Almost the only time that the pledge was broken was in the autumn of

1854. Continual trains of immigrants passing through the Sioux country

made it nearly impossible to prevent friction between the races in

which the blame was quite likely to fall upon the timorous homeseekers.

On August 17, 1854, a cow strayed away from a band of Mormons encamped

a few miles from Fort Laramie. Some have it that the cow was lame, and

therefore abandoned; but whatever the cause, the cow was found, killed,

and eaten by a small band of hungry Miniconjou Sioux. The charge of

theft was brought into camp at Laramie, not by the Mormons, but by The

Bear, chief of the Brulé, and Lieutenant Grattan with an escort of

twenty-nine men, a twelve-pounder and a mountain howitzer, was sent out

the next day to arrest the Indian who had slaughtered the animal. At

the Indian village the culprit was not forthcoming, Grattan's drunken

interpreter roughened a diplomacy which at best was none too tactful,

and at last the troops fired into the lodge which was said to contain

the offender. No one of the troops got away from the enraged Sioux,

who, after their anger had led them to retaliate, followed it up by

plundering the near-by post of the fur company. Commissioner Manypenny

believed that this action by the troops was illegal and unnecessary

from the start, since the Mormons could legally have been reimbursed

from the Indian funds by the agent.

No general war followed this outbreak. A few braves went on the

war-path and rumors of great things reached the East, but General

Harney, sent out with three regiments to end the Sioux war in 1855,

found little opposition and fought only one important battle. On the

Little Blue Water, in September, 1855, he fell upon Little Thunder's

band of Brulé Sioux and killed or wounded nearly a hundred of them.

There is some doubt whether this band had anything to do with the

Grattan episode, or whether it was even at war, but the defeat was,

as Agent Twiss described it, "a thunderclap to them." For the first

time they learned the mighty power of the United States, and General

Harney made good use of this object lesson in the peace council which

he held with them in March, 1856. The treaty here agreed upon was

never legalized, and remained only a sort of _modus vivendi_ for the

following years. The Sioux tribes were so loosely organized that the

authority of the chiefs had little weight; young braves did as they

pleased regardless of engagements supposed to bind the tribes. But the

lesson of the defeat lasted long in the memory of the plains tribes,

so that they gave little trouble until the wars of 1864 broke out.

Meanwhile Chouteau's old Fort Pierre on the Missouri was bought by the

United States and made a military post for the control of these upper

tribes.

Before the plains Sioux broke out again, the Minnesota uprising had led

the Mississippi Sioux to their defeat. Some were executed in the fall

of 1862, others were transported to the Missouri Valley; still others

got away to the Northwest, there to continue a profitless war that kept

up fighting for several years. Meanwhile came the plains war of 1864

in which the tribes south of the Platte were chiefly concerned, and in

which men at the centre of the line thought there were evidences of

an alliance between northern and southern tribes. Thus Governor Evans

wrote of "information furnished me, through various sources, of an

alliance of the Cheyenne and a part of the Arapahoe tribes with the

Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians of the south, and the great family

of the Sioux Indians of the north upon the plains," and the Indian

Commissioner accepted the notion. But, like the question of intrigue,

this was a matter of belief rather than of proof; while local causes to

account for the disorder are easily found. Yet it is true that during

1864 and 1865 the northern Sioux became uneasy.

During 1865, though the causes likely to lead to hostilities were in

no wise changed, efforts were made to reach agreements with the plains

tribes. The Cheyenne, humbled at Sand Creek, were readily handled at

the Little Arkansas treaty in October. They there surrendered to the

United States all their reserve in Colorado and accepted a new one,

which they never actually received, south of the Arkansas, and bound

themselves not to camp within ten miles of the route to Santa Fé. On

the other side, "to heal the wounds caused by the Chivington affair,"

special appropriations were made by the United States to the widows and

orphans of those who had been killed. The Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche

joined in similar treaties. During the same week, in 1865, a special

commission made treaties of peace with nine of the Sioux tribes,

including the remnants of the Mississippi bands. "These treaties were

made," commented the Commissioner, "and the Indians, in spite of the

great suffering from cold and want of food endured during the very

severe winter of 1865-66, and consequent temptation to plunder to

procure the absolute necessaries of life, faithfully kept the peace."

In September, 1865, the steamer _Calypso_ struggled up the shallow

Missouri River, carrying a party of commissioners to Fort Sully, there

to make these treaties with the Sioux. Congress had provided $20,000

for a special negotiation before adjourning in March, 1865, and General

Sully, who was yet conducting the prolonged Sioux War, had pointed out

the place most suitable for the conference. The first council was held

on October 6.

The military authorities were far from eager to hold this council.

Already the breach between the military power responsible for policing

the plains and the civilian department which managed the tribes was

wide. Thus General Pope, commanding the Department of the Missouri,

grumbled to Grant in June that whenever Indian hostilities occurred,

the Indian Department, which was really responsible, blamed the

soldiers for causing them. He complained of the divided jurisdiction

and of the policy of buying treaties from the tribes by presents made

at the councils. In reference to this special treaty he had "only to

say that the Sioux Indians have been attacking everybody in their

region of country; and only lately ... attacked in heavy force Fort

Rice, on the upper Missouri, well fortified and garrisoned by four

companies of infantry with artillery. If these things show any desire

for peace, I confess I am not able to perceive it."

In future years this breach was to become wider yet. At Sand Creek the

military authorities had justified the attack against the criticism of

the local Indian agents and Eastern philanthropists. There was indeed

plenty of evidence of misconduct on both sides. If the troops were

guilty on the charge of being over-ready to fight--and here the words

of Governor Evans were prophetic, "Now the war ... is nearly through,

and the Great Father will not know what to do with all his soldiers,

except to send them after the Indians on the plains,"--the Indian

agents often succumbed to the opportunity for petty thieving. The case

of one of the agents of the Yankton Sioux illustrates this. It was his

custom each year to have the chiefs of his tribe sign general receipts

for everything sent to the agency. Thus at the end of the year he could

turn in Indians' vouchers and report nothing on hand. But the receipt

did not mean that the Indian had got the goods; although signed for,

these were left in the hands of the agent to be given out as needed.

The inference is strong that many of the supplies intended for and

signed for by the Indians went into the pocket of the agent. During the

third quarter of 1863 this agent claimed to have issued to his charges:

"One pair of bay horses, 7 years old; ... 1 dozen 17-inch mill files;

... 6 dozen Seidlitz powders; 6 pounds compound syrup of squills; 6

dozen Ayer's pills; ... 3 bottles of rose water; ... 1 pound of wax;

... 1 ream of vouchers; ... 1/2 M 6434 8-1/2-inch official envelopes;

... 4 bottles 8-ounce mucilage." So great was this particular agent's

power that it was nearly impossible to get evidence against him. "If

I do, he will fix it so I'll never get anything in the world and he

will drive me out of the country," was typical of the attitude of his

neighbors.

With jurisdiction divided, and with claimants for it quarrelling, it

is no wonder that the charges suffered. But the ill results came more

from the impossible situation than from abuse on either side. It needs

often to be reiterated that the heart of the Indian question was in the

infiltration of greedy, timorous, enterprising, land-hungry whites who

could not be restrained by any process known to American government. In

the conflict between two civilizations, the lower must succumb. Neither

the War Department nor the Indian Office was responsible for most of

the troubles; yet of the two, the former, through readiness to fight

and to hold the savage to a standard of warfare which he could not

understand, was the greater offender. It was not so great an offender,

however, as the selfish interests of those engaged in trading with the

Indians would make it out to be.

The Fort Sully conference, terminating in a treaty signed on October

10, 1865, was distinctly unsatisfactory. Many of the western Sioux did

not come at all. Even the eastern were only partially represented.

And among tribes in which the central authority of the chiefs was

weak, full representation was necessary to secure a binding peace. The

commissioners, after most pacific efforts, were "unable to ascertain

the existence of any really amicable feeling among these people towards

the government." The chiefs were sullen and complaining, and the treaty

which resulted did little more than repeat the terms of the treaty of

1851, binding the Indians to permit roads to be opened through their

country and to keep away from the trails.

It is difficult to show that the northern Sioux were bound by the

treaty of Fort Sully. The Laramie treaty of 1851 had never had full

force of law because the Senate had added amendments to it, which

all the signatory Indians had not accepted. Although Congress had

appropriated the annuities specified in the treaty the binding force

of the document was not great on savages. The Fort Sully treaty was

deficient in that it did not represent all of the interested tribes.

In making Indian treaties at all, the United States acted upon a

convenient fiction that the Indians had authorities with power to bind;

whereas the leaders had little control over their followers and after

nearly every treaty there were many bands that could claim to have

been left out altogether. Yet such as they were, the treaties existed,

and the United States proceeded in 1865 and 1866 to use its specified

rights in opening roads through the hunting-grounds of the Sioux.

The mines of Montana and Idaho, which had attracted notice and

emigration in the early sixties, were still the objective points of

a large traffic. They were somewhat off the beaten routes, being

accessible by the Missouri River and Fort Benton, or by the Platte

trail and a northern branch from near Fort Hall to Virginia City. To

bring them into more direct connection with the East an available route

from Fort Laramie was undertaken in 1865. The new trail left the main

road near Fort Laramie, crossed to the north side of the Platte, and

ran off to the northwest. Shortly after leaving the Platte the road got

into the charming foothill country where the slopes "are all covered

with a fine growth of grass, and in every valley there is either a

rushing stream or some quiet babbling brook of pure, clear snow-water

filled with trout, the banks lined with trees--wild cherry, quaking

asp, some birch, willow, and cottonwood." To the left, and not far

distant, were the Big Horn Mountains. To the right could sometimes be

seen in the distance the shadowy billows of the Black Hills. Running to

the north and draining the valley were the Powder and Tongue rivers,

both tributaries of the Yellowstone. Here were water, timber, and

forage, coal and oil and game. It was the garden spot of the Indians,

"the very heart of their hunting-grounds." In a single day's ride were

seen "bear, buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, rabbits, and sage-hens."

With little exaggeration it was described as a "natural source of

recuperation and supply to moving, hunting, and roving bands of all

tribes, and their lodge trails cross it in great numbers from north to

south." Through this land, keeping east of the Big Horn Mountains and

running around their northern end into the Yellowstone Valley, was to

run the new Powder River road to Montana. The Sioux treaties were to

have their severest testing in the selection of choice hunting-grounds

for an emigrant road, for it was one of the certainties in the opening

of new roads that game vanished in the face of emigration.

While the commissioners were negotiating their treaty at Fort Sully,

the first Powder River expedition, in its attempt to open this new road

by the short and direct route from Fort Laramie to Bozeman and the

Montana mines, was undoing their work. In the summer of 1865 General

Patrick E. Connor, with a miscellaneous force of 1600, including a

detachment of ex-Confederate troops who had enlisted in the United

States army to fight Indians, started from Fort Laramie for the mouth

of the Rosebuds on the Yellowstone, by way of the Powder River. Old

Jim Bridger, the incarnation of this country, led them, swearing

mightily at "these damn paper-collar soldiers," who knew so little of

the Indians. There was plenty of fighting as Connor pushed into the

Yellowstone, but he was relieved from command in September and the

troops were drawn back, so that there were no definitive results of the

expedition of 1865.

In 1866, in spite of the fact that the Sioux of this region, through

their leader Red Cloud, had refused to yield the ground or even to

treat concerning it, Colonel Henry B. Carrington was ordered by General

Pope to command the Mountain District, Department of the Platte, and to

erect and garrison posts for the control of the Powder River road. On

December 21 of this year, Captain W. J. Fetterman, of his command, and

seventy-eight officers and men were killed near Fort Philip Kearney in

a fight whose merits aroused nearly as much acrimonious discussion as

the Sand Creek massacre.

[Illustration: RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH

From a cut lent by Professor Warren K. Moorehead, of Andover, Mass.]

The events leading up to the catastrophe at Fort Philip Kearney, a

catastrophe so complete that none of its white participants escaped

to tell what happened, were connected with Carrington's work in

building forts. He had been detailed for the work in the spring, and

after a conference at Fort Kearney, Nebraska, with General Sherman,

had marched his men in nineteen days to Fort Laramie. He reached Fort

Reno, which became his headquarters, on June 28. On the march, if his

orders were obeyed, his soldiers were scrupulous in their regard for

the Indians. His orders issued for the control of emigrants passing

along the Powder River route were equally careful. Thirty men were

to constitute the minimum single party; these were to travel with a

military pass, which was to be scrutinized by the commanding officer

of each post. The trains were ordered to hold together and were

warned that "nearly all danger from Indians lies in the recklessness

of travellers. A small party, when separated, either sell whiskey to

or fire upon scattering Indians, or get into disputes with them, and

somebody is hurt. An insult to an Indian is resented by the Indians

against the first white men they meet, and innocent travellers suffer."

