The West was now a place of many overlapping worlds. The lives of the women in San Francisco’s Chinatown, or that of an African American former slave, may have been a far cry from the pampered milieu of Mrs. Frank Leslie when she made her much-publicized trip across America in a private railway carriage in 1877, but all had been made possible, in their different ways, by the relentless thrust of western emigration.
By the early 1870s, railways had come to be seen as the embodiment of the US’s progress in the West, transforming the pace of change from the slow, steady tread of the oxteam to the shriek of the steam engine. The vast distances, the almost limitless wilderness that had afforded America’s Indigenous people some measure of protection against white incursion, had been conquered. On May 10, 1869, the transcontinental railway had finally been completed. Amid much fanfare, the tracks of the Central Pacific Railroad’s western branch and the Union Pacific’s eastern branch finally joined up on Promontory Summit in Utah. In the space of just thirty years, a journey that had taken the first emigrants to California upward of six months could be completed in little more than a week. Many other railways—most notably the Kansas Pacific Railway, south of the Platte River, and the proposed Northern Pacific Railroad, through the Lakota heartland—were soon to follow.
Throughout the 1860s, the Lakota and their allies the Cheyenne had proved formidable opponents to the progress of the railways, and in the wars leading up to the second Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had bested the US government, forcing it to agree to their terms. But they had made one fatal concession: by acquiescing to the negotiators’ insistence that they must allow the construction of the transcontinental railway, the plains Tribes effectively sealed their own demise. The railways would allow much quicker troop deployments and would also open the floodgates to many more settlers.156 Between 1877 and 1887 an estimated four and a half million more emigrants would make the journey west, many of them settling on prairie land that until now had been thought too inhospitable and dry for human habitation.
The railways quickly came to be seen as “a cure-all” to the Native American “problem.” As the commissioner of Indian affairs would predict, the proposed Northern Pacific Railroad, in particular, “will itself completely solve the Sioux [Lakota] problem, and leave ninety thousand Indians ranging between the two transcontinental lines as incapable of resisting the Government as are the Indians of New York or Massachusetts.”314
Josephine Waggoner would experience firsthand the changes brought by the railroads in her birthplace, Dakota Territory. “The railroad was pushing its way westward regardless of the loss of human lives and stock,” she wrote. “Its iron rails were creeping on like a formidable enemy, slow but sure.” Railways may have been a symbol of progress, but they brought chaos too. Waggoner’s childhood home of Bismarck grew up with all the rapidity of one of the notorious Hell on Wheels towns along the Platte River. “Gambling places, dance halls, meeting places, town trading posts where different kinds of men congregated sprang up. Every night there was an uproar and a shooting scrape. With the arrival of the buffalo hunters, river men, plains men, gold miners, cowboys, and soldiers—all with their different ideas—there were bound to be clashes. Every day, reports of shooting affrays came to us. The hay camps were attacked by Indians. . . .The Rees stole horses and the Sioux stole horses. There had been treaties, but neither side lived up to them.”315
There were other, even more far-reaching consequences. “The insatiable greed of land seekers and settlers would soon cover the land with homesteads, so that there would be no herds left on the prairie; the migrating herds would have no trails to follow. . . . The death chant was quivering in the air.”316 The deer and the beaver had already gone “to enrich the white man.” And now the buffalo was going too.
For the plains Tribes, the buffalo were the stuff of life itself. Old Lady Horse, a woman from the Kiowa nation, described how everything her people had came from them. “Their tipis were made of buffalo hides, so were their clothes and moccasins. They ate buffalo meat. Their containers were made of hide, or of bladders or stomachs. The buffalo were the life of the Kiowas.” Perhaps even more important than providing food and shelter, the buffalo were essential to their spiritual life. “A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above.”317
Before the emigration began, as many as thirty million buffalo roamed the central American grasslands. By the 1860s, just twenty years later, their numbers had already been significantly depleted. The early settler trails along the Platte River Valley had caused much disruption to the herds, but this had not been the only cause. In the early part of the century, the lucrative trade in buffalo robes had long been a source of both wealth and power, for the Lakota in particular, and a highly effective chess piece in their geopolitical maneuvering. The buffalo were also affected by drought, disease, and the huge herds of horses (the descendants of those brought by the Spanish conquistadors) that had been painstakingly built up over a century or more by many of the bands. The coming of the railways, however, spelled wholesale disaster.
