In October 1867, the United States Peace Commission negotiated three treaties in one—with the Kiowas and Comanches, with the Plains Apaches, and with the Southern Cheyennes and Southern Arapahos—at the confluence of Elm Creek and Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge was a major event in shaping and implementing the nation’s Indian policy in the aftermath of the Civil War. Pressured by humanitarian concerns that the Indians faced extinction, and by the staggering financial costs of a protracted Indian war, the Peace Commission sought to bring peace and civilization to the Plains. The goal of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, in the view of the commissioners who negotiated it, was to settle the southern Plains Indians in Indian Territory alongside the Cherokees and other tribes “preparatory to declaring them citizens of the U. States, and the establishment of a government over them.”1
The policy of confining Indians to reservations and “civilizing them” was not new, but the Treaty of Medicine Lodge laid out a blueprint for transforming Indians and set out the agenda with unprecedented clarity and new urgency. More than ever before, reservations were to function as crucibles of change. Indians would be assigned a reservation that would serve as “a permanent home” where no whites could enter without the tribe’s approval; they would be furnished with the tools and skills to survive in American society, and they signed their agreement to embark on a new path. As a prerequisite to this new start, the Peace Commission sought to end the bloody clashes between Americans and Native Americans on the Plains and end the way of life the Indians were fighting to preserve. Indian speakers at Medicine Lodge repeatedly voiced their reluctance and refusal to give up the life they loved but the treaty was predicated on the certainty that the destruction of the economy and culture of the southern tribes was imminent and inevitable. Indians had to move on to reservations to survive.2
The Plains were on fire in 1867. After the Sand Creek massacre in November 1864, Cheyenne warriors flocked to the camps of the militant Dog Soldiers, the elite military society, in the Smoky Hill region of northern Kansas and southern Nebraska. They carried out raids in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, and attacked railroads and wagon routes across the central Plains, although Black Kettle moved his band of some seventy lodges south of the Arkansas and joined the Southern Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches.3
Attempts to end the violence proved futile. In October 1865 US commissioners met some of the southern Plains tribes at the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, near present-day Wichita. The shadow of Sand Creek hung over the talks. “There is something very strong for us,” said the Arapaho chief, Little Raven: “that fool band of soldiers that cleaned out our lodges and killed our women and children.” The commissioners showed the Indians the government’s investigations in “a book and papers that contain all the proceedings of the Sand Creek affair,” and the treaty included an apology and reparations for “the gross and wanton outrages perpetrated.” The treaty also assigned a new reservation on the border of Kansas and the Indian Territory to the Cheyennes and Arapahos, although they were free to range between the Platte and Arkansas rivers until the United States had extinguished the title claims of other Indians, especially the Cherokees and Osages, to the reservation area. The treaty promised annuities for forty years, and special grants of land were made to leading chiefs. In return, the Cheyennes and Arapahos present relinquished claims to all other land, including their hunting territories in western Kansas, thereby accepting a substantial reduction of the territory designated for them at Fort Laramie in 1851. The Plains Apaches agreed to be party to the treaty. In a separate treaty, the Kiowas and Comanches were assigned a large reservation stretching across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles and part of west Texas, with freedom to range south of the Arkansas River until title to the reservation area was settled. The chiefs agreed to refrain from attacking transportation routes and settlements and to return white captives. Black Kettle stressed that he could not speak for those who were not there, however, and most Cheyennes and Arapahos rejected the treaty.4
Many of the tribal representatives would appear two years later at Medicine Lodge: Black Kettle and Little Robe of the Cheyennes; Little Raven of the Arapahos; Satank, Satanta, Teneangopte or Tonaenko, known as Kicking Bird, and Lone Wolf or Guipahko of the Kiowas; Ten Bears of the Yamparika Comanches, and Toshaway or Silver Brooch, chief of the Penetekas or “Honey Eaters,” the largest Comanche band who lived on the Wichita agency and “already could be classified as reservation Indians.”5 Army generals John B. Sanborn and William Harney, the interpreters John Simpson Smith and Margaret Wilmarth or Wilmott, the Indian superintendent Thomas Murphy, the agent Jesse Leavenworth, and the treaty commissioner William Bent also would reconvene at Medicine Lodge. Margaret Wilmott was Thomas Fitzpatrick’s widow. William Bent and his brother Charles had been trading with the Plains Indians since the early 1820s. In 1833, together with Cerain St. Vrain they built Bent’s Fort on the north side of the Arkansas River (at present-day La Junta, Colorado), a prominent adobe structure and the largest trading post on the Plains. William Bent married a Cheyenne named Owl Woman, daughter of the keeper of the sacred medicine arrows, with whom he had four children; after she died in 1846, he married her younger sister, Yellow Woman, with whom he had a fifth child. Senator John Henderson said Bent was “known to every man who knows anything about the Indians.” At “the special request” of the Cheyennes and Arapahos, the United States at the Little Arkansas treaty granted patents for 640 acres in fee simple to certain persons, “all of whom are related to the Cheyennes or Arrapahoes by blood,” including Margaret Wilmott and her children, William Bent’s children and their children, and John Smith’s children.6
The Senate ratified the Little Arkansas treaty in May 1866 but amended it so that no land in Kansas would be included in the reservation, and commissioners had to return to the southern Plains to secure tribal agreement. The Cheyennes kept Sand Creek “fresh in their memories”7 and those who had refused to attend the treaty felt no obligation to observe the terms Black Kettle had accepted. The famous Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose agreed to listen only because the Americans were strong. “I do not believe the whites,” he said. “I do not love them. If I had plenty of warriors I would drive them out of this country.” When the commissioners asked Tall Bear and Bull Bear to sign the amendment papers, the two Dog Soldier chiefs smoked for a time, then got up and left without signing or replying. The Dog Soldiers continued to dominate the region between the Platte and the Arkansas. Annuities promised under the Little Arkansas treaty arrived late and were of poor quality. Construction crews pushed the Kansas Pacific Railroad westward along the Smoky Hill River but Cheyenne attacks threatened to bring work to a standstill. Settlers in Kansas were angered that the Treaty of the Little Arkansas acknowledged Indian hunting rights north of the Arkansas. Texas steadfastly resisted setting up a reservation for Kiowas and Comanches in its public domain. War on the southern Plains continued.8 The Kiowas were as resistant as the Dog Soldiers. Agent Charles Bogy reckoned the Kiowas “probably the worst tribe, considered in all respects, on the plains.”9
On the northern Plains, in the so-called Red Cloud War, the Lakotas, Northern Cheyennes, and Arapahos fought to close the Bozeman Trail that crossed their hunting grounds en route to the Montana gold fields. In December 1866 they inflicted a stunning defeat on the US army, annihilating Captain William Fetterman’s eighty-man command.
