In 1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the brother of George Rogers Clark, departed St. Louis on a two-year odyssey to the Pacific and back with “the Corps of Discovery.” They went to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and beyond and to proclaim American sovereignty over a world where Native people held the power. “In all your intercourse with the natives,” Jefferson instructed Lewis, “treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will permit.”1 Lewis and Clark had both been at the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, and, although the young nation’s muscle flexing was never far beneath the surface during their western expedition, they generally followed tried and tested protocols of Indian diplomacy in order to make their way through Indian country, just as they relied on Indian guides, Indian knowledge, and Indian assistance to get them where they were going. Their expedition marked the beginning of a diplomatic and colonial relationship between the United States and the Indian nations west of the Mississippi that would generate dozens of treaties. As the eminent scholar of Indian law Felix Cohen observed, the United States paid Napoleon Bonaparte $15 million for the transfer of political authority over the Louisiana Territory, and then proceeded to pay the Indian tribes—the actual owners of the ceded territory—more than twenty times that amount as it took possession of the land in treaty after treaty.2 American diplomacy west of the Mississippi replicated what had happened in the East. When Indians held the power, Americans adhered to Native American protocols; when the balance of power shifted irrevocably away from Indians, the United States continued to observe some of the forms of treaty making but subordinated them to the function of its treaties: to remove Indians from the land and obliterate their way of life.
Lewis and Clark entered a complicated diplomatic landscape in which initiating an alliance with one Indian nation could jeopardize relations with another. For more than a century, Indian tribes on the Great Plains and beyond had waged escalating contests for horses, guns, and hunting territories; at the same time, they engaged in increasing diplomatic activity to create, maintain, and renew alliances and exchange networks that were vital to obtaining and defending access to horses, guns, and hunting territories.3 Intertribal diplomacy catered for the suspension of hostilities in the interests of exchange. Alliances were part of the strategies necessary to deal with changing situations; the ebb and flow of power on the Plains sometimes made it expedient to make peace with yesterday’s enemies in order to confront a more serious threat today. When Europeans arrived, some Indian people incorporated the outsiders into their kinship systems and exchange networks, but the onus was on the Europeans to adjust to Indian ways when they dealt with the nations who held the upper hand and, to a large extent, determined which Europeans entered and operated in their country.
At the end of the seventeenth century, both France and Spain had imperial aspirations in Texas. The French saw it as an area into which they could extend the network of Indian trade and alliances they had already established in the Mississippi Valley. For Spain, Texas represented a northern periphery of a great American empire, a vast borderland that might help thwart French intrusions and protect more valuable holdings to the south, particularly the silver mines of Mexico. French and Spaniards both courted the allegiance of the Caddos in what is now eastern Texas and Louisiana. Caddo power and numbers had plummeted since the first Spanish expedition wandered through their country in 1542: epidemic diseases had cut their population dramatically, perhaps from as many as two hundred thousand to as few as ten thousand, and as farmers they faced increasing pressure from mounted and mobile enemies. Nevertheless, they were strategically located, and far-reaching trade routes ran in and out of their villages. Accustomed to making pacts of friendship with other tribes, they extended their network of trade and alliance to include Europeans, who might provide merchandise and military assistance against their enemies. Caddos smoked the calumet pipe with the newcomers, gave them gifts, and offered them their women. Europeans frequently misinterpreted this as evidence of Indians’ promiscuity—Caddo women often functioned as diplomatic mediators.4
Indian power in the interior of the continent continued to limit European ambitions and compel European diplomatic responses throughout the eighteenth century. The Osages dominated the region between the Arkansas and Red rivers for much of the century. They exploited their trade with the French to expand their power over rival tribes and dictated the terms on which Europeans entered their domain. Spaniards and French alike treated them with healthy respect and courted their friendship.5 Meanwhile Spain confronted a new and growing power on the southern Plains, one produced and propelled by the horses the Spaniards themselves had introduced. Comanches and Utes moved out of the foothills of the Rockies and advanced onto the rich grasslands of the southern Plains, where they consolidated their position as horse-and-buffalo Indians. They captured and enslaved women and children from other tribes, incorporated other peoples into their society, and built exchange networks that enabled them to dominate trade between New Mexico and French Louisiana. By midcentury, the Comanches were the dominant power on the southern Plains. They raided deep into Texas, New Mexico, and Spain’s other northern provinces, carrying off captives and livestock and draining the limited resources Spain could afford for frontier defense.6 Confronted by Ute, Comanche, and Apache nomads who proved more than a match for heavily equipped Spanish soldiers in thinly spread garrisons, Spaniards came to rely on Pueblo and O’odham allies and on diplomacy to defend their provinces.7