Not only did the railways affect the migratory patterns of the buffalo (and thus their fertility), but they also enabled hunters on a scale that had never previously been either seen or even imagined. The Union Pacific had hired men to hunt buffalo, to feed the hungry crews laying the railway tracks, but many more were private individuals who thought of it simply as a sport. In the past, a white hunter had been obliged to organize a full-blown expedition, often with American Indian guides, remaining with them in the wilderness for many months at a time. Now, it was not even necessary to set foot on the prairie. Now, anyone could be a hunter; anyone could boast of that ultimate trophy, simply by leaning out the window of a train.
In the early days of the emigration, herds could be as many as a hundred thousand strong. One wagon train was blocked for hours by a herd that was estimated to have been three miles wide and ten miles long. Even in the early 1870s, when Elizabeth Custer saw a herd for the first time, it was an unforgettable sight. “I have been on a train when the black, moving mass of buffaloes before us looked as if it stretched on down to the horizon,” she wrote. But it was not enough just to look. “Everyone went armed in those days, and the car windows and platforms bristled with rifles and pistols, much as if it had been a fortification defended by small-arms instead of cannon,” she explained, with the greatest insouciance. “It was the greatest wonder in the world that more people were not killed, as the wild rush for the windows, and the reckless discharge of rifles and pistols, put every passenger’s life in jeopardy. No one interfered or made a protest with those travelers, however . . . I could not for the life of me avoid a shudder when a long line of guns leaning on the backs of the seats met my eye as I entered a car. When the sharp shriek of the whistle announced a herd of buffaloes the rifles were snatched, and in the struggle to twist round for a good aim out of the narrow window the barrel or muzzle of the firearm passed dangerously near the ear of any scared woman who had the temerity [to get in the way].”318
Elizabeth Custer used her opera glasses, the better to view the slaughter. “It struck us as rather odd, when taking them from their velvet cases on the barren desert of a plain, to contrast our surroundings with the last place where they were used,” she wrote. “The brilliantly lighted opera house, the air scented with hothouse flowers, the rich costumes of the women, the faultlessly dressed men, the studied conventionality of the calmly listening audience, hearing ravishing music unmoved—all these recollections presented a scene about as different from that on the plains as can be imagined. Here we were, after all that glimpse of luxurious life, rolling over the arid desert.”319
More destructive still was the arrival of the professional buffalo hunter, many scores of whom now swarmed across the prairies. At three dollars a hide, the animals were “walking gold pieces.” The buffalo, according to one hunter, “was the stupidest game animal in the world.” If their leader was killed or wounded, instead of taking fright and scattering away, the others would simply gather round it. One hunter reported having acquired 269 hides with just three hundred cartridges. Not so much a slaughter as a “harvest.”
In the smart cities in the East there was a rage for buffalo-hide lap robes; smoked buffalo tongue had become a delicacy. Buffalo horns were made into buttons, combs, knife handles; their hooves were melted down for glue; their bones were made into fertilizer. As one military observer would write, “Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, now there were myriads of carcasses, the air foul with a sickening stench, a vast plain which only a short twelve-month before had teemed with animal life was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”320
On the southern plains, hunters were soon encroaching even onto the lands that were reserved to the plains Tribes by treaty. In 1874, alarmed by the carnage, Congress attempted to pass a law to protect the herds, but President Ulysses S. Grant refused to sign it. The link between the coming of the railroads and the demise of the buffalo herds—twin prongs in the “final solution” to the “Indian question”—was not lost on Washington.157 Not only would the US government do nothing to stop the hunters; they even provided them with free ammunition. Between 1872 and 1874 alone, an estimated three million hides were shipped to the East from the southern and central Great Plains, sending the buffalo into a terminal decline.
Without the buffalo, the plains Tribes knew that they would starve. In the same year, in desperation, and in a last attempt to remain free, large numbers of Kiowa, Comanche, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho rose up to try to drive not only the hunters away, but all whites who had encroached onto their lands, only to be ruthlessly hunted down themselves. By the spring of 1875, all the resisting bands, by now desperate for food, had been driven back onto the reservations. The hunters returned, unchecked, and within a year the buffalo herds on the southern plains were gone.
Old Lady Horse described all of this in her deceptively simple folktale:
So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.
There was a war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers158 shot at the buffalo as fast as they could, but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill.159 Soldiers were not enough to hold them back.
Then the white man hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting sometimes as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track.
The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer. Sadly, the last remnant of the great herd gathered in council, and decided what they would do.