Carrington's orders were to garrison Fort Reno and build new forts

on the Powder, Big Horn, and Yellowstone rivers, and cover the road.

The last-named fort was later cut away because of his insufficient

force, but Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C. F. Smith were located

during July and August. The former stood on a little plateau formed

between the two Pineys as they emerge from the Big Horn Mountains.

Its site was surveyed and occupied on July 15. Already Carrington was

complaining that he had too few men for his work. With eight companies

of eighty men each, and most of these new recruits, he had to garrison

his long line, all the while building and protecting his stockades

and fortifications. "I am my own engineer, draughtsman, and visit

my pickets and guards nightly, with scarcely a day or night without

attempts to steal stock." Worse than this, his military equipment was

inadequate. Only his band, specially armed for the expedition, had

Spencer carbines and enough ammunition. His main force, still armed

with Springfield rifles, had under fifty rounds to the man.

The Indians, Cheyenne and Sioux, were, all through the summer, showing

no sign of accepting the invasion of the hunting-grounds without a

fight. Yet Carrington reported on August 29 that he was holding them

off; that Fort C. F. Smith on the Big Horn had been occupied; that

parties of fifty well-armed men could get through safely if they were

careful. The Indians, he said, "are bent on robbery; they only fight

when assured of personal security and remunerative stealings; they are

divided among themselves."

With the sites for forts C. F. Smith and Philip Kearney selected,

the work of construction proceeded during the autumn. A sawmill,

sent out from the states, was kept hard at work. Wood was cut on the

adjacent hills and speedily converted into cabins and palisades

which approached completion before winter set in. It was construction

during a state of siege, however. Instead of pacifying the valley

the construction of the forts aggravated the Sioux hostility so that

constant watchfulness was needed. That the trains sent out to gather

wood were not seriously injured was due to rigorous discipline. The

wagons moved twenty or more at a time, with guards, and in two parallel

columns. At first sight of Indians they drove into corral and signalled

back to the lookouts at the fort for help. Occasionally men were indeed

cut out by the Indians, who in turn suffered considerable loss; but

Carrington reduced his own losses to a minimum. Friendly Indians were

rarely seen. They were allowed to come to the fort, by the main road

and with a white flag, but few availed themselves of the privilege. The

Sioux were up in arms, and in large numbers hung about the Tongue and

Powder river valleys waiting for their chance.

Early in December occurred an incident revealing the danger of

annihilation which threatened Carrington's command. At one o'clock on

the afternoon of the sixth a messenger reported to the garrison at Fort

Philip Kearney that the wood train was attacked by Indians four miles

away. Carrington immediately had every horse at the post mounted. For

the main relief he sent out a column under Brevet Lieutenant-colonel

Fetterman, who had just arrived at the fort, while he led in person a

flanking party to cut off the Indians' retreat. The mercury was below

zero. Carrington was thrown into the water of Peno Creek when his

horse stumbled through breaking ice. Fetterman's party found the wood

train in corral and standing off the attack with success. The savages

retreated as the relief approached and were pursued for five miles,

when they turned and offered battle. Just as the fighting began, most

of the cavalry broke away from Fetterman, leaving him and some fourteen

others surrounded by Indians and attacked on three sides. He held them

off, however, until Carrington came in sight and the Indians fled.

Why Lieutenant Bingham retreated with his cavalry and left Fetterman

in such danger was never explained, for the Indians killed him and

one of his non-commissioned officers, while several other privates

were wounded. The Indians, once the fight was over, disappeared among

the hills, and Carrington had no force with which to follow them. In

reporting the battle that night he renewed his requests for men and

officers. He had but six officers for the six companies at Fort Philip

Kearney. He was totally unable to take the aggressive because of the

defences which had constantly to be maintained.

In this fashion the fall advanced in the Powder River Valley. The forts

were finished. The Indian hostilities increased. The little, overworked

force of Carrington, chopping, building, guarding, and fighting,

struggled to fulfil its orders. If one should criticise Carrington,

the attack would be chiefly that he looked to defensive measures in the

Indian war. He did indeed ask for troops, officers, and equipment, but

his despatches and his own vindication show little evidence that he

realized the need for large reënforcements for the specific purpose of

a punitive campaign. More skilful Indian fighters knew that the Indians

could and would keep up indefinitely this sort of filibustering against

the forts, and that a vigorous move against their own villages was the

surest means to secure peace. In Indian warfare, even more perhaps

than in civilized, it is advantageous to destroy the enemy's base of

supplies.

The wood train was again attacked on December 21. About eleven o'clock

that morning the pickets reported the train "corralled and threatened

by Indians on Sullivant Hills, a mile and a half from the fort." The

usual relief party was at once organized and sent out under Fetterman,

who claimed the right to command it by seniority, and who was not

highest in the confidence of Colonel Carrington. He had but recently

joined the command, was full of enthusiasm and desire to hunt Indians,

and needed the admonition with which he left the fort: that he was

"fighting brave and desperate enemies who sought to make up by cunning

and deceit all the advantage which the white man gains by intelligence

and better arms." He was ordered to support and bring in the wood

train, this being all Carrington believed himself strong enough to do

and keep on doing. Any one could have had a fight at any time, and

Carrington was wise to issue the "peremptory and explicit" orders to

avoid pursuit beyond the summit of Lodge Trail Ridge, as needless and

unduly dangerous. Three times this order was given to Fetterman; and

after that, "fearing still that the spirit of ambition might override

prudence," says Carrington, "I crossed the parade and from a sentry

platform halted the cavalry and again repeated my precise orders."

With these admonitions, Fetterman started for the relief, leading a

party of eighty-one officers and men, picked and all well armed. He

crossed the Lodge Trail Ridge as soon as he was out of sight of the

fort and disappeared. No one of his command came back alive. The wood

train, before twelve o'clock, broke corral and moved on in safety,

while shots were heard beyond the ridge. For half an hour there was a

constant volleying; then all was still. Meanwhile Carrington, nervous

at the lack of news from Fetterman, had sent a second column, and two

wagons to relieve him, under Captain Ten Eyck. The latter, moving

along cautiously, with large bands of Sioux retreating before him,

came finally upon forty-nine bodies, including that of Fetterman.

The evidence of arrows, spears, and the position of bodies was that

they had been surrounded, surprised, and overwhelmed in their defeat.

The next day the rest of the bodies were reached and brought back.

Naked, dismembered, slashed, visited with indescribable indignities,

they were buried in two great graves; seventy-nine soldiers and two

civilians.

The Fetterman massacre raised a storm in the East similar in volume

to that following Sand Creek, two years before. Who was at fault, and

why, were the questions indignantly asked. Judicious persons were well

aware, wrote the _Nation_, that "our whole Indian policy is a system of

mismanagement, and in many parts one of gigantic abuse." The military

authorities tried to place the blame on Carrington, as plausible,

energetic, and industrious, but unable to maintain discipline or

inspire his officers with confidence. Unquestionably a part of this

was true, yet the letter which made the charge admitted that often the

Indians were better armed than the troops, and the critic himself,

General Cooke, had ordered Carrington: "You can only defend yourself

and trains, and emigrants, the best you can." The Indian Commissioner

charged it on the bad disposition of the troops, always anxious to

fight.

The issue broke over the number of Indians involved. Current reports

from Fort Philip Kearney indicated from 3000 to 5000 hostile

warriors, chiefly Sioux and led by Red Cloud of the Oglala tribe. The

Commissioner pointed out that such a force must imply from 21,000 to

35,000 Indians in all--a number that could not possibly have been in

the Powder River country. It is reasonable to believe that Fetterman

was not overwhelmed by any multitude like this, but that his own

rash disobedience led to ambush and defeat by a force well below

3000. Upon him fell the immediate responsibility; above him, the War

Department was negligent in detailing so few men for so large a task;

and ultimately there was the impossibility of expecting savage Sioux to

give up their best hunting-grounds as a result of a treaty signed by

others than themselves.

The fight at Fort Philip Kearney marked a point of transition in Indian

warfare. Even here the Indians were mostly armed with bows and arrows,

and were relying upon their superior numbers for victory. Yet a change

in Indian armament was under way, which in a few years was to convert

the Indian from a savage warrior into the "finest natural soldier in

the world." He was being armed with rifles. As the game diminished

the tribes found that the old methods of hunting were inadequate and

began the pressure upon the Indian Department for better weapons. The

department justified itself in issuing rifles and ammunition, on the

ground that the laws of the United States expected the Indians to

live chiefly upon game, which they could not now procure by the older

means. Hence came the anomalous situation in which one department

of the United States armed and equipped the tribes for warfare

against another. If arms were cut down, the tribes were in danger of

extinction; if they were issued, hostilities often resulted. After the

Fetterman massacre the Indian Office asserted that the hostile Sioux

were merely hungry, because the War Department had caused the issuing

of guns to be stopped. It was all an unsolvable problem, with bad

temper and suspicion on both sides.

A few months after the Fetterman affair Red Cloud tried again to wreck

a wood train near Fort Philip Kearney. But this time the escort erected

a barricade with the iron, bullet-proof bodies of a new variety of army

wagon, and though deserted by most of his men, Major James Powell, with

one other officer, twenty-six privates, and four citizens, lay behind

their fortification and repelled charge after charge from some 800

Sioux and Cheyenne. With little loss to himself he inflicted upon the

savages a lesson that lasted many years.

The Sioux and Cheyenne wars were links in the chain of Indian outbreaks

that stretched across the path of the westward movement, the overland

traffic and the continental railways. The Pacific railways had been

chartered just as the overland telegraph had been opened to the

Pacific coast. With this last, perhaps from reverence for the nearly

supernatural, the Indians rarely meddled. But as the railway advanced,

increasing compression and repression stirred the tribes to a series of

hostilities. The first treaties which granted transit--meaning chiefly

wagon transit--broke down. A new series of conferences and a new policy

were the direct result of these wars.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY

The crisis in the struggle for the control of the great plains may

fairly be said to have been reached about the time of the slaughter

of Fetterman and his men at Fort Philip Kearney. During the previous

fifteen years the causes had been shaping through the development of

the use of the trails, the opening of the mining territories, and

the agitation for a continental railway. Now the railway was not

only authorized and begun, but Congress had put a premium upon its

completion by an act of July, 1866, which permitted the Union Pacific

to build west and the Central Pacific to build east until the two

lines should meet. In the ensuing race for the land grants the roads

were pushed with new vigor, so that the crisis of the Indian problem

was speedily reached. In the fall of 1866 Ben Holladay saw the end of

the overland freighting and sold out. In November the terminus of the

overland mail route was moved west to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, whither

the Union Pacific had now arrived in its course of construction. No

wonder the tribes realized their danger and broke out in protest.

As the crisis drew near radical differences of opinion among those who

must handle the tribes became apparent. The question of the management

by the War Department or the Interior was in the air, and was raised

again and again in Congress. More fundamental was the question of

policy, upon which the view of Senator John Sherman was as clear as

any. "I agree with you," he wrote to his brother William, in 1867,

"that Indian wars will not cease until all the Indian tribes are

absorbed in our population, and can be controlled by constables instead

of soldiers." Upon another phase of management Francis A. Walker

wrote a little later: "There can be no question of national dignity

involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power. The proudest

Anglo-Saxon will climb a tree with a bear behind him.... With wild men,

as with wild beasts, the question whether to fight, coax, or run is a

question merely of what is safest or easiest in the situation given."

That responsibility for some decided action lay heavily upon the whites

may be implied from the admission of Colonel Henry Inman, who knew the

frontier well--"that, during more than a third of a century passed on

the plains and in the mountains, he has never known of a war with the

hostile tribes that was not caused by broken faith on the part of the

United States or its agents." A professional Indian fighter, like Kit

Carson, declared on oath that "as a general thing, the difficulties

arise from aggressions on the part of the whites."