In the spring of 1867, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding the Department of the Missouri, led an expedition to restore peace in the Smoky Hill country. With 1,500 men, including the Seventh Cavalry led by George Armstrong Custer, he marched up the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas River, burned an abandoned Cheyenne village, and aggravated the state of affairs. The army’s failure to pacify the Plains fueled a growing demand for a peaceful solution to the “Indian problem.”10
Even before Hancock’s expedition, a Joint Special Committee of Congress headed by Senator James R. Doolittle completed a two-year investigation into the causes of the Indian wars. The Doolittle report placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of whites, and this fueled growing demands for a reform of Indian policy that would implement reservation life as an urgent necessity. Congress responded in July 1867 by establishing the Indian Peace Commission, a select group of soldiers and civilians with particular interest and expertise in Indian affairs, who would conduct negotiations and implement the new policies. As the historian Jill St. Germain notes, the very creation of the commission was somewhat “irregular,” in that Congress “authorized” the president to appoint a commission, an authorization he did not need because treaty making was the president’s constitutional responsibility.11
The Peace Commission faced a formidable task and had broad authority: to assemble the chiefs of the warring tribes, to ascertain the causes of hostility, and to negotiate treaties that would “remove the causes of war; secure the frontier settlements and railroad construction; and establish a system for civilizing the tribes.” The commissioners were committed to advancing American settlement but they saw clearly that unregulated expansion spawned violence and spelled doom for the Indians: “If the savage resists, civilization, with the ten commandments in one hand and the sword in the other, demands his immediate extinction.” The current war against the Indians was not only expensive and ineffective but “it was dishonorable to the nation, and disgraceful to those who had originated it.”12 In the face of opposition from Indian agents, traders, settlers, speculators, and contractors who stood to lose a lucrative business if troops were withdrawn, and newspapers that inflated the rate and extent of “Indian depredations,”13 the Peace Commission sought to achieve an Indian policy of expansion with honor that had eluded the United States since the days of the founding fathers. “We have spent two hundred years in creating the present state of things,” the commissioners said in their report to President Johnson. “If we can civilize in twenty-five years it will be a vast improvement on the operations of the past.”14
The twin goal was to establish the kind of peace that “will most likely insure civilization for the Indians and peace and safety for the whites.” On both counts, that meant getting the Indians onto reservations. The commissioners intended to remove the Indians from the vicinity of the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific railroads that were being built across their hunting territories and concentrate them in two large reservations. The Sioux and affiliated bands would be allocated land north of Nebraska; the Kiowas, Comanches, Southern Cheyennes, Southern Arapahos, and Plains Apaches would be confined to an area south of Kansas, on lands acquired from other tribes then living within the Indian Territory. “The goals of the commission could not have been clearer,” says St. Germain, “nor could they have been any broader. They encompassed most of the concerns that plagued American Indian policy on the Plains—war and peace, settler and railroad security, and the compulsion to ‘civilize’ the Indians.” Could the commission secure peace, secure American expansion, and secure a future for the Indians? If it failed to achieve peace, the United States would resort again to military action—“a sop to those in Congress and in the West who would have preferred an all-out war of extermination instead.” The commissioners were given little concrete direction as to how they should achieve these goals and no fiscal restrictions or guidelines. Because conflict over footing the bill for the Peace Commission’s treaties brought the treaty system to an end in 1871, this was, as St. Germain notes, “a significant oversight indeed.”15
Watching the Peace Commissioners (figure 6.1) discuss “the long mooted and most detested Indian question,” the newspaper reporter Henry Morton Stanley felt confident that if the peace effort failed it would not be for want of honest endeavor on their part: “Like philosophers, like astute geometricians do these gentlemen look the question in the face patiently and kindly,” he informed his readers. Nathaniel G. Taylor chaired the commission. A rather hefty former Methodist minister and Princeton graduate, “a man of large brain, full of philanthropic ideas relative to the poor Indian,” Taylor was considered “soft” on Indians in some quarters. Senator John B. Henderson was “never forgetful of Western interests; a cool head, courteous in deportment, affable to all.” He frequently acted as the group’s spokesman, its principal draftsman, and its liaison with the press. Samuel F. Tappan, “a gentle man of few words” and a former officer in the Colorado militia, had headed the investigation into the Sand Creek massacre. John B. Sanborn, a Civil War veteran who had attended the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, was “a garrulous, good natured and jovial gentleman, fond of good living and good company,” and “pretty thoroughly posted on Indian matters.”
The military members, appointed by the president, were the commander of the Division of the Missouri, General William Tecumseh Sherman; retired General William S. Harney; and Major General Alfred H. Terry, commander of the Department of Dakota. Sherman was recalled to Washington and did not go to Medicine Lodge; Major General Christopher C. Augur, commander of the Department of the Platte, substituted for him and then became a regular member of the commission. Augur, said Stanley, was “a courtly gentleman of the old school” and “a man of rare ability.” He had distinguished himself during the Civil War, was seriously wounded at Cedar Mountain, and had fought Indians in Utah and New Mexico. Harney had joined the army nearly fifty years before; in the 1830s he fought in the war against Black Hawk and the Sauks and against the Seminoles; in 1846–48 he fought in the War against Mexico, and in 1855 he attacked a Brulé Sioux village at Ash Hollow in retaliation for the so-called Grattan massacre. He had come out of retirement to serve on peace commissions. Tall and white-bearded, Harney cut an impressive figure. “When he stands erect he towers above all like Saul the chosen of Israel,” Stanley wrote, and then, with less hyperbole: “Really, a goodly man, a tried soldier and a gentleman.” The Lakotas remembered him rather differently from Ash Hollow and called him Winyan Wicakte, “Woman Killer.” Harney and Henderson did not get along and had frequent disagreements during the course of the negotiations. Harney could be pretty irascible. According to his biographer he could be impulsive and obstinate and had a “contentious and quarrelsome nature.”16
FIGURE 6.1 Members of the Peace Commission pose with an unidentified Indian woman. From left to right: Generals Terry, Harney, and Sherman; Commissioner Taylor; Samuel Tappan; and General Augur. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives)
The six-foot-two Terry, on the other hand, was a thoughtful and likeable fellow; “gallant and genial,” said Stanley. Born in Connecticut to an old New England family, Terry had graduated from Yale Law School in 1848 and served with distinction in the Civil War. After a tour of Reconstruction duty in the South he was assigned to the Plains. In 1867 Terry was still a newcomer to the Indian West, but he was to play a key role making treaties and making war for the next ten years. Examining the orders Terry gave the flamboyant and headstrong George Custer in 1876, Nathaniel Philbrick holds him largely responsible for the disaster at the Little Bighorn. He had, writes Philbrick, “a lawyer’s talent for crafting documents that appeared to say one thing but were couched in language that could allow for an entirely different interpretation should circumstances require it.”17 Whether Terry developed or applied this talent as a member of the Peace Commission, the treaty documents the commission produced fit the description. Governor Samuel Crawford and Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas joined the commissioners prior to the negotiations at Medicine Lodge.
A press corps accompanied the Peace Commission, forerunners of twentieth-century “embedded” journalists. This was history in the making, and the nation’s newspapers dispatched reporters to cover the story. Henry Morton Stanley represented the Missouri Democrat in St. Louis, and he also wrote for other papers. Born John Rowlands in Wales in 1841, Stanley had a childhood that “was Dickensian in its hardships.” His parents were unmarried and his birth certificate recorded him as a “bastard.” His father died and his mother abandoned him. Raised by his maternal grandfather until he was five, he was sent to a workhouse for the poor when the old man died. He managed to secure an elementary education and at seventeen or eighteen took a ship to the United States as a cabin boy. In New Orleans he found work and, according to his autobiography, a cotton merchant named Henry Morton Stanley adopted him, and he took his benefactor’s name. He joined the Confederacy during the Civil War and was at the Battle of Shiloh, but after being imprisoned he joined the US Navy. Soon after the war, he began a career as a newspaper reporter and traveled to Turkey, where he found himself in jail again, though he apparently talked his way out of the predicament. Returning to St. Louis, he was assigned by the Missouri Democrat to accompany General Hancock’s expedition in the spring of 1867; he covered the treaty councils on the Platte and continued to report for the paper until November 1867.18
Milton Reynolds, a small man with a goatee, had lived on the Kansas frontier since 1862 and had established a daily newspaper in Lawrence called the State Journal; he now covered the story for the Chicago Times and also dispatched stories to the New York Herald. A seasoned reporter, he provided the most comprehensive account of the Kiowa-Comanche treaty and was not afraid to take on Kansas politicians in his columns. S. F. Hall, reporting for the Chicago Tribune, showed interest in and empathy for the Indians. George Brown of the Cincinnati Commercial and H. J. Budd of the Cincinnati Gazette did not; they had little good to say about either the commissioners or the Indians. William Fayel reported for the St. Louis Missouri Republican; he spent a lot of time walking through the Indian camps, demonstrated an interest in Plains Indian life and culture, and produced the most complete account of the Cheyenne-Arapaho negotiations. A New York Herald reporter named Solomon T. Bulkley had covered the Civil War for the paper and had been held as a prisoner of war in Virginia for seven months. James E. Taylor was the artist for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper; John Howland, Harper’s Weekly artist, had traveled in the Southwest, wore fringed buckskin leggings, carried a Navy Colt revolver, and “told funny stories.” He spoke Spanish and signed on as an official member of the commission as a shorthand stenographer. The newspapermen each had their own styles, opinions, and biases, but Stanley thought them all “good souls.” The reports they dispatched made Medicine Lodge one of the most thoroughly covered Indian treaties.19
The commissioners held their first meeting in St. Louis in August. They agreed to send runners to the tribes north and south of the Platte River to assemble at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in September and at Fort Larned, Kansas, in October.20 Then they traveled by steamer to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they held interviews with General Hancock, the renowned Jesuit missionary Father Pierre De Smet, and Governor Samuel Crawford. Heading up the Missouri to Omaha, they set out across the High Plains toward Fort Laramie. In September 1867, the commission met with Oglala, Brulé, and Northern Cheyenne delegates in North Platte, Nebraska, but nothing was settled and negotiations were suspended, both sides agreeing to meet again at Fort Laramie in the spring. Returning to Omaha, the commissioners turned their attention to the southern Plains. They boarded the Union Pacific for Fort Harker and then traveled by military ambulance to Fort Larned.