When Tomás Vélez Cachupín became the governor of New Mexico in 1749, he inherited a colony beset by Indian enemies. Lacking the manpower and resources to maintain a constant war effort, Vélez Cachupín turned to diplomacy to secure the protection his province needed. After he defeated a large Comanche war party in 1751, he made peace, sitting down and smoking with the Comanche chiefs who visited trade fairs at the Pueblo towns. By the time he left office, he had made peace with the Utes, Navajos, and Apaches as well. He left his successor advice on how to preserve that peace with the tribes, especially the Comanches, and why it was necessary to do so. Spain had been too quick to respond with force and had alienated Indians whose friendship might have been secured by trade and diplomacy, he said. “There is not a nation among the numerous ones which live around this government in which a kind word does not have more effect than the execution of the sword.”8 The peace did not hold, and when Vélez Cachupín became governor a second time in 1762 he found the Comanches on the brink of war with New Mexico. Quickly following his own advice, he dispatched six captive Comanche women as emissaries, inviting the Comanches to Santa Fe for peace talks. A month later a Comanche delegation rode in, armed with French guns and ammunition. Vélez Cachupín reestablished peace with them and sent them away well fed and loaded with presents and bundles of tobacco “so that, in the councils of their chiefs, principal men, and elders, they might smoke and consider well their resolution in regard to my purposes.”9
Despite Vélez Cachupín’s advice and efforts, Spanish-Comanche relations continued to be marred by hostilities. In 1779, Governor Juan Bautista de Anza defeated and killed the Comanche chief Cuerno Verde (Green Horn). Realizing that the years of fighting could have been avoided if Spain had always treated the Comanches “with gentleness and justice,” Anza quickly moved to restore peace.10 Following Native diplomatic protocols that involved exchanging gifts and sending Comanche women as mediators, Spaniards and Comanches made peace in Texas in 1785 and in New Mexico early the next year at Santa Fe.11 The Utes, alarmed at the prospect of peace between their Spanish allies and the Comanches, sent delegates to Santa Fe to observe the Comanche-Spanish peace and then made peace themselves with the Comanches. After the requisite pipe ceremonialism, gifts of horses, and probably an exchange of captives, the Utes and Comanches became reconciled after more than a quarter century of conflict and concluded a peace agreement in February 1786, sanctifying the pact “according to their manner, their chiefs and the individuals mutually exchanging clothes in the presence of the governor.”12
Horses that transformed the balance of powers on the southern Plains spread northward, following and expanding networks of exchange, kinship, and alliance. Apaches traded horses to Pueblos; Kiowas and Kiowa-Apaches traded them to Caddos; Wichitas and Pawnees traded them to Osages; Comanches and Utes traded them to Shoshonis. Shoshonis, Flatheads, and Nez Perces traded them to Crows and to Blackfeet. Blackfeet traded them to Assiniboines. Crows, Kiowas, Arapahos, Cheyennes, and others brought horses to the villages of the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras. The Lakotas, the western Sioux, obtained horses at the Arikara villages and traded them to their eastern Yankton and Dakota relatives. Indian hunters living on the Plains who for years had traveled to the Missouri River trading centers to exchange meat and leather for corn, tobacco, and other crops grown there now went to obtain manufactured goods and guns as well. Bands of Crows and Cheyennes brought horses and meat to the villages, traded for guns and goods, and then headed back to the Plains where they traded those guns and goods to more distant neighbors. Crow traders often traveled to a rendezvous with the Shoshonis in southwestern Wyoming; the Shoshonis in turn traded with the Nez Perces, Flatheads, and other groups in the mountains. Many of those groups were in contact in turn with Native traders at the Dalles, the great salmon fishing site on the Columbia River. The Native traders also connected with European and American maritime traders on the Pacific Coast. When Indian peoples traded, they smoked, made or renewed alliances, and intermarried. The huge web of trading networks that spanned the West was held together by ritual, kinship, and sacred pledges as well as by shared economic needs and opportunities.
Lewis and Clark traveled across parts of this web, but they could neither see its full extent nor fully appreciate how it was built. They were rather like the blind man feeling the elephant. Leaving St. Louis in June 1804 and heading up the Missouri River, they had to learn to navigate the turbulent waters of inter- and intratribal politics. They tested their Indian diplomacy among the Otos, Omahas, and Missouris, once-powerful tribes badly reduced by disease. Meeting and smoking in council after council, the American captains announced the new era of peace and prosperity that would surely come to the Indians now that their land “belonged” to the Great Father in Washington. They gave gifts, flags, and medals to Indian chiefs, sometimes distinguishing between chiefs of different rank by giving medals of different grade.13 Lewis and Clark understood that giving tobacco served “as a calling card for Europeans and Americans seeking entrée into Indian societies,” and they dispensed twists of tobacco and other gifts among the tribes they met. But their reluctance to give gifts to the Brulé Sioux almost caused them to come to blows.14
The Sioux bands on the Missouri were accustomed to levying tribute from St. Louis traders and were not about to allow the American strangers to pass upriver to other tribes without exacting a share of their cargo. Clark called them “the pirates of the Missouri.” Determined to show that the United States would not be bullied, the Americans refused to concede. There was a tense scene in which each side stood to arms. “I felt my Self warm & Spoke in verry [sic] positive terms,” wrote Lewis with characteristic understatement. Only the presence of Indian women and children and a measured conciliation on the part of the Brulé chief Black Buffalo averted conflict. The Americans tossed the Indians some tobacco as a token tribute and Black Buffalo allowed them to proceed. It was touch-and-go. The Brulés followed the Americans for a while and offered them women, which Lewis and Clark rejected (or at least they said they did in their journals), interpreting the offer as evidence of immorality rather than an effort to establish relations of peace and trust.15 The first serious test of American diplomacy in the West initiated a pattern of hostility between the Sioux and the United States that would endure through the century.