In Congress all the interests involved in the Indian problem found

spokesmen. The War and Interior departments had ample representation;

the Western members commonly voiced the extreme opinion of the

frontier; Eastern men often spoke for the humanitarian sentiment that

saw much good in the Indian and much evil in his treatment. But withal,

when it came to special action upon any situation, Congress felt its

lack of information. The departments best informed were partisan and

antagonistic. Even to-day it is a matter of high critical scholarship

to determine, with the passions cooled off, truth and responsibility

in such affairs as the Minnesota outbreak, and the Chivington or the

Fetterman massacre. To lighten in part its feeling of helplessness

in the midst of interested parties Congress raised a committee of

seven, three of the Senate and four of the House, in March, 1865, to

investigate and report on the condition of the Indian tribes. The joint

committee was resolved upon during a bitter and ill-informed debate

on Chivington; while it sat, the Cheyenne war ended and the Sioux

broke out; the committee reported in January, 1867. To facilitate its

investigation it divided itself into three groups to visit the Pacific

Slope, the southern plains, and the northern plains. Its report, with

the accompanying testimony, fills over five hundred pages. In all the

storm centres of the Indian West the committee sat, listened, and

questioned.

The _Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes_ gave a doleful view

of the future from the Indians' standpoint. General Pope was quoted

to the effect that the savages were rapidly dying off from wars,

cruel treatment, unwise policy, and dishonest administration, "and by

steady and resistless encroachments of the white emigration towards

the west, which is every day confining the Indians to narrower limits,

and driving off or killing the game, their only means of subsistence."

To this catalogue of causes General Carleton, who must have believed

his war of Apache and Navaho extermination a potent handmaid of

providence, added: "The causes which the Almighty originates, when in

their appointed time He wills that one race of man--as in races of

lower animals--shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place

to another race, and so on, in the great cycle traced out by Himself,

which may be seen, but has reasons too deep to be fathomed by us. The

races of mammoths and mastodons, and the great sloths, came and passed

away; the red man of America is passing away!"

The committee believed that the wars with their incidents of slaughter

and extermination by both sides, as occasion offered, were generally

the result of white encroachments. It did not fall in with the growing

opinion that the control of the tribes should be passed over to the War

Department, but recommended instead a system of visiting boards, each

including a civilian, a soldier, and an Assistant Indian Commissioner,

for the regular inspection of the tribes. The recommendation of the

committee came to naught in Congress, but the information it gathered,

supplementing the annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs

and the special investigations of single wars, gave much additional

weight to the belief that a crisis was at hand.

Meanwhile, through 1866 and 1867, the Cheyenne and Sioux wars dragged

on. The Powder River country continued to be a field of battle, with

Powell's fight coming in the summer of 1867. In the spring of 1867

General Hancock destroyed a Cheyenne village at Pawnee Fork. Eastern

opinion came to demand more forcefully that this fighting should stop.

Western opinion was equally insistent that the Indian must go, while

General Sherman believed that a part of its bellicose demand was due to

a desire for "the profit resulting from military occupation." Certain

it was that war had lasted for several years with no definite results,

save to rouse the passions of the West, the revenge of the Indians, and

the philanthropy of the East. The army had had its chance. Now the time

had come for general, real attempts at peace.

The fortieth Congress, beginning its life on March 4, 1867, actually

began its session at that time. Ordinarily it would have waited until

December, but the prevailing distrust of President Johnson and his

reconstruction ideas induced it to convene as early as the law allowed.

Among the most significant of its measures in this extra session was

"Mr. Henderson's bill for establishing peace with certain Indian

tribes now at war with the United States," which, in the view of the

_Nation_, was a "practical measure for the security of travel through

the territories and for the selection of a new area sufficient to

contain all the unsettled tribes east of the Rocky Mountains." Senator

Sherman had informed his brother of the prospect of this law, and the

General had replied: "The fact is, this contact of the two races has

caused universal hostility, and the Indians operate in small, scattered

bands, avoiding the posts and well-guarded trains and hitting little

parties who are off their guard. I have a much heavier force on the

plains, but they are so large that it is impossible to guard at all

points, and the clamor for protection everywhere has prevented our

being able to collect a large force to go into the country where we

believe the Indians have hid their families; viz. up on the Yellowstone

and down on the Red River." Sherman believed more in fighting than in

treating at this time, yet he went on the commission erected by the

act of July 20, 1867. By this law four civilians, including the Indian

Commissioner, and three generals of the army, were appointed to collect

and deal with the hostile tribes, with three chief objects in view:

to remove the existing causes of complaint, to secure the safety of

the various continental railways and the overland routes, and to work

out some means for promoting Indian civilization without impeding the

advance of the United States. To this last end they were to hunt for

permanent homes for the tribes, which were to be off the lines of all

the railways then chartered,--the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific,

and the Atlantic and Pacific.

The Peace Commission, thus organized, sat for fifteen months. When

it rose at last, it had opened the way for the railways, so far as

treaties could avail. It had persuaded many tribes to accept new and

more remote reserves, but in its debates and negotiations the breach

between military and civil control had widened, so that the Commission

was at the end divided against itself.

On August 6, 1867, the Commission organized at St. Louis and discussed

plans for getting into touch with the tribes with whom it had to treat.

"The first difficulty presenting itself was to secure an interview with

the chiefs and leading warriors of these hostile tribes. They were

roaming over an immense country, thousands of miles in extent, and much

of it unknown even to hunters and trappers of the white race. Small

war parties constantly emerging from this vast extent of unexplored

country would suddenly strike the border settlements, killing the men

and carrying off into captivity the women and children. Companies of

workmen on the railroads, at points hundreds of miles from each other,

would be attacked on the same day, perhaps in the same hour. Overland

mail coaches could not be run without military escort, and railroad

and mail stations unguarded by soldiery were in perpetual danger. All

safe transit across the plains had ceased. To go without soldiers was

hazardous in the extreme; to go with them forbade reasonable hope of

securing peaceful interviews with the enemy." Fortunately the Peace

Commission contained within itself the most useful of assistants.

General Sherman and Commissioner Taylor sent out word to the Indians

through the military posts and Indian agencies, notifying the tribes

that the Commissioners desired to confer with them near Fort Laramie in

September and Fort Larned in October.

The Fort Laramie conference bore no fruit during the summer of 1867.

After inspecting conditions on the upper Missouri the Commissioners

proceeded to Omaha in September and thence to North Platte station

on the Union Pacific Railroad. Here they met Swift Bear of the Brulé

Sioux and learned that the Sioux would not be ready to meet them until

November. The Powder River War was still being fought by chiefs who

could not be reached easily and whose delegations must be delayed. When

the Commissioners returned to Fort Laramie in November, they found

matters little better. Red Cloud, who was the recognized leader of the

Oglala and Brulé Sioux and the hostile northern Cheyenne, refused even

to see the envoys, and sent them word: "that his war against the whites

was to save the valley of the Powder River, the only hunting ground

left to his nation, from our intrusion. He assured us that whenever

the military garrisons at Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C. F. Smith

were withdrawn, the war on his part would cease." Regretfully, the

Commissioners left Fort Laramie, having seen no savages except a few

non-hostile Crows, and having summoned Red Cloud to meet them during

the following summer, after asking "a truce or cessation of hostilities

until the council could be held."

The southern plains tribes were met at Medicine Lodge Creek some eighty

miles south of the Arkansas River. Before the Commissioners arrived

here General Sherman was summoned to Washington, his place being taken

by General C. C. Augur, whose name makes the eighth signature to the

published report. For some time after the Commissioners arrived the

Cheyenne, sullen and suspicious, remained in their camp forty miles

away from Medicine Lodge. But the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache came to

an agreement, while the others held off. On the 21st of October these

ceded all their rights to occupy their great claims in the Southwest,

the whole of the two panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and agreed to

confine themselves to a new reserve in the southwestern part of Indian

Territory, between the Red River and the Washita, on lands taken from

the Choctaw and Chickasaw in 1866.

The Commissioners could not greatly blame the Arapaho and Cheyenne for

their reluctance to treat. These had accepted in 1861 the triangular

Sand Creek reserve in Colorado, where they had been massacred by

Chivington in 1864. Whether rightly or not, they believed themselves

betrayed, and the Indian Office sided with them. In 1865, after Sand

Creek, they exchanged this tract for a new one in Kansas and Indian

Territory, which was amended to nothingness when the Senate added to

the treaty the words, "no part of the reservation shall be within the

state of Kansas." They had left the former reserve; the new one had not

been given them; yet for two years after 1865 they had generally kept

the peace. Sherman travelled through this country in the autumn of 1866

and "met no trouble whatever," although he heard rumors of Indian wars.

In 1867, General Hancock had destroyed one of their villages on the

Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas, without provocation, the Indians believed.

After this there had been admitted war. The Indians had been on the

war-path all the time, plundering the frontier and dodging the military

parties, and were unable for some weeks to realize that the Peace

Commissioners offered a change of policy. Yet finally these yielded

to blandishment and overture, and signed, on October 28, a treaty

at Medicine Lodge. The new reserve was a bit of barren land nearly

destitute of wood and water, and containing many streams that were

either brackish or dry during most of the year. It was in the Cherokee

Outlet, between the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers.

The Medicine Lodge treaties were the chief result of the summer's

negotiations. The Peace Commission returned to Fort Laramie in the

following spring to meet the reluctant northern tribes. The Sioux, the

Crows, and the Arapaho and Cheyenne who were allied with them, made

peace after the Commissioners had assented to the terms laid down by

Red Cloud in 1867. They had convinced themselves that the occupation of

the Powder River Valley was both illegal and unjust, and accordingly

the garrisons had been drawn out of the new forts. Much to the anger of

Montana was this yielding. "With characteristic pusillanimity," wrote

one of the pioneers, years later, denouncing the act, "the government

ordered all the forts abandoned and the road closed to travel." In the

new Fort Laramie treaty of April 29, 1868, it was specifically agreed

that the country east of the Big Horn Mountains was to be considered as

unceded Indian territory; while the Sioux bound themselves to occupy

as their permanent home the lands west of the Missouri, between the

parallels of 43° and 46°, and east of the 104th meridian--an area

coinciding to-day with the western end of South Dakota. Thus was begun

the actual compression of the Sioux of the plains.

The treaties made by the Peace Commissioners were the most important,

but were not the only treaties of 1867 and 1868, looking towards the

relinquishment by the Indians of lands along the railroad's right

of way. It had been found that rights of transit through the Indian

Country, such as those secured at Laramie in 1851, were insufficient.

The Indian must leave even the vicinity of the route of travel, for

peace and his own good.

Most important of the other tribes shoved away from the route were the

Ute, Shoshoni, and Bannock, whose country lay across the great trail

just west of the Rockies. The Ute, having given their name to the

territory of Utah, were to be found south of the trail, between it and

the lower waters of the Colorado. Their western bands were earliest

in negotiation and were settled on reserves, the most important being

on the Uintah River in northeast Utah, after 1861. The Colorado Ute

began to treat in 1863, but did not make definite cessions until

1868, when the southwestern third of Colorado was set apart for them.

Active life in Colorado territory was at the start confined to the

mountains in the vicinity of Denver City, while the Indians were pushed

down the slopes of the range on both sides. But as the eastern Sand

Creek reserve soon had to be abolished, so Colorado began to growl at

the western Ute reserve and to complain that indolent savages were

given better treatment than white citizens. The Shoshoni and Bannock

ranged from Fort Hall to the north and were visited by General Augur

at Fort Bridger in the summer of 1868. As the results of his gifts

and diplomacy the former were pushed up to the Wind River reserve in

Wyoming territory, while the latter were granted a home around Fort

Hall.

The friction with the Indians was heaviest near the line of the old

Indian frontier and tended to be lighter towards the west. It was

natural enough that on the eastern edge of the plains, where the

tribes had been colonized and where Indian population was most dense,

the difficulties should be greatest. Indeed the only wars which were

sufficiently important to count as resistance to the westward movement

were those of the plains tribes and were fought east of the continental

divide. The mountain and western wars were episodes, isolated from the

main movements. Yet these great plains that now had to be abandoned

had been set aside as a permanent home for the race in pursuance of

Monroe's policy. In the report of the Peace Commissioners all agreed

that the time had come to change it.

The influence of the humanitarians dominated the report of the

Commissioners, which was signed in January, 1868. Wherever possible,

the side of the Indian was taken. The Chivington massacre was an

"indiscriminate slaughter," scarcely paralleled in the "records of

the Indian barbarity"; General Hancock had ruthlessly destroyed the

Cheyenne at Pawnee Fork, though himself in doubt as to the existence

of a war: Fetterman had been killed because "the civil and military

departments of our government cannot, or will not, understand each

other." Apologies were made for Indian hostility, and the "revolting"

history of the removal policy was described. It had been the result of

this policy to promote barbarism rather than civilization. "But one

thing then remains to be done with honor to the nation, and that is to

select a district, or districts of country, as indicated by Congress,

on which all the tribes east of the Rocky mountains may be gathered.

