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Show THE ZEPHYR/DECEMBER 2005-JANUARY name to a Southerner could end a friendship or stop a conversation. Sherman oy Oo: took up the Indian cause with the same fervor. “We :. } as tr +} = 7 i. g ; men, must act,” he said, “with vindictive Aalst Niathi: a 4 ig will Fathers, fathers...call back your young men. They have run over our country. They have destroyed the growing wood and the green grass. They have set fire to our lands. They have killed my animals-the elk, the deer, the antelope. My buttalo. They do not kill them to eat them. They leave them to rot where they fall....If I came to your country to kill your animals, what would you say? Would I not be wrong and would you not make war on me? Bear Tooth But techniques used against white civilians failed miserably with Native Americans. A campaign in 1867 to subdue the Indians cost the government $30 million and accomplished nothing but arouse the Native Americans to fight with even more urgency. The army, frustrated by its inability to gain a military solution, began to offer treaties and compromises as a way of assuaging Indian concerns. The treaties were meaningless, especially to the U.S. Government who had no intention of honoring their commitments. It was just a stalling technique that Sherman came to understand and appreciate. : “Time will do more to settle the Indians,” Sherman observed, “ than anything we can do....we may have to concede to the Indians the right to hunt buffalos, as along as they last, and this may lead to collisions. But it won't be long until all the buffalos are extinct.” But when Sherman brought his old friend General Phil Sheridan west in 1868, he knew he had anally and a man who shared his views on total war. He instructed Sheridan, “Go ahead in your own way and I will back you with my whole authority. The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed next year. For the more I see of these Indians, the more I am convinced they will all have to be killed, or be maintained as a species of paupers.” Sheridan sent his protege, George A. Custer to attack Indian encampments in Indian territory itself, where Native Americans believed themselves to be safe. Like Sand Creek, four years earlier, Custer killed more women and children than warriors and this time, the luckless Black Kettle was shot in the back. But Custer’s engagement was hailed a great victory and he gained notoriety as America’s most famous Indian Fighter. We must move with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination--men, women and children. nothing else will do William Tecumseh Sherman By 1869, with the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the southern tribes began to collapse. Buffalo hunters, now able to haul their kills to eastern markets via the Union Pacific, killed the buffalo by the thousands. In one three year period, hunters killed eight million buffalo, simply for their hides, and left the carcasses to rot. Along the South Platte River, it was possible to walk on their bones for 200 miles without ever touching the ground. : General Sheridan watched the slaughter with an eye to the future. “The hide hunters will do more,” he said, “to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. For the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffal termi d. Then your prairies can be covered with the speckled cattle and the festive cowboy, which follows the hunter as the forerunner of civilization.” The Indians, stripped of their ability to feed themselves, turned desperately to the reservations. In Washington, President Grant was visited by a group of Quaker leaders who urged him to stop the army’s military campaign. They were convinced they could bring the Indians to Christianity and an agrarian life. The Quaker approach was as enlightened as it got in 1869. Grant agreed to let them try. “If you can make Quakers out of the Indians, it will take the fight out of them.” It was, what historian Robert Utley called, “Conquest by kindness. If only we reason rationally with the Indians, they will recognize where their best interests lie and they will do what we want them to.” The uneasy alliance between the U.S. Army and the various tribes of the northern plains lasted less than five years, when a crisis in the banking industry plunged the country into depression. White expansion into the mineral rich lands of the Northern Plains Indians seemed like a way out of the economic crisis and the public urged the government to act immediately. The Bismarck Tribunenoted, “The American people need the country the Indians now occupy. The era of railroad building has been brought to termination by the greed of capitalists. Many of our people are unemployed and depression prevails on every hand. An Indian war would 2006 few years in exile and pushed to the edge of starvation, would surrender as well. The near extermination of the buffalo, as Sheridan had prophesied, was as responsible for the Native Am llapse, as anything In 1845, as many as 60 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains. By 1883, less than 200 could be found in all of the West. For white Americans, it was not enough to defeat the Indians militarily; with the Native American population stripped of its ability to care for itself, stripping them of any