For Lewis and Clark flags symbolized Indian loyalty and recognition of US sovereignty. But when they gave a Brulé chief a flag he displayed it alongside two Spanish flags. He was either building multiple alliances or just collecting flags. Clearly, the flags meant something different to Indians. Farther upriver at the Mandan villages, Lewis and Clark found that traders from Canada had given the Indians British medals and flags. They protested to the traders and told the chiefs “to impress it on the minds of their nations that those Simbells were not to be recved by any from them, without they wished incur the displeasure of their Great American Father.”16 Jean Baptiste Truteau, a St. Louis fur trader who presented Spanish medals, flags, and commissions to Arikara and Cheyenne chiefs in the 1790s, noted that the Indians carefully preserved these objects in wrapping and when they took them out “smoked” them, smudging them with burning sweetgrass.17
Lewis and Clark participated in the smoking rituals of the peoples they met, recognized how important pipe rituals were in establishing friendship, and incorporated the rituals into their own diplomatic repertoire. When they met Shoshonis in the foothills of the Rockies in the summer of 1805, Lewis “had the pipe lit and gave them smoke; they seated themselves in a circle around us and pulled off their mockersons before they would receive or smoke the pipe. This is a custom among them as I afterwards learned indicative of a sacred obligation of sincerity in their profession of friendship given by the act of receiving and smoking the pipe of a stranger.” Lewis and Clark became “fluent in the language of the pipe.” They brought back from their journey more pipes than any other category of object, not because they “collected” them but because Native people had given them the pipes as powerful diplomatic gifts in order to establish formal relations between the Indian nations and the United States.18
The language of pipes was especially important where the language of humans failed, which it often did as the Americans made their way through various language groups. In western Montana, for instance, Lewis and Clark attempted to open relations between the United States and the Flathead or Salish Indians. The captains gave their speech in English; one of their men translated it into French; the expedition’s interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau translated it into Hidatsa; his Shoshoni wife, Sakakawea, who had lived among the Hidatsa, translated it into Shoshoni; and finally a Shoshoni boy who was living with the Flatheads translated it into Salish.19
On their return home, a Mandan Indian chief named Sheheke accompanied Lewis and Clark as an ambassador to the nation’s capital, embarking on his own voyage of discovery.20 Throughout the rest of the century the federal government followed European precedents and brought Indian delegations from the West to Washington, D.C. The Indian delegates usually received a tour of the sights and military installations, were outfitted with suits of clothing, and also sat for portraits or, later, had their photographs taken. Sometimes they negotiated treaties in Washington with the commissioner of Indian affairs. Sometimes, like Sheheke, they met the president.21
The Indian diplomacy of Lewis and Clark did not end with their expedition. Jefferson appointed Lewis as territorial governor of upper Louisiana, and he appointed Clark as the principal Indian agent for the tribes west of the Mississippi, except for the Osages, where Pierre Chouteau served as agent. Clark drew up his first formal Indian treaty in September 1808 with the Osages. Perhaps anxious to impress the government in his new position, he coerced Osage chiefs to sign a treaty that ceded fifty thousand square miles of land (about half of present-day Missouri and Arkansas). Governor Lewis tweaked the treaty and had Choteau present it to the Osages for approval, repeating Clark’s thinly veiled threats that they must sign it if they wished to remain at peace with the United States and continue to receive American trade. In later years Clark reflected that the Osage treaty “was the hardest treaty on the Indians he ever made and that if he was to be damned hereafter it would be for making that treaty.”22
Lewis was highly strung, driven, and subject to fits of depression that worried his few friends. In 1809 he committed suicide. Clark was easygoing, dependable, pragmatic, and levelheaded. In 1813, Madison appointed him as the governor of Missouri Territory. In addition to his former duties as Indian agent, Clark was now responsible for all tribes in the Louisiana Purchase north of the state of Louisiana. American treaty commissioners in the upper Mississippi region after the War of 1812 were primarily concerned with establishing peace with tribes who had been allied to the British, regulating Indian trade, and extending American sovereignty, rather than obtaining land cessions. Clark served as commissioner for twenty-five treaties during his tenure as governor, many of them signed at the great treaty council held at Portage des Sioux near the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi, and Illinois rivers in 1815.
