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The Last Stand

Cheyenne

After Dull Knife's band of northern Cheyenne was defeated by Mackenzie in late 1876, the scattered fugitives were rounded up or came in and surrendered. In the spring of 1877 they were sent to join their relatives, the southern Cheyenne, in Indian Territory. The Indian Bureau liked to wrap up their charges in neat tribal packages, whether the Indians liked it or not. The northern Cheyenne did not like it. Within two months, two-thirds of them were ill; forty-one died that winter. Medical care was inadequate and rations were short. In the summer of 1878 Little Wolf told the agent that he did not want to fight but that he and his band were going back to their old home in the north. Dull Knife's following accompanied Little Wolf's band.

Troops were sent after them; there were fights, but the Cheyenne kept on going, across Kansas and well into Nebraska. They did some plundering, and a few citizens were killed, but Little Wolf tried to make it a peaceful migration. At the Platte River the bands of Little Wolf and Dull Knife separated. Little Wolf surrendered to First Lieutenant William Philo Clark of the 2nd Cavalry, and was taken to Fort Keogh on the Yellowstone. There General Miles enlisted Little Wolf and his warriors as Indian scouts to help run down Sioux hostiles. Little Wolf's people were allowed to remain in the North.

A more tragic end awaited Dull Knife's band. Not knowing that the Red Cloud Agency had been discontinued, he led his people toward it. Troops surrounded, disarmed and imprisoned his entire band in nearby Fort Robinson. When they refused to agree to return south, an attempt was made to starve them into submission. On January 9, 1879, with a few weapons they had managed to hide, they broke out of their barracks prison. Surrounded by troops, the Cheyenne kept on fighting until sixty-four were killed. Seventy-eight, most of them wounded, were captured. The survivors were sent to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Ghost Dance

Sitting Bull returned from Canada and surrendered in 1881. From then on the Northern Plains were at peace until disturbed by a religious revival. In 1889 Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, a Paiute living near Walker Lake, Nevada, had visions. He preached that the Messiah who had been crucified by the whites was coming back, this time for the Indians. The white man and all his works would be swept away; buffalo would return; dead Indians would live again. To aid in bringing this about the ceremonial of the Ghost Dance was instituted. First Lieutenant Hugh L. Scott of the 7th Cavalry said, "The name of Jesus was on every tongue, and had I been a missionary I could have led every Indian on the Plains into the church."

A new administration in Washington had replaced most of the agents among the Sioux with inexperienced men. A new agent at Pine Ridge was frightened by the Ghost Dance excitement, and called for troops. The experienced James McLaughlin at Standing Rock Agency, near Fort Yates, North Dakota, was an honest and able administrator, but he ardently supported the current Indian Bureau policy of civilizing the Indians by suppressing all vestiges of their culture. For several years he had been attempting to undermine the influence of Sitting Bull - most of the downrating of Sitting Bull derives from McLaughlin. There is doubt whether Sitting Bull took any part in the Ghost Dance movement, but McLaughlin believed he was its leader, and even General Miles became convinced that Sitting Bull was planning a great conspiracy of all Indian tribes.

It is improbable that Sitting Bull had any such idea. He had traveled one season with Buffalo Bill's Wild West and had learned much, saying with questionable grammar, "The white people are so many that if every Indian in the West killed one every step they took, the dead would not be missed among you. I go back and tell my people what I have seen. They will never go on the war-path again."

In the hope of determining Sitting Bull's intentions, General Miles decided to employ the services of Buffalo Bill Cody. He had seen the scout in action, and knew of his friendship with Sitting Bull. This procedure outraged McLaughlin, who apparently expected Cody to perform after the manner of the hero of the Buffalo Bill dime novels. Cody was recalled from his mission, and McLaughlin sent Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull, thereby stirring up a feud that was one of the primary causes of the Sioux disaffection. There was a fight; Sitting Bull and eight of his followers were killed, as well as six of the Indian Police.

Battle of Wounded Knee

Sitting Bull's surviving followers fled to the Bad Lands, where they fell in with a Miniconjou band led by Big Foot, who had just agreed to come into the agency. Alarmed by the killing of Sitting Bull, Big Foot and his band joined the refugees. They were overtaken a few days later by Major Samuel M. Whitside with Troops A, B, I and K of the 7th Cavalry. Brevet Brigadier General James W. Forsyth, colonel of the 7th, arrived to take command with Troops C, D, E and G. He also had Battery E, 1st Artillery, manning four Hotchkiss rapid-fire guns.

The Indians were encamped on Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. On the morning of December 29, 1890, Forsyth attempted to disarm them. A Ghost Dancer started a harangue, some Indian fired a shot, and the result was indiscriminate slaughter. Artillery shells tore through the Sioux camp. In the early confusion it is probable that both sides fired shots that hit their own people. As the Indians fled, the troops kept shooting. One count lists eighty-four Sioux men and boys, forty-four women and eighteen children killed. Of the troops, one officer and twenty-four enlisted men were killed; three officers and thirty-two enlisted men were wounded.

General Miles moved promptly to avert further fighting and succeeded in calming the Indians. On January 16, 1891, they formally surrendered. Twenty years later wrote Miles, "I did not even then realize that we had probably reached the close of Indian wars in our country." Nor did anyone else at that time. As late as 1903 General Charles King in such military novels as A Daughter of the Sioux wrote of Indian wars as part of the contemporary scene, just as writers about cowboys continued for a half-century to use Owen Wister's The Virginian as a model for a contemporary West that no longer existed.