The Kiowas were camped on the north side of Mount Scott, those of them who were still free to camp. One young woman got up very early in the morning. The dawn mist was still rising from Medicine Creek, and as she looked across the water, peering through the haze, she saw the last buffalo herd appear like a spirit dream.
Straight to Mount Scott the leader of the herd walked. Behind him came the cows and their calves, and the few young males who had survived. As the woman watched, the face of the mountain opened.
Inside Mount Scott the world was green and fresh, as it had been when she was a small girl. The rivers ran clear, not red. The wild plums were in blossom, chasing the red buds up the inside slopes. Into this world of beauty, the buffalo walked, never to be seen again.321
Before the emigration “the white men in the region were only a few little islands in a sea of Indians and buffaloes,” Mari Sandoz, a white writer who would record much Cheyenne oral history in her book Cheyenne Autumn, would write. Fewer than forty years later, in 1877, “the buffaloes were about gone and the last of the Indians driven onto the reservations—only a few little islands of Indians in a great sea of whites.”322
Throughout the 1870s, Ulysses S. Grant’s “Peace Policy” had succeeded in completing the task of moving vast numbers of Native people onto reservations. By the early part of the decade, not only the buffalo but game of all kinds had all but disappeared from the Platte Valley. Dwindling numbers of bison elsewhere resulted in much intertribal fighting: the Lakota, driven by the absolute imperative to keep the herds for their own people, usually won. Cut off from their game, and soon all but starving, smaller, less powerful nations such as the Pawnees, the Poncas, the Omahas, and the Otoe-Missourians had had little choice but to accept government rations and be relocated, many of them to distant Indian Territory. Farther to the southwest, the Shoshones and the Utes had also accepted life on their allotted reservations, as had Sarah Winnemucca’s Tribe, the Northern Paiute. The same fate had befallen the Cayuse, the Miwok, and the Navajo. Major General Philip Sheridan’s notorious winter campaign of 1868 in the central Great Plains had now all but destroyed the autonomy of the Southern Cheyenne and the Arapaho. They too were moved to reservations on Indian Territory.
One group, however, had remained free. While almost all other Native American nations were struggling for their survival in the “great sea of whites,” the Lakota, their bands perhaps as many as thirty thousand strong, had not only held out against them, but were still both expanding and enriching their empire.
The Lakota heartland was in Powder River country, between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains. Here, in these lush, well-watered valleys of the Yellowstone, Powder, Rosebud, Tongue, and Bighorn Rivers, where the buffalo and game were still plentiful, large numbers of Lakota lived.160 As a little girl, Josephine Waggoner experienced this life firsthand when she traveled with her mother to Powder River country in the summer of 1875, in what would prove to be the last days of Lakota hegemony.
The historian Josephine Waggoner (seated, center) as a child
Like her friend and collaborator Susan Bordeaux, Josephine Waggoner was a woman of mixed-race heritage. Hers, too, would prove to be a life of many overlapping worlds. Her father, Charles McCarthy, was an Irishman who as a young boy had emigrated with his family from County Cork in 1840. After fighting in the Civil War—he had marched with General Sherman to Atlanta—he had gone out West, along with many other veterans, “to seek his fortune.” After a short period as a miner, he had sold on his claim, and with the proceeds had set up a general store at the American Fur Company’s trading post at Grand River in South Dakota. An Indian agency had been set up at Grand River in 1868, and it was there that he had met Josephine’s mother, Itˇhatéwiŋ, or “Wind Woman,” a Lakota woman of the Hunkpapa band, buying her from her brothers as his wife.
It was not an unusual arrangement for the times. As Waggoner states in her magisterial work Witness: A Hunkpapa Historian’s Strong-Heart Song of the Lakotas, in those days “there was many a young Indian girl sold to white traders.” By 1870, the furs—“buffalo robes, elk hides, beaver, mink and otter hides”—that had for so long been used by Native people as a medium of exchange, were by now an all but vanished commodity, and yet Itˇhatéwiŋ’s brothers and male relatives still needed to be able to buy guns and ammunition as they prepared themselves “for a defense against the invasion of their country by the whites.” Traditionally, it was the women of the bands who carried out the trading, and when they saw the particular attention paid by McCarthy to their sister, they paid attention too. They consulted with her, explaining the situation carefully, and Itˇhatéwiŋ had agreed to be sold. “She was decked out in her finest clothes and taken to my father.”161 Her price was ten guns and several pounds of powder and bullets.
