5

THE PERMANENT INDIAN FRONTIER

I met Kelvin Crow on a crisp April day in rolling Kansas prairie territory at one of the first major U.S. bases abroad. “History is Everything,” read the button on Crow’s office wall at the U.S. Army’s Fort Leavenworth. Crow is a white-bearded, boot-wearing civilian historian posted to the Army’s elite Command and General Staff College. With Crow’s own time in the military and that of his father and brother, his family has a combined hundred years of military service. His daughter, son, and daughter-in-law have since followed them into the Army, adding to the family’s total. He actually urged his children not to join the military, he told me. They did anyway. They pointed out that when they were kids, he sat them on top of tanks when they were playing together. “What do you expect?” they asked, about their choice to follow his path.

On the day we met, Crow was leading a tour of Fort Leavenworth for a class of students from Missouri. He kindly let me tag along. After the tour he showed me where my grandparents had lived when my grandfather was stationed at Fort Leavenworth during World War II. As German Jews who fled Nazi Germany shortly before the war, my grandparents lived in a home on base that was within sight of the prison where German prisoners of war were held.

Built by the Army in 1827, Fort Leavenworth is the oldest continuously operating U.S. base west of the Appalachian Mountains. The base is located on a bluff 150 feet above the western bank of the Missouri River that divides Kansas and Missouri. In the eighteenth century, the same bluff was home to France’s Fort de Cavignal, which protected French fur traders in the region. Almost forty years after French troops abandoned the fort, Col. Meriwether Lewis and Capt. William Clark stopped near the site as they followed the course of the Missouri River toward its source. Fort Leavenworth would become one of the most well-known bases in U.S. history. The fort is home to what is certainly the best-known U.S. military prison after only Guantánamo Bay: it has held the likes of My Lai’s William Calley and WikiLeaks’s Chelsea Manning.1 (The city of Leavenworth, Kansas, is also home to a federal penitentiary, a state correctional facility, and a nearby prison labor outsourcing facility.)

On the tour Crow invoked a common ethnocentric trope of the day to explain that when the Army built the fort, it was the dividing line between “desert” to the west and “civilization” to the east. The U.S. government declared this the “permanent Indian frontier.” “All the white guys,” Crow said, were going to put up cattle and grow tobacco to the east. And “all the Indians” would be to the west to ride horses and hunt buffalo. “And never the twain shall meet.”

Or at least that was supposedly the idea, he said.

The base that marked the supposed “western edge of civilization” was soon enabling the westward migratory invasion of Euro-American settlers beyond the “permanent Indian frontier” by protecting the start of the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails. Army expeditions and a growing chain of forts led the way for settlers sweeping westward in streams of wagon trains. As the migrants settled farther and farther west, the Army built new forts and abandoned older ones no longer needed. In the three decades after the end of the War of 1812, one historian explains, “the Army pushed westward ahead of the settlers, surveying, fortifying, and building roads. Stockades and forts built and garrisoned in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas became the footholds of settlement in the wild frontier; just outside the walls could be found gristmills, sawmills, and blacksmith shops, all of them erected by the troops.”2

By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were 60 major forts west of the Mississippi River and 138 Army posts in the western territories. Trappers, traders, farmers, miners, and (soon) railroads followed in their wake. The primary mission of these bases was to aid these colonizing settlers, who, at the time, were tellingly called “emigrants.” Fort historian Alison Hoagland explains that “travelers stopped at the forts for supplies, relied on them for protection, or at the least saw them as landmarks on their journey.” For the most part forts west of the Mississippi were not the high-walled circular forts of Hollywood Westerns and other cowboy-and-Indian clichés. Forts were for the most part open and rarely faced attack. “Fort Union [in Dakota Territory] had a wall,” writes Hoagland, “but its gates were closed nightly only to corral the livestock, and were opened by day to gladly welcome in Assiniboine, Cree, and Crow Indians to trade.”³

Much as today, forts like Fort Leavenworth played important economic roles, both to advance nearby individual, family, and corporate profit making and as economic centers in their own right. Forts were marketplaces and trading hubs for the colonists. They offered contracts to settlers to provide supplies for the installation. And they hired settlers for short-term construction and other work. “Settlers did not view forts as remote, Indian-focused establishments outside their realm, but rather as accessible resources, there to serve them, buy from them, or hire them,” says Hoagland.⁴

