Winning the West: Indian Wars after 1840

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Winning the West: Indian Wars after 1840

At the turn of the eighteenth century the territory east of the Mississippi River seemed like enough land for the growing U.S. population for generations to come. Early explorers had indicated that much of the land west of the Mississippi was either too arid or too mountainous to serve a nation of farmers. In fact, many maps depicted the area west of the Mississippi as the Great American Desert. But wars and the discovery of gold in the West soon led to a hunger for expansion. Settlers who had ventured into Texas (before the territory became a state) found themselves at odds with the Mexican governors of the territory. Eventually Americans joined the dispute, fighting a war with Mexico that earned the United States a vast territory, including present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California. (See Chapter 4 for more information about the Mexican-American War.)

The western lands acquired from Mexico in 1848 might well have remained relatively uninhabited and unvisited were it not for the California gold rush of 1849, which drew many thousands of gold seekers across the country to settle in California. Within a few years, the United States had added vast tracts of western land and a new state on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Finally, an 1846 treaty with the British gave the Americans unimpeded control of the present-day states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. And, many Americans thought, why shouldn't they spread across the entire continent? Throughout the 1830s and 1840s there developed a national fervor for building the nation until it reached from coast to coast. This fervor was known as manifest destiny—the belief that it was God's intended plan for the Americans to control a vast empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Manifest Destiny meant the end of what remained of the American Indians' traditional way of life.

In the years after 1840, many thousands of Americans moved out into the trans-Mississippi West. Those who made it as far as California and Oregon were rarely bothered by the Native Americans who lived in the region. But the miners, ranchers, and farmers who settled in the vast territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific faced strong resistance from the many Indian tribes that claimed this region as their own. In the Southwest, the Navajo and Apache raided mines and ranches and stopped wagon trains crossing their desert landscape. On the prairies, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who had happily let wagon trains pass through took offense when whites began to claim the land and kill the buffalo that had sustained the Indian tribes for so long. The American settlers and soldiers who faced these tribes encountered resistance unheard of in the history of Indian removal (see Chapter 2). The difficulties of simply moving across the vast western landscape, combined with the ferocity of Indian tribes, made the final removal of the Indian threat a long and arduous process. It took until 1890 for the United States to finally conquer the people whose land it had so ruthlessly stolen.

Indians of the Southwest

The Indians of the American Southwest—the Pueblo, Zuni, Navajo, Apache, Hopi, Yavapai, Mojave, Yuma, Pima, and Papago tribes, among others—had already dealt with white conquerors for centuries when Americans began to encroach on their lands. An army of Spanish invaders had ventured north in search of gold in 1540, conquering a Zuni tribe with the help of guns—something never before seen by the Indians. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (c. 1510–1554) and his men were not the first to search the Arizona and New Mexico deserts for gold, nor would they be the last. As the Spaniards colonized Mexico, they also extended their influence north into the Rio Grande Valley. Though the Pueblo tribes living in what is now New Mexico eventually came to terms with the Spanish and Mexican colonizers, the Apache and Navajo never accepted foreign rule and waged war against the Spanish and Mexican governments for nearly 150 years. Thus, when American traders and soldiers sought to extend their influence into the Southwest in the 1830s and 1840s, they faced tribes with a long history of resisting colonization.

At first the Navajo embraced the Americans, for the new arrivals had succeeded at what the tribes had tried to do for years: they had defeated the Mexicans. The Navajo assumed that the Americans would keep Mexicans from settling on their land and stealing their sheep. Moreover, the Americans and the Navajo shared a common enemy: the Apache. The Navajo soon found that they were badly mistaken, for the conquerors believed that first claim to the land went to white Christians, known now as New Mexicans. In the eyes of the whites, the vast rangelands the Navajo used to graze their sheep and horses were going to waste. The whites thought the land should be used more productively—and by them.