The site and date of the Medicine Lodge council had been fixed three months beforehand. Thomas Murphy, head of the central Indian superintendency, was responsible for the arrangements. Working with Edward Wynkoop, a Cheyenne and Arapaho agent who had been the commander at Fort Lyon prior to the Sand Creek massacre and testified in the subsequent investigations, and with Jesse Leavenworth, an agent for the Kiowas, Comanches, and Southern Cheyennes, Murphy sent out runners during the summer to call the bands together for the peace talks. Most of the runners were Arapahos although the trader William Bent and his sons George and Charley also helped to spread the word among the Cheyennes.21
William Bent had sent his sons to school in Westport, Missouri (present-day Kansas City), and in St. Louis. When the Civil War broke out, the brothers joined the Confederate Army and served under General Sterling Price. George was captured and released on parole and by 1863 he had returned to his mother’s people, just in time to be thrown into the middle of another war. He and his half brother Charley were in the village at Sand Creek when Chivington’s Colorado militia, guided at gunpoint by their brother Robert, attacked. George was wounded and he and Charley fought alongside Cheyenne warriors in vengeance raids. But George married Magpie, a daughter or niece of the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, and at Medicine Lodge, he was trying to bring the bands in to talk peace (figure 6.2).
FIGURE 6.2 George Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Magpie, 1867. Magpie gave birth to a daughter on the opening day of the Medicine Lodge council. (Courtesy of History Colorado, Scan #10025735)
The commissioners arrived at Fort Larned, eighty miles northeast of Medicine Lodge, on October 12. There they were met by several chiefs whom Murphy had asked to escort them to the council site: the Crow, Stumbling Bear, and Satanta of the Kiowas, and Little Raven, Yellow Bear, and Wolf Slave of the Arapahos.
FIGURE 6.3 Satanta. Photograph by W. S. Soule c. 1867. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives)
Satanta, or White Bear (figure 6.3) was a member of an elite warrior society known as the Koietsenko, Katsienko, or Qóichégàu (“the Real/Principal Dogs” or “Sentinel Horses”); as one of only ten sash wearers in the society, he was considered one of the Kiowas’ “greatest and bravest warriors.”22 Contemporaries described him as “a man of magnificent physique, being over six feet tall, well built and finely proportioned.” He also had a reputation for oratory and theatrics, arrogance and boastfulness, characteristics he displayed at Medicine Lodge.23 He had built a record and a reputation as a fierce raider. On one occasion, after driving off horses from Fort Larned, Satanta sent a message to the post commander, complaining about the quality of the horses and expressing his hope that the army would provide better animals for him to steal in the future. On another, dressed in clothes he had been given at a council, he led a raid that stampeded the herd at Fort Dodge. “He had the politeness, however, to raise his plumed hat to the garrison of the fort, though he discourteously shook his coattails at them as he rode away with the captured stock.”24 He was about fifty years old in 1867. His face was painted red, he wore a blanket, and he carried a brass bugle hanging from his waist. He had met Henry Stanley the year before and now greeted him with “a gigantic bear’s hug.” The other members of the press “looked upon him with some awe, having heard so much of his ferocity and boldness. By his defiant and independent bearing he attracted all eyes.” Stanley felt “he would certainly be a formidable enemy to encounter alone on the prairie.” Satanta boasted that he had killed more white men than any other Indian on the Plains.25 He had also declared that he wanted all military posts and troops removed from his country immediately.26
The reporter William Fayel was impressed with Satanta’s “splendid physique” and with his reputation as a terror to frontier whites. He noted: “His head is large and massive, measuring twenty-three inches around the cranium only one inch less than that of Daniel Webster.” Another correspondent reckoned the crania of Satanta and Webster were of equal size. The scenario of newspaper correspondents sitting down the infamous warrior and measuring his head is certainly bizarre, but as the historian Charles Robinson notes, it is “not unlikely considering their curiosity, the nineteenth-century fascination with physiognomy, and Satanta’s vanity.”27 Satanta was loud and effusive, and one correspondent thought he was drunk. At one point he abruptly announced that he wanted to leave because “it stink too much white man here,” but the commissioners informed him he had to remain and escort them to Medicine Lodge. Robinson suggests that Satanta’s “bluster concealed his nervousness” in a situation he could not control. He calmed down after a few drinks.28
At Fort Larned, wrote Henry Stanley, “we were joined by an army of special agents, special bosses, special caterers, special bummers, each sent on special business by the Government.” After a day there, the assemblage set off on the sixty-mile journey to Medicine Lodge, a huge cavalcade stretching five miles as it threaded its way across the plains. Satanta rode in the lead wagon with General Harney. Behind them trailed the other commissioners, two (later increased to four) companies of the Seventh Cavalry, a battery of artillery equipped with Gatling guns; soldiers and the regimental band of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry; news correspondents, Indians, and an entourage of aides, bureaucrats, camp attendants, teamsters, cooks, interpreters, and other camp followers: a column of 600 people, at least 165 (and perhaps as many as 211) wagons and ambulances, and 1,250 horses and mules.29 The Seventh Cavalry was temporarily without its commander—Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer had been suspended for leaving his troops to visit his wife without authorization—and Major Joel Elliott was the officer in command. En route, the caravan encountered a buffalo herd and many in the party took the opportunity to join a hastily organized hunt. The fact that they took only the tongues from the fallen animals infuriated Satanta. “Has the white man become a child, that he should kill the buffalo for sport?” he demanded. “An unprejudiced man could not blame him for his language,” one of the reporters admitted.30
The Peace Commission reached Medicine Lodge on October 14. Thousands of Indian ponies grazed the nearby hills and five different camp circles were already there. As the commissioners entered the valley at its northwestern end, the nearest encampment was that of the Arapahos, consisting of 171 lodges; across the stream were 250 Cheyenne lodges. The Plains Apaches were farther down the creek, with 85 lodges on the same side as the Arapahos. The Comanches were encamped in 100 lodges across the creek from the Apaches, and the 150 Kiowa lodges were at the far end. In total, about five thousand Indians eventually congregated in the area.31
A group of chiefs came to welcome the commissioners. One of them was Black Kettle. In October 1867, he was the only prominent Cheyenne chief advocating peace. In the wake of Sand Creek and Hancock’s campaign, the Dog Soldiers and Roman Nose were calling the shots for most Cheyennes. Roman Nose stayed away from Medicine Lodge. Nervous enough about being amid so many Indians, the commissioners were especially apprehensive about the proximity, a day’s ride to the south, of a large Cheyenne encampment forty miles away on the Cimarron River, who they feared might disrupt the council. Black Kettle seems to have been apprehensive about them, too (at one point, Dog Soldiers threatened to kill his horses). When the Dog Soldier chief Bull Bear visited camp, newspaper reporters recognized him as “the man of the Cheyennes.” The Cheyennes were also apprehensive about the commissioners and their large entourage. “For two weeks they kept themselves at a distance, sending in small parties to discover if possible our true intentions.”32 In fact, the Cheyennes were gathered at the Cimarron for the renewal of the Sacred Arrows, their most important ceremony, which the whole tribe was summoned to attend. (Black Kettle’s absence may have triggered the threats against him.)33
Preliminary talks began on October 15. The commissioners had set up two hospital tents, facing one another with flysheets between them and, shielded from the sun, they sat waiting for the Indians to assemble.34 Senator Henderson was in a hurry to get down to business but Commissioner Taylor insisted on doing things according to Indian protocol, which meant being patient. The Comanches made a point of keeping everyone waiting. Taylor gave a short welcome and the various chiefs reciprocated. But intertribal rivalries threatened to end the meeting before it began. The Kiowas and Arapahos wanted to start talks immediately and threatened to leave because the Cheyennes had asked that the talks be postponed for eight days. The other tribes were suspicious that some separate agreement had been made with the Cheyennes. The chiefs assembled in a semicircle around the commissioners, who lined up at the front of the tent. The dark suits and army uniforms of the commissioners contrasted with the colorful trade blankets, breechcloths, leggings, moccasins, eagle feathers, beads, trade silver, soldier’s coats, and occasional hats of the Indians. Satanta, Black Eagle, Kicking Bird, and Fishermore represented the Kiowas. Fishermore was the senior counselor; Stanley described him as “a stout Indian of ponderous proportions, and [he] speaks five languages. He is a favorite with all the tribes.” Ten Bears, the Yamparika Comanche chief, scoffed: “What I say is law for the Comanches, but it takes half a dozen to speak for the Kiowas.” Ten Bears said the Comanches were willing to talk when the Kiowas did. Poor Bear, speaking for the Apaches, said he would wait only four more days for the talks to begin. Eventually, the commissioners agreed to start the talks in five days. The council adjourned and rations of flour, coffee, and sugar were distributed to each tribe. Ten Bears had been to Washington and met President Lincoln: “You laid out the road once before and we traveled it,” he told the commissioners.35 Commissioner Taylor knew from Jesse Leavenworth that Ten Bears “is a very good man, and is doing more than any other to preserve peace between the Red and white man.”36 Now a worn, gray-haired old man, possibly around seventy, Ten Bears peered at the commissioners through gold-rimmed spectacles (see figure 6.4). But he was quick-witted, understood the issues at stake and, noted the historian Douglas Jones, was the only man at the council who ever managed to get Satanta to stop talking!37