Josephine Waggoner always admired her father for the speech he made on that occasion. Most Native women were not “married” by whites in the accepted Euro-American sense, and many of these men had white wives and families still living elsewhere, to whom they would one day return. Charles McCarthy was determined to do things differently. “Father told them that he had been in the war and had traveled many places since the war; that he had never married and had no offspring, but the woman he married and who was to be the mother of his children, he intended to marry legally, the way marriage was generally performed by the white race. He told them that a marriage performed by a man of God was for life, and was sacred—it was not for a year or two, but forever.”323
Charles McCarthy respected and honored his new wife, and their marriage seems to have been a happy one. For all this, according to her daughter, Itˇhatéwiŋ was “like a bird in captivity,” always “inquiring about and looking for her people who came in from the West to trade.” When she met any of them, Josephine remembered, her mother would embrace them and cry tears of joy. By 1871, when Josephine was born, the couple had moved from Grand River to Apple Creek, North Dakota, where McCarthy had put down a claim, with “several lots in the town site.” Here, in what would shortly become the new town of Bismarck, Josephine’s father ran a thriving livery and feed business, as well as owning “many horses, mules, wagons, sleighs, and buggies.”
It is hard to imagine what Itˇhatéwiŋ thought of the coming of the railroads to those once-peaceful prairies. Soon, people of all nationalities “were camped along the railroad right-of-way; expert drivers were hired; wages were good; settlers came in covered wagons, traveling with the graders.” Where there was no wood to put up houses, they built sod houses instead. And between these new emigrants “there was just as much trouble as there ever was among the wildest of tribes. There were shooting scrapes, gambling and killing going on every day.” Josephine’s father was appointed the first sheriff of the newly created Burleigh County.
Just a few years later, disaster struck. In December 1874, while giving chase in the middle of a blizzard to a man accused of murder, the sheriff’s sleigh fell through the ice and Charles drowned in the frozen waters of the Missouri. Only his gloves and his sealskin cap, which had been left on the riverbank, were recovered. “My mother was prostrate with grief,” Josephine remembered. Although Charles had been a wealthy man and a considerable landowner at the time of his death, neither his wife nor his daughter ever knew what became of his property.162 Instead, Itˇhatéwiŋ would return all but empty-handed to her own people. She bought a large tent and, taking only a few household belongings with her, traveled back to the Grand River agency. Now located some fifty miles north of its original position, the agency was known as Standing Rock.
Standing Rock, on the northeastern periphery of the Great Sioux Reservation, was one of a number of agencies at which the plains Tribes could receive their rations and other goods, according to the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty. On issue days, the place would be “teeming with traffic, the prairie alive with horses.” The dust on the trails “looked like the smoke of a prairie fire.” But whereas not so long ago Native Americans had looked to these agencies as places that served their interests, they were increasingly becoming places of control. Attached to the government distributions of blankets, quilts, clothing, and food were numerous rules and regulations, even “restrictions about leaving the reservation without a permit.” When these things were explained to them, through interpreters, there was a growing feeling among them that “they had no rights at all, even in their own country,” and they would disperse as quickly as possible. “From a distance the procession looked like a row of ants crawling along until they disappeared into the dust.” Whereas one day there would be thousands of tents, the next there would be “nothing but emptiness remaining.”
The following summer, when her people were still free to roam, Itˇhatéwiŋ decided to take her two daughters out West, to Powder River country.163 After life at the agency, the journey to Powder River was a halcyon experience for a little girl. Itˇhatéwiŋ, who had traveled back to Standing Rock with all her possessions loaded into a prairie schooner, would now take them overland the traditional way, by horse and travois. Josephine’s grandmother, Waštéwiŋ (“Beautiful Woman”), was also part of that summer caravan, and she too had a packhorse and a travois. Itˇhatéwiŋ loaded up her travois with cooking utensils and many pounds of beads, intending to trade them for deer and beaver skins. Waštéwiŋ rode her horse, giving Itˇhatéwiŋ the chance to ride behind; the two children, Josephine and Marcella, were pulled along on the second travois. “Mother had put boughs of willow on the wickerware and put a sheet over it so we were in the shade. We could walk if we wanted to or jump on and ride.”
In this way, they traveled in easy stages of about twenty miles a day. The buffalo herds were still relatively plentiful on the northern plains, and large herds of antelope, sometimes as many as a hundred strong, grazed on the hillsides. Men would go hunting, taking the travois with them to carry back the meat. Josephine’s mother and grandmother had to work fast, getting the meat dried and cured so it would not be wasted. They fixed long poles over the fires “so the smoke would blow on the meat to keep insects away while it was drying.”
