NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.
NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.
A Good Year to Die: The Story of the Great Sioux War
464
A Good Year to Die: The Story of the Great Sioux War
464eBook
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Overview
NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307823373 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/12/2012 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
The year 1876 was a pivotal one. The United States prepared for its centennial with an extravagant exposition in Philadelphia. During that hundred years of national existence, the industrial revolution had changed the face of the planet, and man’s capabilities seemed limitless. The focal point of the exposition would be the halls of arts and industries, with exhibits of technological achievement from every major nation on earth.
The United States itself had grown from thirteen agrarian British colonies hugging the Atlantic coast to one of the world’s leading industrial and economic powers. The Atlantic and Pacific were linked by rail and telegraph. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. John D. Rockefeller was organizing the businesses that would ultimately become Standard Oil. Andrew Carnegie was making Pittsburgh synonymous with steel.
Nor did the nation lag behind in art. Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler were establishing American painters as equals to their European counterparts. The American stamp in letters was even greater. In 1876, Samuel L. Clemens published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a timeless story of boyhood that confirmed its author as a giant of American literature, and shook the literature itself from its British roots giving it a national character all its own.
Baseball had become a national passion since its invention almost thirty years before, and in 1876, the five-year-old National Association of Professional Base Ball Players reorganized itself as the National League.
In the South, the bitter years of Reconstruction were drawing to a close. Most states had reestablished their sovereignty, and only a few remained under military rule.
Not everything was bright, however. Four years earlier, General Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War hero, had been overwhelmingly elected to a second term as president, only to find himself mired in scandal. First, the Credit Mobilier, involving high officials in government, nearly destroyed the Union Pacific Railroad on which the nation depended for coast-to-coast transportation. Then the Whiskey Ring, equally well connected, defrauded the government out of millions of dollars in liquor tax revenue. The administration of the Indian agencies had long been a national disgrace, and Congress was becoming suspicious of Grant’s sacrosanct War Department. Aggravating the situation was one of the worst economic depressions in history. Thousands went hungry and homeless, while politicians enriched themselves at public expense.
The nation in 1876 was only one third of its present area. Although the United States was second only to the British Empire in North American possessions, much of it was “territories,” a polite republican word that essentially meant “colonies.” The territories were outside the national boundaries, and administered according to the will and pleasure of the federal government. Although it was presumed that eventually all would be admitted as states, they were dependent possessions whose people had only limited voice in territorial affairs, and none at all on the federal level. The primary recourse for action was public opinion in the nation as a whole and, with the tacit support of the army, territorial citizens manipulated public opinion.
Except for Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska, the eastern United States ended at the 95th meridian. West of that line were millions of square miles of territories—Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Indian Territory, and more—until one reached the states of Nevada, California, and Oregon. So remote were these territories that people living in them often referred to “the States” as if they were a distant foreign land.
Although Colorado entered the Union in 1876, many of the remaining territories were still unsettled. Large tracts of the western Dakotas and eastern Montana and Wyoming were unexplored, their features unknown, never seen by any member of the white race. Scientists, scholars, and government officials knew less of these areas than modern schoolchildren know of Saturn.
Most of the people who lived in this land were the nomadic tribesmen customarily called American Indians. Like many primitive societies, they were warriors. The greatest of these were the Teton Lakota or western Sioux. Fearless in battle, their fighting men would cry, “It is a good day to die!”
For the United States Army, 1876 was a good year to die; for that year, an extraordinary number of soldiers did die at the hands of the Sioux and their allies—1876 was the worst year for the army since the close of the Civil War. It was the year of the Great Sioux War.
Like most wars, the Great Sioux War was expected to resolve permanently a situation that both sides found intolerable. And like most wars, it created more problems than it solved, problems that have continued to haunt the national conscience.
The complicated nature of Indian-white relations has been oversimplified throughout our history. Until the 1960s, the whites were thought to represent progress and civilization whereas the Indians were viewed as bloodthirsty savages. Since then, the Indians have been depicted as virtuous custodians of nature; the whites have been vicious despoilers of the land and environment. In reality, neither side was essentially good or essentially evil. More than anything else, they were different. As national development threw white and Indian into ever increasing contact, the differences became more apparent until they were irreconcilable.
