soldiers, and missionaries arrived from Mexico. Despite its proximity to Mexico, Spain did not begin to colonize the area until 1769, when it learned that Russian seal hunters and traders were moving south from Alaska. 

The Spanish clergy played a critical role in colonization, using the mission system, which was designed to spread Christianity among, and establish control over, the indigenous western population. A Franciscan father, Junipero Serra, established the first California mission near the site of present-day San Diego. Between 1769 and 1823, Spain established twenty-one missions in California, extending from San Diego northward to Sonoma. By 1830, thirty thousand Indians lived in mission communities, where they toiled in workhouses, orchards, and fields for long hours. At least a quarter million other Indians lived outside of missions, occupying small villages during the winter, and moving during the rest of the year gathering wild plants and seeds, hunting small game, and fishing in the rivers. 

The Mexican Revolution led to the demise of the mission system in California. In 1833-34, the missions were "secularized"--broken up and their property sold or given away to private citizens. By 1846, mission lands had fallen into the hands of eight hundred private landowners. The Indians who worked on these private estates had a status similar to that of slaves. Indeed, the death rate of Indians on these ranchos was twice as high as among southern slaves, and by 1848 a fifth of California's Indian population had died. 

The acquisition of California by the United States resulted in further reductions in the number of Indians. In 1846, fifteen years before the United States was plunged into civil war, it fought a war against Mexico that increased the country's size by one third. On January 10, 1848, less than ten days before the signing of the peace treaty ending the war, gold was discovered in California. Within two years, California's non-Indian population soared from 14,000 to 100,000. For California's Indians, the results were catastrophic. Between 1849 and 1859, disease and deliberate campaigns of extermination killed 70,000 Indians. Many Indian women were forced into concubinage and many men into virtual slavery. By 1880, there were fewer than 20,000 Indians in California. 

In California and northward the Indian population remained extremely vulnerable to European diseases. In the Oregon country of the Pacific Northwest, the arrival of Protestant missionaries, beginning in 1834, ignited epidemics of measles and other diseases that killed tens of thousands of people. Many more died during the Cayuse War (1847-50) and the Rogue River wars of the 1850s. 

A pervasive belief in white supremacy led to mass killings of Indians in Texas and the Great Basin, the harsh, barren region between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. A treatise of the 1850s provided a pseudo-scientific rationale for the extermination campaigns: "The Barbarous races of America...are essentially untameable. Not merely have all attempts to civilize them failed, but also every endeavor to enslave them." 

In Texas, settlers accused Indian warriors of impaling white women on fence posts and staking men under the sun with their eyelids removed, while heaping burning coals on their genitals. They retaliated with campaigns of extermination against the Karankawas and other peoples who inhabited the area. In the Great Basin, where food was so scarce that the Paiutes and Gosiutes subsisted on berries, pine nuts, roots, and rabbits, impoverished Indians were sometimes shot by trappers for sport.

Resistance on the Great Plains

Beyond the Mississippi River, stretching westward to the Rocky Mountains and south from Alberta and Saskatchewan to Texas, lies a dry, largely treeless region known as the Great Plains. Before European contact, the Plains Indians were relatively small in number, since it was difficult to cultivate the tough Plains sod. Many of the original inhabitants of the Plains were farmers who lived in villages along rivers and streams where the land was more easily cultivated. In the summer, these people would leave their villages to hunt antelope, bison, deer, and elk. 

The introduction of the horse by the Spanish brought about a thoroughgoing transformation of life on the Plains. Population size, hunting, communication, transportation, and warfare--all greatly changed. Horses made the Plains Indians much more efficient hunters. Animals that were difficult to hunt on foot could easily be followed on horseback. As a result, many agricultural people, like the Cheyenne, became hunters. 

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many new peoples, including the Apaches, the Arapahoes, the Blackfeet, the Cheyennes, the Comanches, and the Sioux--moved onto the Plains, tripling the population to approximately 360,000. As an increasing number of tribes were forced onto the Plains by advancing white settlement, intertribal conflict grew. These Indians developed sign language as an easily understood system of communication. 