While the small children were kept busy collecting wood from the creeks to keep the fires burning, the older boys would go to the river to water the horses in the shallows. They would keep a careful watch, lying flat on the ground and holding their horses by a lariat, “gazing into the distance for chance travelers.” In the evenings, with the smell of supper cooking, Josephine enjoyed herself with the other small girls, playing and running between the tents. According to custom, “the girls were never allowed to play with the boys. They were kept separate, so much so that the male dialect was different from the female. . . . Some nights mother would make me listen to the bellowing of the buffalo; [but] the smoke of the campfire generally scared them away.”
Josephine would learn many things on her journey to Powder River country. In Montana, they came to a place where pine trees grew in abundance. Everyone in the caravan went to collect the pitch gum, and for a while “nearly every boy and girl, even the men and women, were chewing gum.” The yellow flowers of the pine trees were also harvested to be used as dye. When the blooms were mixed with a certain type of red berry, it made a “brilliant scarlet of every shade” with which decorations such as porcupine quills and feathers could be colored. Farther on, they came to another place where yellow ochre could be found in the rocks. Another type of dye, in the form of oxidized iron, was dug up from the ground. “The Indians knew where the best red powder was because the prairie dogs had thrown it up in digging their holes.”
After many weeks of traveling, the caravan approached the Powder River valley at last. It was the custom of the Lakota to move leisurely from one river valley to another. Their huge tipi villages could be as many as a thousand lodges strong. A single Lakota tipi could be made with as many as twenty buffalo hides and was often filled with imported luxury goods: red and blue Navajo blankets, dried pumpkins and cornmeal from Mexico, silver rings from Germany, glass beads for making necklaces and earrings—as well as state-of-the-art Remingtons and Colt six-shooters and the ammunition to go with them. “It was a beautiful sight to see the countless white tents that were pitched in a circle on the green grass,” Josephine wrote. “The winding river was lovely with its border of dark green trees as we approached.”
Beyond the sparkling river, on either side there were impassable ranges of mountains, so densely wooded that the tracks through them were unknown to whites. About a hundred miles away was the headwater of the Little Missouri, “whose rough banks and badlands were impassable except for travois traveling,” while to the east lay the headwaters of the Cheyenne River, which could be followed into the Black Hills if ever a retreat were necessary.
In 1875, the Powder River country may still have been a place of safety and plenty for the Lakota, but it was a closely guarded stronghold too. Knowing that outside their domain were not only buffalo hunters and white trappers but also soldiers and railway surveyors, none of them “on any friendly business,” the Lakota kept a careful watch. Each night in the great council tent different scouts were appointed to patrol the country. “If anyone was coming, these scouts made signals from the high mountains that were watched all the time.”
Even when the caravan in which Itˇhatéwiŋ and her family were traveling was within sight of the Powder River camp, precautions were taken before they could approach. “The men that were ahead gave a signal from the top of the hill, where the processions stopped. A young man rode back and forth on a white horse several times. The white horse meant that all was clear. The main camp sent the flash of a looking glass, which meant come on.” After this, they came quickly down from the mountains into the river valley. “The people were so glad to meet each other,” Josephine Waggoner wrote. “There was exchanging of gifts, invitations from place to place. It was a reunion of joy and pleasure.”
Josephine would spend the whole summer, and much of the autumn, camped at the Powder River village, not returning to the agency until November. In contrast with life at Standing Rock, where they had been entirely dependent on government rations, and even then often had barely enough to eat, her time on the Powder River was a revelation. Although, even here, the bison herds had been depleted, it was still “the heart of the game country.” That summer Josephine ate “almost every kind of wild meat there was.” As well as elk, deer, buffalo, and even bear meat, they had wild eggs, duck, sage hens, and chickens. There was an abundance of fruit, and the rivers teemed with so much fish that the boys, simply by tying a string to their arrows, could draw the fish in “as fast as they were shot.” These included “the speckled mountain trout, catfish three feet long sometimes, bullheads, pike and sunfish.”
That summer, Itˇhatéwiŋ worked hard, spending her time tanning deer skins and smoking the hides until they were golden yellow. She did the same with buffalo hides, carefully choosing those with the heaviest winter fur, although it was tiring and heavy work. Other furs, such as mink, otter, and beaver, could still be obtained here, and she knew she could sell them to the US Army officers back at Standing Rock. “Most of the officers wanted beaver collars on their buffalo-hide overcoats” and would pay her well for them. Josephine and her sister also benefited from their mother’s hard work. For them she made new winter suits: “beaver-hide moccasins with the fur inside . . . buffalo calf-hide leggings, coats, and mittens and mink-hide hoods trimmed with white rabbit fur.”
