attacking the indians

• 0 COMMENTS

Today's selection-- from Continental Reckoning by Elliot West. The 1870s saw a broad and concerted attack against Native Americans across the American west:

 “After giving the Comanches and Kiowas some considerable slack in 1867, the government took it back in 1871. It was sparked into action in May by an attack on an army supply train, which General of the Army William Sherman missed by a half hour. Sherman answered by turning all the force he could muster against Comancheria, sending Colonel Ranald Mackenzie on cavalry forays over the next year and a half that destroyed supplies, captured horses, killed some warriors and captured women and children. Another command, with Texas cattlemen as paramilitaries, struck the comanchero system and effectively shut down that critical commercial outlet. Pressed first by the army from the south, then cut off from support to the west, Comanches next faced an even more elemental threat out of the north—a market—driven assault on the heart of their economy. In 1873 white hide hunters turned from the depleted central plains to the Texas Panhandle, the irreducible core of the bands' livelihood. The army did nothing to stop them. 

“Staggering from military attacks and stunned by the ferocity of the hunt, Comanches and Kiowas responded to a young holy man, Isatai (Wolf Vagina), who claimed divine power to reverse the disaster, restore Native dominance, and resurrect the slaughtered bison. He could freeze enemy bullets as they flew and could vomit forth thousands of his own to fire back. On June 27, 1874, he and the mixed-blood leader Quanah Parker led several hundred warriors against an outpost of buffalo runners at Adobe Walls near the Canadian River. The hunters, however, used their powerful, long-barreled rifles nearly as effectively against the Indians as against the bison. The bullets did not halt in midair but killed perhaps two dozen warriors, wounded Quanah Parker, and shot lsatai's horse from under him. The demoralized attackers dispersed and the great hunt continued. 

“At summer's end the army command ordered a full assault out of seven posts in Texas, Indian Territory, New Mexico, and Kansas. On September 28 Mackenzie and the Fourth Cavalry fell on a camp of more than two hundred lodges along the Prairie Dog Town branch of the Red River in Palo Duro Canyon, south of modern Amarillo. Comanches and Kiowas fled with minimal losses, but Mackenzie fired the lodges and everything inside them: the dried meat, blankets, flour, clothing, robes, coffee, and everything else the bands would need to survive the coming winter. They also captured more than 1,300 horses and mules. Two days later they herded more than a thousand to the head of a feeder canyon and shot them all. For decades afterward mounds of bones marked the spot and stories of whinnying ghost herds chilled the dreams of Texas ranch children. 

“The episode was both unique and revealing. The Comanche resurgence must have seemed a rekindling of glory—the leader Ten Bears told agents in 1867 that his people were no longer ‘weak and blind as puppies’ but strong again, ‘like grown horses’ —but in fact it was a sobering lesson in a new reality.  An international market, reaching out through the bloody hands of white hide hunters, devastated the resource that fed and housed the bands. Then, after briefly looking away, Washington turned its attention back on Comancheria and sent in its own warriors, positioned and provisioned via train, coordinated via wire, and applied by what was now a well-tested strategy of denying winter refuge. The Comanches and Kiowas were certainly not ‘weak and blind,’ but they were fatally vulnerable. In the end their interlude of reborn power measured the weight-of the market's scope and might, of military force, and of sheer numbers of people—now leaning against all former masters of the plains. 

“To seal the Indians' defeat, Washington took a two-step approach. The first could not have been more basic. To destroy Native horse cultures, Washington would destroy or seize the cultures' horses. By the time Mackenzie turned his men's guns against those screaming animals, he was following a well-grounded military policy. In 1858 Col. George Wright had followed his victory over the coalition of tribes in eastern Washington with the slaughter of more than 800 horses. Five years later Col. Patrick Connor had sealed the crushing of the Shoshone village at Bear River by taking at least 175 horses from survivors who had fled afoot into the frozen countryside. In another five years, on November 27, 1868, Lt. Col. George Custer ordered 875 horses shot after routing a peace camp of Cheyennes on the Washita River, and the next year, on July 11, 1869, Gen. Eugene Carr seized about 400 horses and mules after sending the last resistant Southern Cheyennes into flight from Summit Springs along the South Platte River. Two years after Palo Duro, after Custer's crushing on the Little Big Horn, Ranald Mackenzie caught the Northern Cheyenne band under Morning Star (or Dull Knife) along Wyoming's Powder River and took 500 horses as the Cheyennes fled on foot into the winter cold. In late September of the next year, Col. Nelson Miles caught resistant bands of the Nez Perces at Snake Creek in north central Montana, and in the battle's opening moments his men captured or dispersed the camp's several hundred horses. The surrendered Nez Perces were taken to Bismarck, Dakota Territory, by boat or on foot. They were allowed a single horse, ridden by Chief Joseph (Heinmot Tooyalakekt). 

“The second step, usually hard on the heels of the first, was to replace remaining horses with cattle. In the fall of 1876, as some cavalry pursued the Lakota and Cheyenne victors at the Little Bighorn, more than a thousand others seized most horses on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservations and drove them to Saint Paul, Minnesota, for sale. Hundreds were lost along the way to distemper, frigid storms, exhaustion, and theft, and the rest, worth nearly twenty thousand dollars, were exchanged for 450 cows. The next summer the surrendered Northern Cheyennes were given back some of their mounts for the trip to Indian Territory. One leader claimed they were promised ‘presents of horses’ on arrival, but Ranald Mackenzie allowed one horse per lodge and sold the rest to buy 51 cows for 933 men, women, and children to begin a new life. Two years earlier, Mackenzie had used a ‘pony fund’ from selling horses he had not slaughtered at Palo Duro Canyon to buy 3,600 New Mexican sheep for surrendered Comanches and Kiowas. Three years later a Comanche reported that 30 survived. 

“Officials always justified the swap as serving the Indians. The Brule Lakotas would ever remain ‘a horde of painted savages’ as long as they were in the saddle, their agent wrote in 1876, but unhorse them and he could begin their transformation, dressing them as whites, turning them to farming and ‘productive industry.’ The rhetorical puff is easy to dismiss, but beneath it was a pragmatic strategy of ecological politics. By decoupling Indians from horses and recoupling them to cattle, Washington was securing its power by realigning the endless movement of sunlight. 

“Follow its flow, and consider the cow. From one angle the arrival of cattle was a variation of the coming of horses. A cow was another shortcut to the energy waiting in grasses, in its case turning it into readily available food. But a cow's advantages stopped there. An Indian cattleman could never be a cattle-man, a fusion of two species into a new form with possibilities that just kept unfolding. No Indian ever chased a bison or rode into battle on a Hereford. Washington was taking away grass power that was transcendent and liberating and giving back grass power that was dinner. And it was giving that power–providing cattle of its choosing and giving them on its own terms."

author:	Elliot West
title:	Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (History of the American West)
publisher:	University of Nebraska Press
pages:	339-341