In 1822 President Monroe appointed Clark to be the superintendent of Indian affairs in St. Louis, with responsibility for a vast array of tribes on the upper Mississippi and Missouri. At the Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825, Clark and Lewis Cass, an arch-advocate of Indian removal, negotiated over sixteen days with one thousand Sioux, Sauk and Fox, Menominee, Iowa, Winnebago, and some Ottawa, Potawotami, and Ojibwe Indians to safeguard trade and settlement in the region west of the Great Lakes by reducing conflict and establishing boundaries between the tribes. Clark and Cass associated intertribal warfare with a lack of well-defined territorial boundaries, but peace in Indian country depended on maintaining or mending relationships between people rather than drawing lines to separate them.23 Meanwhile, Brigadier General Henry Atkinson and Clark’s Indian agent, Benjamin Fallon, accompanied by almost five hundred troops as a demonstration of American power, retraced the route followed by Lewis and Clark in order to establish treaty relations with the nations of the upper Missouri. In the summer and fall of 1825 they met with the Arikaras, Mandans, various bands of Sioux, Cheyennes, Crows, Otos and Missouris, Pawnees, and Omahas. They presented them with identical prewritten treaties in which the tribes acknowledged the sovereignty of the United States, placed themselves under American protection and criminal jurisdiction, and agreed to American trade regulations. The Indians took the trade goods Atkinson and Fallon offered and signed the treaties.24
Increasingly, as Americans intensified the pressures on Indian peoples to remove from their coveted homelands in the East, Clark applied his expertise and experience to supervising the exodus of displaced peoples and negotiating a string of treaties with the Osages (again), Kansas, Pawnees, Poncas, and other prairie tribes, acquiring title to their lands in preparation for the influx of exiles. In some cases, he negotiated removal treaties with tribes who had removed before. He presided over the transfer of millions of acres of Indian lands and signed thirty-seven separate treaties with Indian nations, about one-tenth of all the Indian treaties the United States had made. “No government official signed more treaties than Clark,” concludes one scholar of his Indian diplomacy.25
Clark’s diplomacy had faltered when he encountered the Brulé Sioux in 1804, but he learned well the business of doing business in Indian country. In 1829, he and Cass drew up regulations and guidelines for dealing with Natives. “When they assemble to deliberate upon their public affairs, they are pure democracies, in which every one claims an equal right to speak and vote,” they noted. “The public deliberations, however, are usually conducted by the elderly men, but the young men or warriors exercise the real controlling influence. No measure can safely be adopted, without their concurrence.” That was the reason, said Cass and Clark, “why so many signatures are usually appended to our Indian treaties.”26
Confronted with the invasion of Indians from the East and the increasing presence of Americans, Indians on the prairies and Plains implemented new diplomatic initiatives and adjusted their foreign policies as they jostled for position and competed for trade networks and hunting territories in contests for diminishing resources. The Crows, increasingly besieged in their southern Montana homelands by more powerful enemies, generally maintained amicable relations with the Nez Perces and Flatheads to their west, who supplied them with horses, but they found their major ally in the new and growing power on the Plains. For Atkinson and Fallon, the treaty they made with the Crows in 1825 established American supremacy; for the Crows, it initiated an alliance that would help them survive their struggles against the Lakotas and Cheyennes.27
The Cheyennes, too, forged new alliances. They allied with the Arapahos and the Lakotas but Cheyennes who migrated south of the Platte River clashed increasingly with Comanches, Kiowas, and Plains Apaches who dominated the southern Plains and sometimes ranged north of the Arkansas River to hunt. But pressed by eastern Indians and Texans in the south, the Kiowas and Comanches did not need to be fighting Cheyennes in the Arkansas Valley. After some tentative peace feelers between the tribes, the Cheyennes and Arapahos and the Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches agreed to meet on the Arkansas River near Bent’s Fort. “There we will make a strong friendship which shall last forever,” declared the Kiowa chief Little Mountain. “We will give you horses, and you shall give us presents.” The Cheyennes camped north of the river, and the Kiowas stayed on the south bank. They agreed to share the upper Arkansas Valley and engaged in an elaborate ritual exchange of gifts that not only signaled and confirmed the peace but also established the trade in desired items that made the new alliance economically beneficial to both parties. The horse-rich Kiowas gave horses; the Kiowa chief Satank was said to give away 250 head. The Cheyennes, middlemen between the central Plains and the great trade rendezvous at the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara villages on the upper Missouri, gave guns and manufactured goods. The Cheyennes needed more horses, both for themselves and for trade for more goods. They called the site of the peace agreement “Giving Presents to One Another Across the River.” As Little Mountain had foretold, the Great Peace of 1840 lasted forever.28
Peace with tribes to their north freed the Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches to escalate their incursions south of the Rio Grande. Their attacks drove away settlers, left whole areas devastated, generated political instability, and rendered Mexico’s northern provinces ripe for conquest by American armies in the war of 1846–48.29 The Kiowas and Comanches had waged a life-and-death struggle with Texans since Governor Mirabeau B. Lamar initiated a policy of Indian extermination in the late 1830s.30 But after New Mexico and Texas were incorporated into the United States in the 1840s, the US government determined to stamp out attacks on what were now American citizens and American property.