End of Indian Fighting

There were fights of record after Wounded Knee, but none of importance. Along the Texas border detachments of the 3rd Cavalry and Indian scouts clashed with remnants of Geronimo's raiders from Mexico three times in 1891 and four in 1892. The 7th Cavalry had two similar encounters in 1896.

Two individual Apache caused trouble for the 7th Cavalry for years. Massai - also spelled Ma-si, Matse and Masse - was one of the Chiricahua entrained for Florida with Geronimo. He escaped from the cars near Springfield, Missouri, and made his way back to Arizona unseen and unreported - proof of his ability as scout and trailer. After many years of raiding he was killed in Mexico.

The last fight in which soldiers were killed occurred at Leech Lake, Minnesota, on October 5, 1898. The Indians were Chippewa, and the soldiers killed were Brevet Major Melville C. Wilkinson of the 3rd Infantry, veteran of the Civil War and of the Nez Perce War, and five enlisted men of his regiment. After an investigation, charges against the Indians were dropped.

In the fall of 1906 some 400 White River Ute - members of the tribe of the Meeker killing and the Thornburgh fight - became dissatisfied with their reservation in Utah and wandered off across the plains of Wyoming. After Inspector James McLaughlin of the Indian Service failed to persuade them to return, eight troops of the 6th Cavalry and eight of the 10th rounded them up on the Powder River in Montana. After spending some time at Fort Meade and on the Cheyenne River Reservation, they returned to Utah. This affair was bloodless.

Even as late as 1915 a fracas occurred in Utah over the arrest of a Paiute for murder. Indians resisted a United States marshal's posse of seventy-five men, and a tribal uprising was feared. General Hugh L. Scott, then Chief of Staff of the Army, went to the scene of the trouble in February, 1916, and with great good sense settled the affair with no loss of face on either side. The wanted Indian surrendered, was tried and acquitted.

During this period Congress wavered from session to session on whether Indian fighting was war or police action. It sometimes denied brevets and other honors on the ground that there was no war, yet in 1890 and at other times granted brevets so belatedly in wholesale lots that the recognition was meaningless.

The Indian wars were not all the fault of the Indian; nor were they all the fault of the white intruder. They were perhaps inevitable in the collision of two races whose values were so dissimilar that they could not understand each other - and perhaps do not yet. It is easy to say, "We took the land away from the Indians," but they were taking lands away from each other in wars more brutal and bloody than any waged against them by Americans. It is easy to say they resented destruction of the buffalo and other game by white men, but they did their share of destroying it for furs to trade for white man's goods, and even wantonly. That the Indians felt no great urge to defend their homes and hunting grounds is shown in the rarity of wars in the West that involved entire tribes.

The bands that waged war had grievances; in perhaps most cases they had been treated with rank injustice, often through ignorance. Probably many of the Indian wars, like many other wars, could have been avoided by a wise and consistent policy, based on mutual understanding-but there was no understanding.

As in all generalizations, there are exceptions. One among many may be cited, a strange case of an understanding between an Indian and some white men. At dawn on August 29, 1911, some dogs cornered a strange man in the slaughter yards near Oroville, California. He was an Indian, almost naked, probably in his forties and unable to speak English. During all of his lifetime his people, in ever-dwindling numbers, had hidden like hunted animals in the forests below Lassen Peak. This last man subsisted alone for almost three years in the wilderness before he came to the slaughterhouses, fully expecting to be killed as all his people had been.

The sheriff called off the dogs, but was at a loss to know what to do with the wild man. When newspapers announced the incident, two professors of anthropology at the University of California in Berkeley realized that a rare specimen of Stone Age man had been found. They decided to investigate. Subsequently they got permission from the Department of the Interior to take charge of the lone Indian, and they arranged for him to live the rest of his life in an apartment at the University Museum in San Francisco.

On one occasion the two professors took him on a pack trip back into the mountains where he showed them how his people had lived, how they made flint arrowheads, started fires without matches, speared salmon, snared deer and rabbits. The savage proved to be a man of great patience, gentleness, bravery and loyalty, with a remarkable control over his temper. He was quick to learn, and he readily adapted himself to a strange civilization. However, he clung to the pagan teachings of his childhood, although he showed tolerance for the religious beliefs of others. Watching people in the bustling city around him, the trolley cars and ferryboats, he pronounced civilized man to be very, very clever, but not very wise.

The two professors became much attached to this Stone Age man. Almost five years after his capture he died of tuberculosis, and some scientists demanded that the "specimen" be dissected. The men who knew him best objected, saying they proposed to stand by their friend. "If there is any talk about the interests of science," said Professor A. L. Kroeber, "say for me that science can go to hell." So an understanding between red man and white was possible - but too little, or too late.

Jay Monaghan. Last Stand of the Cheyenne. Sitting Bull and the Ghost Dance. The Book of the American West. Simon & Schuster New York, NY 1969.

The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee Classic of American anthropology explores messianic cult behind Indian resistance, from Pontiac to the 1890s. Extremely detailed, thorough account, citing many primary documents as well as Mooney's own anthropological data. Originally published in 1896 as Part Two of Bureau of American Ethnology Report XIV.

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