Perhaps the greatest difference was an attitude toward land. The Plains Indian concept of private property was restricted to personal possessions. Tribal lands were held in common. As a semi- nomad who existed largely by hunting, the Indian thought it absurd that anyone could claim individual ownership over the bounty of nature. To the whites, however, property essentially meant land, and the right of individual ownership was one of the cornerstones of white civilization.
Land was a key issue in the government’s Indian policy, and that policy was less than noble. Tribes were invited to sign away their land in treaties they did not understand, in exchange for goods that often were of no use to them. The goods were frequently less than promised, because government officials routinely plundered the Indian appropriation. Treaties were broken. When the Indians rebelled at this treatment, troops were sent to restore order.
There were those in the East, particularly among the religious groups, who viewed the entire policy as a travesty. Exactly two weeks after Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, Rev. D. J. Burrell, a Chicago minister, told his congregation that the government had brought the disaster upon itself through its historic indifference to the rights of Indians as human beings.
Despite their good intentions, however, the religious groups offered no viable alternative to existing policy. For seven years prior to the Great Sioux War, the government had allowed churches to administer the western Indian agencies and work with the tribes. The churches failed, largely because they neither understood nor respected the indigenous Plains Indian cultures. Their goal was to “save” the Indian by destroying his very existence as an Indian. Their primary method was to force agriculture on a warrior society, ignoring not only the social upheaval it brought but also the even more important fact that Indian reservations were often located on land totally unsuited for farming. When the Indian failed to respond in what the missionary/Indian agent considered an appropriate manner, he was allowed to starve, much as white children of the period were sometimes starved to guide them toward the Victorian ideal of virtue.2 (The Indians were, after all, children of the “Great Father” as the president was called.)
Religious groups aside, many easterners adhered to the “noble savage” concept of eighteenth-century European author-philosophers, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Alexander Pope. Although Pope died in 1744, and probably never saw an Indian, nineteenth-century easterners nevertheless quoted a stanza of his Essay on Man, which begins:
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.
Ironically, this passage was also quoted by western frontiersmen, as a sarcastic comment on eastern idealism. The phrase, “Lo, the poor Indian,” was so well known that “Poor Lo,” “Mr. Lo,” or just plain “Lo” became common western slang names for the average Indian.
Words and ideals did not alter the situation on the plains. The seemingly endless warfare did, however, alter public opinion, even in the East. As white casualties grew, many citizens came to agree with Gen. William T. Sherman, commander of the army during much of the Indian wars, who observed, “The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed in the next war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers. Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous.”
Sherman was frustrated; initially, he had hoped for a peaceful settlement of white-Indian differences and saw those hopes drowned in bloodshed. Far from being a Hitlerian Final Solution, his comment was actually the most extreme expression of a profound dilemma—the basic conflict between a technologically advanced society and a primitive, tribal society. In such a situation, where both occupy—or wish to occupy—the same area, the less advanced society must yield.4 How to make the less advanced society yield, yet preserve its rights and integrity until it can become fully integrated (as eventually it must), is a problem that continues to trouble the nations of the world.
In the nineteenth century, however, the government rarely concerned itself with Indian rights. The “civilization” of the Indian, and the expansion of mainstream America into Indian lands became a quasi-divine mission. For those citizens who might have pangs of conscience, the officials in Washington created elaborate subterfuges, placing the moral burden upon the Indians. With or without war, the seizure of the Indian lands would have ultimately occurred. War simply speeded the process.
The United States Army of that period very closely resembled the French Foreign Legion. It was a largely mercenary force, whose recruiters asked no questions when someone sought to enlist. Almost half the soldiers were foreign born, and had already fought in nationalist uprisings in Europe, or imperialist expansion elsewhere. Others were former Confederates—often former officers—forbidden by law from holding a U.S. Army commission, but willing to serve in the ranks in order to follow the only profession they knew. A substantial number of soldiers were Germans, and the Irish constituted such a high percentage that army anecdotes and songs of the era are often in brogue.