For each district let a territorial government be established, with

powers adapted to the ends designed. The governor should be a man of

unquestioned integrity and purity of character; he should be paid

such salary as to place him above temptation." He should be given

adequate powers to keep the peace and enforce a policy of progressive

civilization. The belief that under American conditions the Indian

problem was insoluble was confirmed by this report of the Peace

Commissioners, well informed and philanthropic as they were. After

their condemnation of an existing removal policy, the only remedy which

they could offer was another policy of concentration and removal.

The Commissioners recommended that the Indians should be colonized on

two reserves, north and south of the railway lines respectively. The

southern reserve was to be the old territory of the civilized tribes,

known as Indian Territory, where the Commissioners thought a total of

86,000 could be settled within a few years. A northern district might

be located north of Nebraska, within the area which they later allotted

to the Sioux; 54,000 could be colonized here. Individual savages might

be allowed to own land and be incorporated among the citizens of the

Western states, but most of the tribes ought to be settled in the two

Indian territories, while this removal policy should be the last.

Upon the vexed question of civilian or military control the

Commissioners were divided. They believed that both War and Interior

departments were too busy to give proper attention to the wards, and

recommended an independent department for the Indians. In October,

1868, they reversed this report and, under military influence,

spoke strongly for the incorporation of the Indian Office in the

War Department. "We have now selected and provided reservations for

all, off the great roads," wrote General Sherman to his brother in

September, 1868. "All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are

hostile and will remain so till killed off. We will have a sort

of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the

indiscriminate murder of travellers and settlers, but the country is so

large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a

single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances

and clean out Indians as we encounter them." Although it was the

tendency of military control to provoke Indian wars, the army was near

the truth in its notion that Indians and whites could not live together.

The way across the continent was opened by these treaties of 1867 and

1868, and the Union Pacific hurried to take advantage of it. The other

Pacific railways, Northern Pacific and Atlantic and Pacific, were so

slow in using their charters that hope in their construction was

nearly abandoned, but the chief enterprise neared completion before the

inauguration of President Grant. The new territory of Wyoming, rather

than the statue of Columbus which Benton had foreseen, was perched upon

the summit of the Rockies as its monument.

Intelligent easterners had difficulty in keeping pace with western

development during the decade of the Civil War. The United States

itself had made no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and

allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered through a

thousand volumes of government documents. Even Indian agents and

army officers were often as ignorant of the facts as was the general

public. "All Americans have some knowledge of the country west of the

Mississippi," lamented the _Nation_ in 1868, but "there is no book

of travel relating to those regions which does more than add to a

mass of very desultory information. Few men have more than the most

unconnected and unmethodical knowledge of the vast expanse of territory

which lies beyond Kansas.... [By] this time Leavenworth must have

ceased to be in the West; probably, as we write, Denver has become an

Eastern city, and day by day the Pacific Railroad is abolishing the

marks that distinguish Western from Eastern life.... A man talks to us

of the country west of the Rocky Mountains, and while he is talking,

the Territory of Wyoming is established, of which neither he nor his

auditors have before heard."

[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1863

The mining booms had completed the territorial divisions of the

Southwest. In 1864 Idaho was reduced and Montana created. Wyoming

followed in 1868.]

In that division of the plains which was sketched out in the fifties,

the great amorphous eastern territories of Kansas and Nebraska met on

the summit of the Rockies the great western territories of Washington,

Utah, and New Mexico. The gold booms had broken up all of these.

Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Dakota, Colorado, had found their

excuses for existence, while Kansas and Nevada entered the Union, with

Nebraska following in 1867. Between the thirty-seventh and forty-first

parallels Colorado fairly straddled the divide. To the north, in the

region of the great river valleys,--Green, Big Horn, Powder, Platte,

and Sweetwater,--the precious metals were not found in quantities which

justified exploitation earlier than 1867. But in that year moderate

discoveries on the Sweetwater and the arrival of the terminal camps of

the Union Pacific gave plausibility to a scheme for a new territory.

The Sweetwater mines, without causing any great excitement, brought a

few hundred men to the vicinity of South Pass. A handful of towns was

established, a county was organized, a newspaper was brought into life

at Fort Bridger. If the railway had not appeared at the same time, the

foundation for a territory would probably have been too slight. But the

Union Pacific, which had ended at Julesburg early in 1867, extended its

terminus to a new town, Cheyenne, in the summer, and to Laramie City in

the spring of 1868.

Cheyenne was laid out a few weeks before the Union Pacific advanced

to its site. It had a better prospect of life than had most of the

mushroom cities that accompanied the westward course of the railroad,

because it was the natural junction point for Denver trade. Colorado

had been much disappointed at its own failure to induce the Union

Pacific managers to put Denver City on the main line of the road, and

felt injured when compelled to do its business through Cheyenne. But

just because of this, Cheyenne grew in the autumn of 1867 with a

rapidity unusual even in the West. It was not an orderly or reputable

population that it had during the first months of its existence, but,

to its good fortune, the advance of the road to Laramie drew off the

worst of the floating inhabitants early in 1868. Cheyenne was left with

an overlarge town site, but with some real excuse for existence. Most

of the terminal towns vanished completely when the railroad moved on.

A new territory for the country north of Colorado had been talked about

as early as 1861. Since the creation of Montana territory in 1864, this

area had been attached, obviously only temporarily, to Dakota. Now,

with the mining and railway influences at work, the population made

appeal to the Dakota legislature and to Congress for independence.

"Without opposition or prolonged discussion," as Bancroft puts it, the

new territory was created by Congress in July, 1868. It was called

Wyoming, just escaping the names of Lincoln and Cheyenne, and received

as bounds the parallels of 41° and 45°, and the meridians of 27° and

34°, west of Washington.

For several years after the Sioux treaties of 1868 and the erection of

Wyoming territory, the Indians of the northern plains kept the peace.

The routes of travel had been opened, the white claim to the Powder

River Valley had been surrendered, and a great northern reserve had

been created in the Black Hills country of southern Dakota. All these,

by lessening contact, removed the danger of Indian friction. But

the southern tribes were still uneasy,--treacherous or ill-treated,

according as the sources vary,--and one more war was needed before they

could be compelled to settle down.

CHAPTER XVIII

BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID

Of the four classes of persons whose interrelations determined the

condition of the frontier, none admitted that it desired to provoke

Indian wars. The tribes themselves consistently professed a wish to

be allowed to remain at peace. The Indian agents lost their authority

and many of their perquisites during war time. The army and the

frontiersmen denied that they were belligerent. "I assert," wrote

Custer, "and all candid persons familiar with the subject will sustain

the assertion, that of all classes of our population the army and

the people living on the frontier entertain the greatest dread of an

Indian war, and are willing to make the greatest sacrifices to avoid

its horrors." To fix the responsibility for the wars which repeatedly

occurred, despite the protestations of amiability on all sides, calls

for the examination of individual episodes in large number. It is

easier to acquit the first two classes than the last two. There are

enough instances in which the tribes were persuaded to promise and keep

the peace to establish the belief that a policy combining benevolence,

equity, and relentless firmness in punishing wrong-doers, white or red,

could have maintained friendly relations with ease. The Indian agents

were hampered most by their inability to enforce the laws intrusted

to them for execution, and by the slowness of the Senate in ratifying

agreements and of Congress in voting supplies. The frontiersmen, with

their isolated homesteads lying open to surprise and destruction,

would seem to be sincere in their protestations; yet repeatedly

they thrust themselves as squatters upon lands of unquieted Indian

title, while their personal relations with the red men were commonly

marked by fear and hatred. The army, with greater honesty and better

administration than the Indian Bureau, overdid its work, being unable

to think of the Indians as anything but public enemies and treating

them with an arbitrary curtness that would have been dangerous even

among intelligent whites. The history of the southwest Indians, after

the Sand Creek massacre, illustrates well how tribes, not specially

ill-disposed, became the victims of circumstances which led to their

destruction.

After the battle at Sand Creek, the southwest tribes agreed to a

series of treaties in 1865 by which new reserves were promised them

on the borderland of Kansas and Indian Territory. These treaties were

so amended by the Senate that for a time the tribes had no admitted

homes or rights save the guaranteed hunting privileges on the plains

south of the Platte. They seem generally to have been peaceful during

1866, in spite of the rather shabby treatment which the neglect

of Congress procured for them. In 1867 uneasiness became apparent.

Agent E. W. Wynkoop, of Sand Creek fame, was now in charge of the

Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Apache tribes in the vicinity of Fort Larned,

on the Santa Fé trail in Kansas. In 1866 they had "complained of the

government not having fulfilled its promises to them, and of numerous

impositions practised upon them by the whites." Some of their younger

braves had gone on the war-path. But Wynkoop claimed to have quieted

them, and by March, 1867, thought that they were "well satisfied and

quiet, and anxious to retain the peaceful relations now existing."

The military authorities at Fort Dodge, farther up the Arkansas and

near the old Santa Fé crossing, were less certain than Wynkoop that

the Indians meant well. Little Raven, of the Arapaho, and Satanta,

"principal chief" of the Kiowa, were reported as sending in insulting

messages to the troops, ordering them to cut no more wood, to leave

the country, to keep wagons off the Santa Fé trail. Occasional thefts

of stock and forays were reported along the trail. Custer thought that

there was "positive evidence from the agents themselves" that the

Indians were guilty, the trouble only being that Wynkoop charged the

guilt on the Kiowa and Comanche, while J. H. Leavenworth, agent for

these tribes, asserted their innocence and accused the wards of Wynkoop.

The Department of the Missouri, in which these tribes resided, was

under the command of Major-general Winfield Scott Hancock in the spring

of 1867. With a desire to promote the tranquillity of his command,

Hancock prepared for an expedition on the plains as early as the roads

would permit. He wrote of this intention to both of the agents, asking

them to accompany him, "to show that the officers of the government are

acting in harmony." His object was not necessarily war, but to impress

upon the Indians his ability "to chastise any tribes who may molest

people who are travelling across the plains." In each of the letters he

listed the complaints against the respective tribes--failure to deliver

murderers, outrages on the Smoky Hill route in 1866, alliances with

the Sioux, hostile incursions into Texas, and the specially barbarous

Box murder. In this last affair one James Box had been murdered by the

Kiowas, and his wife and five daughters carried off. The youngest of

these, a baby, died in a few days, the mother stated, and they "took

her from me and threw her into a ravine." Ultimately the mother and

three of the children were ransomed from the Kiowas after Mrs. Box and

her eldest daughter, Margaret, had been passed around from chief to

chief for more than two months. Custer wrote up this outrage with much

exaggeration, but the facts were bad enough.

With both agents present, Hancock advanced to Fort Larned. "It is

uncertain whether war will be the result of the expedition or not,"

he declared in general orders of March 26, 1867, thus admitting that

a state of war did not at that time exist. "It will depend upon the

temper and behavior of the Indians with whom we may come in contact. We

go prepared for war and will make it if a proper occasion presents."

The tribes which he proposed to visit were roaming indiscriminately

over the country traversed by the Santa Fé trail, in accordance with

the treaties of 1865, which permitted them, until they should be

settled upon their reserves, to hunt at will over the plains south

of the Platte, subject only to the restriction that they must not

camp within ten miles of the main roads and trails. It was Hancock's

intention to enforce this last provision, and more, to insist "upon

their keeping off the main lines of travel, where their presence is

calculated to bring about collisions with the whites."

The first conference with the Indians was held at Fort Larned, where

the "principal chiefs of the Dog Soldiers of the Cheyennes" had been

assembled by Agent Wynkoop. Leavenworth thought that the chiefs here

had been very friendly, but Wynkoop criticised the council as being

held after sunset, which was contrary to Indian custom and calculated

"to make them feel suspicious." At this council General Hancock

reprimanded the chiefs and told them that he would visit their village,

occupied by themselves and an almost equal number of Sioux; which

village, said Wynkoop, "was 35 miles from any travelled road." "Why

don't he confine the troops to the great line of travel?" demanded

Leavenworth, whose wards had the same privilege of hunting south of the

Arkansas that those of Wynkoop had between the Arkansas and the Platte.

So long as they camped ten miles from the roads, this was their right.