Navajo resistance

In the late 1840s, however, it appeared that whites and Navajo might still live peacefully together. The Navajo respected the power of the white forces and wanted to avoid hostilities, and the Americans saw no great need to drive these Indians from their desert lands. However, some tribe members resented white settlements on traditional Indian lands and showed their resentment by stealing horses and belongings from these settlements. Because the Navajo chiefs who had signed peace treaties were unable to control the thieves, whites felt that the treaties were being ignored and called for more protection from the U.S. Army. Beginning in 1851 they got what they asked for: the army began a long war against the Navajo.

Tensions between the army and the Navajo escalated quickly after the army constructed Fort Defiance in eastern Arizona in 1851, squarely in Navajo grazing territory and near religious shrines. When one Navajo turned his cattle and horses out onto the land, the fort's commander ordered sixty of the animals shot, and the Navajo stepped up their attacks on white settlements as a result. Emboldened by the lack of a strong army response, they attacked more and more frequently. On April 30, 1860, a force of one thousand warriors led by chiefs Manuelito and Barboncito attacked Fort Defiance directly, killing a number of soldiers before being driven from the fort. No longer able to overlook isolated Indian raids, after 1860 the army was determined to destroy the Navajo.

The man put in charge of the assault, Colonel Edward Canby, divided his army of New Mexican and Pueblo volunteers and Ute scouts and dispersed them across the landscape to hunt down and kill the Navajo. For months Canby's forces searched, wearing out their horses and nearly killing themselves with thirst. In all, they killed just thirty-four Navajo. The Navajo had proved that they were masters of the desert landscape, and the army needed a new strategy. Canby camped his tired army in the middle of the Navajo grazing lands, keeping the Indians from returning to care for their crops and livestock. By winter the Navajo were ready to make peace. In exchange for promises that Navajo raids would end and that thieves would be stopped, the Americans closed Fort Defiance and moved their base to Fort Fauntleroy. For months this treaty brought peace to the region. But the coming of a new commander ended that peace.

A line in the sand

Colonel James Henry Carleton was, in the words of historians Robert Utley and Wilcomb Washburn, "an imperious, flint-eyed martinet with rocklike fixity of purpose." His purpose was no less than the utter defeat of the Navajo people, and within a few years, he had achieved his goal. In June 1863, less than a year after he took command of army forces in the region, he declared that the Navajo had until July 20, 1863, to report to a forty-square-mile reservation in southern New Mexico known as Bosque Redondo. After that day, every Navajo not on the reservation would be considered an enemy and be hunted down ruthlessly. When the deadline passed without a single Navajo having entered the reservation, Carleton set out to keep his word.

At the time, twelve thousand Navajo lived in a region that stretched from central New Mexico to the western border of present-day Arizona, an area riddled with canyons and valleys that were as familiar to the Navajo as the backs of their hands. Yet Carleton masterminded a campaign designed to crush the Native Americans' will to resist. Carleton entrusted well-known scout and Indian fighter Kit Carson (1809–1868) to lead his campaign. According to Utley and Washburn, "For six months, in summer and winter, [Carson's force] marched ceaselessly, burning hogans [Navajo houses], killing Navahos where they could but always keeping them on the run." The soldiers burned crops, slaughtered sheep and horses, and destroyed villages. Eventually Carson trapped a huge number of Navajos in Canyon de Chelly, a steep-sided canyon in which the Navajo had traditionally taken refuge. They would find no refuge in January 1864, as the soldiers moved relentlessly up the canyon, capturing nearly six thousand Navajo in the process. The captives were marched southeast to Bosque Redondo, with many dying along the way. The Navajo resistance was broken; Carleton had kept his promise.

The Apache

The Apache were a small tribe, numbering about eight thousand people scattered across present-day Arizona and New Mexico. They were not skilled farmers, nor did they maintain vast herds of sheep like the Navajo. They built few lasting villages and lived in some of the most desolate areas of the American West. Yet they proved to be one of the most formidable tribes American forces ever faced. Skilled thieves, the Apache harassed white settlers and travelers from the moment the whites set foot in the West. Able warriors, the Apache were fearless on the attack and difficult to track. Warriors were known to travel seventy miles on foot in a single day, and it was believed that an Apache could virtually merge into his surroundings to avoid discovery. For nearly forty years, the Apache resisted American attempts to uproot them from their desert homes.