At the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States took from Mexico more than half a million square miles of territory, including present-day California, most of Arizona and New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and part of Colorado, and it secured Mexican recognition of the independence and annexation of Texas. Invoking their Manifest Destiny (a term coined in 1845) to occupy the continent, Americans were determined to extend the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the inferior races inhabiting the West.31 That meant dispossessing and radically changing the lifestyles of thousands of Natives over huge stretches of the continent. According to the historian Francis Paul Prucha, “the government conceived of no way to deal with the new problems except by the traditional method of formal treaties.”32
Removal treaties promised Indian exiles new homes in the West that would be theirs forever. The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 designated “Indian country” as a permanent reserve stretching the length of the eastern Plains from the headwaters of the Missouri River to the Red River in Texas, where indigenous and immigrant Indian peoples would inhabit lands American settlers did not yet need and where traders and other non-Indians could enter only with government permission. But the government’s idea of a safe haven where Indians could lead better lives was illusory from the start and inhabitants of Indian country were immediately under pressure. The acquisition of valuable new territories in the Far West sent emigrants teeming to the gold fields of California and the rich valleys of Oregon, and the government needed to ensure their safe passage and to establish transportation links across Indian lands. The old policy of removing Indians before an advancing tide of white settlement and maintaining a boundary separating Indians and whites was no longer feasible; curbing westward migration was neither feasible nor desirable. Instead of constituting “a permanent Indian frontier,” Indian country in the West was to be broken up into a series of separate reservations. Indian people would relocate to reservations to minimize conflict with whites and undergo the transformation to a new way of life that was their only alternative to extinction.33
The Indian Office, later known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was established in 1824 to consolidate the administration of Indian relations. In 1832, Congress authorized the president to appoint, with Senate approval, a commissioner of Indian affairs who operated under the direction of the secretary of war. To deal with the increase in Indian relations that came with the massive increase in territory, President Polk asked Congress for more Indian agents. Congress did not grant the request but in 1849 it transferred the management of Indian affairs from the War Department to the newly created Department of the Interior, on the assumption that the civilian branch would do better than the military in promoting the work of civilizing Indians. The Indian Office exercised growing influence in shaping Indian policy and administering the reservations. The United States continued to make treaties—more than one hundred between 1850 and 1868—but the outcome of those treaties was never in doubt. Power trumped protocol as American commissioners secured agreements that established boundaries, removed obstacles to American expansion, and opened Indian lands to logging, mining, farming, and ranching. Treaties whose sole purpose was to take away Indian land and eradicate Indian ways of life bore little resemblance to colonial-era councils that had begun with Natives and Europeans negotiating cultural thickets and building alliances through ritual exchange and kinship ties.
In California, beginning in 1850, US commissioners negotiated eighteen almost identical treaties, setting aside an estimated 11,700 square miles for reservations, mostly in the foothills. In January 1851, the treaty commissioners published an address to the people of California in the Daily Alta California newspaper. With Indian people being pushed to extinction, the commissioners advocated a policy of moderation:
As there is now no further west to which they can be removed, the General Government and the people of California appear to have left but one alternative in relation to these remnants of once numerous and powerful tribes. viz: extermination or domestication. As the latter includes all proper measures for their protection and gradual improvement, and secures to the people of the State an element greatly needed in the development of its resources, viz: cheap labor—it is the one which we deem the part of wisdom to adopt.34
But the state legislature opposed reserving potentially valuable lands for the exclusive occupancy of Indians and removing Americans who were already settled on those lands. President Fillmore submitted the treaties to the Senate in 1852, but the Senate refused to ratify any of them. The senators held their debate and vote in executive session and imposed an injunction of secrecy on the original documents that was not removed until 1905, so their arguments do not appear in a published Senate document and if a transcript of the executive session was made it seems not to have survived, but the costs of establishing the reservations and the value of the lands in question were clearly major concerns that killed the treaties. It is difficult to argue with the assessment of archaeologist and professor of anthropology Robert Heizer more than forty years ago that the whole thing was “a farce, from beginning to end.” In other parts of the country, the president stated in his annual message to Congress in December, the government set apart particular lands for the exclusive occupation of the Indians and they acknowledged and respected their rights to those lands. But in California the government did not recognize the exclusive right of the Indians to any part of the country. “They are, therefore, mere tenants at sufferance, and liable to be driven from place to place at the pleasure of the whites.” Not until several decades later did the government establish small reservations (rancherías) for California Indians who survived the gold rush and the genocidal Indian policies that followed in its wake.35