Contrary to Wynkoop's urgings, Hancock led his command from Fort

Larned on April 13, 1867, moving for the main Arapaho, Cheyenne, and

Sioux village on Pawnee Fork, thirty-five miles west of the post. With

cavalry, infantry, artillery, and a pontoon train, it was hard for him

to assume any other appearance than that of war. Even the General's

particular assurance, as Custer puts it, "that he was not there to

make war, but to promote peace," failed to convince the chiefs who had

attended the night council. It was not a pleasant march. The snow was

nearly a foot deep, fodder was scarce, and the Indian disposition was

uncertain. Only a few had come in to the Fort Larned conference, and

none appeared at camp after the first day's march. After this refusal

to meet him, Hancock marched on to the village, in front of which he

found some three hundred Indians drawn up in battle array. Fighting

seemed imminent, but at last Roman Nose, Bull Bear, and other chiefs

met Hancock between the lines and agreed upon an evening conference. It

developed that the men alone were left at the Indian camp. Women and

children, with all the movables they could handle, had fled out upon

the snowy plains at the approach of the troops. Fear of another Sand

Creek had caused it, said Wynkoop. But Hancock chose to regard this

as evidence of a treacherous disposition, demanded that the fugitives

return at once, and insisted upon encamping near the village against

the protest of the chiefs. Instead of bringing back their people, the

men themselves abandoned the village that evening, while Hancock,

learning of the flight, surrounded and took possession of it. The next

morning, April 15, Custer was sent with cavalry in pursuit of the

flying bands. Depredations occurring to the north of Pawnee Fork within

a day or two, Hancock burned the village in retaliation and proceeded

to Fort Dodge. Wynkoop insisted that the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been

entirely innocent and that these injuries had been committed by the

Sioux. "I have no doubt," he wrote, "but that they think that war has

been forced upon them."

When Hancock started upon the plains, there was no war, but there was

no doubt about its existence as the spring advanced. When the Peace

Commissioners of this year came with their protestations of benevolence

for the Great Father, it was small wonder that the Cheyenne and Arapaho

had to be coaxed into the camp on the Medicine Lodge Creek. And when

the treaties there made failed of prompt execution by the United

States, the war naturally dragged on in a desultory way during 1868 and

1869.

In the spring of 1868 General Sheridan, who had succeeded Hancock in

command of the Department of the Missouri, visited the posts at Fort

Larned and Fort Dodge. Here on Pawnee and Walnut creeks most of the

southwest Indians were congregated. Wynkoop, in February and April,

reported them as happy and quiet. They were destitute, to be sure, and

complained that the Commissioners at Medicine Lodge had promised them

arms and ammunition which had not been delivered. Indeed, the treaty

framed there had not yet been ratified. But he believed it possible to

keep them contented and wean them from their old habits. To Sheridan

the situation seemed less happy. He declined to hold a council with

the complaining chiefs on the ground that the whole matter was yet in

the hands of the Peace Commission, but he saw that the young men were

chafing and turbulent and that frontier hostilities would accompany the

summer buffalo hunt.

There is little doubt of the destitution which prevailed among the

plains tribes at this time. The rapid diminution of game was everywhere

observable. The annuities at best afforded only partial relief, while

Congress was irregular in providing funds. Three times during the

spring the Commissioner prodded the Secretary of the Interior, who in

turn prodded Congress, with the result that instead of the $1,000,000

asked for $500,000 were, in July, 1868, granted to be spent not by the

Indian Office, but by the War Department. Three weeks later General

Sherman created an organization for distributing this charity, placing

the district south of Kansas in command of General Hazen. Meanwhile,

the time for making the spring issues of annuity goods had come. It

was ordered in June that no arms or ammunition should be given to the

Cheyenne and Arapaho because of their recent bad conduct; but in July

the Commissioner, influenced by the great dissatisfaction on the part

of the tribes, and fearing "that these Indians, by reason of such

non-delivery of arms, ammunition, and goods, will commence hostilities

against the whites in their vicinity, modified the order and

telegraphed Agent Wynkoop that he might use his own discretion in the

matter: "If you are satisfied that the issue of the arms and ammunition

is necessary to preserve the peace, and that no evil will result from

their delivery, let the Indians have them." A few days previously on

July 20, Wynkoop had issued the ordinary supplies to his Arapaho and

Apache, his Cheyenne refusing to take anything until they could have

the guns as well. "They felt much disappointed, but gave no evidence of

being angry ... and would wait with patience for the Great Father to

take pity upon them." The permission from the Commissioner was welcomed

by the agent, and approved by Thomas Murphy, his superintendent. Murphy

had been ordered to Fort Larned to reënforce Wynkoop's judgment. He

held a council on August 1 with Little Raven and the Arapaho and

Apache, and issued them their arms. "Raven and the other chiefs then

promised that these arms should never be used against the whites, and

Agent Wynkoop then delivered to the Arapahoes 160 pistols, 80 Lancaster

rifles, 12 kegs of powder, 1-1/2 keg of lead, and 15,000 caps; and to

the Apaches he gave 40 pistols, 20 Lancaster rifles, 3 kegs of powder,

1/2 keg of lead, and 5000 caps." The Cheyenne came in a few days later

for their share, which Wynkoop handed over on the 9th. "They were

delighted at receiving the goods," he reported, "particularly the

arms and ammunition, and never before have I known them to be better

satisfied and express themselves as being so well contented." The

fact that within three days murders were committed by the Cheyenne on

the Solomon and Saline forks throws doubt upon the sincerity of their

protestations.

The war party which commenced the active hostilities of 1868 at a time

so well calculated to throw discredit upon the wisdom of the Indian

Office, had left the Cheyenne village early in August, "smarting

under their _supposed_ wrongs," as Wynkoop puts it. They were mostly

Cheyenne, with a small number of Arapaho and a few visiting Sioux,

about 200 in all. Little Raven's son and a brother of White Antelope,

who died at Sand Creek, were with them; Black Kettle is said to have

been their leader. On August 7 some of them spent the evening at Fort

Hays, where they held a powwow at the post. "Black Kettle loves his

white soldier brothers, and his heart feels glad when he meets them

and shakes their hands in friendship," is the way the post-trader,

Hill P. Wilson, reported his speech. "The white soldiers ought to be

glad all the time, because their ponies are so big and so strong,

and because they have so many guns and so much to eat.... All other

Indians may take the war trail, but Black Kettle will forever keep

friendship with his white brothers." Three nights later they began to

kill on Saline River, and on the 11th they crossed to the Solomon. Some

fifteen settlers were killed, and five women were carried off. Here

this particular raid stopped, for the news had got abroad, and the

frontier was instantly in arms. Various isolated forays occurred, so

that Sheridan was sure he had a general war upon his hands. He believed

nearly all the young men of the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche

to be in the war parties, the old women, men, and children remaining

around the posts and professing solicitous friendship. There were 6000

potential warriors in all, and that he might better devote himself to

suppressing them, Sheridan followed the Kansas Pacific to its terminus

at Fort Hays and there established his headquarters in the field.

The war of 1868 ranged over the whole frontier south of the Platte

trail. It influenced the Peace Commission, at its final meeting in

October, 1868, to repudiate many of the pacific theories of January

and recommend that the Indians be handed over to the War Department.

Sheridan, who had led the Commission to this conclusion, was in the

field directing the movement. His policy embraced a concentration of

the peaceful bands south of the Arkansas, and a relentless war against

the rest. It is fairly clear that the war need not have come, had it

not been for the cross-purposes ever apparent between the Indian Office

and the War Department, and even within the War Department itself.

At Fort Hays, Sheridan prepared for war. He had, at the start, about

2600 men, nearly equally divided among cavalry and infantry. Believing

his force too small to cover the whole plains between Fort Hays and

Denver, he called for reënforcements, receiving a part of the Fifth

Cavalry and a regiment of Kansas volunteers. With enthusiasm this last

addition was raised among the frontiersmen, where Indian fighting was

popular; the governor of the state resigned his office to become its

colonel. September and October were occupied in getting the troops

together, keeping the trails open for traffic, and establishing, about

a hundred miles south of Fort Dodge, a rendezvous which was known

as Camp Supply. It was the intention to protect the frontier during

the autumn, and to follow up the Indian villages after winter had

fallen, catching the tribes when they would be concentrated and at a

disadvantage.

On October 15, 1868, Sherman, just from the Chicago meeting of the

Peace Commissioners and angry because he had there been told that the

army wanted war, gave Sheridan a free hand for the winter campaign. "As

to 'extermination,' it is for the Indians themselves to determine. We

don't want to exterminate or even to fight them.... The present war ...

was begun and carried on by the Indians in spite of our entreaties and

in spite of our warnings, and the only question to us is, whether we

shall allow the progress of our western settlements to be checked, and

leave the Indians free to pursue their bloody career, or accept their

war and fight them.... We ... accept the war ... and hereby resolve to

make its end final.... I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain

our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow

no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their

hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these

Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not

again be able to begin and carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind

of pretext that they may choose to allege."

The plan of campaign provided that the main column, Custer in immediate

command, should march from Fort Hays directly against the Indians, by

way of Camp Supply; two smaller columns were to supplement this, one

marching in on Indian Territory from New Mexico, and the other from

Fort Lyon on the old Sand Creek reserve. Detachments of the chief

column began to move in the middle of November, Custer reaching the

depot at Camp Supply ahead of the rest, while the Kansas volunteers

lost themselves in heavy snow-storms. On November 23 Custer was ordered

out of Camp Supply, on the north fork of the Canadian, to follow a

fresh trail which led southwest towards the Washita River, near the

eastern line of Texas. He pushed on as rapidly as twelve inches of snow

would allow, discovering in the early morning of November 27 a large

camp in the valley of the Washita.

It was Black Kettle's camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho that they had found

in a strip of heavy timber along the river. After reconnoitring Custer

divided his force into four columns for simultaneous attacks upon the

sleeping village. At daybreak "my men charged the village and reached

the lodges before the Indians were aware of our presence. The moment

the charge was ordered the band struck up 'Garry Owen,' and with cheers

that strongly reminded me of scenes during the war, every trooper,

led by his officer, rushed towards the village." For several hours a

promiscuous fight raged up and down the ravine, with Indians everywhere

taking to cover, only to be prodded out again. Fifty-one lodges in

all fell into Custer's hands; 103 dead Indians, including Black

Kettle himself, were found later. "We captured in good condition 875

horses, ponies, and mules; 241 saddles, some of very fine and costly

workmanship; 573 buffalo robes, 390 buffalo skins for lodges, 160

untanned robes, 210 axes, 140 hatchets, 35 revolvers, 47 rifles, 535

pounds of powder, 1050 pounds of lead, 4000 arrows and arrowheads, 75

spears, 90 bullet moulds, 35 bows and quivers, 12 shields, 300 pounds

of bullets, 775 lariats, 940 buckskin saddle-bags, 470 blankets, 93

coats, 700 pounds of tobacco."

As the day advanced, Custer's triumph seemed likely to turn into

defeat. The Cheyenne village proved to be only the last of a long

string of villages that extended down the Washita for fifteen miles

or more, and whose braves rode up by hundreds to see the fight. A

general engagement was avoided, however, and with better luck and more

discretion than he was one day to have, Custer marched back to Camp

Supply on December 3, his band playing gayly the tune of battle, "Garry

Owen." The commander in his triumphal procession was followed by his

scouts and trailers, and the captives of his prowess--a long train of

Indian widows and orphans.

The decisive blow which broke the power of the southwest tribes had

been struck, and Black Kettle had carried on his last raid,--if indeed

he had carried on this one at all--but as the reports came in it became

evident that the merits of the triumph were in doubt. The Eastern

humanitarians were shocked at the cold-blooded attack upon a camp of

sleeping men, women, and children, forgetting that if Indians were to

be fought this was the most successful way to do it, and was no shock

to the Indians' own ideals of warfare and attack. The deeper question

was whether this camp was actually hostile, whether the tribes had not

abandoned the war-path in good faith, whether it was fair to crush a

tribe that with apparent earnestness begged peace because it could not

control the excesses of some of its own braves. It became certain, at

least, that the War Department itself had fallen victim to that vice

with which it had so often reproached the Indian Office--failure to

produce a harmony of action among several branches of the service.

The Indian Office had no responsibility for the battle of the Washita.

It had indeed issued arms to the Cheyenne in August, but only with

the approval of the military officer commanding Forts Larned and

Dodge, General Alfred Sully, "an officer of long experience in Indian

affairs." In the early summer all the tribes had been near these forts

and along the Santa Fé trail. After Congress had voted its half million

to feed the hungry, Sherman had ordered that the peaceful hungry among

the southern tribes should be moved from this locality to the vicinity

of old Fort Cobb, in the west end of Indian Territory on the Washita

River.

During September, while Sheridan was gathering his armament at Fort

Hays, Sherman was ordering the agents to take their peaceful charges

to Fort Cobb. With the major portion of the tribes at war it would

be impossible for the troops to make any discrimination unless there

should be an absolute separation between the well-disposed and the

warlike. He proposed to allow the former a reasonable time to get to

their new abode and then beg the President for an order "declaring all

Indians who remain outside of their lawful reservations" to be outlaws.

