CHAPTER XXI

THE LAST STAND OF CHIEF JOSEPH AND SITTING BULL

The main defence of the last frontier by the Indians ceased with the termination of the Indian wars of the sixties. Here the resistance had most closely resembled a general war with the tribes in close alliance against the invader. With this obstacle overcome, the work left to be done in the conquest of the continent fell into two main classes: terminating Indian resistance by the suppression of sporadic outbreaks in remote byways and letting in the population. The new course of the Indian problem after 1869 led it speedily away from the part it had played in frontier advance until it became merely one of many social or race problems in the United States. It lost its special place as the great illustration of the difficulties of frontier life. But although the new course tended toward chronic peace, there were frequent relapses, here and there, which produced a series of Indian flurries after 1869. Never again do these episodes resemble, however remotely, a general Indian war.

Human nature did not change with the adoption of the so-called peace policy. The government had constantly to be on guard against the dishonest agent, while improved facilities in communication increased the squatters' ability to intrude upon valuable lands. The Sioux treaty of 1868, whereby the United States abandoned the Powder River route and erected the great reserve in Dakota, west of the Missouri River, was scarcely dry before rumors of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills turned the eyes of prospectors thither.

Early in 1870 citizens of Cheyenne and the territory of Wyoming organized a mining and prospecting company that professed an intention to explore the Big Horn country in northern Wyoming, but was believed by the Sioux to contemplate a visit to the Black Hills within their reserve. The local Sioux agent remonstrated against this, and General C. C. Augur was sent to Cheyenne to confer with the leaders of the expedition. He found Wyoming in a state of irritation against the Sioux treaty, which left the Indians in control of their Powder River country--the best third of the territory. He sympathized with the frontiersmen, but finally was forced by orders from Washington to prevent the expedition from starting into the field. Four years later this deferred reconnoissance took place as an official expedition under General Custer, with "great excitement among the whole Sioux." The approach from the northeast of the Northern Pacific, which had reached a landing at Bismarck on the Missouri before the panic of 1873, still further increased the apprehension of the tribes that they were to be dispossessed. The Indian Commissioner, in the end of 1874, believed that no harm would come of the expedition since no great gold finds had been made, but the Montana historian was nearer the truth when he wrote: "The whole Sioux nation was successfully defied." It was a clear violation of the tribal right, and necessarily emboldened the frontiersmen to prospect on their own account.

Still further to disquiet the Sioux, and to give countenance to the disgruntled warrior bands that resented the treaties already made, came the mismanagement of the Red Cloud agency. Professor O. C. Marsh, of Yale College, was stopped by Red Cloud, while on a geological visit to the Black Hills, in November, 1874, and was refused admission to the Indian lands until he agreed to convey to Washington samples of decayed flour and inferior rations which the Indian agent was issuing to the Oglala Sioux. With some time at his disposal, Professor Marsh proceeded to study the new problem thus brought to his notice, and accumulated a mass of evidence which seemed to him to prove the existence of big plots to defraud the government, and mismanagement extending even to the Secretary of the Interior. He published his charges in pamphlet form, and wrote letters of protest to the President, in which he maintained that the Indian officials were trying harder to suppress his evidence than to correct the grievances of the Sioux. He managed to stir up so much interest in the East that the Board of Indian Commissioners finally appointed a committee to investigate the affairs of the Red Cloud agency. The report of the committee in October, 1875, whitewashed many of the individuals attacked by Professor Marsh, and exonerated others of guilt at the expense of their intelligence, but revealed abuses in the Indian Office which might fully justify uneasiness among the Sioux.

To these tribes, already discontented because of their compression and sullen because of mismanagement, the entry of miners into the Black Hills country was the last straw. Probably a thousand miners were there prospecting in the summer of 1875, creating disturbances and exaggerating in the Indian mind the value of the reserve, so that an attempt by the Indian Bureau to negotiate a cession in the autumn came to nothing. The natural tendency of these forces was to drive the younger braves off the reserve, to seek comfort with the non-treaty bands that roamed at will and were scornful of those that lived in peace. Most important of the leaders of these bands was Sitting Bull.