While the preliminary talks were going on, reported Stanley, “the honorable gentlemen” of the Peace Commission occupied themselves in different ways. Harney, “with head erect,” watched the faces of the Indians. Sanborn “picked his teeth and laughed jollily.” Tappan read reports about Hancock’s destruction of the Indian village at Pawnee Creek. Henderson, “with eyeglass in hand, seemed buried in deep study.” Terry “busied himself in printing alphabetical letters, and Augur whittled away with energy.” Agent Leavenworth “made by-signals to old Satank.” The newspaper correspondents “sat à la Turque on the ground, their pencils flying over the paper.”38
At dusk, about eighty Cheyenne warriors arrived from the Cimarron. Painted, armed, and chanting, they rode their ponies across Medicine Lodge Creek to the edge of the commissioners’ camp. Two Dog Soldier chiefs, Gray Head and Tall Bull, dismounted and shook hands with General Harney whom they had met before, but most of the warriors remained sitting on their ponies while their chiefs conversed with the general in his tent. When they emerged, Gray Head said his men were hungry after their ride from the Cimarron and they went to Black Kettle’s camp to share the rations there. Late that night, they rode back to the Cimarron.39 Two evenings later, Gray Head and Tall Bull returned to talk with the commissioners, this time minus the escort of chanting warriors. Gray Head said his people were not hostile but after Sand Creek and Hancock’s attack on the Pawnee Fork village he could not speak for other Cheyennes.40
FIGURE 6.4 Ten Bears. Photograph by Alexander Gardner. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives)
In the days before the formal talks began, the commissioners took depositions on the causes of the warfare on the Plains. Wynkoop blamed the Sand Creek massacre and General Hancock’s campaign. Major Henry Douglass, a former commandant at Fort Dodge, blamed Satanta.41 The news reporters and some of the officers visited the Indian camps and some recorded descriptions of Indian life. Some of them attended a dance in the Arapaho camp.42
The tribes at Medicine Lodge had their own histories, rivalries, and foreign policies. The Comanches had pushed most Apache groups off the Plains in the eighteenth century. The Kiowas were longtime allies of the Comanches, and both were enemies of the Cheyennes and Arapahos until 1840 when they fashioned a peace of mutual benefit. The Indians at Medicine Lodge spoke several languages. Most spoke Comanche, a Shoshonean language that had developed into the lingua franca of the southern Plains as a result of Comanche dominance and trade networks. Few spoke Kiowa, a Tanoan language quite unlike others spoken on the Plains. An army officer who had heard Kiowa in the 1840s described it as “an entirely different language” from Comanche, “being much more deep and guttural, striking upon the ear like the sound of falling water.” Cheyenne and Arapaho are related Algonquian languages but are not mutually intelligible. The Indians also used sign language. Three interpreters—George Bent, Philip McCusker, and A. A. Whitaker—signed the treaties as witnesses but there were more. They had their work cut out for them. McCusker, a former army scout with a Comanche wife, was the busiest because the speeches were often translated first into Comanche, and then from Comanche into other languages. Satanta occasionally switched from Kiowa to Comanche. McCusker may also have had a smattering of Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache, although Kiowas told the anthropologist James Mooney in the 1890s that McCusker spoke only Comanche and that a Kiowa called Bao (Cat), or Having Horns, translated his words. Richard Henry Pratt, who used McCusker as an interpreter during the Red River War, said he was “a most capable Comanche linguist” and proficient in sign language but had difficulty understanding Kiowa. McCusker earned more than the other interpreters at Medicine Lodge—$583.65—although that was not all that he asked for: General Sherman rejected his voucher for $1,565 ($5 per day for 313 days) as unreasonable.43
Jesse Chisholm, the part-Cherokee trader, guide, and cattle rancher, and the ubiquitous Delaware scout Black Beaver also served as interpreters. William Bent and three of his children, George, Charley, and Julia, interpreted for the Cheyennes. Charley wore a red trade blanket much like others in the Cheyenne delegation, but George dressed for the occasion and for his intermediary role, wearing a broadcloth suit, vest, cravat, and moccasins. George’s wife, Magpie, gave birth to a daughter on October 19, the opening day of the council. Also present were John Simpson Smith and Ed Guerrier, who was the son of a white father and a Cheyenne mother and had attended St. Louis University. Guerrier married Julia Bent. Like the Bent brothers, Smith and Guerrier had been in the Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek, where Smith’s son Jack had been murdered.44
The interpreter who attracted the most attention was the thirty-three-year-old daughter of a Kentucky-born trader and an Arapaho mother named Margaret or Walking Woman. She was the daughter of the trader John Poisal or Pizelle (who interpreted at the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851) and Snake Woman (who had been taken captive from the Blackfeet as a small child and was the adopted sister of an Arapaho chief named Left Hand). In 1849, Margaret married Thomas Fitzpatrick, the first US agent to the Arapahos. They had two children. After Fitzpatrick died in 1854, leaving her well provided for, Margaret married an American from Ohio named L. J. Wilmarth or Wilmott, with whom she lived in Denver and Leavenworth, Kansas. By the time of the Medicine Lodge treaty, she had married a third time and was now Mrs. Margaret Adams. She accompanied Little Raven as the Arapaho interpreter. She caused a sensation when she showed up wearing “crimson petticoat, black cloth cloak, and a small coquettish velvet hat, decorated with a white ostrich feather.”45 According to one reporter, she usually showed up drunk. The Plains Apaches spoke an Athapaskan language. Bulkley said an Apache-speaking Arapaho translated the Apaches’ speeches into Arapaho, and then Mrs. Adams translated them into English. The Indian speakers often had to pause after each sentence while their words were translated into three languages. It was a precarious chain of communication by which to convey philosophies and worldviews central to the way of life they were trying to preserve.
The great council finally got under way on October 19 at ten o’clock in the morning. In a grove of elms and cottonwoods, the commissioners sat under a brush arbor facing a huge half circle of four hundred chiefs. The principal chiefs sat on logs in the front row of the half circle. The Kiowas were on the left. Satanta sat in front on an army campstool, wearing an army coat given to him by General Hancock. Immediately behind Satanta sat Satank and Kicking Bird.46
Unlike Satanta, Satank (Sitting Bear) was an old man of slender build. But he was a formidable presence. Satank was one of the architects of the Great Peace made with the Cheyennes in 1840 and was “the foremost warrior in a nation of warriors.” As head of the Koietsenko society, he wore a broad elk-skin sash across his chest from his left shoulder and he carried a ceremonial arrow. The lower end of the sash trailed the ground; when the Kiowas went into battle the sash wearer dismounted in front of the warriors and thrust the arrow through a hole in the sash, pinning himself to the ground. He could only retreat if freed by his warriors. Like Satanta, Satank had a fearsome reputation as a killer of whites, but on this occasion he wore a peace medal bearing a likeness of President Buchanan.47 Unlike Satanta, he remained quiet throughout most of the talks. Kicking Bird represented the peace faction of the Kiowas. Satanta was in a power struggle with Kicking Bird’s peace faction and also with Lone Wolf for control of the war faction.
FIGURE 6.5 American depiction of the Medicine Lodge treaty. Medicine Lodge Council, 1867. Sketched by John Howland for Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1867, p. 724. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives)
The Comanches sat to the left of the Kiowas, with Ten Bears at their head and McCusker in front of them. Black Kettle and Gray Head, with the Bents sitting behind them, represented the Cheyennes. Mrs. Adams, “in a new crimson gown, specially worn for this important occasion,” sat in a folding chair near Little Raven, whom Stanley characterized as a good-natured, “fat, short, asthmatic fellow.” Poor Bear and the Plains Apaches were on the far right. Fishermore, “the lusty crier of the Kiowa nation,” opened the council, calling in the tribes “to do right above all things”48 (figures 6.5 and 6.6).