Indians attacked wagon trains in twentieth-century Hollywood, but rarely on the nineteenth-century Great Plains.36 Nevertheless, migrants on the overland trails to California and Oregon generated tensions and in 1849 they brought cholera. To head off conflicts the government attempted to assemble the southern Plains tribes in the spring of 1850 for a treaty to ensure the safety of the emigrant roads, but Comanche medicine men told their people to stay away from the whites until the cholera epidemic died out, and the negotiations were postponed until 1851 at Fort Laramie and 1853 at Fort Atkinson.37
In its treaties with the Dakota or Eastern Sioux at Traverse des Sioux and Mendota in 1851, the United States required the Sisseton, Wahpeton, Mdwekanton, and Wahpekute bands to “cede, sell, and relinquish” their lands in the state of Iowa and the Territory of Minnesota, in all about twenty-four million acres.38 But out on the Plains what the United States wanted that year was to establish peace and to secure free passage for its westward-moving citizens. Once again, it tried to do so by imposing boundary lines on a complex intertribal landscape where relationships overlapped, alliances fluctuated, and borderlands were shared as well as contested. At the government’s request, the Indian agent and former mountain man Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick convened more than ten thousand Plains Indians in a huge multitribal tepee encampment at Horse Creek near Fort Laramie, Wyoming, a post established to safeguard the California and Oregon trails. The famous mountain man Jim Bridger brought a Shoshoni delegation. The Crows made a dramatic arrival “in a solid column, singing their national melody” and impressing one news reporter as “much the finest delegation of Indians we have yet seen.” Many of the tribes had long histories of conflict but for three weeks in September they met, smoked, talked, socialized, and held dances and horse races. Fitzpatrick and David D. Mitchell, the superintendent of Indian affairs at St. Louis, met the Indians in council, adhered to Native custom by smoking the pipe, and drew up a map delineating tribal territories, while the Belgian Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet, well known among the tribes, worked to promote goodwill. With representatives from the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Crows, Shoshonis, Gros Ventres, Assiniboines, Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras, the conference involved western Algonquian, Siouan, Shoshonean, Caddoan, English, and Plains sign languages, and the interpreters—Bridger, De Smet, Robert Meldrum for the Crows, former mountain man and frontier guide John Simpson Smith for the Cheyennes, C. Campbell for the Sioux, H. Culbertson for the Assiniboines and Gros Ventres, François L’Etalie for the Arikaras, and John Pizelle for the Arapahos—were kept busy. The Sioux resented efforts to impose boundaries –“You have split the country and I do not like it,” said an Oglala chief named Black Hawk—and resisted the idea of creating chiefs with whom the government could deal, but they consented to “touch the pen” along with the other tribes. The Treaty of Fort Laramie defined the territorial boundaries of the various tribes, who agreed to live in peace with the United States and each other and recognized the right of the United States to build roads and posts in their country. In return, the commissioners distributed a wagon train full of presents and the United States pledged to protect the Indians from depredations by whites and to pay the tribes $50,000 per year for fifty years in “provisions, merchandise, domestic animals, and agricultural implements.”39 The government requested no land at Fort Laramie, but the boundaries established there could be redrawn in subsequent treaties, thereby breaking up the Indian reserve into separate and ever-diminishing individual reservations. As the historian Jeffrey Ostler concludes, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was “merely a temporary convenience of a relentlessly expansionist nation-state.”40
After the treaty, Fitzpatrick, Mitchell, De Smet, and John Simpson Smith accompanied a delegation of chiefs down the Missouri by steamboat to St. Louis and then to Washington where they met President Fillmore.41 But the good feelings from Horse Creek soon evaporated. The Miniconjou Sioux chief Lone Horn, who as a young man had been instrumental in making peace with the Cheyennes in 1840, now worked hard to maintain this peace with the Crows and the truce held for half a dozen years. “Given the volatile politics of a Sioux camp,” comments the historian Kingsley Bray, “Lone Horn’s achievement in engineering and maintaining the Crow peace between peoples who had been implacable enemies for generations evinces a political acumen, a breadth of vision, and diplomatic skill rare among any people in any age.” But the northern bands—the Hunkpapa and Blackfoot Sioux—would have nothing to do with the peace and their war parties were soon pressing hard again into Crow country.42 Congress altered the terms of the treaty, reducing the government’s commitment to pay the signatory tribes $50,000 a year from fifty years to ten, with an additional five years to be paid at the discretion of the president. In 1854, in a bungled dispute over a stray or stolen cow, a rash lieutenant named John Grattan and his men were killed in a Brulé village. Conquering Bear (a.k.a. Frightening Bear), whom Mitchell had selected at Fort Laramie as a chief to represent the Sioux, died in the melee.43 General William Harney destroyed another Brulé village at Ash Hollow, Nebraska, in retaliation.