In December the Indian Commissioner, despite the Sioux privilege to pursue the chase, ordered all the Sioux to return to their reserves before February 1, 1876, under penalty of being considered hostile. As yet the mutterings had not broken out in war, and the evidence does not show that conflict was inevitable. The tribes could not have got back on time had they wanted to; but their failure to return led the Indian Office to turn the Sioux over to the War Department. The army began by destroying a friendly village on the 17th of March, a fact attested not by an enemy of the army, but by General H. H. Sibley, of Minnesota, who himself had fought the Sioux with marked success in 1862.

With war now actually begun, three columns were sent into the field to arrest and restrain the hostile Sioux. Of the three commanders, Cook, Gibbon, and Custer, the last-named was the most romantic of fighters. He was already well known for his Cheyenne campaigns and his frontier book. Sherman had described him in 1867 as "young, _very_ brave, even to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry officer," and as "ready and willing now to fight the Indians." La Barge, who had carried some of Custer's regiment on his steamer _De Smet_, in 1873, saw him as "an officer ... clad in buckskin trousers from the seams of which a large fringe was fluttering, red-topped boots, broad sombrero, large gauntlets, flowing hair, and mounted on a spirited animal." His showy vanity and his admitted courage had already got him into more than one difficulty; now on June 25, 1876, his whole column of five companies, excepting only his battle horse, Comanche, and a half-breed scout, was destroyed in a battle on the Little Big Horn. If Custer had lived, he might perhaps have been cleared of the charge of disobedience, as Fetterman might ten years before, but, as it turned out, there were many to lay his death to his own rashness. The war ended before 1876 was over, though Sitting Bull with a small band escaped to Canada, where he worried the Dominion Government for several years. "I know of no instance in history," wrote Bishop Whipple of Minnesota, "where a great nation has so shamelessly violated its solemn oath." The Sioux were crushed, their Black Hills were ceded, and the disappointed tribes settled down to another decade of quiescence.

In 1877 the interest which had made Sitting Bull a hero in the Centennial year was transferred to Chief Joseph, leader of the non-treaty Nez Percés, in the valley of the Snake. This tribe had been a friendly neighbor of the overland migrations since the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Living in the valleys of the Snake and its tributaries, it could easily have hindered the course of travel along the Oregon trail, but the disposition of its chiefs was always good. In 1855 it had begun to treat with the United States and had ceded considerable territory at the conference held by Governor Stevens with Chief Lawyer and Chief Joseph.

The exigencies of the Civil War, failure of Congress to fulfil treaty stipulations, and the discovery of gold along the Snake served to change the character of the Nez Percés. Lawyer's annuity of five hundred dollars, as Principal Chief, was at best not royal, and when its vouchers had to be cashed in greenbacks at from forty-five to fifty cents on the dollar, he complained of hardship. It was difficult to persuade the savage that a depreciated greenback was as good as money. Congress was slow with the annuities promised in 1855. In 1861, only one Indian in six could have a blanket, while the 4393 yards of calico issued allowed under two yards to each Indian. The Commissioner commented mildly upon this, to the effect that "Giving a blanket to one Indian works no satisfaction to the other five, who receive none." The gold boom, with the resulting rise of Lewiston, in the heart of the reserve, brought in so many lawless miners that the treaty of 1855 was soon out of date.