Commissioner Taylor called the council to order and Senator Henderson got down to business outlining their goals. There must be peace on the Plains, he said. Indians had attacked railroad construction crews and murdered settlers, but white men were far from blameless. The commissioners wanted to hear the Indians’ side of the story so they could remove their causes of complaint and bring the war to an end. Furthermore, the government intended to civilize the Indians. The commissioners were authorized to set aside some of the “richest agricultural lands” for the Indians and furnish farming implements, cattle, sheep, and hogs; they were authorized to build churches and schools and provide teachers for their children.49
FIGURE 6.6 Indian depiction of the Medicine Lodge treaty. “Treaty Signing at Medicine Lodge” by Howling Wolf from a ledger book done at Fort Marion, Florida, 1876. The Cheyenne warrior-artist Howling Wolf, who was probably in Black Kettle’s village at the time of the treaty, recorded the scene nine years later when he was a prisoner of war in Fort Marion. Indians encamped at the forks of the river watch the council, with the commissioners wearing hats in a grove of elm trees. (Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, PRI0672–11)
Satanta “became uneasy, buried his hands in the ground, and rubbed sand over them.” He then shook hands with everyone and stood in the circle to speak. His heart was glad to see the commissioners and he would hide nothing from them, he said. It was the Cheyennes who had been fighting the Americans, not the Kiowas and Comanches, who had kept the peace. Then he announced: “All the land south of the Arkansas belongs to the Kiowas and Comanches, and I don’t want to give away any of it. I love the land and the buffalo, and will not part with it.” He said the Kiowas did not want to fight and that they had not fought since the Little Arkansas treaty, which was not the case. Indicating the commissioners, he said: “I hear a good deal of talk from these gentlemen, but they never do what they say. I don’t want any of these medicine homes [i.e., churches and schools] built in the country.” He wanted to see his children raised as he was and he had no intention of settling down: “I love to roam over the prairie; I feel free and happy; but when we settle down we get pale and die.” When he traveled to the Arkansas River, he saw soldiers cutting down timber and killing buffalo, “and when I see it my heart feels like bursting with sorrow.” “I have told you the truth,” Satanta asserted. “I have no little lies about me; but I don’t know how it is with the Commissioners.” He then sat down and wrapped a crimson blanket around himself. According to Henry Stanley, the commissioners gave Satanta “a rather blank look.”50
Ten Bears echoed Satanta’s sentiments. The Comanches wanted to be left free to live as they had lived and to go where they pleased. They had fought to defend their lands in Texas. “I have no wisdom,” Ten Bears concluded rather tongue in cheek, looking at the commissioners. “I expect to get some from you.” Silver Brooch, a Paneteka Comanche who had accompanied Ten Bears to Washington and had met Lincoln, recited his people’s struggle against the Texans and reminded the commissioners that following the white man’s path had not helped his people much. They had been given many promises but had received little. “My band is dwindling away fast,” he said. “My young men are a scoff and a by-word among the other nations. I shall wait until next spring to see if these things shall be given us; if they are not, I and my young men will return with our wild brothers to live on the prairie,” perhaps a reference to the Kwahadi Comanches out on the Staked Plains who were not represented at the treaty. The old chief Poor Bear promised that his Plains Apaches would listen to the commissioners’ words and “follow the straight road,” but they were anxious to return south. The preliminary speeches took up most of the day. The meeting adjourned until the next morning.51
Before evening the commissioners drafted the treaty they intended to present to the Kiowas and Comanches. The United States had no intention of leaving them to roam the Plains, and the commissioners knew that the buffalo herds on which the tribes based their existence and their future would soon be destroyed. But in order to get them to accept the treaty and make the bitter pill of reservation life more palatable, the commissioners offered to continue the Indians’ hunting rights below the Arkansas River and in the Texas Panhandle, an offer that was almost certain to spawn conflicts with American settlers who were already living in the region. The commissioners were still nervous about the Cheyennes out on the Plains. After dark a dozen Osages turned up, evidently to see what was going on. They complained about their agent, shoddy provisions, and thefts of their horses. The Osages were enemies of the Kiowas but they left without incident.52
The meeting reconvened on Sunday, October 20, but things did not go smoothly. Senator Henderson and General Harney had a “spat.” The Indians drifted in late and some of the warriors were hungover, although the chiefs were not. It was almost noon before the proceedings got under way. The Kiowas and Comanches continued to object to schools and farms. Ten Bears spoke first: “There is one thing which is not good in your speeches; that is, building us medicine houses. We don’t want any. I want to live and die as I was brought up. I love the open prairie, and I wish you would not insist on putting us on a reservation.” If the Texans had been kept out of Comanche country, there might have been peace and the Comanches might have lived on a reservation, he said, but the Texans had already taken the lands where the grass grew thickest and the timber was best and now it was too late to do what the commissioners wanted. The assembled Indians voiced their approval of his words as the old man sat down. Satanta got to his feet and said everything that needed to be said had been said yesterday. But he did demand that the annuities be delivered on schedule for a change and asked for a new agent for the Comanches, in place of Jesse Leavenworth, joint agent for the Kiowas and Comanches. At some point, Satanta and Ten Bears got into a heated argument and the old Comanche said his people liked Leavenworth and did not want him removed. For a moment, it looked like the council might unravel. Nevertheless, by the end of the second day the Kiowas and Comanches agreed in principle to the idea of a reservation in what is now southwestern Oklahoma.53
Senator Henderson wrapped up the council with a classic expression of United States Indian policy that blended humanitarian concern, paternalism, cultural arrogance, cynicism, hypocrisy, and veiled threats. Stanley thought it so important that he copied it down verbatim:
You say you do not like the medicine houses of the whites, but you like the buffalo and the chase, and that you wish to do as your fathers did.
We say to you that the buffalo will not last forever. They are now becoming few and you must know it.
When that day comes, the Indian must change the road his father trod, or he must suffer, and probably die. We tell you that to change will make you better. We wish you to live, and we will now offer the way.
The whites are settling up all the good lands. They have come to the Arkansas River. When they come, they drive out the buffalo. If you oppose them, war must come. They are many and you are few. You may kill some of them, but others will come and take their places. And finally, many of the red men will have been killed, and the rest will have no homes. We are your best friends, and now, before all the good lands are taken by whites, we wish to set aside a part of them for your exclusive home.