In 1853, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois called for the removal of “the Indian barrier” and the extension of territorial governments as the necessary first step in protecting American possessions along the Pacific Coast, prompting a debate that led to passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 that opened the territories to settlement. It also reopened the divisive and ultimately explosive issue of slavery in the territories, effectively nullifying the Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 and leaving the inhabitants to decide for themselves whether the territories should be free or slaveholding. Between 1854 and 1860, more than one hundred thousand non-Indians entered Kansas Territory.44
On the southern Plains, at the Treaty of Fort Atkinson in 1853, the Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches agreed to peace among themselves and with the United States and to allow Americans free passage and across their territories. The Treaty of Fort Wise in 1861 restricted the Cheyennes and Arapahos to the plains of eastern Colorado, south of the Arkansas River. In 1863, Samuel Colley, an agent on the Upper Arkansas, took a delegation of fourteen southern Plains chiefs (and two women) to Washington, D.C. Several of the delegates—Lone Wolf of the Kiowas, Paruasemena or Ten Bears of the Yamparika band of Comanches, and Poor Bear of the Plains Apaches, as well as interpreter John Simpson Smith—would figure prominently in the Treaty of Medicine Lodge four years later. The Indians toured the capital, attended a play, and met President Lincoln in the East Room of the White House, where the throng of onlookers included the secretaries of state, treasury, navy, and interior, as well as visiting ministers from England, France, Prussia, and Brazil. Lincoln assured the Indians of his government’s peaceful intentions but reminded them with a smile that no father could get his children to do exactly as he wished.45
John Simpson Smith was married to a Cheyenne woman and in November 1864 he was back from Washington and living with her in a village of Southern Cheyennes and Arapahos on the banks of Sand Creek near Fort Lyon, where the Indians had camped supposedly under the protection of the US Army. Smith and his son Jack were eating breakfast when Colonel John Chivington and a regiment of Colorado Volunteers attacked the village. John Smith survived the ensuing slaughter, as did the Cheyenne chief, Black Kettle, and his wife, who sustained nine gunshot wounds. Jack was murdered after the massacre. The treacherous nature of the attack, the wanton slaughter of women and children, and the gruesome mutilation of the bodies prompted a congressional investigation and inflamed the Plains.46
In the Pacific Northwest, Congress in 1853 divided Oregon Territory into Oregon and Washington territories. The new superintendent of Indian affairs in Oregon, Joel Palmer, negotiated a series of treaties with Oregon tribes.47 In Washington, anxious to clear the way for construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad through his territory, Governor Isaac Stevens acted as superintendent of Indian affairs as well. Between Christmas 1854 and January 1856, he negotiated, many would say dictated, ten treaties with multiple tribes in what would become Idaho and western Montana as well as Washington State. He acquired some seventy million acres by “confederating” multiple tribes onto shared reservations where they were expected to learn to live like Americans. To expedite matters, Stevens and his associates drafted the treaties in advance of the treaty councils and the texts, except in their descriptions of the lands to be ceded, were nearly identical. “This is a great day for you and for us,” Stevens announced to the Nisqually, Puyallup, and other Indians who assembled for his first treaty at Medicine Creek at the mouth of the Nisqually River on Christmas Day, 1854. “You are about to be paid for your lands, and the Great Father has sent me today to treat with you concerning the payment.” The Indians ceded 2.5 million acres and retained 3,840 acres. The story was the same at the other treaties in the Puget Sound Basin as the small tribes gave up most of their land, but they did retain “the right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations … in common with all citizens of the Territory.” Stevens’s high-handed, threatening, and deceitful treaty-making tactics, combined with continuing encroachments by American miners and settlers, sparked outbreaks of violent resistance, which Stevens promptly and ruthlessly suppressed. The Nisqually chief, Leschi, was tried by a kangaroo court and hanged for his part in the fighting.48
Stevens faced stiffer opposition from the larger tribes east of the Cascade Mountains. The Cayuses, Wallawallas, Umatillas, Yakamas, and Nez Perces who met with Stevens and Palmer in the Walla Walla Valley in May 1855 were in no mood to be browbeaten. Lieutenant Lawrence Kip, a young officer who was with the military escort, described the dramatic arrival of the Nez Perces, some 2,500 “wild horsemen in single file, clashing their shields, singing, and beating their drums as they marched past us. Then they formed a circle and dashed around us, while our little group stood there, the centre of their wild evolutions” (see figure 5.1). By the time all the tribes arrived, about five thousand Indians were gathered in the valley, and there was much feasting and horse racing. The Nez Perces had been friendly to Americans since Lewis and Clark had stumbled starving into their country, and in 1831 four Nez Perces had journeyed to St. Louis to see William Clark and learn about Christianity. Now, noted Kip, they held prayers in their lodges every morning and evening, and several times on Sunday.49
FIGURE 5.1 Arrival of the Nez Perce Indians at the meeting for the Walla Walla Treaty, May 1855, by Gustav Sohon. (Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma)
When the council got under way, Stevens and Palmer sat in front of an arbor facing the Indians who sat in the open air in concentric semicircles, “the chiefs in the front ranks, in order of their dignity, while the background was filled with women and children.” Several scribes sat at a table taking notes of everything that was said and, Kip learned later, “two or three of the half civilized Nez Perces, who could write, were keeping a minute account of all that transpired at these meetings.”50 Stevens and Palmer had to work hard before their inflated promises, threats, and behind-the-scenes maneuvering took effect. Monitoring what had been going on west of the mountains, the Yakama head chief Kamiakin had worked to stiffen resistance among the tribes, and he demonstrated his distrust of the commissioners and their treaty making by refusing Stevens’s gift of tobacco. The Nez Perce chief Lawyer, a Christian so-called for his ability to talk, voiced his approval of the treaty, but the other tribes were hostile to it and Kamiakin kept silent. Then on Saturday, June 9, seventy-year-old Looking Glass, the second Nez Perce chief who had been away hunting when the council began, spoke so strongly against the treaty that not only the Nez Perces but all the other tribes refused to sign it. Kip assumed the commissioners would have to “bring some cogent arguments to bear upon Looking Glass.” The Nez Perces spent all Sunday in council among themselves, and Lawyer and a group of Indians visited the commissioners before breakfast on Monday. At 10 a.m. Stevens opened the council with a short speech and then asked the chiefs to come forward and sign the papers. “This they all did without the least opposition,” wrote Kip. “What he has been doing with Looking Glass since last Saturday, we cannot imagine, but we suppose savage nature in the wilderness is the same as civilized nature was in England in Walpole’s day, and ‘every man has his price.’”51 William Cameron McKay, a secretary and interpreter, was present when Kamiakin signed the Yakama treaty. When the Indians hesitated, Stevens told them that if they did not sign the treaty they would “walk in blood knee deep.” Kamiakin made a cross on the paper. “When he returned to his seat, his lips were covered with blood, having bitten them in suppressed rage.” “Thus ended in the most satisfactory manner this great council,” McKay wrote in his journal. The Indians ceded about forty-five thousand square miles at Walla Walla.52 The same year, gold was discovered on the newly created Yakama reservation. When Kamiakin led the tribes in a united resistance against trespassing miners, tensions exploded in the so-called Yakama War.