In 1863 a new treaty was held with Chief Lawyer and fifty other headmen, by which certain valleys were surrendered and the bounds of the Lapwai reserve agreed upon. Most of the Nez Percés accepted this, but Chief Joseph refused to sign and gathered about him a band of unreconciled, non-treaty braves who continued to hunt at will over the Wallowa Valley, which Lawyer and his followers had professed to cede. It was an interesting legal point as to the right of a non-treaty chief to claim to own lands ceded by the rest of his tribe. But Joseph, though discontented, was not dangerous, and there was little friction until settlers began to penetrate into his hunting-grounds. In 1873, President Grant created a Wallowa reserve for Joseph's Nez Percés, since they claimed this chiefly as their home. But when they showed no disposition to confine themselves to its limits, he revoked the order in 1875. The next year a commission, headed by the Secretary of the Interior, Zachary Chandler, was sent to persuade Joseph to settle down, but returned without success. Joseph stood upon his right to continue to occupy at pleasure the lands which had always belonged to the Nez Percés, and which he and his followers had never ceded. The commission recommended the segregation of the medicine-men and dreamers, especially Smohalla, who seemed to provide the inspiration for Joseph, and the military occupation of the Wallowa Valley in anticipation of an outbreak by the tribe against the incoming white settlers. These things were done in part, but in the spring of 1877, "it becoming evident to Agent Monteith that all negotiations for the peaceful removal of Joseph and his band, with other non-treaty Nez Percé Indians, to the Lapwai Indian reservation in Idaho must fail of a satisfactory adjustment," the Indian Office gave it up, and turned the affair over to General O. O. Howard and the War Department.

The conferences held by Howard with the leaders, in May, made it clear to them that their alternatives were to emigrate to Lapwai or to fight. At first Howard thought they would yield. Looking Glass and White Bird picked out a site on the Clearwater to which the tribe agreed to remove at once; but just before the day fixed for the removal, the murder of one of the Indians near Mt. Idaho led to revenge directed against the whites and the massacre of several. War immediately followed, for the next two months covering the borderland of Idaho and Montana with confusion. A whole volume by General Howard has been devoted to its details. Chief Joseph himself discussed it in the _North American Review_ in 1879. Dunn has treated it critically in his _Massacres of the Mountains_, and the Montana Historical Society has published many articles concerning it. Considerably less is known of the more important wars which preceded it than of this struggle of the Nez Percés. In August the fighting turned to flight, Chief Joseph abandoning the Salmon River country and crossing into the Yellowstone Valley. In seventy-five days Howard chased him 1321 miles, across the Yellowstone Park toward the Big Horn country and the Sioux reserve. Along the swift flight there were running battles from time to time, while the fugitives replenished their stores and stock from the country through which they passed. Behind them Howard pressed; in their front Colonel Nelson A. Miles was ordered to head them off. Miles caught their trail in the end of September after they had crossed the Missouri River and had headed for the refuge in Canada which Sitting Bull had found. On October 3, 1877, he surprised the Nez Percé camp on Snake Creek, capturing six hundred head of stock and inflicting upon Joseph's band the heaviest blow of the war. Two days later the stubborn chief surrendered to Colonel Miles.

"What shall be done with them?" Commissioner Hayt asked at the end of 1877. For once an Indian band had conducted a war on white principles, obeying the rules of war and refraining from mutilation and torture. Joseph had by his sheer military skill won the admiration and respect of his military opponents. But the murders which had inaugurated the war prevented a return of the tribe to Idaho. To exile they were sent, and Joseph's uprising ended as all such resistances must. The forcible invasion of the territory by the whites was maintained; the tribe was sent in punishment to malarial lands in Indian Territory, where they rapidly dwindled in number. There has been no adequate defence of the policy of the United States from first to last.

The Modoc of northern California, and the Apache of Arizona and New Mexico fought against the inevitable, as did the Sioux and the Nez Percés. The former broke out in resistance in the winter of 1872-1873, after they had long been proscribed by California opinion. In March of 1873 they made their fate sure by the treacherous murder of General E. R. S. Canby and other peace commissioners sent to confer with them. In the war which resulted the Modoc, under Modoc Jack and Scar-Faced Charley, were pursued from cave to ravine among the lava beds of the Modoc country until regular soldiers finally corralled them all. Jack was hanged for murder at Fort Klamath in October, but Charley lived to settle down and reform with a portion of the tribe in Indian Territory.