The government was offering the Indians an alternative to that bleak future. They must settle down, learn to farm, send their children to school, and take their place in American society. The government would feed, clothe, and educate them, and provide a physician, a blacksmith, and a farmer to instruct them. The Indians, however, did not share the commissioners’ enthusiasm for American-style civilization. Nor did they share their sense of urgency: they would hunt buffalo as long as they could and then worry about making the transition to farming. Henderson assured them they could continue to hunt buffalo south of the Arkansas River. Convinced that the Indians would not accept the treaty without such a provision, and over the objections of the military commissioners who argued that the concession would jeopardize the peace they were trying to establish, Henderson inserted a clause to that effect in the treaty. As Douglas Jones noted, this provision made the treaty “a bit ambiguous.”54 Also ambiguous was the promise of a “permanent” reservation; by their very role in the process of transforming Indians into individual property owners, reservations were designed to be impermanent.55 The commissioners spent most of the next day explaining the terms to the Kiowas and Comanches. Henderson assured them that the purpose of the treaty was to give them more goods than they received before. “It is solely for your good and not for the good of the whites,” he lied.56
At some point Kicking Bird, the Kiowa peace chief (figure 6.7), made clear his opinion of what the Indians were being offered, in a way that stuck in the memory of artillery officer Edward Godfrey sixty years later. At the end of his speech, the Kiowa chief remained standing, “his gaze fixed on the high silk hat in front of one of the commissioners.” When the commissioner asked what he wanted, he replied, “I want that hat.” Thinking he intended just to look at it, the commissioner handed it over, but Kicking Bird took it and walked away. “Later, he appeared in the immediate vicinity of the council tents arrayed in moccasins, breechclout, and the high hat. He stalked back and forth, telling the tribesmen to look at him; that he ‘was walking in the white man’s ways,’ and using other set phrases that had been used in the council. Finally he grew tired of the burlesque, set the hat on the ground, and used it as a football until he had battered it out of shape, then stalked away.”57
On October 21, the chiefs duly made their marks on the treaty.58 It pledged the Kiowas and Comanches and the United States to live in peace. Individual violators of the peace, whether Indian or white, would be dealt with under US law. Annuities would be delivered to the agency every October for thirty years: each male fourteen years or older would receive a suit of good woolen clothing, “consisting of coat, pantaloons, flannel shirt, hat, and a pair of home-made socks”; each female would get one flannel skirt or cloth to make it, a pair of woolen hose, and other material; and there would be clothes for children. The secretary of the interior would be allotted $25,000 each year to spend on necessities for the Indians and Congress was prohibited from changing the amount. The treaty outlined the boundaries of the reservation, for “the absolute and undisturbed use” of the Indians. The Kiowas and Comanches agreed to live on a reservation on lands ceded by the Choctaws and Chickasaws, between the Canadian and Red rivers, west of the ninety-eighth meridian. In effect, they gave up claims to some ninety million acres in exchange for a reservation of less than three million acres in the southwestern corner of Indian Territory, a tiny fragment of the Kiowa and Comanche range.59 The treaty set aside 160 acres of farm land for each member of the tribes on the reservation, and it specified the buildings that would be constructed—an agency building, medical facility, school, sawmill, and buildings for a blacksmith, carpenter, miller, farmer, and engineer. Instead of living at a nearby army post, as was common practice, the Indian agent would live on the reservation. Article 6 of the treaty stipulated that heads of families who wished to farm could select 320 acres with the agent’s assistance, and that tract would be taken out of the tribe’s communal land and became the private property of the individual and his family. The land was not held in fee simple, but the president could give it fee simple status at his discretion. The transactions would be recorded in a land book. This provision was the core of the government’s “civilization program”: the Indians would give up an entire way of life and their former independence in exchange for the right to work and to own a piece of real estate.60 Once an Indian selected land for farming he was entitled to up to $100 in seeds and farming implements for the first year and up to $25 for the next three years. Silver Brooch was the only individual mentioned in the text of the treaty. Because he was already farming in the area set aside for the reservation, the treaty authorized $750 to build a house for him and his family.
FIGURE 6.7 Kicking Bird. Photograph by W. S. Soule. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives)
Article 7 stipulated that “in order to insure the civilization of the tribes,” children aged six to sixteen would be compelled to attend school. For every thirty students the government would provide a teacher “competent to teach elementary branches of an English education.” Some colonial colleges had recruited Indian students, and some earlier American treaties had included clauses providing for education, but this was a new departure: the government was now committed to making education mandatory for Indian children. Education had become “an integral part of an aggressive policy of pacification.”61
In Article 11 the Indians relinquished all rights to permanently occupy the territory outside their reservation, but retained the right to continue hunting south of the Arkansas “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.” They also agreed to stop harassing railroad construction crews, wagon trains, settlers, and army posts. Article 12 stipulated that no part of the reservation could be ceded without the consent of at least three-quarters of the adult male population. It appeared almost as an afterthought in the treaty and the Indians must have thought it sounded like a solid guarantee that they would never lose more land. The newspaper correspondents paid little attention to it,62 but in years to come this provision—or rather the breach of it—would have major repercussions.
Beyond agreeing to peace, it is difficult to believe that the Kiowas and Comanches understood all the treaty’s provisions or had them fully explained, and it is doubtful that they would have signed it had they done so. At the treaty signing Satanta repeated his sentiment that “this building of houses for us is all nonsense; we don’t want you to build any for us. We would all die.” He wanted all his land from the Arkansas to the Red River, and he did not want houses. Time enough to worry about settling down when the buffalo were all gone. Ten Bears said he wanted the houses built, but only if they were completed before the next summer; so many things had been promised before and not delivered. Kicking Bird asked why they needed a new treaty since they had not broken the one they made on the Arkansas two years before: “I don’t see any necessity for making new treaties. You are piling more papers here, one after another. Are you ever going to get through with all this talk?”63 Ten Kiowas and ten Comanches signed, including Satanta, Satank, Kicking Bird, Stumbling Bear, Fishermore, and Ten Bears. Then annuity goods were distributed: two thousand uniforms, two thousand blankets, tobacco, bolts of cloth, axes, knives, mirrors, needles and thread, and fifty revolvers—an event marred by the fact that three of the pistols exploded when their new owners tried to fire them. The Kiowas and Comanches loaded their ponies and headed back along the creek to their encampment.64
In the evening an autumn storm hit. That night a group of Cheyennes, blanketed against the wind and rain, emerged out of the dark at the commissioners’ tent and asked for a conference. It was Black Kettle, together with Little Robe, Grey Beard, and White Horse from the Cimarron encampment. The Cimarron chiefs said they were ready to talk peace but they could not begin talks for four days, after they had finished their Medicine Arrow ceremony, and they wanted the Kiowas and Comanches to remain at the treaty to hear what was said. The commissioners reluctantly agreed to the delay, but only after some debate and disagreement—Senator Henderson was anxious to wrap things up and declared he was leaving for St. Louis; General Harney was determined to wait for the Cheyennes and threatened to have Henderson arrested until they arrived! No one could promise that the other Indians would stay to hear what the Cheyennes had to say. Meanwhile, Little Raven told Superintendent Murphy that the Arapahos wanted to negotiate separately from the Cheyennes, and the Plains Apaches told him they wanted to share a reservation with their Kiowa and Comanche allies. The commissioners ignored Little Raven’s request but promptly met the Apache’s request with an appendix to the Kiowa-Comanche treaty. The Plains Apaches agreed to confederate with the Kiowas and Comanches and live on the same reservation.65
Stanley summed it all up: “Much breath has been expended, and many fine poetical sentiments wasted on the prairie air. Councils have broken up time and again with eternal promises of love and friendship on both sides, many a shaking of hands and gesticulations, the meaning and the true interpretation of which is only known to the favored few.” On the morning of October 22, the Kiowas and Comanches gathered to receive the treaty presents. Wagonloads of goods were distributed: blankets, army coats, cotton clothes, knives, ammunition, thousands of glass beads, and hundreds of army surplus brass bugles.66 On a one-hundred-year pictorial calendar recorded by the Kiowa artist Silver Horn, the Treaty of Medicine Lodge is represented by a pile of trade goods placed between a Kiowa and a bearded white man in a hat and uniform coat, beneath an American flag.67
Kicking Bird gave Commissioner Taylor a hunting pony and some Arapahos brought General Harney a gift of buffalo meat. Some Kiowas and Comanches, anxious to reach their winter grazing ranges, took down their lodges and headed south, but others stayed for the next round of talks. In the days that followed whites and Indians visited back and forth. In the Kiowa encampment the newspaper reporters met two white women, one Irish, one German, who had been captured as children and now lived as Kiowas. Neither had any interest in leaving.68
Satank (see figure 6.8) had not spoken during the negotiations. On October 24 or 25, before he left for the winter hunting grounds, he rode up to the council tent, dismounted, and addressed the commissioners. It is not clear whether he spoke in Kiowa or Comanche, or who interpreted—presumably McCusker was involved—but Stanley told his readers that he took down the old man’s words verbatim in shorthand. George Wills, the commission stenographer, also was there. Standing alone before the Peace Commission, holding the silver peace medal that hung around his neck, the old man said:
It has made me very glad to meet you, who are the commissioners sent by the Great Father to see us. You have heard much talk by our chiefs, and no doubt are tired of it. Many of them have put themselves forward and filled you with their sayings. I have kept back and said nothing—not that I did not consider myself the principal chief of the Kiowa Nation, but others younger than I desired to talk, and I left it to them.
Before leaving, however, as I now intend to go, I come to say that the Kiowas and Camaches [sic] have made with you a peace, and they intend to keep it. If it brings prosperity to us, we of course will like it the better. If it brings prosperity or adversity, we will not abandon it. It is our contract, and it shall stand.
Our people once carried war against Texas. We thought the Great Father would not be offended for the Texans had gone out from among his people, and became his enemies. You now tell us that they have made peace and returned to the great family. The Kiowas and Camanches will seek no bloody trail in their land. They have pledged their word and that word shall last, unless the whites break their contract and invite the horrors of war. We do not break treaties. We make but few contracts, and them we remember well. The whites make so many that they are liable to forget them. The white chief seems not able to govern his braves. The Great Father seems powerless in the face of his children. He sometimes becomes angry when he sees the wrongs of his people committed on the red man, and his voice becomes loud as the roaring winds. But like the wind it soon dies away and leaves the sullen calm of unheeded oppression. We hope now that a better time has come. If all would talk and then do as you have done the sun of peace would shine forever. We have warred against the white man, but never because it gave us pleasure. Before the day of oppression came, no white man came to our villages and went away hungry. It gave us more joy to share with them than it gave him to partake of our hospitality. In the far-distant past there was no suspicion among us. The world seemed large enough for both the red and the white man. Its broad plains seem now to contract, and the white man grows jealous of his red brother.