When Americans began settling in the former Mexican territories in the 1850s, they soon began to complain about the terrors visited upon them by the Apache. Moreover, the few roads, including the Gila Trail, that stretched across the desert passed directly through Apache territory and were frequent targets for attack. Military leaders decided that the Apache menace must end. The first major campaign against the Apache was led by Colonel James Carleton, the notorious Indian-hater who had broken the Navajo (see p. 134). Carleton showed the Mescalero Apache (as this band of the tribe was known) no mercy. He told his men, according to historian Don Nardo, that "the men are to be slain whenever and wherever they can be found. The women and children may be taken prisoner." Carleton eventually forced the Mescalero to surrender and moved them to the Bosque Redondo reservation in southern New Mexico.

The remaining Apache learned from the Mescalero's defeat and would not take on U.S. forces directly. Instead, separate bands of Apache conducted guerrilla warfare against the American forces, attacking small bands of isolated soldiers, killing settlers in distant locations, and generally making life miserable for Americans in the region. These bands of Apache tended to follow strong leaders, several of whom became famous for their skill in alternately terrorizing and evading their white enemies. The most noted of the Apache chiefs were Cochise and Geronimo (1829–1909).

Cochise

Cochise (c. 1812–1874) had once signed a treaty with Americans allowing the Overland Mail service to travel across Indian lands through what became known as Apache Pass. Cochise's tolerance ended in 1861 when a lieutenant at Fort Buchanan named George Bascom called Cochise in to answer to charges of kidnaping a settler's children and stealing his livestock. Cochise escaped from the prison he was thrown in, but Bascom held Cochise's family as hostages. Cochise began a series of raids on mail routes, capturing hostages whom he hoped to trade for his family members. When no trade was forthcoming, the Apache tortured and killed their hostages. Bascom retaliated, killing Cochise's adult nephews (though releasing his wife and children) and the war was on. For years thereafter Cochise led Apache warriors in an attempt to drive the white people from the Indians' land. For a time the Apache made travel between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, nearly impossible.

In the mid-1860s American military leaders tried to make a treaty with Cochise and other prominent Apache chiefs, but the Native Americans wanted nothing to do with the reservations the white men offered. Raids continued into the 1870s, to such an extent that Arizona and New Mexico were deemed unfriendly places for whites to settle. Cochise took the largest share of the blame, even if he was not personally involved in many of the attacks. In the early 1870s, General George Crook received permission to chase the Apache into Mexican territory, where they had often hidden from U.S. forces. Tiring of a life on the run, Cochise surrendered to Crook after receiving promises that he and his people would be treated fairly. When it was clear that Crook planned to place the Apache on a reservation, however, Cochise escaped and continued fighting. Finally, in 1872, forces led by General Oliver O. Howard promised Cochise, now in his sixties, that the Apache would be moved onto land of Cochise's choosing. Cochise accepted—and died two years later, still waiting for the U.S. government to honor its promise. For the most part, Apache resistance ended, though Geronimo's small band kept up the fight into the 1880s (see box on p. 139).

Blood on the Plains

Well after California had attained statehood in 1850 and Oregon had been settled, and even after the present-day states of New Mexico and Arizona began to receive substantial numbers of white visitors, one area remained largely undeveloped. The Great Plains—which included the present-day states of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and parts of Colorado and Idaho—was a land of dry, rolling prairies and harsh winters. It was crossed over by many but settled by very few. Up until the 1850s, it was populated almost entirely by Indian tribes such as the Sioux and Cheyenne, who had lived there for centuries, making their living from the land and from the buffalo that roamed it. These tribes were seminomadic, following the herds of buffalo on the horses that they had learned to ride so well. But as Americans discovered new deposits of gold in Colorado and Montana, and as settlers proved willing to commit themselves to farming and ranching in the area once known as the Great American Desert, the peaceful life of the Plains Indians changed. For thirty years, they fought to defend their way of life, but in the end they too were defeated.