identity at all became a primary objective. Even the “enlightened” whites were of littl fort to their quished foes. “It is not at this date in our power,” said General Randolph Marcy, “to atone for all the injustice inflicted on the Red Man, but it seems to me that a wise policy would dictate almost the only recompense that is in our . power to make, that of introducing among them the light of CChristianity i . and V5 he blessi 'S f civilizati with their attendant benefits of agriculture and the arts.” Not even the most progressive white man in 1877 could find a shred of value in Native American life. They were stripped of their customs and clothes and religion and even their language. Indian schools were established across the country and children were taken from their parents, to be taught Christian virtues and the concept of free enterprise. The United States Congress ordered, “The Sun Dance shall be stricken down and the heathen idols shall give way to the Christian alters. The tribal organizations shall be broken up and the individuality of the Indian encouraged and developed. The lands unnecessarily given to them shall be open to the pioneer. That intelligence and thrift may find lodging there.” When a race lies crushed and groaning under an alien yoke, how natural is it to dream of a redeemer, and author who shall return from exile or wake from a long sleep? To drive out the usurpér and win back tor his people what they have lost? The hope becomes a faith and the faith becomes the creed of prophets, until the hero is a god and the dream a religion, looking to some great miracle for its culmination and accomplishment. —James Mooney A year before his death, Sitting Bull said, “I would rather die an Indian than live as a white man.” In his last year, word spread across the reservations of a new religion that would save the Native America people and restore their lives to the way it once was. On January 1, 1889, a Paiute holy man named Wovoka became feverishly ill and a vision came to him.during his delirium. He prophesied a Second Coming of Jesus, who this time would return to earth as a Red Man. Wovoka believed in the Ghost Dance. He believed that if Native Americans laid down their weapons and practiced nonviolence, if they prayed hard enough, and if they performed the sacred Ghost Dance, their world would be re-born and their ancestors would come back from the dead. And that the whites would disappear. The Ghost Dance came to the Lakota Sioux in the summer of 1890 and was enthusiastically embraced by them; as many as 5000 participated in the dances. And yet, while the Ghost Dance religion was, in many ways, the perfect expression of non-violent Christian philosophy, white Americans feared it and, incredibly, prepared for war. The Indian agent at Pine Ridge, James McLaughlin, called the-Ghost © Dance, “demoralizing, disgusting and obscene,” and demanded government protection. By the end of November, a third of all the armed forces in the United States was on alert. é In mid-December, Sitting Bull, the leader of Indian resistance for more than 30 years, was murdered by Lakota soldiers hired by the whites to arrest him. His followers, fearful of more retribution fled south, toward Pine Ridge, Dakota. On December 29, 1890, a band of Lakota led by the ailing chief, Big . Foot, found themselves surrounded by several hundred members of the 7" Cavalry at a place called Wounded Knee Creek. The soldiers placed six Hotchkiss cannons on the ridge above Big Foot’s camp. An uneasy truce carried through the night, but the next morning, as soldiers rifled the Indians’ . belongings, looking for weapons, a shot went off—who fired it was never known—and 100 soldiers opened fire on the crowd of Indians below. Big Foot died where he lay. Warriors and soldiers traded shots until there were no warriors left to fire. The lop-sided battle became a massacre. Women and children fled the scene in terror as soldiers shot them from the top of the ravines. Of the 350 men, women and children in Big Foot’s band, all but 100 were gunned down by the soldiers or cut to pieces by the Hotchkiss cannons. Some of the dead women and their children were found as far as three miles away, shot dead as they ran. Later, the U.S. Congress awarded 25 members of the Cavalry the Congressional Medal of Honor for their “valor” at Wounded Knee. This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals in this terrorist attack. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. Ann Coulter. 2001 do no harm, for it must come sooner or later.” And another newspaper editorial railed against the 1868 Indian treaty with the Lakota Sioux. “This after 9/II attacks abominable compact is seen as a barrier to the improvement and development of one of the richest and most fertile sections of America. What shall be done with these Indian dogs in our manger? They will ' not dig gold, or let others do it.” And so it was all over. I did not know then how much was ended. But when I look back now from this In 1874, a “scientific expedition,” led by the most famous Indian fighter himself, George Custer, a high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children, lying in a heap and scattered thousand soldiers, a hundred wagons and a host of reporters, moved into the Black Hills country of _ all along the crooked gulch, as plain as when I saw them, with eyes still young. And I can see that Dakota. It was believed to contain a wealth of precious metals, including gold, but the land was something else died there in the bloody mud. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream, protected by the Treaty of 1868, which gave these lands to Native Americans, for “as long as the grass and I to whom so great a vision was given in my youth...you see me now, a pitiful old man, who has grew and the rivers ran.” done nothing. For the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer and the Custer came to test the waters. They found the gold they were in search of, reporters sent special sacred tree is dead. stories to the press and within weeks, a new gold rush had ignited a frenzy. The government tried but —Black Elk failed to buy the land. The Lakota chief Red Cloud said, “The Black Hills are worth more than all the wild beasts and all the tame beasts in their possession of the white people. God placed those hills here Indian resistance to white Christian culture ended brutally that day. We could not see the value in for my wealth but now you want to take them from me and make me poor.” a way of life that didn’t mirror our own and so Americans chose to destroy it, by any means possible. President Grant, aware that public opinion now supported the invasion of the Black Hills for its gold, i took pine away from Native Americans but what survives in their hearts—we could never signed an executive order that forced the removal of all Indians in the Black Hills and onto reservations. claim that. He sent a terse memo, “Said Indians are hereby turned over to the War Department, for such action as What about today? Has Christian America evolved? Did it learn a lesson from the 19™ Century? ~ you deem proper.” A final showdown loomed. Sherman wrote, “We all know that the time approaches Have we been able to separate adversity from diversity? Do we understand the difference between an for the battle that is to decide whether they or the United States is sovereign in the land they occupy.” enemy and one who simply doesn’t agree with us? Consider these sentiments, after 9/11... The Army organized a massive three-pronged attack to subdue the remaining free-roaming Indians-those who followed Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other leaders who refused to give up the “This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this terrorist “old way of life.” The 7" Cavalry, led by Custer, moved confidently from Fort Abraham Lincoln; Custer attack...We should i Je thei ies, kill their lead d hem to Christianity. We weren't was convinced the 7 “was about to see its finest hour.” punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officials. We carpet-bombed German cities, we killed civilians. That’s war, and this is war.” Wherever we went, the soldiers came to kill us and it was all our own country. It was ours already when the Wacishus made a treaty with Red Cloud, that said it was ours as Jong as the grass should grow and the waters flow. It was only eight years before and they were chasing us now because we remembered, and they forgot. —Black Elk General Crook moved north along the Rosebud River and was soundly defeated by Crazy Horse. At the Little Big Horn, Custer’s Crow scouts warned him that to attack the Indians here would be suicide. Custer replied, “The largest Indian encampment on the North American continent is ahead...and I am going to attack it.” By the end of the day, his entire regiment had been wiped out. The U.S. Cavalry had attacked Native Americans, on their land, guaranteed by solemn treaty, but when word of Custer’s defeat reached the American people, his memory was transformed overnight. The arrogant, reckless, vain soldier whose ambition always over-rode logic and decency now became a gallant hero, dying with his boots on, making his “last stand” on Custer Hill, against a band of godless savages. The Indians never lost a battle, but their victory at the Little Big Horn would be their death song as well. The Army now brought its full might to bear and the government unilaterally confiscated the Black Hills territory. Within a year, Crazy Horse would surrender and then be shot to death at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, Sitting Bull would escape to Canada with a small band of followers but, after a Ann Coulter, a conservative columnist, held in high regard by the Christian religious right, wrote that in The National Review, America’s “premiere conservative web site.” She sounds just like General Sherman, 135 years ago. : Have we evolved in the last century as a “Christian nation?” And are we really any less violent or judgmental than the millions we condemn? I can’t help but recall the admonition from Jesus Christ to his disciples: “Do not look for the speck in your brother's eye. Consider the log in your own.” The Ghost Dancers understood far better than we do. SOURCE MATERIAL FOR THIS STORY: THE INDIAN FRONTIER of the American West: 1846-1890 _ By Robert Utley THE WEST By Geoffrey C. Ward SHERMAN By Lee Kennett THE TIME OF THE BUFFALO By Tom McHugh THE WAY WEST...A documentary film for The American Experience (PBS) By Ric Burns . THE WEST...A documentary film for The American Experience (PBS) By Steven Ives |