In addition to having these oasis-like qualities for settlers—Kelvin Crow’s depiction of white settlers seeing the West as “desert” was accurate—Fort Leavenworth and the other forts were the source of destruction for those peoples who saw the land not as desert but as their home. Forts enabled the disappearance of Indian-controlled lands during near-constant warfare; they facilitated the concentration of Indians on Army-controlled reservations; they brokered a series of broken treaties that the government sometimes signed with no intention of honoring; they accelerated the extermination of beloved buffalo; and they assisted in the dissolution of Native American societies, involving the dispossession and death of millions.⁵

In the presidential election of 1828, eligible white male voters ousted John Quincy Adams and elected the man who would define the term “Indian hater.” Among Euro-Americans Jackson got the nickname “Old Hickory” because of his perceived toughness. “Sharp Knife” is what the Cherokee Nation and others called him. Many U.S. history books credit new President Andrew Jackson and the new Democratic Party with bringing an era of expanded democracy to the country, thanks to the expansion of voting rights to all white adult men. It’s difficult to call the system democratic at all given its clear limitations along racial and gender lines.

The invasion of white settlers and the demands of many for the removal of Native Americans accelerated in 1829 with the discovery of gold on indigenous lands in Georgia. “The lands in question belong to Georgia. She must and she will have them,” the Georgia state legislature declared in an 1827 report about Cherokee Territory.6 In 1830 Congress passed President Jackson’s “Indian Removal Policy” to force all Native groups east of the Mississippi River to give up their lands in exchange for land farther west. The Indian Removal Act, as the law was formally and euphemistically known, called for the ethnic cleansing of the Choctaw, Seminole, Muskogee, Chickasaw, and Cherokee Nations from the southern homelands to Oklahoma. New Army forts played a critical role in enforcing the forced deportations.⁷

Support for the removals was far from universal. Many in the U.S. Congress and beyond vehemently resisted the law, which passed the House of Representatives by only five votes and the Senate by a twenty-eight to nineteen vote. Speaking about the Cherokee, Maine Senator Peleg Sprague questioned the right of the United States “to drive them from all their lands—or to destroy the Cherokee nation, to strike it out of existence; and, instead of managing for their ‘benefit,’ to annihilate ‘their affairs,’ as a body politic.” Sprague reminded the Senate that the United States had signed fifteen treaties with the Cherokees alone since 1785 that guaranteed their land and freedom.

By several of these treaties, we have unequivocally guaranteed to the Cherokees that they shall forever enjoy

1st.  Their separate existence, as a political community;

2nd.  Undisturbed possession and full enjoyment of their lands . . .;

3rd.  The protection of the United States, against all interference with or encroachments upon their rights by any people, state, or nation.8

Map 9. The Trans-Mississippi West: Some Posts, Tribes, and Battles of the Indian Wars, 1860–1890. (Map appears on the following pages.)

Reproduced from U.S. Army map. The names, spellings, and locations of Native American peoples and nations are not necessarily accurate. The years indicate the date of post/fort creation and battles. Source: Stewart, American Military History, 1:329.

After the law’s passage, Jackson told Congress, “It gives me pleasure to announce . . . that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation.”⁹ Jackson of course intended no irony in his use of the word “happy.” The racism of Jackson and many of his contemporaries that underlay the removal policy was on full display when the president told Congress in 1833.

That those tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens is certain. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement, which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.¹⁰

When the Cherokee Nation tried to block the removals in court, Jackson ignored Supreme Court rulings and proceeded with the expulsions with the help of the U.S. Army and forts throughout the Southeast.

Unsurprisingly, Native peoples resisted outside the courtroom as well. In Florida in 1835 the Seminoles fought back against their removal to Arkansas, attacking and burning settler sugar plantations. The U.S. Army reinforced Forts Brooke and King in central Florida—two of at least twenty-three forts across Florida at the time—to prepare for war. To uproot the Seminoles the Army employed extermination tactics, including the destruction of villages and food supplies. The war between the Seminoles and the United States continued for twelve years. Despite employing a total of around forty thousand troops and $30 million, the Army failed to drive the last Seminoles out; hundreds held out in the Florida swamps.¹¹

Despite fierce resistance, the Cherokees and most of the other remaining Native American groups in the East were forced into camps and reservations in the newly declared “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma. Some of the soldiers from the “Second Seminole War” redeployed to Alabama and Georgia to assist with the expulsion of the Cherokee.12 Between 1838 and 1839 the Army and local militias forced approximately sixteen thousand Cherokee to move one thousand miles westward, mostly by foot, from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Without extra food, clothing, or blankets, conditions were horrific. As many as 25 percent—four thousand people—on the march may have died. The Cherokee called it “Nunna dual Isunyi,” or the Trail of Tears. “Trail of Death” would be an equally appropriate name.^a In total forty-six thousand Native Americans were driven from twenty-five million acres of their lands in the East. At least six thousand died from smallpox, starvation, and exposure. As planned, white settlers took over most indigenous lands.