The Plains Indians felt the pressure of white expansion as early as the 1700s, when Sioux tribes driven out of the East by white settlement eventually settled in the Great Plains. When the Oregon Trail began to see substantial travel in the 1840s, settlers crossed land controlled by the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Crow tribes but were rarely disturbed. The Plains Indians felt little threat from those who were just passing through, and an 1851 treaty helped secure the travelers' safe passage. In fact, the army felt so secure about the territory that they withdrew regiments from forts in Wyoming and Idaho. The easy relations between whites and Indians began to deteriorate in 1854, when a dispute over a wandering cow convinced an army officer that he needed to teach the Indians a lesson. The officer, John L. Grattan, led thirty men to the camp of the Brule Sioux to demand that they turn over the supposed cow thief; when they met with resistance, the troops opened fire, killing the Sioux chief and a number of other Indians. The Sioux warriors struck back, killing all but one soldier.

As with most Indian attacks—no matter how justified—this one was met by an overwhelming response. Colonel William S. Harney marched on a Sioux village near Blue Water Creek in Wyoming and launched an attack that left eighty-five Sioux dead and led to the capture of seventy prisoners. Many Indians, including a young warrior named Crazy Horse, now believed that there could be no peace with the whites. Events in Colorado soon confirmed their views.

Geronimo

By the mid-1870s, just one branch of the Apache tribe continued to resist white rule: the Chiricahua, led by Geronimo (1829–1909). Though they had been settled on the San Carlos reservation in eastern Arizona in the early 1870s, Geronimo and his followers left the reservation in 1874 when conditions there proved miserable. Well into the 1880s Geronimo led his warriors on frequent attacks on white settlements. Several times during these years Geronimo was captured, only to escape again.

By the early 1880s Geronimo had become a legend, his exploits widely reported in the eastern newspapers. Determined to catch and hold the elusive Indian, Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles (1839–1925) led a force of five thousand soldiers to capture Geronimo and his band of followers, which included about thirty-five warriors. It took them five months to trap Geronimo in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, on September 3, 1886. Geronimo was moved to a reservation in Florida and later became something of a celebrity, appearing at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 and in President Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade in 1905. Already he had become a quaint reminder of the Wild West.

The Sand Creek Massacre

Soon after gold was discovered near Pikes Peak in Colorado in 1858, American legislators created the Colorado Territory. In order to facilitate white settlement, the government tried to negotiate a treaty that would place the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes on a small plot of land in southeastern Colorado. The tribes either rejected or ignored the treaty and continued to roam the prairies and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Finally, territorial governor John Evans encouraged white citizens "to kill and destroy, as enemies of the country, wherever they may be found, all ... Indians," according to Nardo. And he appointed a notorious Indian-hater, John M. Chivington, to lead the militia and drive the Indians out of Colorado.

In late November 1864, Chivington's force of seven hundred men neared the camp of Black Kettle, an Indian chief who had actually agreed to the terms of the treaty. Surprised that an army was approaching his camp, Black Kettle raised two flags: an American flag and a white flag of peace. But Chivington ordered his men to attack the camp, and they did so brutally. The five hundred Indians in the camp—mostly women and children—defended themselves as best they could, but the soldiers ripped through the camp. One member of Chivington's forces, quoted in Utley and Washburn's Indian Wars, remembered the battle: "They [the Indians] were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word." In all, two hundred Cheyenne were killed, and Chivington's men, clutching Indian scalps, rode into Denver boasting of their victory. The message to Indians was clear: they would receive no mercy from the white men. (Later congressional and military investigations into the Sand Creek Massacre decried the incident, but Chivington was never punished.)