It was not all work. The Lakota were passionate about their horses, and racing them was a great sport in the summertime. The horses, richly caparisoned, would be led around in front of the crowds, “that the people might use their judgement of which was the best [one].” Betting could often reach fever pitch; “there would be so much excitement [that] some of the men would bet their last horse.” Women would bet their most treasured beaded moccasins, and sometimes even the dresses they stood up in, “and if they lost out, they had to give up their dresses right then and there.”
But this love of horses was not only about excitement and parade. There was a quality to the relationship between the Lakota and their horses, a sacred bond that Josephine was aware of, even as a little girl. “So great was the pride in owning a herd that owners just fairly lived with them,” she wrote. To see to their horses was the first thing they would do in the morning and the last thing at night. She wrote, too, of “the grooming, the pampering, and even painting ornaments on their pet horses.” The herds were driven down to water twice a day and taken out to fresh pastures “as though they didn’t know enough” to do so on their own. “I have seen Indians talk to their horses as though they were human.”
Other, more serious matters intrigued her too. She became fascinated by the great council lodge in the main camp, and by the four council men who sat cross-legged on buffalo robes by the door. Inside, the chiefs of all seven Lakota bands had their allotted places. It was here, Josephine learned from her mother, that all matters pertaining to their people could be discussed and debated, and it was here, too, that their laws were made, although at the time of her writing all those customs had been abolished, “and there are very few living who can remember how the laws and rules were made in those old tribal days.”
Although women were not allowed into the council tent, everyone was aware of the most pressing issue of the day. The Northern Pacific Railroad had already reached Bismarck, and it seemed only a matter of time before it would be pushing its way still farther west. Three years previously, and in direct contravention of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, surveying teams, accompanied by an escort of more than a thousand US Army soldiers, had entered the Yellowstone Valley but been forcibly repelled. The following year, a second expedition, this time escorted by an even greater military force, among them none other than George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, was again sent to survey the river basin.164 Yet again, the Lakota succeeded in forcing them to retreat. “ ‘Why didn’t the soldiers stay off the Sioux territory?’ were the arguments asked at the council lodge. The Sioux claimed the country south of the Yellowstone according to the treaty with the government, but in the constant invasion of soldiers, freighters, hunters and trappers—regardless of the provisions of the treaty—they sensed danger and were nervous.”
Josephine Waggoner would later estimate that the camp she had stayed in that summer was only about fifty miles south of the Yellowstone Valley. The scouts appointed each day at the council lodge were charged with keeping a close watch on any movements in the area. “Every move that the soldiers made was watched by the signal riders, where the horses were kept at night and where they grazed through the day; every steamboat that came up the river was reported, what kind of supplies it unloaded, whether the boats were bringing more soldiers or not.” The same scouts even knew when buffalo hunters or white trappers were within a fifty-mile radius of the camp; if they found them, some of the scouts would bring home scalps “to show they were not idling their time away.” Even so, the future seemed clouded.
Elizabeth and George Custer had arrived in Dakota in the spring of 1873 and soon took up residence at Fort Abraham Lincoln, just to the north of the Standing Rock agency. When he found out that Josephine’s mother was an expert hide tanner and seamstress, Custer commissioned a fringed buckskin hunting suit from her, the same one in which, before his death, he would often be photographed. In addition to cutting and sewing these suits, Itˇhatéwiŋ would decorate the collars and cuffs with beads. “Her beadwork was beautiful, her color combinations were perfect,” Josephine wrote; “she was an artist in that line” and was often commissioned to do beadwork for the Army officers’ wives, as well as the men.
In this way, Itˇhatéwiŋ came to know Elizabeth Custer as well as her husband. Itˇhatéwiŋ did other work besides sewing for her: Elizabeth would often send for her when her own cook, the formidable Eliza, was ill. “Mrs. Custer was very much pleased with the work my mother did. She took her visitors into the kitchen to show them how an Indian worked. My mother could understand English a great deal better than they thought. She heard Mrs. Custer say that when the Sioux were captured, she was going to have Indian girls for servants. In after years, my mother thought of this remark and commented how little we knew of the future.”