The deportation and dispossession continued throughout the West, and Fort Leavenworth was at the center of this process. A string of U.S. Army expeditions set out from the fort to make treaties with Native Americans of the Great Plains and to protect westward-moving trading caravans. The government honored many of the treaties only briefly, if at all. An official Army history explains that by the 1840s the Army’s “prime consideration was to help the American settlers pouring westward.”¹³ Tens of thousands had already moved into Texas, which the United States would annex in 1845.

Fort Leavenworth’s central parade grounds for soldiers’ exercises hosted negotiations between the Army and Indian representatives. It also served as a location for the distribution of goods owed—but often withheld—as treaty obligations.¹⁴ After once-free nations were confined to reservations, the Army created forts, mostly west of Leavenworth, to encircle them, keeping Native peoples in and Euro-Americans out. Frequently, the reservations soon faced new white encroachment.15 Fort Leavenworth’s post commander, Col. Stephen Watts Kearny, was well known for protecting settlers along the Oregon, Mormon, and Santa Fe Trails. Fort Leavenworth had become the departure point not just for wagon trains and caravans of colonizers but also for expeditions, led by Kearny and others, to patrol the trails and resupply more isolated frontier posts, providing protection farther west.¹⁶ As it had been in the East, the U.S. Army was effectively a protection service for settlers.

In 1846 Kearny received new orders from President James Polk. At Fort Leavenworth Kearny mustered three thousand men, mostly from the East, and wagonloads of supplies as the Army of the West. They readied to deploy. President Polk had already ordered Gen. Zachary Taylor to deploy four thousand troops to the Rio Grande. He ordered the Navy’s Pacific Squadron to sail for northern Mexico’s California coast, with orders to seize Yerba Buena—later known as San Francisco—in the event of war. Tensions had been high between Mexico and the United States since the United States annexed Texas in 1845. Indeed, tensions had been high for several years; in 1842 part of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Squadron invaded and briefly captured the capital of Mexican California, Monterrey, when its commander mistakenly thought the two countries were at war.¹⁷

After the Texas annexation Mexico cut off diplomatic ties to the United States. The government had threatened to declare war if its northern neighbor annexed its territory. Mexican officials had yet to follow through on the threat and appeared unlikely to do so facing their stronger neighbor. In contrast to the demarcated and walled border today, the Rio Grande was at the southern edge of a large border area disputed by the United States and Mexico. Polk’s deployment of U.S. troops into the area was clearly a provocative move. It became even more provocative when Taylor built a strong fort on the river, opposite the Mexican town of Matamoros, and called it Fort Texas.¹⁸

Polk was hoping to provoke a war with Mexico.¹⁹ The president—another slaveholder—was a fierce expansionist and had dreams of annexing California and other territories in the West. Wherever U.S. migrants settled, he declared in his inaugural address, the federal government should provide them with protection.²⁰ Polk was far from alone in this view. He was also not alone in holding an even more expansionist national vision of at least continental reach. Shortly before Polk’s administration annexed Texas, one of the country’s most popular magazines, the Democratic Review, argued for annexation in words that would themselves become justification for further expansion. The incorporation of Texas into the United States, the magazine wrote, would represent the “fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”21 The religious, messianic language reflected a growing pattern of millenary Protestant Christianity in the United States. Millenary Christianity would be another impetus for expansion, along with the economic interests of slaveholders, land speculators, farmers, and others interested in making money through territorial expansion.²² “We do but follow out our destiny,” wrote South Carolina poet William Gilmore Simms in 1846,

As did the ancient Israelite—and strive

Unconscious that we work at His knee

By whom alone we triumph as we live.²³

Others opposed such expansionist views and argued vehemently against a war with Mexico. Many feared that expansion would be a way to create more slave states. Former president John Quincy Adams was one who protested in Congress; he suffered a massive stroke on the House floor while arguing against the war. Abraham Lincoln in part made a name for himself challenging President Polk to identify where on U.S. soil U.S. troops had been attacked.²⁴ Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay “Civil Disobedience” was inspired by his opposition to the war and the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax to support it.