After Walla Walla, Stevens met with 1,200 Salish (Flathead), Pend d’Oreilles, and Kutenais at the Hell Gate Council near Missoula in western Montana. There, in the summation of the Jesuit historian Robert Ignatius Burns, he demonstrated his customary “patronizing impatience” for a “lesser race whose problems intruded upon his policies and career.”53 Accompanied by delegates from the western tribes, he then pushed on across the Continental Divide to Fort Benton where he met the Blackfeet in a large multitribal gathering of fifty-nine chiefs from ten different tribes, although it is often called Lame Bull’s Treaty, after the Piegan chief whose name appears first on the document. Unlike Stevens’s previous treaties, the purpose of the Blackfoot peace council was not to impose land cessions or remove people to reservations but to establish intertribal peace and obtain consent to building “roads of every description” through the region. In the Walla Walla and Hell Gate treaties Stevens had recognized the right of tribes from west of the Rockies to continue crossing the mountains from their newly established reservations to hunt buffalo on the northern plains; now he designated a common hunting ground centered on the headwaters of the Missouri and the Yellowstone and secured Blackfoot agreement to share it in peace with the tribes from beyond the mountains. In return, the Blackfeet would receive $20,000 in annuities for ten years and an additional $15,000 for the same period in farming instruction and education. A contentious council with the Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, and Colville Indians that failed to produce a treaty wrapped up Stevens’s rapid-fire diplomatic grand tour through Northwest Indian country.54 Construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad began in 1870 and eventually it snaked across Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Stevens did not live to see it; he died while fighting in the Civil War. But the so-called Indian problem Stevens faced—removing Indians to make way for railroads and settlers—remained.
Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act of July 1862 as a war measure designed to help preserve California and the West for the Union. The act provided government bonds and land subsidies to encourage and assist the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad companies in constructing a line between the Missouri River and the Pacific. It also charged that the United States must “extinguish as rapidly as may be the Indian titles to all lands falling under the operation of this act.” Subsequent railroad acts increased the incentives. The Pacific Railroad Act of 1864 doubled the amount of land granted so that the railroad companies received 12,800 acres of land in checkerboard sections along both sides of the railway line for every mile of track they built. The railroad companies attracted emigrants (and sold their lands to them) which also increased the value of the lands retained by the government for sale. The “public land” that the government awarded to the railroad companies in vast quantities was Indian land.55 Thomas Jefferson had envisioned the United States as a republic of self-sufficient yeoman farmers but the thousands of immigrants who poured into eastern cities became mill and factory workers dependent on food from elsewhere. The West would feed the labor force of the industrial revolution. Texas cattlemen found a way out of the postwar depression by driving herds north to meet the railheads and shipping their cattle east. The government needed to remove Indians to make way for railroads that were vital to the nation’s growth and unity, and to replace herds of buffalo with herds of cattle to feed the nation’s workers.
The task of reuniting and reconstructing the nation after the war required remaking the West as well as remaking the South, incorporating Indians as well as former slaves, which, as western historian Elliott West notes, meant “giving freedom to slaves and taking it away from Indians.” No sooner had the United States settled “the negro question” and fought a bloody war over the black race, declared Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri, chairman of the Senate Committee of Indian Affairs, than “it seems, we must have another war over the red man.”56 The question of the hour for men like Henderson was what to do about the Indians given the harsh realities of American expansion and the inevitable outcome of the historic struggle between barbarism and civilization. “We have reached a point in our national history,” wrote Commissioner of Indian Affairs Nathaniel G. Taylor in 1867, when “there are but two alternatives left to us as to what shall be the future of the Indian, namely swift extermination by the sword, and famine, or preservation by gradual concentration on territorial reserves, and civilization.” Located “in the way of our toiling and enterprising population,” the Plains tribes would be submerged and buried unless they were confined and “civilized.”57 Instead of being removed from place to place and pushed to the brink of extinction, the Indians must be assigned to reservations where they would give up living as buffalo-hunting nomads and become sedentary farmers on their own land. And they had better do it soon. They did not have many options.