By 1875, there had been so many white assaults on the Lakota’s unceded territories that it had become clear to them that the US government was no longer to be trusted. It was not only the Northern Pacific Railroad’s surveying expeditions to the Yellowstone River that were the issue. In 1874, Custer had been chosen to lead another expedition, this time into the Black Hills, the most sacred of all the Lakota’s lands. Officially, the purpose of the 900-soldier-strong cavalcade was to look for a potential site for a new military fort—in itself an egregious treaty violation—but the convoy also had with it a geologist and some miners. Before long, traces of glittering yellow metal were found.
A triumphant Custer was quick to announce the discovery. As well as miners, he had taken three journalists with him on the expedition, and before long the news that gold had been found in the Black Hills had been reported, often in exaggerated terms, all over the country. In the inevitable gold rush that followed, an estimated fifteen thousand prospectors flooded west to the Black Hills.
At first, the US Army made efforts to keep the trespassers out, but the rush of miners was simply too great. For the Lakota, the invasion of the Black Hills by Custer and his troops was nothing short of a declaration of war. For the US government, too, it was clear that a breaking point had been reached. A Lakota delegation, led by Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Lone Horn, was invited to Washington, and some desultory talks ensued, but they did no good. Another attempt to negotiate the sale, or at least the lease, of the Black Hills for mining purposes, which took place at the Red Cloud agency in late September that year, also failed. By now it was clear that a final showdown was inevitable. Rather than declare outright war, President Grant, his “Peace Policy” in tatters, decided to “let things flow spontaneously into bloodshed.”324 In December, in a deliberate attempt to hasten this end, word was sent out that all Native people living outside the reservation boundaries were to report to an agency by the end of January 1876—an impossible proposition in the dead of winter. Those who failed to do so, such as the bands who had coalesced around Lakota chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, were to be brought in by force.
At Standing Rock, even though it was many hundreds of miles away from Powder River country, rumors abounded. Itˇhatéwiŋ was on good terms with the wives of the US Army’s Indian scouts, and from them she gleaned much information. In the spring of 1876, she learned that Custer had moved out of Fort Lincoln and was headed west again. His mission was to bring in Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa bands, among whom were many of Itˇhatéwiŋ’s own relatives, including her mother, who had remained behind at the Powder River camp when she returned to Standing Rock.
Although Josephine, by now a child of six, was too young to understand much of what was happening, the atmosphere at the agency was palpable. On issue days, in particular, there were whispered conversations everywhere, and it seemed, even to her, that “death and gloom hung over the heads of all.” Ever inquisitive, she tried to find out the cause of all the tension: “I wanted to ask questions, but I dreaded to know what the answers would be; my mother would not permit me to ask any questions when people came to our house.”
Although the women and children wanted peace, the men, daredevils who “were born to fight,” were in silent agony. Every day the infantry at the nearby garrison, Fort Yates, could be heard at target practice, and the cavalry seen carrying out their drills. More ominous still, their cannons were already trained on the camps. Everyone knew that it would be madness if the men took up arms and went to help their relatives out West. To do so would mean death to all.
One day, when Josephine was out with her mother visiting friends at one of the camps on the prairie, she noticed a lone man standing way out in the foothills. At first she was too absorbed in playing games with the other children to pay him much heed. The game they were playing was called “Beaver, put out your paws.” She remembered this particularly because it was the only game she ever knew in which boys would join in with the girls. “Someone covered up under a robe, the rest all danced around the robe singing, ‘Beaver, put out your paws.’ Every once in a while, the one under the robe would put out his hand a second and jerk it back again as someone would try to snatch it. Whoever caught the hand would have to be ‘it.’ ”
Later, when the game was over, Josephine asked her mother what had made the lone man stand on the hill so long. Itˇhatéwiŋ told her that the man was called Black Bird, and he was doing a devotion to the Great Spirit, fasting and praying for three days. “He was crying to the sea of silence that his relatives out west may be safe from harm, that he may see them again this side of the life plane.”
It took a strong man to do this fasting and praying devotion. On the third day, Black Bird, weakened by living only on bread and thin coffee, had fainted. “Such a devotion on a light diet was most damaging. Half a dozen went up the hill on horseback. He was given a cool drink, was rubbed to consciousness, put on a horse, and brought back down to camp, for he was too weak to walk.”