He believed that by going to war these tribes had violated their

hunting rights. Superintendent Murphy thought he saw another Sand Creek

in these preparations. Here were the tribes ordered to Fort Cobb; their

fall annuity goods were on the way thither for distribution; and now

the military column was marching in the same direction.

In the meantime General W. B. Hazen had arrived at Fort Cobb on

November 7 and had immediately voiced his fear that "General Sheridan,

acting under the impression of hostiles, may attack bands of Comanche

and Kiowa before they reach this point." He found, however, most of

these tribes, who had not gone to war this season, encamped within

reach on the Canadian and Washita rivers,--5000 of the Comanche and

1500 of the Kiowa. Within a few days Cheyenne and Arapaho began to join

the settlements in the district, Black Kettle bringing in his band to

the Washita, forty miles east of Antelope Hills, and coming in person

to Fort Cobb for an interview with General Hazen on November 20.

"I have always done my best," he protested, "to keep my young men

quiet, but some will not listen, and since the fighting began I have

not been able to keep them all at home. But we all want peace." To

which added Big Mouth, of the Arapaho: "I came to you because I wish

to do right.... I do not want war, and my people do not, but although

we have come back south of the Arkansas, the soldiers follow us and

continue fighting, and we want you to send out and stop these soldiers

from coming against us."

To these, General Hazen, fearful as he was of an unjust attack,

responded with caution. Sherman had spoken of Fort Cobb in his orders

to Sheridan, as "aimed to hold out the olive branch with one hand

and the sword in the other. But it is not thereby intended that any

hostile Indians shall make use of that establishment as a refuge from

just punishment for acts already done. Your military control over

that reservation is as perfect as over Kansas, and if hostile Indians

retreat within that reservation, ... they may be followed even to

Fort Cobb, captured, and punished." It is difficult to see what could

constitute the fact of peaceful intent if coming in to Fort Cobb did

not. But Hazen gave to Black Kettle cold comfort: "I am sent here as

a peace chief; all here is to be peace; but north of the Arkansas is

General Sheridan, the great war chief, and I do not control him; and he

has all the soldiers who are fighting the Arapahoes and Cheyennes....

If the soldiers come to fight, you must remember they are not from me,

but from that great war chief, and with him you must make peace....

I cannot stop the war.... You must not come in again unless I send

for you, and you must keep well out beyond the friendly Kiowas and

Comanches." So he sent the suitors away and wrote, on November 22,

to Sherman for more specific instructions covering these cases. He

believed that Black Kettle and Big Mouth were themselves sincere, but

doubted their control over their bands. These were the bands which

Custer destroyed before the week was out, and it is probable that

during the fight they were reënforced by braves from the friendly

lodges of Satanta's Kiowa and Little Raven's Arapaho.

Whatever might have been a wise policy in treating semi-hostile Indian

tribes, this one was certainly unsatisfactory. It is doubtful whether

the war was ever so great as Sherman imagined it. The injured tribes

were unquestionably drawn to Fort Cobb by a desire for safety; the army

was in the position of seeming to use the olive branch to assemble

the Indians in order that the sword might the better disperse them.

There is reasonable doubt whether Black Kettle had anything to do with

the forays. Murphy believed in him and cited many evidences of his

friendly disposition, while Wynkoop asserted positively that he had

been encamped on Pawnee Fork all through the time when he was alleged

to have been committing depredations on the Saline. The army alone had

been no more successful in producing obvious justice than the army and

Indian Office together had been. Yet whatever the merits of the case,

the power of the Cheyenne and their neighbors was permanently gone.

During the winter of 1868-1869 Sheridan's army remained in the

vicinity of Fort Cobb, gathering the remnants of the shattered tribes

in upon their reservation. The Kiowa and Comanche were placed at last

on the lands awarded them at the Medicine Lodge treaties, while the

Arapaho and Cheyenne once more had their abiding-place changed in

August, 1869, and were settled down along the upper waters of the

Washita, around the valley of their late defeat.

The long controversy between the War and Interior departments over the

management of the tribes entered upon a new stage with the inauguration

of Grant in 1869. One of the earliest measures of his administration

was a bill erecting a board of civilian Indian commissioners to advise

the Indian Department and promote the civilization of the tribes. A

generous grant of two millions accompanied the act. More care was used

in the appointment of agents than had hitherto been taken, and the

immediate results seemed good when the Commissioner wrote his annual

report in December, 1869. But the worst of the troubles with the

Indians of the plains was over, so that without special effort peace

could now have been the result.

CHAPTER XIX

THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS

Twenty years before the great tribes of the plains made their last

stand in front of the invading white man overland travel had begun;

ten years before, Congress, under the inspiration of the prophetic

Whitney and the leadership of more practical men, had provided for a

survey of railroad routes along the trails; on the eve of the struggle

the earliest continental railway had received its charter; and the

struggle had temporarily ceased while Congress, in 1867, sent out its

Peace Commission to prepare an open way. That the tribes must yield

was as inevitable as it was that their yielding must be ungracious and

destructive to them. Too weak to compel their enemy to respect their

rights, and uncertain what their rights were, they were too low in

intelligence to realize that the more they struggled, the worse would

be their suffering. So they struggled on, during the years in which

the iron band was put across the continent. Its completion and their

subjection came in 1869.

After years of tedious debate the earliest of the Pacific railways was

chartered in 1862. The withdrawal of southern claims had made possible

an agreement upon a route, while the spirit of nationality engendered

by the Civil War gave to the project its final impetus. Under the

management of the Central Pacific of California, the Union Pacific, and

two or three border railways, provision was made for a road from the

Iowa border to California. Land grants and bond subsidies were for two

years dangled before the capitalists of America in the vain attempt to

entice them to construct it. Only after these were increased in 1864

did active organization begin, while at the end of 1865 but forty miles

of the Union Pacific had been built.

Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean was

easily the greatest engineering feat that America had undertaken. In

their day the Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania

Portage Railway had ranked among the American wonders, but none of

these had been accompanied by the difficult problems that bristled

along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must be laid across

plain and desert, through hostile Indian country and over mountains.

Worse yet, the road could hope for little aid from the country through

which it ran. Except for the small colonies at Carson, Salt Lake, and

Denver, the last of which it missed by a hundred miles, its course lay

through unsettled wilderness for nearly the whole distance. Like the

trusses of a cantilever, its advancing ends projected themselves across

the continent, relying, up to the moment of joining, upon the firm

anchorage of the termini in the settled lands of Iowa and California.

Equally trying, though different in variety, were the difficulties

attendant upon construction at either end.

The impetus which Judah had given to the Central Pacific had started

the western end of the system two years ahead of the eastern, but had

not produced great results at first. It was hard work building east

into the Sierra Nevadas, climbing the gullies, bridging, tunnelling,

filling, inch by inch, to keep the grade down and the curvature out.

Twenty miles a year only were completed in 1863, 1864, and 1865,

thirty in 1866, and forty-six in 1867--one hundred and thirty-six

miles during the first five years of work. Nature had done her best

to impede the progress of the road by thrusting mountains and valleys

across its route. But she had covered the mountains with timber and

filled them with stone, so that materials of construction were easily

accessible along all of the costliest part of the line. Bridges and

trestles could be built anywhere with local material. The labor problem

vexed the Central Pacific managers at the start. It was a scanty

and inefficient supply of workmen that existed in California when

construction began. Like all new countries, California possessed more

work than workmen. Economic independence was to be had almost for the

asking. Free land and fertile soil made it unnecessary for men to work

for hire. The slight results of the first five years were due as much

to lack of labor as to refractory roadway or political opposition. But

by 1865 the employment of Chinese laborers began. Coolies imported

by the thousand and ably directed by Charles Crocker, who was the

most active constructor, brought a new rapidity into construction. "I

used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull," Crocker

dictated to Bancroft's stenographer, "stopping along wherever there

was anything amiss, and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not

up to time." With roadbed once graded new troubles began. California

could manufacture no iron. Rolling stock and rails had to be imported

from Europe or the East, and came to San Francisco after the costly sea

voyage, _via_ Panama or the Horn. But the men directing the Central

Pacific--Stanford, Crocker, Huntington, and the rest--rose to the

difficulties, and once they had passed the mountains, fairly romped

across the Nevada desert in the race for subsidies.

The eastern end started nearer to a base of supplies than did the

California terminus, yet until 1867 no railroad from the East reached

Council Bluffs, where the President had determined that the Union

Pacific should begin. There had been railway connection to the Missouri

River at St. Joseph since 1859, and various lines were hurrying across

Iowa in the sixties, but for more than two years of construction the

Union Pacific had to get rolling stock and iron from the Missouri

steamers or the laborious prairie schooners. Until its railway

connection was established its difficulty in this respect was only less

great than that of the Central Pacific. The compensation of the Union

Pacific came, however, in its roadbed. Following the old Platte trail,

flat and smooth as the best highways, its construction gangs could

do the light grading as rapidly as the finished single track could

deliver the rails at its growing end. But for the needful culverts and

trestles there was little material at hand. The willows and Cottonwood

lining the river would not do. The Central Pacific could cut its wood

as it needed it, often within sight of its track. The Union Pacific had

to haul much of its wood and stone, like its iron, from its eastern

terminus.

The labor problem of the Union Pacific was intimately connected with

the solution of its Indian problem. The Central Pacific had almost no

trouble with the decadent tribes through whom it ran, but the Union

Pacific was built during the very years when the great plains were

most disturbed and hostile forays were most frequent. Its employees

contained large elements of the newly arrived Irish and of the recently

discharged veterans of the Civil War. General Dodge, who was its chief

engineer, has described not only the military guards who "stacked their

arms on the dump and were ready at a moment's warning to fall in and

fight," but the military capacity of the construction gangs themselves.

The "track train could arm a thousand men at a word," and from chief

constructor down to chief spiker "could be commanded by experienced

officers of every rank, from general to a captain. They had served five

years at the front, and over half of the men had shouldered a musket

in many battles. An illustration of this came to me after our track had

passed Plum Creek, 200 miles west of the Missouri River. The Indians

had captured a freight train and were in possession of it and its

crews." Dodge came to the rescue in his car, "a travelling arsenal,"

with twenty-odd men, most of whom were strangers to him; yet "when I

called upon them to fall in, to go forward and retake the train, every

man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was

a soldier.... I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the

command they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had

seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire."

By an act passed in July, 1866, Congress did much to accelerate the

construction of the road. Heretofore the junction point had been in the

Nevada Desert, a hundred and fifty miles east of the California line.

It was now provided that each road might build until it met the other.

Since the mountain section, with the highest accompanying subsidies,

was at hand, each of the companies was spurred on by its desire to get

as much land and as many bonds as possible. The race which began in the

autumn of 1866 ended only with the completion of the track in 1869. A

mile a day had seemed like quick work at the start; seven or eight a

day were laid before the end.

The English traveller, Bell, who published his _New Tracks in North

America_ in 1869, found somewhere an enthusiastic quotation admirably

descriptive of the process. "Track-laying on the Union Pacific is a

science," it read, "and we pundits of the Far East stood upon that

embankment, only about a thousand miles this side of sunset, and backed

westward before that hurrying corps of sturdy operatives with mingled

feelings of amusement, curiosity, and profound respect. On they came.

A light car, drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with its

load of rails. Two men seize the end of a rail and start forward, the

rest of the gang taking hold by twos until it is clear of the car. They

come forward at a run. At the word of command, the rail is dropped in

its place, right side up, with care, while the same process goes on at

the other side of the car. Less than thirty seconds to a rail for each

gang, and so four rails go down to the minute! Quick work, you say, but

the fellows on the U. P. are tremendously in earnest. The moment the

car is empty it is tipped over on the side of the track to let the next

loaded car pass it, and then it is tipped back again; and it is a sight

to see it go flying back for another load, propelled by a horse at full

gallop at the end of 60 or 80 feet of rope, ridden by a young Jehu,

who drives furiously. Close behind the first gang come the gaugers,

spikers, and bolters, and a lively time they make of it. It is a grand

Anvil Chorus that these sturdy sledges are playing across the plains.

It is in a triple time, three strokes to a spike. There are ten spikes

to a rail, four hundred rails to a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San

Francisco. That's the sum, what is the quotient? Twenty-one million

times are those sledges to be swung--twenty-one million times are they

to come down with their sharp punctuation, before the great work of

modern America is complete!"