“We have not one particle of right to be here,” U.S. Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote from near the Rio Grande on March 26, 1846. “It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses; for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of a war between the United States and Mexico.”²⁵ A young soldier at the time, future general and president Ulysses Grant said, “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico.”26 Today even the U.S. State Department acknowledges that U.S. troops instigated the war that ensued.²⁷

After the first shots were fired, Polk used what he knew to be false claims that Mexico had “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil” to ask for and win a congressional declaration of war.²⁸ Kearny led his army on an eight-hundred-mile march from Fort Leavenworth to the Southwest. First they seized Santa Fe. Next they claimed the rest of Nuevo México, renaming it the New Mexico Territory. Locals briefly resisted U.S. occupation but were crushed when elite New Mexicans allied themselves with U.S forces. Newly promoted General Kearny and his army marched to the Pacific, capturing San Diego and Los Angeles.²⁹

Once the war started many soldiers questioned the invasion of a neighbor posing no threat to the United States. Angry volunteer troops from Virginia, Mississippi, and North Carolina mutinied. Thousands of soldiers deserted. Some of the resistance was due to casualty rates that were unusually high for U.S. forces. They were higher for Mexicans, including civilians subjected to U.S. bombardment and wartime atrocities. Commanding generals employed the same tactics of inflicting “extravagant violence” against Native American noncombatants that had become the U.S. “way of war.”³⁰ “Murder, robbery, and rape on mothers and daughters, in the presence of the tied-up males of the families, have been common all along the Rio Grande,” reported U.S. General Winfield Scott in 1847.³¹ The atrocities were motivated “in large measure by bitter racism and anti-Catholicism” among U.S. troops, writes historian Steven Hahn. Some soldiers specifically targeted Catholic churches for plunder, desecration, and arson.³² Several hundred Irish American soldiers switched sides during the war to fight for Catholic Mexico in the San Patricio Battalion. They faced considerable anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment in the military (as elsewhere in the United States). Most were killed during fighting that quickly turned against Mexican forces; U.S. troops hanged many of the rest.³³

As fighting continued, U.S. troops captured the major cities of Monterrey, Yerba Buena (San Francisco), Vera Cruz, Puebla, and finally Mexico City. From September 1847 until June 1848, the Army occupied the Mexican capital. During this time commanders established bases to support and resupply the occupation forces in the capital and to contain Mexican guerilla forces who refused to surrender. An Army post of 2,200 soldiers occupied the major Mexican city of Puebla; almost 25,000 occupied central Mexico.34

When U.S. and Mexican officials signed a treaty to end the war in 1848, the U.S. government paid $15 million and agreed to pay up to $3.25 million in Mexican government debts in exchange for almost half of Mexico’s prewar territory. This included around 525,000 square miles that today are the states of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. President Polk had wanted even more territory: he had plans to invade the Yucatán Peninsula and also hoped to buy Cuba from Spain.³⁵ Some expansionist Democrats in Polk’s party pushed for annexing all of Mexico.

The Polk administration expanded U.S. borders farther into the Northwest shortly after the outbreak of the war with Mexico. In an 1846 treaty with Great Britain, the United States took complete control of the Oregon Territory, which included parts of today’s states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and portions of Montana and Wyoming. The country would expand further in 1853, when Mexico agreed to what the U.S. government calls the Gadsden Purchase. The purchase involved a swath of Mexican-controlled, but still indigenous-occupied, land in today’s Arizona and New Mexico that’s larger than West Virginia.

As the government annexed each new territory, scores of Army bases followed, from Fort Bliss, Texas, to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and from the Presidio in California to the Vancouver Barracks in Oregon Country. Like earlier bases, the new installations would continue to protect Euro-American pioneers, prospectors, California gold miners, and other settlers.