The Apache had always been a thorn in the flesh of the trifling population of Arizona and New Mexico, and a nuisance to both army and Indian Office. The Navaho, their neighbors, after a hard decade with Carleton and the Bosque Redondo, had quieted down during the seventies and advanced towards economic independence. But the Apache were long in learning the virtues of non-resistance. Bell had found in Arizona a young girl whose adventures as a fifteen-year-old child served to explain the attitude of the whites. She had been carried off by Indians who, when pressed by pursuers, had stripped her naked, knocked her senseless with a tomahawk, pierced her arms with three arrows and a leg with one, and then rolled her down a ravine, there to abandon her. The child had come to, and without food, clothes, or water, had found her way home over thirty miles of mountain paths. Such episodes necessarily inspired the white population with fear and hatred, while the continued residence of the sufferers in the Indians' vicinity illustrates the persistence of the pressure which was sure to overwhelm the tribes in the end. Tucson had retaliated against such excesses of the red men by equal excesses of the whites. Without any immediate provocation, fourscore Arivapa Apache, who had been concentrated under military supervision at Camp Grant, were massacred in cold blood.

General George Crook alone was able to bring order into the Arizona frontier. From 1871 to 1875 he was there in command,--"the beau-ideal Indian fighter," Dunn calls him. For two years he engaged in constant campaigns against the "incorrigibly hostile," but before 1873 was over he had most of his Apache pacified, checked off, and under police supervision. He enrolled them and gave to each a brass identification check, so that it might be easier for his police to watch them. The tribes were passed back to the Indian Office in 1874, and Crook was transferred to another command in 1875. Immediately the Indian Commissioner commenced to concentrate the scattered tribes, but was hindered by hostilities among the Indians themselves quite as bitter as their hatred for the whites. First Victorio, and then Geronimo was the centre of the resistance to the concentration which placed hereditary enemies side by side. They protested against the sites assigned them, and successfully defied the Commissioner to carry out his orders. Crook was brought back to the department in 1882, and after another long war gradually established peace.

Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada in 1876, returned to Dakota in the early eighties in time to witness the rapid settlement of the northern plains and the growth of the territories towards statehood. After his revolt the Black Hills had been taken away from the tribe, as had been the vague hunting rights over northern Wyoming. Now as statehood advanced in the later eighties, and as population piled up around the edges of the reserve, the time was ripe for the medicine-men to preach the coming of a Messiah, and for Sitting Bull to increase his personal following. Bad crops which in these years produced populism in Kansas and Nebraska, had even greater menace for the half-civilized Indians. Agents and army officers became aware of the undercurrent of danger some months before trouble broke out.

The state of South Dakota was admitted in November, 1889. Just a year later the Bureau turned the Sioux country over to the army, and General Nelson A. Miles proceeded to restore peace, especially in the vicinity of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies. The arrest of Sitting Bull, who claimed miraculous powers for himself, and whose "ghost shirts" were supposed to give invulnerability to his followers, was attempted in December. The troops sent out were resisted, however, and in the mêlée the prophet was killed. The war which followed was much noticed, but of little consequence. General Miles had plenty of troops and Hotchkiss guns. Heliograph stations conveyed news easily and safely. But when orders were issued two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull to disarm the camp at Wounded Knee, the savages resisted. The troops within reach, far outnumbered, blazed away with their rapid-fire guns, regardless of age or sex, with such effect that more than two hundred Indian bodies, mostly women and children, were found dead upon the field.

With the death of Sitting Bull, turbulence among the Indians, important enough to be called resistance, came to an end. There had been many other isolated cases of outbreak since the adoption of the peace policy in 1869. There were petty riots and individual murders long after 1890. But there were, and could be, no more Indian wars. Many of the tribes had been educated to half-civilization, while lands in severalty had changed the point of view of many tribesmen. The relative strength of the two races was overwhelmingly in favor of the whites.