Handling, housing, and feeding the thousands of laborers who built

the road was no mean problem. Ten years earlier the builders of the

Illinois Central had complained because their road from Galena and

Chicago to Cairo ran generally through an uninhabited country upon

which they could not live as they went along. Much more the continental

railways, building rapidly away from the settlements, were forced to

carry their dwellings with them. Their commissariat was as important as

their general offices.

An acquaintance of Bell told of standing where Cheyenne now is and

seeing a long freight train arrive "laden with frame houses, boards,

furniture, palings, old tents, and all the rubbish" of a mushroom city.

"The guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform,

called out with a flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.'" The head of

the serpentine track, sometimes indeed "crookeder than the horn that

was blown around the walls of Jericho," was the terminal town; its

tongue was the stretch of track thrust a few miles in advance of the

head; repeatedly as the tongue darted out the head followed, leaving

across the plains a series of scars, marking the spots where it had

rested for a time. Every few weeks the town was packed upon a freight

train and moved fifty or sixty miles to the new end of the track. Its

vagrant population followed it. It was at Julesburg early in 1867; at

Cheyenne in the end of the year; at Laramie City the following spring.

Always it was the most disreputably picturesque spot on the anatomy of

the railroad.

In the fall of 1868 "Hell on Wheels," as Samuel Bowles, editor of

the _Springfield Republican_, appropriately designated the terminal

town, was at Benton, Wyoming, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from

Omaha and near the military reservation at Fort Steele. In the very

midst of the gray desert, with sand ankle-deep in its streets, the

town stood dusty white--"a new arrival with black clothes looked like

nothing so much as a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel."

A less promising location could hardly have been found, yet within

two weeks there had sprung up a city of three thousand people with

ordinances and government suited to its size, and facilities for vice

ample for all. The needs of the road accounted for it: to the east the

road was operating for passengers and freight; to the west it was yet

constructing track. Here was the end of rail travel and the beginning

of the stage routes to the coast and the mines. Two years earlier the

similar point had been at Fort Kearney, Nebraska.

The city of tents and shacks contained, according to the count of John

H. Beadle, a peripatetic journalist, twenty-three saloons and five

dance houses. It had all the worst details of the mining camp. Gambling

and rowdyism were the order of day and night. Its great institution

was the "'Big Tent,' sometimes, with equal truth but less politeness,

called the 'Gamblers' Tent.'" This resort was a hundred feet long by

forty wide, well floored, and given over to drinking, dancing, and

gambling. The sumptuous bar provided refreshment much desired in a dry

alkali country; all the games known to the professional gambler were in

full blast; women, often fair and well-dressed, were there to gather in

what the bartender and faro-dealer missed. Whence came these people,

and how they learned their trade, was a mystery to Bowles. "Hell would

appear to have been raked to furnish them," he said, "and to it they

must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its

highest seats and most diabolical service."

Behind the terminal town real estate disappointments, like beads,

were strung along the cord of rails. In advance of the construction

gangs land companies would commonly survey town sites in preparation

for a boom. Brisk speculation in corner lots was a form of gambling

in which real money was often lost and honest hopes were regularly

shattered. Each town had its advocates who believed it was to be the

great emporium of the West. Yet generally, as the railroad moved on,

the town relapsed into a condition of deserted prairie, with only the

street lines and débris to remind it of its past. Omaha, though Beadle

thought in 1868 that no other "place in America had been so well lied

about," and Council Bluffs retained a share of greatness because of

their strategic position at the commencement of the main line. Tied

together in 1872 by the great iron bridge of the Union Pacific, their

relations were as harmonious as those of the cats of Kilkenny, as they

quarrelled over the claims of each to be the real terminus. But the

future of both was assured when the eastern roads began to run in to

get connections with the West. Cheyenne, too, remained a city of some

consequence because the Denver Pacific branched off at this point

to serve the Pike's Peak region. But the names of most of the other

one-time terminal towns were writ in sand.

The progress of construction of the road after 1866 was rapid enough.

At the end of 1865, though the Central Pacific had started two years

before the Union Pacific, it had completed only sixty miles of track,

to the latter's forty. During 1866 the Central Pacific built thirty

laborious miles over the mountains, and in 1867, forty-six miles, while

in the same two years the Union Pacific built five hundred. In 1868,

the western road, now past its worst troubles, added more than 360 to

its mileage; the Union Pacific, unchecked by the continental divide,

making a new record of 425. By May 10, 1869, the line was done, 1776

miles from Omaha to Sacramento. For the last sixteen months of the

continental race the two roads together had built more than two and a

half miles for every working day. Never before had construction been

systematized so highly or the rewards for speed been so great.

Whether regarded as an economic achievement or a national work, the

building of the road deserved the attention it received; yet it was

scarcely finished before the scandal-monger was at work. Beadle had

written a chapter full of "floridly complimentary notices" of the

men who had made possible the feat, but before he went to press

their reputations were blasted, and he thought it safest "to mention

no names." "Never praise a man," he declared in disgust, "or name

your children after him, till he is dead." Before the end of Grant's

first administration the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal proved that men,

high in the national government, had speculated in the project whose

success depended on their votes. That many of them had been guilty of

indiscretion, was perfectly clear, but they had done only what many of

their greatest predecessors had done. Their real fault was made more

prominent by their misfortune in being caught by an aroused national

conscience which suddenly awoke to heed a call that it had ever

disregarded in the past.

The junction point for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had been

variously fixed by the acts of 1862 and 1864. In 1866 it was left open

to fortune or enterprise, and had not Congress intervened in 1869 it

might never have existed. In their rush for the land grants the two

rivals hurried on their surveys to the vicinity of Great Salt Lake,

where their advancing ends began to overlap, and continued parallel

for scores of miles. Congress, noticing their indisposition to agree

upon a junction, intervened in the spring of 1869, ordering the two to

bring their race to an end at Promontory Point, a few miles northwest

of Ogden on the shore of the lake. Here in May, 1869, the junction was

celebrated in due form.

Since the "Seneca Chief" carried DeWitt Clinton from Buffalo to the

Atlantic in 1825, it has been the custom to make the completion of

a new road an occasion for formal celebration. On the 10th of May,

1869, the whole United States stood still to signalize the junction

of the tracks. The date had been agreed upon by the railways on short

notice, and small parties of their officials, Governor Stanford for the

Central Pacific and President Dillon for the Union Pacific, had come

to the scene of activities. The latter wrote up the "Driving the Last

Spike" for one of the magazines twenty years later, telling how General

Dodge worked all night of the 9th, laying his final section, and how

at noon on the appointed day the last two rails were spiked to a tie

of California laurel. The immediate audience was small, including few

beyond the railway officials, but within hearing of the telegraphic

taps that told of the last blows of the sledge-hammer was much of the

United States. President Dillon told the story as it was given in the

leading paragraph of the _Nation_ of the Thursday after. "So far as

we have seen them," wrote Godkin's censor of American morals, "the

speeches, prayers, and congratulatory telegrams ... all broke down

under the weight of the occasion, and it is a relief to turn from them

to the telegrams which passed between the various operators, and to

get their flavor of business and the West. 'Keep quiet,' the Omaha man

says, when the operators all over the Union begin to pester him with

questions. 'When the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we will

say "Done."' By-and-by he sends the word, 'Hats off! Prayer is being

offered.' Then at the end of thirteen minutes he says, apparently with

a sense of having at last come to business: 'We have got done praying.

The spike is about to be presented.' ... Before sunset the event was

celebrated, not very noisily but very heartily, throughout the country.

Chicago made a procession seven miles long; New York hung out bunting,

fired a hundred guns, and held thanksgiving services in Trinity;

Philadelphia rang the old Liberty Bell; Buffalo sang the 'Star-spangled

Banner'; and many towns burnt powder in honor of the consummation of

a work which, as all good Americans believe, gives us a road to the

Indies, a means of making the United States a halfway house between

the East and West, and last, but not least, a new guarantee of the

perpetuity of the Union as it is."

No single event in the struggle for the last frontier had a greater

significance for the immediate audience, or for posterity, than this

act of completion. Bret Harte, poet of the occasion, asked the question

that all were framing:--

"What was it the Engines said,

Pilots touching, head to head

Facing on the single track,

Half a world behind each back?"

But he was able to answer only a part of it. His western engine

retorted to the eastern:--

"'You brag of the East! _You_ do?

Why, _I_ bring the East to _you_!

All the Orient, all Cathay,

Find through me the shortest way;

And the sun you follow here

Rises in my hemisphere.

Really,--if one must be rude,--

Length, my friend, ain't longitude.'"

The oriental trade of Whitney and Benton yet dazzled the eyes of the

men who built the road, blinding them to the prosaic millions lying

beneath their feet. The East and West were indeed united; but, more

important, the intervening frontier was ceasing to divide. When the

road was undertaken, men thought naturally of the East and the Pacific

Coast, unhappily separated by the waste of the mountains and the desert

and the Indian Country. The mining flurries of the early sixties raised

a hope that this intervening land might not all be waste. As the

railway had advanced, settlement had marched with it, the two treading

upon the heels of the Peace Commissioners sent out to lure away the

Indians. With the opening of the road the new period of national

assimilation of the continent had begun. In fifteen years more, as

other roads followed, there had ceased to be any unbridgeable gap

between the East and West, and the frontier had disappeared.

CHAPTER XX

THE NEW INDIAN POLICY

Through the negotiations of the Peace Commissioners of 1867 and 1868,

and the opening of the Pacific railway in 1869, the Indians of the

plains had been cleanly split into two main groups which had their

centres in the Sioux reserve in southwest Dakota and the old Indian

Territory. The advance of a new wave of population had followed along

the road thus opened, pushing settlements into central Nebraska and

Kansas. Through the latter state the Union Pacific, Eastern Division,

better known as the Kansas Pacific, had been thrust west to Denver,

where it arrived before 1870 was over. With this advance of civilized

life upon the plains it became clear that the old Indian policy

was gone for good, and that the idea of a permanent country, where

the tribes, free from white contact, could continue their nomadic

existence, had broken down. The old Indian policy had been based upon

the permanence of this condition, but with the white advance troops

for police had been added, while the loud bickerings between the

military authorities, thus superimposed, and the Indian Office, which

regarded itself as the rightful custodian of the problem, proved

to be the overture to a new policy. Said Grant, in his first annual

message in 1869: "No matter what ought to be the relations between

such [civilized] settlements and the aborigines, the fact is they do

not harmonize well, and one or the other has to give way in the end.

A situation which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible

for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all

Christendom and engendering in the citizen a disregard for human life

and the rights of others, dangerous to society. I see no substitute for

such a system, except in placing all the Indians on large reservations,

as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection

there."

The vexed question of civilian or military control had reached the

bitterest stage of its discussion when Grant became President. For five

years there had been general wars in which both departments seemed

to be badly involved and for which responsibility was hard to place.

There were many things to be said in favor of either method of control.

Beginning with the establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in

1832, the office had been run by the War Department for seventeen

years. In this period the idea of a permanent Indian Country had been

carried out; the frontier had been established in an unbroken line of

reserves from Texas to Green Bay; and the migration across the plains

had begun. But with the creation of the Interior Department in 1849

the Indian Bureau had been transferred to civilian hands. As yet the

Indian war was so exceptional that it was easy to see the arguments in

favor of a peace policy. It was desired, and honestly too, though the

results make this conviction hard to hold, to treat the Indian well,

to keep the peace, and to elevate the savages as rapidly as they would

permit it. However the government failed in practice and in controlling

the men of the frontier, there is no doubt about the sincerity of its

general intent. Had there been no Oregon and no California, no mines

and no railways, and no mixture of slavery and politics, the hope might

not have failed of realization. Even as it was, the civilian bureau

had little trouble with its charges for nearly fifteen years after

its organization. In general the military power was called upon when

disorder passed beyond the control of the agent; short of that time the

agent remained in authority.

As a means of introducing civilization among the tribes the agents

were more effective than army officers could be. They were, indeed,

underpaid, appointed for political reasons, and often too weak to

resist the allurements of immorality or dishonesty; but they were

civilians. Their ideals were those of industry and peace. Their terms

of service were often too short for them to learn the business, but

they were not subject to the rapid shifting and transfer which made up

a large part of army life. Army officers were better picked and trained

than the agents, but their ambitions were military, and they were

frequently unable to understand why breaches of formal discipline were

not always matters of importance.

The strong arguments in favor of military control were founded largely

on the permanency of tenure in the army. Political appointments were

fewer, the average of personal character and devotion was higher. Army

administration had fewer scandals than had that of the Indian Bureau.