Any vague pretense of the U.S. government’s maintaining a “permanent Indian frontier” disappeared after 1846. Following the expulsion of Native peoples from the Southwest to Oklahoma, the War Department designed plans to create a line of forts running from north to south along the permanent Indian frontier. Fort Leavenworth was one of the major forts in the chain, along with Forts Wilkins, Snelling, Scott, Gibson, Towson, and Washita, among others. Once the United States acquired Oregon and then California and other territories taken from Mexico, settlers effectively “shattered” the supposed permanency of the frontier.36

Map 10. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 1849–1898.

Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. Because of space limitations, this map does not reflect all conflicts between U.S. forces and Native American peoples. Some bases were occupied for only part of this period. U.S. borders are for 1898. Oceans not to scale. Key sources: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014); “Fort Wiki,” accessed June 13, 2019, www.fortwiki.com; “North American Forts, 1526–1956,” accessed June 13, 2019, www.northamericanforts.com; Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018).

Forts in Wyoming were central to protecting the northern wagon trails through the Great Plains to Oregon, Utah, and California. “Protection of these routes was the original reason for the army’s intrusion into the West,” Hoagland says starkly. “Establishing a presence over as much of the region as possible accounted for the army’s construction of hundreds of posts.” The U.S. Army acquired some of the bases from fur-trapping companies, trading posts, and Mormons. Often the settlers demanded protection from the government. Members of Congress responded by authorizing appropriations for new fort construction.³⁷

Secretary of War John B. Floyd described a new policy of placing a larger number of smaller forts near colonization trails: “A line of posts running parallel with our frontier, but near to the Indians’ usual habitations, placed at convenient distances and suitable positions, and occupied by infantry, would exercise a salutary restraint upon the tribes, who would feel that any foray by their warriors upon the white settlements would meet with prompt retaliation upon their own homes.”³⁸ In the 1850s there were major forts and minor posts in as many as 138 locations in the western territories.³⁹

The traditional occupants of the Great Plains saw animal and other food sources and natural resources decimated by the immigrants coming into their lands. The Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Mandan, and Arikara signed a treaty with the United States to protect specific areas of land for each group in exchange for compensation in the form of annual payments of goods for a period of a mere ten years. The treaty specified the right of the federal government to build additional roads and forts in the region.⁴⁰

Thousands of colonizers continued to move westward. In 1852 and 1853 alone, an estimated sixty thousand people passed by Fort Laramie, in Wyoming. During the 1850s the fort “served as staging grounds for expeditions against the Indians,” writes Hoagland, including full-scale campaigns, smaller patrol actions, and armed escorts for specific travelers.⁴¹ As Native peoples throughout the West found themselves herded onto reservations to control their movement, the Army positioned forts and troops nearby to maintain control. In some places the Army positioned forts to protect settlers from “wild Indians” not yet confined to reservations. In California the Army established new forts in response to Indian attacks and “depredations” against settlers—language long used to justify attacks against indigenous peoples.42

“No man except themselves can say what wrongs they do to the Indians by robbery, by violence, or by dispossessing them of districts of country which they have occupied unmolested for centuries,” Gen. John Pope would later observe of settlers. “What the white man does to the Indian is never known. It is only what the Indian does to the white man (nine times out of ten in the way of retaliation) that reaches the public.”⁴³

In 1853 a government agent who delivered treaty money described how the Cheyennes, Arapahos, and many Sioux were “actually in a starving state.”⁴⁴ The agent described the “system of removals and congregating tribes in small parcels of territory” as “the legalized murder of a whole nation. It is expensive, vicious, and inhuman, and producing these consequences, and these alone. The custom, being judged by its fruits, should not be persisted in.”⁴⁵ Shawnee leader Tecumseh said of the encroaching “civilization”: “We gave them forest-clad mountains and valleys full of game. And in return, what did they give our warriors and our women? Rum and trinkets and a grave.”⁴⁶

During the United States’ Civil War, the U.S. military’s attacks on indigenous peoples continued unabated. After Southern rebels’ seizure of Fort Sumter in South Carolina started the war in 1860, the Army’s focus changed. President Abraham Lincoln transferred soldiers to the East to fight against the Southern states. During five years of fighting, other than temporary “field camps” used to launch offensive actions, new base construction was often defensive in nature. Washington, DC, became one of the world’s most fortified cities: the Army built a series of sixty-eight forts and ninety-three weapons batteries to encircle the nation’s capital.⁴⁷ Back in the West Lincoln and the War Department recruited volunteers to take the place of the Army’s professional soldiers battling the secessionist states. “Having few Confederates to fight,” writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of the new western recruits, “they attacked people closer to hand, Indigenous people.”48

