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Native American Voices
Introduction: Part I.
Part I.
Introduction
Prehistoric Patterns of Change
The Cultures of Prehistoric America
The Eve of Contact
Kinship and Religion
Part II.
European Perceptions
The Clash of Cultures
English Encounters
Native Americans and European Contests for Empire
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
Part IV.
"Kill the Indian and Save
the Man"
Native Americans at the Turn of the Century
Revitalization and Renewal
Indian Power
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?
Violence erupted first in Minnesota, where, by 1862, the Santee
Sioux were confined to a territory 150 miles long and just 10
miles wide. Denied a yearly payment and agricultural aid promised
by treaty, these people rose up in August 1862 and killed 500
white settlers at New Ulm. Lincoln appointed John Pope, who
had commanded Union forces at the second Battle of Bull Run,
to crush the uprising. The general announced that he would deal
with the Sioux "as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means
as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made."
When the Sioux surrendered in September 1862, about 1,800 were
taken prisoner and 303 were condemned to death. Lincoln commuted
the sentences of most, but he authorized the hanging of 38, the
largest mass execution in American history.
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.
The best-known episode of Indian resistance took place
after miners discovered gold in the Black Hills--land that had
been set aside as a reservation "in perpetuity." When
thousands of miners staked claims on Sioux lands, war erupted,
in which an Indian force led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull
killed General George Custer and his 264 men at the Battle of
the Little Big Horn. "Custer's Last Stand" was followed
by five years of warfare in Montana that confined the Sioux to
their reservations.
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.
The Battle of Wounded Knee marked the end of three centuries
of bitter warfare between Indians and whites. Indians had been
confined to small reservations, where reformers would seek to
transform them into Christian farmers. In the future, the Indian
struggle to maintain an independent way of life and a separate
culture would take place on new kinds of battlefields.
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