Not all Plains Indians, however, conformed to the Hollywood image of hunters on horseback. Many village dwellers continued to herd sheep and cultivate corn, beans, and squash. Semi-sedentary tribes, such as the Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Pawnee, lived in earth- or sod-covered lodges with log frames, while more nomadic peoples lived in portable tipis covered with buffalo hides. 

A belief that the Great Plains was a dry, barren wasteland--a great American desert--delayed white settlement in that region. But the discovery of gold, silver, copper, and lead in Nevada and Colorado in the 1850s, Idaho and Montana in the 1860s, and the Black Hills of South Dakota in the 1870s touched off a rush of white prospectors into these areas. Ranchers soon arrived, bringing cattle and sheep to the Plains. Farmers followed, using windmills to draw water from wells, and shipping their goods on newly constructed railroads. As miners, ranchers, and land-hungry farmers moved onto the Plains, they violated treaties that guaranteed this land to the Indians "as long as the rivers shall run and the grass shall grow." 
To find a way for Indians and white settlers to live peacefully federal officials introduced a policy known as "concentration." At Fort Laramie in Wyoming in 1851, representatives of the United States government and the Plains Indians met and Indian leaders agreed to restrict hunting to specified regions in exchange for yearly payments in money and goods. But this agreement quickly broke down, as railroad tracks disrupted the migration routes of buffalo herds and farms disrupted Indian lands. 

Beginning in the 1860s, a thirty-year conflict arose as the government sought to concentrate the Plains tribes on reservations. Philip Sheridan, a Civil War general who led many campaigns against the Plains Indians, is famous for saying "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." But even he recognized the injustice that lay behind the late nineteenth-century warfare: 

We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this that they made war. Could anyone expect less?

In 1864, warfare spread to Colorado, after the discovery of gold led to an influx of whites. Because the regular army was fighting the Confederacy, a the Colorado territorial militia was responsible for maintaining order. On November 29, 1864, a group of Colorado volunteers, under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington, fell on Chief Black Kettle's unsuspecting band of Cheyennes at Sand Creek in eastern Colorado, where they had gathered under the protection of the governor. "We must kill them big and little," he told his men. "Nits make lice" (nits are the eggs of lice). The militia slaughtered about 150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children. 

Violence broke out on other parts of the Plains. Between 1865 and 1868, conflict raged in Utah. In 1866, the Teton Sioux, tried to stop construction of the Bozeman Trail, leading from Fort Laramie, Wyoming to the Virginia City, Wyoming, gold fields, by attacking and killing Captain William J. Fetterman and 79 soldiers. 

The Sand Creek and Fetterman massacres produced a national debate over Indian policy. In 1867, Congress created a Peace Commission to recommend ways to reduce conflict on the Plains. The commission recommended that Indians be moved to small reservations, where they would be Christianized, educated, and taught to farm. 

At two conferences in 1867 and 1868, the federal government demanded that the Plains Indians give up their lands and move to reservations. In return for supplies and annuities, the southern Plains Indians were told to move to poor, unproductive lands in Oklahoma and the northern tribes to the Black Hills of the Dakotas. The alternative to acceptance was warfare. The commissioner of Indian Affairs, Ely S. Parker, himself a Seneca Indian, declared that any Indian who refused to "locate in permanent abodes provided for them, would be subject wholly to the control and supervision of military authorities." Many whites regarded the Plains Indian as an intolerable obstacle to westward expansion. They agreed with Theodore Roosevelt that the West was not meant to be "kept as nothing but a game reserve for squalid savages." 

Leaders of several tribes--including the Apaches, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Navajos, Shoshones, and Sioux--agreed to move onto reservations. But many Indians rejected the land cessions made by their chiefs. 