“We remember the Civil War as a war of liberation that freed four million slaves,” says historian Ari Kelman. “But it also became a war of conquest to destroy and dispossess Native Americans.”⁴⁹ In Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, volunteer Army units and other militias terrorized Native peoples including the Shoshone, Bannock, Ute, Apache, and Navajo. In March 1864 the U.S. Army forced around eight thousand Navajos to march three hundred miles over eighteen days to what was effectively a military-run concentration camp, Bosque Redondo, at New Mexico’s Fort Sumner. The Navajo would refer to the forced march as the “Navajo Long Walk.” The people remained interned there for four years. At least one-fourth died of starvation.⁵⁰

In Colorado, in late 1864, around 700 volunteer soldiers attacked a military reservation near Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. Around 1,000 displaced Cheyennes and Arapahos had been living in the reservation since 1861 as captives in what they thought was a government-promised “place . . . of safety.” During the attack at least 108 women and children and 28 men were “butchered in cold blood by troops in the service of the United States,” the federal Commissioner of Indian Affairs later reported. As many as 150 may have died, while the others fled for their lives. The killings became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. The commander of the volunteers, Col. John Chivington, claimed a great victory over a well-armed enemy and “almost an annihilation of the entire tribe.” Later a congressional committee found Chivington had “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre” and “surprised and murdered, in cold blood,” Cheyennes and Arapahos who “believe[d] that they were under [U.S.] protection.”⁵¹

One of Chivington’s captains reported what happened: “Hundreds of women and children were coming towards us, and getting on their knees for mercy.” Instead, they were shot and had “their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.” The soldiers mutilated the bodies and decorated their weapons and hats with severed ears, penises, breasts, vulvas, fetuses. In Denver some of the body parts were publicly displayed to celebrate the supposed battle.⁵²

In the Minnesota Territory during the Civil War, the federal government carried out the largest mass execution in U.S. history. On Lincoln’s orders 38 men were hanged in a public square. They were not Confederate soldiers. Not a single Confederate general or official was executed after the war.53 The hanged were Dakota Sioux who briefly tried to rise up against settlers in 1862, amid a series of broken treaties and stolen land. Lincoln spared the lives of 265 Dakotas originally sentenced to die by a military tribunal. The president and Congress exiled the Dakota and Winnebago, who were not involved in the uprising, from their lands in Minnesota. General Pope would not have been so merciful. “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so,” he said.⁵⁴

Dunbar-Ortiz points out that “these military campaigns against Indigenous nations constituted foreign wars during the US Civil War.” The Civil War’s conclusion “did not end” these foreign wars. Indeed, the process of dispossession and the unabashed extermination of indigenous peoples accelerated. After the war large numbers of Euro-Americans were again migrating westward, from the defeated South and Union states alike. The federal government granted 1.5 million homesteads, representing almost 300 million acres of indigenous land. Railroad companies claimed large parcels of land from the government and were free to sell the lands for profit. “As a far more advanced killing machine and with seasoned troops” from the war, writes Dunbar-Ortiz, “the army began the slaughter of people, buffalo, and the land itself,” decimating the food supplies of indigenous nations.⁵⁵

Commanding General of the U.S. Army William T. Sherman brought the system of scorched-earth total warfare to the wars in the West. Sherman employed the tactics—long favored by U.S. and colonial troops battling Native Americans in the East—during his Army’s march from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, aimed at frightening the South into submission. With ethnic cleansing and extermination in mind, the U.S. Army thus went after the Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Sioux, Ute, and other nations. Soldiers and government officials destroyed food supplies, burned villages, carried out more massacres, displaced and incarcerated entire communities in reservations, and separated Indian children from their families to send them to now-notorious boarding schools aimed at forced assimilation and Christian conversion.⁵⁶

Between 1865 and 1898, the U.S. Army fought no fewer than 943 distinct engagements against Native peoples, ranging from “skirmishes” to full-scale battles in twelve separate campaigns.57 In 1874 and 1875, for example, the Army used bases in Texas, New Mexico, and the Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) to uproot the Arapahos, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas from a refuge in the Texas panhandle. Soldiers launched raids, destroying horses, property, and supplies, forcing the groups to surrender and relocate to reservations. “The Indian, in truth, has no longer a country,” General Pope wrote. “His lands are everywhere pervaded by white men; his means of subsistence destroyed and the homes of his tribe violently taken from him; himself and his family reduced to starvation, or to the necessity of warring to the death upon the white man, whose inevitable and destructive progress threatens the total extermination of his race.”