FIGURE 6.8 Satank, toward the end of his life. He wears the sash of the Koietsenko Warrior Society, and may have amputated his left little finger at the joint in mourning for the death of his son. Photograph by W. S. Soule. (Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society)
The white man once came to trade; he now comes as a soldier. He once put his trust in our friendship and wanted no shield but our fidelity. But now he builds forts and plants big guns on their walls. He once gave us arms and powder and ball, and bade us to hunt the game. We then loved him for his confidence; he now suspects our plighted faith and drives us to be his enemies; he now covers his face with the cloud of jealousy and anger, and tells us to begone, as an offended master speaks to his dog. Look at this medal I wear. By wearing this I have been made poor. Formerly, I was rich in horses and lodges—today I am the poorest of all. When you put this silver medal on my neck you made me poor.
We thank the Great Spirit that all these wrongs are now to cease and the old day of peace and friendship [is] to come again.
You came as friends. You talked as friends. You have partially heard our many complaints. To you they may have seemed trifling. To us they are everything.
You have not tried, as many have done, to make a new bargain merely to get the advantage.
You have not asked to make our annuities smaller, but unasked you have made them larger.
You have not withdrawn a single gift, but you have voluntarily provided more guarantees for our education and comfort.
When we saw these things done, we then said among ourselves, these are the men of the past. We at once gave you our hearts. You now have them. You know what is best for us. Do for us what is best. Teach us the road to travel, and we will not depart from it forever.
For your sakes the green grass shall no more be stained with the red blood of the pale-faces. Your people shall again be our people, and peace shall be between us forever. If wrong comes, we shall look to you for right and justice.
We know you will not forsake us, and tell your people also to act as you have done, to be as you have been.
I am old, but still am chief. I shall have soon to go the way of my fathers, but those who come after me will remember this day. It is now treasured up by the old, and will be carried by them to the grave, and then handed down to be kept as a sacred tradition by their children and their children’s children. And now the time has come that I must go. Good-bye!
You may never see me more, but remember Satank as the white man’s friend.
The old man passed down the line shaking hands with each of the commissioners, then mounted his pony and rode away. The correspondents and commissioners were moved by his words. Reporter H. J. Budd, who rarely had much good to say about Indians, wrote that he had heard plenty of oratory in Congress and in church “But never have I known true eloquence before this day.” Stanley said it was the best speech they heard at Medicine Lodge, equal to any by Red Jacket or Logan, and that there was “a good deal of truth in it which strikes home.” Satank closed the Kiowa treaty on a note of good feelings and hope for the future.69
Neither lasted long. Like the commissioners’ talks, Satank’s talk contained some wishful thinking and some half truths as well as hard truths. After Medicine Lodge the United States pressed on destroying the Kiowas’ way of life and Satank and Satanta went back to raiding.
There could be no peace without the Cheyennes, and although the commissioners and reporters were tired of the endless proceedings and “hankered for the flesh pots of St. Louis” and the joys of city life, they waited. The Cimarron Cheyennes finally showed up on October 27. The news that they were coming spread through the camp “like wildfire.” Led by the renowned Dog Soldiers (“modern Spartans, who knew how to die but not to be led captive,” wrote Stanley), five hundred warriors galloped in, chanting in unison, and firing their pistols in the air—an event that caused considerable alarm in the camp even though Little Robe had given the Peace Commission advance warning. They reined their horses to an abrupt halt right in front of the commissioners, a dramatic grand entry that impressed everyone: “The Wild Chivalry of the Prairie in Force,” said the Chicago Tribune. That evening a Cheyenne woman, who was giving gifts in celebration of the birth of her son, presented a pony to General Harney.70
The next day Henderson began the proceedings by explaining to the Cheyennes gathered in a semicircle before him that the Great Father had sent the commissioners to make peace. Bad men on both sides had caused bloodshed but, said the senator, “the world is big enough for both of us.” He then offered the Cheyennes the same treaty the Kiowas and Comanches had agreed to: they must stop attacking railroads and settlers and settle on a reservation of their own. The government would provide the implements and livestock they needed to become farmers: “In lieu of the buffalo you must have herds of oxen and flocks of sheep and droves of hogs, like the white man.” Nevertheless, so long as there were sufficient buffalo, the Cheyennes could continue to hunt south of the Arkansas River, in accordance with the terms of the Little Arkansas treaty.71
When Henderson had finished, the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs smoked and passed the pipe. Then Little Robe invited Little Raven to speak first, for the Arapahos. Somewhat surprised, Little Raven, who only a few days before had wanted a separate treaty and did not get it, now expressed his undying love for his Cheyenne friends. “The Cheyennes are like my own flesh and blood,” he said, “and what they do, I am concerned in it.” He said he was pleased with the idea of a reservation now that the buffalo were disappearing and hoped that whites would not encroach on it. If the whites were kept away, he promised not to interfere with the railroads. “As for myself, and men aged like me, we will be dead before the farms get to be productive, but those who come after us will enjoy them and have the benefit.” He repeated his request for a separate Arapaho reservation: “This country here don’t belong to me. It belongs to the Kiowas, Comanches, and Cheyennes. That country in Colorado belongs to me and I want to go there. I do not want to be mixed up with the other Indians.” He asked when the annuities would be delivered, hoped the commissioners would keep their promises, and requested that honest traders be appointed. However, the Arapahos did not get their Colorado reservation.72
Buffalo Chief spoke for the Cheyennes. Did the whites really want peace? Henderson assured him they did. Then the Cheyennes would not molest the railroads and travelers, Buffalo Chief said. But they did not want houses or to be treated as orphans: “You think that you are doing a great deal for us by giving these presents to us, but we prefer to live as formerly. If you gave us all the goods you could give, yet we would prefer our own life. You give us presents, and then take our land; that produces war.” In short, they just wanted to be left alone to live their own way of life as long as they could. When they chose to live like whites they would ask for advice; until then they would take their chances. The Cheyennes never claimed any land south of the Arkansas, said Buffalo Chief, “but that country between the Arkansas and the South Platte is ours.” Almost at the end of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, notes Douglas Jones, Buffalo Chief touched “the raw nerve that everyone had been afraid would be touched.” The territory he referred to was a vast expanse of territory embracing western Kansas and part of eastern Colorado. The Cheyennes and the Kiowas and Comanches had contested it and then shared it but the United States now wanted it cleared of Indians to make way for settlers and railroads. The Cheyenne land claim could wreck the whole treaty.73
Little Raven stood up again and said that the Arapahos wanted Mrs. Adams as their regular interpreter and wanted an honest trader on their reservation, but the commissioners were too busy worrying about how to deal with Buffalo Chief’s bombshell to pay him much heed. They didn’t pay much more attention when a Cheyenne Dog Soldier named Little Man launched into a tirade against the Kiowas and Comanches.74
For a moment, it looked as if the commissioners might have to adjourn the meeting and draw up a new treaty: clearly the Cheyennes would not agree to the one they had prepared. But Henderson was determined to get the treaty signed that day. Huddling with Buffalo Chief and several Dog Soldier chiefs at a distance from the council, with George Bent and John Smith interpreting and mediating, the senator hammered out a quick fix. He “explained to the Indians the obnoxious treaty clause” and that they did not have to go onto the reservation immediately. Henderson assured them that they could have hunting rights north of the Arkansas as far as the South Platte as long as there were buffalo and so long as they adhered to the terms of the Little Arkansas treaty and kept ten miles away from travel routes and white settlements. Henderson knew that, at the rate Americans were settling Kansas, the Cheyennes’ hunting would soon be severely restricted and the buffalo herds would not last long. But the Cheyennes bought his verbal promise and signed the treaty as it was written. Bull Bear (the head chief of the Dog Soldiers), White Horse, and Little Robe at first balked at touching the pen. (Indian leaders frequently objected to “touching the pen”: they were suspicious of it, thought it unnecessary, and did not always realize that affixing their names to the treaty signified their approval of everything in it, not just to the things they themselves had said.75) “By dint of infinite coaxing,” even the Dog Soldier chiefs were induced to fix their marks, although Bull Bear drove the pen through the paper when he signed. Little Raven led the Arapaho delegates in signing. Some Cheyennes refused to sign. Roman Nose stayed away from the council, and, perhaps most significantly, Medicine Arrows, also called Stone Forehead, the Keeper of the Sacred Arrows, would have nothing to do with the treaty. No provision authorizing the Cheyennes and Arapahos to hunt in the area between the Arkansas and the South Platte appeared in the final treaty ratified by the Senate; like the Kiowas and Comanches, they were permitted to hunt lands only south of the Arkansas.76