The war escalates

Throughout the late 1860s, Indian attacks on white outposts and wagon trains increased—and so did white attacks on Indians. By the 1870s, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Oglala, Tetons, Hunkpapas, and other tribes in Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota believed that if they joined together they might be able to repel the white invaders. Savvy Indian chiefs such as Red Cloud (1822–1909), Crazy Horse (c. 1842–1877), and Sitting Bull (c. 1831–1890) began to school their warriors in more sophisticated methods of fighting. Rather than leaving battle strategies entirely up to the individual warriors, as was traditional, Indians began to orchestrate their actions. They sent small parties of decoys out to attract white forces into ambushes. They also instituted disciplined charges of warriors. Already fierce fighters, with these new methods the Native Americans became even more dangerous.

Yet all the gains in Native American strength were matched by changes in the U.S. Army. For years the army forces in the West had been a ragtag bunch of relatively undisciplined soldiers. But beginning in the late 1860s, a new kind of soldier and general took the field. Commanders such as Philip Sheridan (1831–1888) and George Armstrong Custer (1839–1876) had learned a great deal during the recent Civil War (1861–65), and they commanded soldiers who had become hardened to the blood and trauma of battle.

Black Hills battles

U.S. soldiers and Indian warriors met in dozens of battles and skirmishes across the wide Plains region, with neither side gaining a decisive advantage. Eastern newspapers even mocked the American forces for their inability to capture the relatively small bands of Indians who were causing so much trouble. The final collision between the two forces came in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Sacred ground to many of the Plains tribes, the Black Hills had been protected by many treaties over the years. But General Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills in 1874 to support those who believed there might be gold in the region. When gold was found, tens of thousands of fortune seekers and settlers moved into this sacred territory. The Indians had no choice but to respond.

In the winter of 1875, thousands of Indians from a number of tribes began to gather on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in southern Montana. There they planned their strategy for the defense of the Black Hills, ignoring or never learning of the army's threat to hunt down and kill any Indians found off the reservations. For its part, the U.S. Army planned a major attack on the tribes for the spring of 1876. Three contingents led by Generals George Crook, John Gibbon, and Alfred Terry and George Custer would converge on the Indian camp and put an end to the threat.

The Battle of Little Bighorn

As the U.S. troops approached the Indian camp at Little Bighorn, Custer grew overeager. Always impetuous, Custer ignored his orders to wait for the remaining forces and marched his 675 men forward, hoping for a moment of glory if his men alone defeated the Indians. Dividing his soldiers into three groups, Custer and his commanders attacked on the morning of June 25, 1876. The first group to meet the Indians, 280 men led by Major Marcus Reno, faced attack from many hundreds of Sitting Bull's Hunkpapas band of Sioux. Though they fought valiantly at first, the troops were soon over-whelmed and were forced to retreat. Digging into a nearby hill, Reno's men were reinforced by 125 troops led by Captain Frederick Benteen. As they fought they became aware that more and more Indians were heading off in another direction. Something was drawing the Indian attack away.

That something was an attack on the other side of the camp, this time by a band of 267 men led by Custer himself. Three groups of Indians responded to this attack—Cheyenne under Lame White Man, Hunkpapas under Gall, and Oglala under Crazy Horse—and they soon surrounded Custer's men on all sides. According to Nardo, "Thousands of Indians took part in the bloody assault, during which most of the soldiers dismounted and separated into small groups. Here, Crazy Horse's new battlefield strategy worked brilliantly. The Indians attacked in well-coordinated waves, overwhelming the troops. In the space of about forty-five minutes, Custer and all of his men were killed."

Aware that even more troops were on their way, the remainder of the Indians abandoned their village and prepared to fight again. When the remaining soldiers came upon the battlefield, they discovered Custer's dead army. At the center of the group of bodies was a core of white officers who had surrounded General Custer and fought to the bitter end. This final standoff, which ended in the death of all the soldiers, has become famous as Custer's Last Stand. The remaining troops thus bore witness to the carnage of the greatest Indian victory ever over white forces. It was the high point for the Indian alliance, and it called forth a devastating response.