“Whatever may be the right or wrong of the question,” Pope continued, “the Indian must be dispossessed. The practical question to be considered is how the inevitable can be accomplished with the least inhumanity to the Indian. We are surely not now pursuing such a course, nor are the means used becoming to a humane and Christian people.”⁵⁸

In California, Native Americans suffered what Daniel Howe calls a “shocking process of expropriation, disease, subjugation, and massacre that historians today sometimes call genocide.”⁵⁹ Even if some resist using the word genocide in the broader U.S. context, writes historian Russell Thornton, “California is the one place in the United States where few would dispute that a genocide of Native Americans occurred.”⁶⁰ Extermination-driven policies led to a decimation of the indigenous population, from an estimated 150,000 to 50,000 between 1845 and 1855. By 1870 it would be 30,000, and by 1890, just 18,000.⁶¹ “The assumption of white supremacy permeated” policies of expansion often justified by the language of “manifest destiny,” explains Howe. “It never occurred to US policymakers to take seriously the claims of nonwhite or racially mixed societies to territorial integrity.”⁶²

Supposed racial differences and ideas of inherent racial superiority and inferiority became a justification for further conquest in an era when the pseudoscientific idea of race solidified itself in the minds of Euro-Americans (since the mid-twentieth century, scientists have widely debunked the idea of race as a biological reality or valid scientific concept). Ideas of human hierarchy were also frequently expressed through the related language of “civilization” versus “savagery” or “barbarism,” promulgated by anthropologists and other race scientists. “The great battle between civilization and barbarism” is how Gen. William T. Sherman described the Army’s mission in the West. The work of civilizing and eradicating supposed barbarism justified what can only be called savage, barbaric violence.

U.S. soldiers, settlers, and citizens were not alone. This was the classic age of late nineteenth-century European imperialism. European empires and their citizens would increasingly invoke ideas of race and the civilizing effects of colonization during their conquests of territories in Africa and Asia. The U.S. government would do much the same in the Philippines and other colonies after 1898. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, among others in the twentieth century, drew on U.S. racial “science” to justify persecution, murder, and, ultimately, the extermination of entire peoples.

The beginning of the end of the wars between the U.S. government and Native American peoples and the last remnants of freedom for the few indigenous nations not yet forced onto reservations came in 1876. One hundred years after independence, President Ulysses Grant’s Secretary of the Interior gave the War Department carte blanche: “Said Indians are hereby turned over to the War Department for such action on the part of the Army as you may deem proper.”63

In 1877 and 1878 what’s now Fort Leavenworth’s airfield became a prisoner-of-war camp for the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce), who had been trying to flee to the safety of Canada.⁶⁴ By 1879 “Indian Territory”—the land supposedly reserved for Native Americans’ exclusive use—had been whittled down to today’s Oklahoma. It was home to Apaches, Arapahos, Caddos, Cherokees, Cheyennes, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Comanches, Creeks, Delawares, Kaws, Kichais, Kickapoos, Kiowas, Miamis, Modocs, Nimíipuu, Odawas, Osages, Pawnees, Peorias, Poncas, Potawatomis, Quapaws, Sacs and Foxes, Seminoles, Senecas, Shawnees, Tawakonis, Wacos, Wichitas, and Wyandots. Gradually, the indigenous nations were forced into the eastern part of the territory. Euro-American settlers took over the rest. A lottery for land parcels and a race begun with the shot of a federal official’s pistol helped divide up the land. Soon settlers were moving into Native Americans’ lands in the eastern part of what became the state of Oklahoma (the name appropriates a Choctaw word meaning “red people”).65

The Army’s attempt to quash some of the remaining Indian resistance led to the deaths of Lt. Col. George Custer and his entire Seventh Cavalry at Little Big Horn. The Army responded with a ruthless revenge campaign. The campaign led to the last major battle in what were effectively almost 115 consecutive years of U.S. wars against indigenous nations. In 1890, in the Dakota Territory, at a place called Wounded Knee, U.S. soldiers massacred as many as three hundred disarmed and starving Lakota Sioux.