In the Southwest, war broke out in 1871 in New Mexico and Arizona with the massacre of more than one hundred Indians at Camp Grant. The Apache war did not end until 1886, when their leader, Geronimo was captured. On the southern Plains, war erupted when the Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas staged raids into the Texas panhandle. The Red River War ended only after federal troops destroyed Indian food supplies and killed a hundred Cheyenne warriors near the Sappa River in Kansas. This brought resistance on the southern Plains to a close. In the Pacific Northwest, the Nez Perce of Oregon and Idaho rebelled against the federal reservation policy and then attempted to escape to Canada, covering 1300 miles in just 75 days. They were forced to surrender in Montana, just forty miles short of the Canadian border. Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader, offered a poignant explanation for why he had surrendered: 

I am tired of fighting....The old men are all killed.... The little children are freezing to death....From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.
After their surrender, the Nez Perce were taken to Oklahoma, where most died of disease. 

Several factors contributed to the defeat of the Plains Indians. One was a shift in the military balance of power. Before the Civil War, an Indian could shoot thirty arrows in the time it took a soldier to load and shoot his rifle once. The introduction of the Colt six-shooter and the repeating rifle after the Civil War, undercut this Indian advantage. During the 1870s, the army also introduced a military tactic--winter campaigning. The army attacked Plains Indians during the winter when they divided into small bands, making it difficult for Indians effectively to resist. 

Another key was the destruction of the Indian food supply, especially the buffalo. In 1860, about 13 million roamed the Plains. These animals provided Plains Indians with many basic necessities. They ate buffalo meat, made clothing and tipi coverings out of hides, used fats for grease, fashioned the bones into tools and fishhooks, made thread and bowstrings from the sinews, and even burned dried buffalo droppings ("chips") as fuel. Buffalo also figured prominently in Plains Indians' religious life. After the Civil War, the herds were cut down by professional hunters, who shot a hundred an hour to feed railroad workers, and by wealthy easterners who killed them for sport. By 1890, only about 1,000 bison remained alive. Government officials quite openly viewed the destruction of the buffalo as a tool for controlling the Plains Indians. Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano explained in 1872, "as they become convinced that they can no longer rely upon the supply of game for their support, they will return to the more reliable source of subsistence...."

Wounded Knee

The late nineteenth century marked the nadir of Indian life. Deprived of their homelands, their revolts suppressed, and their way of life besieged, many Plains Indians dreamed of restoring a vanished past, free of hunger, disease, and bitter warfare. Beginning in the 1870s, a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance arose among Indians of the Great Basin, and then spread, in the late 1880s, to the Great Plains. Beginning among the Paiute Indians of Nevada in 1870, the Ghost Dance promised to restore the way of life of their ancestors. 

During the late 1880s, the Ghost Dance had great appeal among the Sioux, despairing over the death of a third of their cattle by disease and angry that the federal government had cut their food rations. In 1889, Wovoka, a Paiute holy man from Nevada, had a revelation. If only the Sioux would perform sacred dances and religious rites, then the Great Spirit would return and raise the dead, restore the buffalo to life, and cause a flood that would destroy the whites. 

Wearing special Ghost Dance shirts, fabricated from white muslim and decorated with red fringes and painted symbols, dancers would spin in a circle until they became so dizzy that they entered into a trance. White settlers became alarmed: "Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy...We need protection, and we need it now." 

Fearful that the Ghost Dance would lead to a Sioux uprising, army officials ordered Indian police to arrest the Sioux leader Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull resisted, he was killed. In the ensuing panic, his followers fled the Sioux reservation. Federal troops tracked down the Indians and took them to a cavalry camp on Wounded Knee Creek. There, on December 29, 1890, one of the most brutal incidents in American history took place. While soldiers disarmed the Sioux, someone fired a gun. The soldiers responded by using machine guns to slaughter over 200 Indian men, women, and children. The Oglala Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk summed up the meaning of Wounded Knee: 

I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there.