The partisan on either side in the sixties was prone to believe that

his favorite branch of the service was honest and wise, while the

other was inefficient, foolish, and corrupt. He failed to see that

in the earliest phase of the policy, when there was no friction, and

consequently little fighting, the problem was essentially civilian;

that in the next period, when constant friction was provoking wars,

it had become military; and that finally, when emigration and

transportation had changed friction into overwhelming pressure, the

wars would again cease. A large share of the disputes were due to

the misunderstandings as to whether, in particular cases, the tribes

should be under the bureau or the army. On the whole, even when the

tribes were hostile, army control tended to increase the cost of

management and the chance of injustice. There never was a time when

a few thousand Indian police, with the ideals of police rather than

those of soldiers, could not have done better than the army did. But

the student, attacking the problem from afar, is as unable to solve it

fully and justly as were its immediate custodians. He can at most steer

in between the badly biassed "Century of Dishonor" of Mrs. Jackson,

and the outrageous cry of the radical army and the frontier, that the

Indian must go.

The demand of the army for the control of the Indians was never

gratified. Around 1870 its friends were insistent that since the army

had to bear the knocks of the Indian policy,--knocks, they claimed,

generally due to mistakes of the bureau,--it ought to have the whole

responsibility and the whole credit. The inertia which attaches to

federal reforms held this one back, while the Indian problem itself

changed in the seventies so as to make it unnecessary. Once the great

wars of the sixties were done the tribes subsided into general peace.

Their vigorous resistance was confined to the years when the last great

wave of the white advance was surging over them. Then, confined to

their reservations, they resumed the march to civilization.

From the commencement of his term, Grant was willing to aid in at once

reducing the abuses of the Indian Bureau and maintaining a peace policy

on the plains. The Peace Commission of 1867 had done good work, which

would have been more effective had coöperation between the army and the

bureau been possible. Congress now, in April, 1869, voted two millions

to be used in maintaining peace on the plains, "among and with the

several tribes ... to promote civilization among said Indians, bring

them, where practicable, upon reservations, relieve their necessities,

and encourage their efforts at self-support." The President was

authorized at the same time to erect a board of not more than ten men,

"eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy," who should, with the

Secretary of the Interior, and without salary, exercise joint control

over the expenditures of this or any money voted for the use of the

Indian Department.

The Board of Indian Commissioners was designed to give greater wisdom

to the administration of the Indian policy and to minimize peculation

in the bureau. It represented, in substance, a triumph of the peace

party over the army. "The gentlemen who wrote the reports of the

Commissioners revelled in riotous imaginations and discarded facts,"

sneered a friend of military control; but there was, more or less, a

distinct improvement in the management of the reservation tribes after

1869; although, as the exposures of the Indian ring showed, corruption

was by no means stopped. One way in which the Commissioners and Grant

sought to elevate the tone of agency control was through the religious,

charitable, and missionary societies. These organizations, many of

which had long maintained missionary schools among the more civilized

tribes, were invited to nominate agents, teachers, and physicians

for appointment by the bureau. On the whole these appointments were

an improvement over the men whom political influence had heretofore

brought to power. Fifteen years later the Commissioner and the board

were again complaining of the character of the agents; but there was an

increasing standard of criticism.

In its annual reports made to the Secretary of the Interior in 1869,

and since, the board gave much credit to the new peace policy. In

1869 it looked forward with confidence "to success in the effort to

civilize the nomadic tribes." In 1871 it described "the remarkable

spectacle seen this fall, on the plains of western Nebraska and

Kansas and eastern Colorado, of the warlike tribes of the Sioux of

Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, hunting peacefully for buffalo without

occasioning any serious alarm among the thousands of white settlers

whose cabins skirt the borders of both sides of these plains." In 1872,

"the advance of some of the tribes in civilization and Christianity

has been rapid, the temper and inclination of all of them has greatly

improved.... They show a more positive intention to comply with their

own obligations, and to accept the advice of those in authority over

them, and are in many cases disproving the assertion, that adult

Indians cannot be induced to work." In 1906, in its _38th Annual

Report_, there was still most marked improvement, "and for the last

thirty years the legislation of Congress concerning Indians, their

education, their allotment and settlement on lands of their own, their

admission to citizenship, and the protection of their rights makes,

upon the whole, a chapter of political history of which Americans may

justly be proud."

The board of Indian Commissioners believed that most of the obvious

improvement in the Indian condition was due to the substitution of

a peace policy for a policy of something else. It made a mistake in

assuming that there had ever been a policy of war. So far as the United

States government had been concerned the aim had always been peace

and humanity, and only when over-eager citizens had pushed into the

Indian Country to stir up trouble had a war policy been administered.

Even then it was distinctly temporary. The events of the sixties

had involved such continuous friction and necessitated such severe

repression that contemporaries might be pardoned for thinking that war

was the policy rather than the cure. But the resistance of the tribes

would generally have ceased by 1870, even without the new peace policy.

Every mile of western railway lessened the Indians' capacity for

resistance by increasing the government's ability to repress it. The

Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas Pacific,

and Southern Pacific, to say nothing of a multitude of private roads

like the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the Denver and Rio Grande,

the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, and the Missouri, Kansas, and

Texas, were the real forces which brought peace upon the plains. Yet

the board was right in that its influence in bringing closer harmony

between public opinion and the Indian Bureau, and in improving the

tone of the bureau, had made the transformation of the savage into the

citizen farmer more rapid.

Two years after the erection of the Board of Indian Commissioners

Congress took another long step towards a better condition by

ordering that no more treaties with the Indian tribes should be made

by President and Senate. For more than two years before 1871 no

treaty had been made and ratified, and now the policy was definitely

changed. For ninety years the Indians had been treated as independent

nations. Three hundred and seventy treaties had been concluded with

various tribes, the United States only once repudiating any of them.

In 1863, after the Sioux revolt, it abrogated all treaties with the

tribes in insurrection; but with this exception, it had not applied

to Indian relations the rule of international law that war terminates

all existing treaties. The relation implied by the treaty had been

anomalous. The tribes were at once independent and dependent. No

foreign nation could treat with them; hence they were not free. No

state could treat with them, and the Indian could not sue in United

States courts; hence they were not Americans. The Supreme Court in the

Cherokee cases had tried to define their unique status, but without

great success. It was unfortunate for the Indians that the United

States took their tribal existence seriously. The agreements had always

a greater sanctity in appearance than in fact. Indians honestly unable

to comprehend the meaning of the agreement, and often denying that they

were in any wise bound by it, were held to fulfilment by the power

of the United States. The United States often believed that treaty

violation represented deliberate hostility of the tribes, when it

signified only the unintelligence of the savage and his inclination to

follow the laws of his own existence. Attempts to enforce treaties thus

violated led constantly to wars whose justification the Indian could

not see.

The act of March 3, 1871, prohibited the making of any Indian treaty in

the future. Hereafter when agreements became necessary, they were to be

made, much as they had been in the past, but Congress was the ratifying

power and not the Senate. The fiction of an independence which had held

the Indians to a standard which they could not understand was here

abandoned; and quite as much to the point, perhaps, the predominance of

the Senate in Indian affairs was superseded by control by Congress as a

whole. In no other branch of internal administration would the Senate

have been permitted to make binding agreements, but here the fiction

had given it a dominance ever since the organization of the government.

In the thirty-five years following the abandonment of the Indian

treaties the problems of management changed with the ascending

civilization of the national wards. General Francis A. Walker, Indian

Commissioner in 1872, had seen the dawn of the "the day of deliverance

from the fear of Indian hostilities," while his successors in office

saw his prophecy fulfilled. Five years later Carl Schurz, as Secretary

of the Interior, gave his voice and his aid to the improvement of

management and the drafting of a positive policy. His application

of the merit system to Indian appointments, which was a startling

innovation in national politics, worked a great change after the petty

thievery which had flourished in the presidency of General Grant.

Grant had indeed desired to do well, and conditions had appreciably

bettered, yet his guileless trust had enabled practical politicians to

continue their peculations in instances which ranged from humble agents

up to the Cabinet itself. Schurz not only corrected much of this,

but the first report of his Commissioner, E. A. Hayt, outlined the

preliminaries to a well-founded civilization. Besides the continuance

of concentration and education there were four policies which stood

out in this report--economy in the administration of rations, that

the Indians might not be pauperized; a special code of law for the

Indian reserves; a well-organized Indian police to enforce the laws;

and a division of reserve lands into farms which should be assigned to

individual Indians in severalty. The administration of Secretary Schurz

gave substance to all these policies.

The progress of Indian education and civilization began to be a

real thing during Hayes's presidency. Most of the wars were over,

permanency in residence could be relied on to a considerable degree,

the Indians could better be counted, tabulated, and handled. In

1880, the last year of Schurz in the Interior Department, the Indian

Office reported an Indian population of 256,127 for the United

States, excluding Alaska. Of these, 138,642 were described as wearing

citizen's dress, while 46,330 were able to read. Among them had been

erected both boarding and day schools, 72 of the former and 321 of the

latter. "Reports from the reservations" were "full of encouragement,

showing an increased and more regular attendance of pupils and a

growing interest in education on the part of parents." Interest in

the problem of Indian education had been aroused in the East as well

as among the tribes during the preceding year or two, because of the

experiment with which the name of R. H. Pratt was closely connected.

The non-resident boarding school, where the children could be taken

away from the tribe and educated among whites, had become a factor in

Carlisle, Hampton, and Forest Grove. Lieutenant Pratt had opened the

first of these with 147 students in November, 1879. His design had been

to give to the boys and girls the rudiments of education and training

in farming and mechanic arts. His experience had already, in 1880,

shown this to be entirely practicable. The boys, uniformed and drilled

as soldiers, under their own sergeants and corporals, marched to the

music of their own band. Both sexes had exhibited at the Cumberland

County Agricultural Fair, where prizes were awarded to many of them for

quilts, shirts, pantaloons, bread, harness, tinware, and penmanship.

Many of the students had increased their knowledge of white customs by

going out in the summers to work in the fields or kitchens of farmers

in the East. Here, too, they had shown the capacity for education and

development which their bitterest frontier enemies had denied. In 1906

there were twenty-five of these schools with more than 9000 students in

attendance.

It was one thing, however, to take the brighter Indian children away

from home and teach them the ways of white men, and quite another

to persuade the main tribe to support itself by regular labor. The

ration system was a pauperizing influence that removed the incentive

to work. Trained mechanics, coming home from Carlisle, or Hampton, or

Haskell, found no work ready for them, no customers for their trade,

and no occupation but to sit around with their relatives and wait for

rations. Too much can be made of the success of Indian education, but

the progress was real, if not rapid or great. The Montana Crows, for

instance, were, in 1904, encouraged into agricultural rivalry by a

county fair. Their congenital love for gambling was converted into

competition over pumpkins and live stock. In 1906 they had not been

drawing rations for nearly two years. While their settling down was

but a single incident in tribal education and not a general reform,

it indicated at least a change in emphasis in Indian conditions since

the warlike sixties. The brilliant green placard which announced their

county fair for 1906 bears witness to this:--

"CROWS, WAKE UP!

"Your Big Fair Will Take Place Early in October.

"Begin Planting for it Now.

"Plant a Good Garden.

"Put in Wheat and Oats.

Get Your Horses, Cattle, Pigs, and Chickens in Shape to Bring to

the Fair.

Cash Prizes and Badges will be awarded to Indians Making Best

Exhibits.

"Get Busy. Tell Your Neighbor to Go Home and Get Busy, too.

"_Committee._"

A great practical obstruction in the road of economic independence

for the Indians was the absence of a legal system governing their

relations, and more particularly securing to them individual ownership

of land. Treated as independent nations by the United States, no

attempt had been made to pass civil or even criminal laws for them,

while the tribal organizations had been too primitive to do much of

this on their own account. Individual attempts at progress were often

checked by the fact that crime went unpunished in the Indian Country.

An Indian police, embracing 815 officers and men, had existed in 1880,

but the law respecting trespassers on Indian lands was inadequate, and

Congress was slow in providing codes and courts for the reservations.

The Secretary of the Interior erected agency courts on his own

authority in 1883; Congress extended certain laws over the tribes in

1885; and a little later provided salaries for the officials of the

agency courts.

An act passed in 1887 for the ownership of lands in severalty by

Indians marked a great step towards solidifying Indian civilization.

There had been no greater obstacle to this civilization than communal

ownership of land. The tribal standard was one of hunting, with

agriculture as an incidental and rather degrading feature. Few of

the tribes had any recognition of individual ownership. The educated

Indian and the savage alike were forced into economic stagnation by the

system. Education could accomplish little in face of it. The changes of

the seventies brought a growing recognition of the evil and repeated

requests that Congress begin the breaking down of the tribal system

through the substitution of Indian ownership.