The end

Following the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Indians separated into smaller units and were hunted down by Generals Terry and Crook. Sitting Bull and his band escaped into Canada; Crazy Horse was hounded by soldiers until 1877, when he finally surrendered and led his people onto a reservation. Other tribes were slowly rounded up and led to reservations as well. Their spirit had been broken by the white soldiers' neverending pursuit and the continuing stream of white settlers who claimed Indian land as their own. By the 1880s there seemed to be no land left to them but the reservations.

Indians on the reservations lived lives of poverty and squalor. The lands given to them were generally inferior: farms failed, there was not enough land to support extensive grazing of livestock, and the herds of buffalo had nearly been exterminated. Indians lived off the supplies given to them by the Indian agencies that managed the reservations.

On the Plains reservations, a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance predicted that magical powers would allow the Indians to gain back all their land from the whites. Determined to squash even this limited resistance, the army isolated a band of 350 Sioux, hoping to arrest suspected Ghost Dance leaders. Gathered by Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the Miniconjou Sioux were preparing to give up their weapons on December 29, 1890, when a weapon was accidentally discharged. Suspecting that they were being attacked, the soldiers opened fire on the camp. "The clash at Wounded Knee was a horror of murderous fighting," wrote Utley and Washburn. "Soldiers and Indians faced each other at close range and shot, stabbed, and clubbed one another." The army finally opened fire with its Hotchkiss guns, which fired fifty bullets a minute. Soon the Indians were routed. Approximately three hundred of the Sioux had fallen in one of the worst massacres in the long history of hostility between whites and Indians; only twenty-five soliders lost their lives. It was the last major battle of the Indian wars. Within a year and without much more bloodshed, the remaining Indians had moved to the reservations and the Indian wars were over.

Conclusion

For the better part of the nineteenth century, Indians and whites faced one another over a divide of misunderstanding and mutual hatred. Believing in the superiority of their way of life, white Americans laid claim to any Indian lands that suited them and, when faced with Indian resistance, attacked with scarcely a trace of remorse. Most whites thought that it was inevitable and necessary that Indians be removed; they justified their actions by their belief that it was their destiny to populate and domesticate the continent. This led the whites to break treaties and promises and slaughter innocent people. Though we now find these actions morally questionable if not downright reprehensible, they allowed America to quickly attain and control the vast territory now known as the United States.

For their part, the Indians were ill equipped to deal with the endless assault of the white man. Long accustomed to intertribal warfare among peoples of roughly equal strength, most Indians never suspected that the whites could bring so many soldiers into battle. Attacks that might have scared off an enemy tribe only brought down the wrath of large white armies. With radically different ways of living on and understanding the land, Indians could not grasp the white man's desire to possess land and mistakenly entered into treaties they had no intention of obeying. In the end, these factors, combined with the Indians' smaller population, inferior technology and weaponry, and lack of resistance to white diseases, meant that Indians were doomed to be victims in the onslaught of westward expansion.

For More Information

Books

Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.

Hook, Jason. American Indian Warrior Chiefs: Tecumseh, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Geronimo. New York: Firebird Books, 1990.

Lawson, Don. The United States in the Indian Wars. New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1975.

Morris, Richard B. The Indian Wars. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 1985.

Nardo, Don. The Indian Wars. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1991.

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783–1846. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Rogin, Michael Paul. Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.

Utley, Robert M. Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890. New York: Macmillan, 1973.

Utley, Robert M. Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Utley, Robert M., and Wilcomb E. Washburn. Indian Wars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Waldman, Carl. Atlas of the North American Indian. New York: Facts On File, 1985.

Web sites

Documents on American Indian Wars. [Online] http://www.hillsdale.edu/academics/history/Documents/War/19Ind.htm (accessed April 13, 2000).

National Indian Wars Association. [Online] http://www.indianwars.org/contents1.htm (accessed April 13, 2000).

Schultz, Stanley K. "Which Old West and Whose?" American History 102. [Online] http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture03.html (accessed April 13, 2000).