With conquest across the continent complete and major Native armed resistance dwindling, the government began consolidating many of its western forts. Between 1880 and 1890 the number of forts declined from around 187 to 118.⁶⁶ Still, U.S. forts and troops continued to assist Euro-Americans pushing westward.⁶⁷ Soldiers focused on exploring and mapping of the type performed since Lewis and Clark’s expedition, along with road construction and railroad expansion. The main functions of forts changed from protecting settlers to facilitating the actual settlement process.⁶⁸

Bases continued to protect or advance specific business and economic interests. For example, the Army built Fort Warren (originally D. A. Russell) in Wyoming to protect the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad. “Even after the completion of the transcontinental railroad,” writes Alison Hoagland, “travelers continued to pass by and through the forts.” Thousands passed through Fort Laramie, for example, on their way from the railroad station in Cheyenne to a gold rush in the Black Hills of North Dakota between 1875 and 1877.⁶⁹ Elsewhere the government instructed the Army to establish new bases to quell anti-Chinese riots along the construction route for the Union Pacific Railroad. Back east major cities witnessed the construction of a growing number of hulking, castle-like armories, as economic and political elites sought to send a message to working-class neighborhoods and to quash class conflict.⁷⁰ In Denver the Army built a fort at the urging of those who thought it would help the local economy.⁷¹ Fort Warren remained open and actually saw new investment when many other bases closed. The growth was thanks almost entirely to the power of one Wyoming senator, who conveniently happened to chair both the Senate’s Military Affairs and Appropriations Committees. His name was Francis E. Warren.72

The change of the fort’s name from D. A. Russell to Warren came in 1930, following the senator’s death, as an unsurprising tribute to Warren’s largesse in funneling taxpayer dollars to the fort.⁷³ Fort Russell would foreshadow the development of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex after World War II, including the tendency of bases abroad to take on lives of their own, sustaining careers and profits, irrespective of strategic or military needs.⁷⁴

The construction of a growing number of bases outside North America will likewise illustrate how base creation has almost always been closely linked to the advancement of economic interests of one kind or another—be they the interests of individual entrepreneurs or specific businesses and industries. Bases were never ends in themselves. They were always aimed at ensuring access to markets, natural resources, land, and investment opportunities in new lands.⁷⁵ They also enabled future military invasions and conquest to advance these same ends.

In the cemetery at Fort Leavenworth, there are more than twenty-three thousand graves from every U.S. war since 1812.⁷⁶ The cemetery is officially closed to new burials, Kelvin Crow told me. But, he said, there are a few spaces reserved for “the inevitable casualties for inevitable future wars.” The end of my tour with Crow led us to Fort Leavenworth’s chapel. There plaques on the walls memorialize the deaths of Custer and the Seventh Cavalry, once based at the fort. Other plaques memorialize more than one hundred soldiers who perished in the Indian Wars.

There are no memorials to Indian dead. The closest thing comes in an ironic memorial outside the fort’s gates in the depressed town that bears the same name as the fort. Many of Fort Leavenworth’s streets, which are lined with dilapidated homes, pawn shops, liquor stores, and payday lenders, bear the names of some of the defeated nations: Choctaw, Cherokee, Delaware, Shawnee, Seneca, Miami, Osage, Pottawatomie [sic], Ottawa [sic.], Kickapoo, Kiowa, Dakota, Pawnee, Cheyenne, and Iowa.

Inside the gates of the fort feels like a quaint, idealized East Coast town. Kelvin Crow compared it to a “gated community,” with its schools, groomed golf course, tranquil ponds, and horse stables. Flags fly outside each perfectly maintained home on shaded streets commemorating the names of some of the generals who brought death and destruction to the West’s original inhabitants: Kearny, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, McClellan, Pope, Scott, and Custer. “They made us many promises, more than I can remember,” a Sioux elder said of the white man in 1890. “But they never kept but one: they promised to take our land, and they took it.”77

Estimates of Native American numbers in the present territory of the United States before Cristóbal Colón’s arrival vary widely, from one to twelve million. Their numbers by the end of the nineteenth century are widely accepted: 250,000.⁷⁸ “Somehow, even ‘genocide’ seems an inadequate description for what happened,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz, “yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country’s manifest destiny.”⁷⁹ The conquest and destruction of territory and peoples across North America was enabled by aggressive fort construction at every step. Forts in the West would soon enable new conquests. For the first time those conquests would be found outside North America.