One day in June, Itˇhatéwiŋ was out working in her garden when three riders were seen approaching. When they got closer, she recognized them as some of her relatives, among them a particularly favorite uncle of Josephine’s, Nahaha, or “Walks Stealthily.” Inviting them in for coffee, Itˇhatéwiŋ sent the two girls out to the store—a ruse that Josephine only realized much later was to make sure they were safely out of the way. They had brought the news that every soldier under Custer’s command, including Custer himself, had been killed. The soldiers had attacked a village at a place the Lakota knew as the Greasy Grass. Whites called it the Little Bighorn.
On June 25, some six thousand American Indians, of which half were Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho who had left their reservations to join forces with Sitting Bull, were camped along the river, in a village that extended for almost three miles. Among them were two thousand warriors. Custer had pushed his men, already exhausted from their long march through unknown terrain, to attack at once. Outnumbered four to one, the fighting took barely an hour—“as long as it took a hungry man to eat his lunch.” The Battle of the Little Bighorn, as it would become known, was not so much a battle as a rout.
Long before word reached any of the whites at the fortresses and settlements along the Missouri, who would have to wait for their messengers to arrive by boat, the news of the battle was known in every camp at Standing Rock. And yet this, the greatest Native American victory in all the Plains Wars, would also mark the end of the Lakota’s free-roaming life. Determined to avenge Custer and his men, the US Army would now hunt down each remaining band, one by one.
“The Indians had struck, then retreated out toward the snowcapped, rough and reckless Bighorn Mountains, where pursuit was almost impossible.” Among those who had fled were many of Josephine’s relatives, including her grandmother, Waštéwiŋ, who had stayed behind on the Powder River the summer before. “My grandmother . . . was all the world to me,” Josephine wrote. When she asked her mother if she would ever see her again, she always received a cheerful answer; all her sons, and two other daughters, were with her, as well as many other grandchildren who would help take care of her, Itˇhatéwiŋ explained. Josephine tried to take comfort from this, but it was no good. She would sit and try to imagine how it was out there in the mountains, “ghostly, white-topped, high and misty, unapproachable, repellent, and delusive—where nothing but wild animals could exist,” and she knew in her heart that she would never see her grandmother again.
Of all Josephine’s many relatives who followed Sitting Bull, only one of her uncles, Grasping Eagle, would live. From the Bighorn Mountains, they would follow their chief still farther north into exile in Canada, and here, like many others, they died of “privations, hardship, and famine,” including her beloved grandmother.
Those who remained behind suffered too. Even the men and women at the agency, who had had nothing to do with the fighting, were ordered by the military to give up all their guns and ammunition. This was not all that would be taken from them. One stiflingly hot day in August, a great plume of dust could be seen in the distance. Together with her mother and sister, Josephine climbed to the top of a hill to see what it was. As they watched the dust clouds getting nearer, gradually it dawned on them. Vast herds of horses were being driven in the direction of the agency garrison, Fort Yates.
When Custer had raided Black Kettle’s village on the Washita, he had ordered the slaughter of some nine hundred Cheyenne horses, but this was not to be the fate of the Lakota herds. Most of these horses were driven to Minnesota to be sold. The horses from the agencies at Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Rosebud, and Oglala were taken south to Omaha, also to be sold at auction. Others, either through incompetence or corruption, found their way more locally to farmers “looking for a bargain for little or nothing,” to livery stables in Bismarck, and, perhaps bitterest of all, to the railway grading camps. At the Standing Rock and nearby Cheyenne River agencies, attempts were made by the people there to hide as many of their horses as possible by taking them to distant pastures, but it did no good. The commander of the Department of Dakota, General Alfred Terry, threatened to withhold their rations if they did not comply, and they were forced to bring them in. In this way, an estimated five thousand horses belonging to the Lakota were taken away, never to be seen by them again.165
“So the horses were all gone,” Josephine Waggoner wrote, and with them “the life, the hope, the pride of the Indian” were all gone too. “No one in this machine age could ever understand the love between master and horse. The love of a man toward a spirited, courageous horse was wonderful. It was like the love of a beloved child, only a man is dependent on a horse.” To lose their horses was like losing both father and mother.
Along with other children from the reservation, Josephine and her sister would often climb the hill behind Fort Yates. There they could see the “wind-whipped tipis in the dust-beclouded prairies for many miles away without a horse moving around.” Instead, they could only watch as men and women moved slowly to and fro, “laboriously dragging wood home, or carrying small quantities on their backs. Every tent seemed to be silent except where children were crying for food. Silence, because there was no enjoyment in talking, no enjoyment in singing, only a wailing song at times came with the wind, a song of grief and regret.”325