The terms of the Cheyenne treaty were essentially the same as those in the Kiowa and Comanche treaty, with the exception that the Cheyenne reservation was to be bounded on the north by the southern border of Kansas, on the east by the Arkansas River, and on the south and west by the Cimarron. It is difficult to believe the Cheyennes knew what they were getting into beyond agreeing to let the railroads through to secure peace. Stanley captured the essence of the Cheyenne position. They had been at war all summer and had come to Medicine Lodge at the commissioners’ invitation. “They had been conquerors, and we wished for peace. They did not wish any peace, but, since we asked it they, as brave men, were willing to accord it. As a recompense for this action we might, if we chose, build them schools, but they could not occupy them. They preferred the life they led.”77 As had the Kiowas and Comanches, the Cheyennes signed a treaty containing items they had expressly opposed during the treaty talks. On October 27, their Sacred Arrow ceremonies completed, they had galloped into Medicine Lodge full of power; the next day, they apparently agreed to surrender lands they said they would not give up, agreed to move to a reservation they said they did not want, agreed to have tribal members tried in white courts, agreed to have their children educated in English, and agreed to be trained to live as sedentary farmers. Alfred Barnitz, a captain in the Seventh Cavalry who was present during the negotiations, wrote that the Cheyennes “have no idea that they are giving up, or that they have ever given up the country which they claim as their own, the country north of the Arkansas. The treaty all amounts to nothing, and we will have another war sooner or later with the Cheyennes, at least, and probably with the other Indians, in consequence of misunderstanding of the terms of present and previous treaties.”78 George Bent later wrote that Medicine Lodge was “the most important treaty ever signed by the Cheyenne” in that it “marked the beginning of the end” for them as free and independent warriors and hunters.79
The Peace Commission had been at Medicine Lodge more than two weeks. Eager to get back to St. Louis now that the treaty was signed, the commissioners had the treaty presents delivered promptly to the Cheyennes and Arapahos. The Arapahos held a dance for the commissioners that night, in another rainstorm, and the next morning the great council at Medicine Lodge broke up. The commissioners headed back east to St. Louis where they met and briefed General Sherman.80 Reaching St. Louis after a seventy-five-hour journey, Taylor telegraphed the secretary of the interior with the good news: “Please congratulate the President and the country upon the entire success of the Indian Peace Commission thus far.” Treaties of peace had been concluded with the five tribes south of the Arkansas and “everything passed off satisfactorily.” The commission now turned its attention to the northern tribes.81
Henry Stanley agreed. When the Peace Commission began its work, war raged all across the Plains, he wrote. The commission met thousands of Indians in council “and turned their thoughts and feelings from war to peace.” “Peace has been concluded with all the Southern tribes,” declared Stanley. “Civilization is now on the move, and westward the Star of Empire will again resume its march, unimpeded in the great work of Progress.”82 After Medicine Lodge, Stanley’s newspaper career took a decided upward swing when he joined America’s most famous newspaper, the New York Herald. The Herald’s editor dispatched him on an expedition to “Darkest Africa” to find the famous missionary Henry Livingstone. Stanley’s success, and his greeting—“Doctor Livingstone, I presume”—won him world renown, and even a small measure of immortality. The first European to travel the full length of the Congo River, the illegitimate boy from the workhouse became one of the most famous, and controversial, British explorers of the Victorian era.83
Others who attended the treaty were not so fortunate. The commissioners had handed out peace medals to Satanta, Satank, Kicking Bird, and Black Eagle of the Kiowas, and to Tall Bull, Bull Bear, Little Robe, and the son of a former head chief of the Cheyennes.84 The chiefs would not have much peace.
Medicine Lodge was the last great treaty council held on the southern Plains and it was one of the very last treaties. The Great Peace Commission was a product of dissatisfaction and demand for change in Indian affairs but it failed to satisfy the dissatisfied or to effect the necessary changes. The commission was intended to bring peace to the Plains but it brought only an appearance of peace. In order to get the Indians to agree to the terms of the treaty, the commissioners had promised them they would be able to continue the very way of life the treaty was designed to terminate. They had persuaded the chiefs to touch the pen to documents the Senate could accept as valid treaties and which “gave the stamp of legitimacy to United States efforts to concentrate the Indians and open the region to white exploitation.” The Indians at Medicine Lodge accepted the peace treaty but rejected the new way of life that came with it, making conflict inevitable with the Americans who invaded their hunting lands.85 Back in the summer General Sherman was quoted as saying that the mission of the Peace Commission was “a humbug” and that it would achieve nothing. He now ordered that hostilities cease with the tribes who had signed the Medicine Lodge treaty and that their rights to hunt south of the South Platte be respected. Sherman’s goal was to clear the Natives out of the territory between the Platte and the Arkansas and he believed “it makes little difference whether they be coaxed out by Indian commissioners or killed.” He now informed General Ulysses Grant that “the chief use of the Peace Commission is to kill time which will do more to settle the Indians than anything we can do.”86 The flawed peace cobbled together at Medicine Lodge quickly unraveled as American expansion drove the pace of events even faster than the commissioners’ cynical schedule anticipated. As Douglas Jones points out, “October 28, 1867, was the last time the representatives of the United States ever sat at a treaty table with any of the Southern Plains tribes. The next time red and white diplomats met, terms were not offered, they were dictated.”87 Less than four years after Medicine Lodge the treaty system itself was terminated.
Press reports of the Medicine Lodge council had been appearing in newspapers while it was going on. Once the treaty was over, the commissioners prepared an official report.88 The press reports and the official report show essential agreement but, even before the official report was written, Major Joel Elliott, commander of the cavalry escort at Medicine Lodge and commander of the Seventh Cavalry during Custer’s fifteen-month suspension, was criticizing the Peace Commission and advocating tougher measures in fighting Indians. He filed his own dissenting report and sent it to General Sherman. Elliott claimed the treaties were never interpreted to the Indians, charged the commissioners with pandering to the Indians, and complained that the negotiations “were conducted in such a manner that anyone unacquainted with the relative strengths of the two contracting parties would have imagined the Indians to have been the stronger and we the suppliants.”89
Enoch Hoag, Indian superintendent for the central region, tried to see things from the Indians’ perspective. They had relinquished “a domain large enough for an empire, comprising some 400,000 square miles, with the agreement to abandon their accustomed chase, and move to a diminished and restricted reservation in the Indian territory, and enter upon the new and untried duties of civilized life, with the assurance on the part of our government of protection in all their rights”90 (see figure 6.9). But Congress was busy impeaching President Andrew Johnson and did not ratify the Medicine Lodge treaty until July 1868. The required appropriations were not included in that year’s budget, no annuities were paid, the reservations were not established on time, and the promised rations were not delivered on schedule.91 Congressmen argued at length about whether appropriations were pledges honoring treaties and payments for Indian lands or “handouts to a broken people” that constituted an endless drain on the Treasury. Corruption, notorious within the Indian department, further reduced the quantity and quality of the goods designated for Indians. General Sherman used the rations of food and clothing as an inducement to attract Indians to the reservations but things were in short supply. Withholding rations from people whose economies were being destroyed—in essence, keeping them on the edge of starvation—was a powerful instrument of colonial control, calculated to render formerly independent people entirely dependent on the government and its agents, but the policy pushed young men off the reservations and back into the kind of activities the government was trying to suppress. Indians complained that their families were going hungry waiting for the government to honor its pledges and some went back to raiding. At the same time, the government failed to honor its treaty commitments to keep predatory whites out of the reservations, and horse thieves preyed on the Indians’ herds.92
Jesse Leavenworth took charge of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache reservation and the Kiowas settled in the Eureka Valley near their agency at Fort Cobb on the northern edge of the reservation. But they protested that the government had “no right to pen them up on this small tract of land, only about one hundred miles square, and then give half their rations of provisions in corn, feeding them as the white people do their horses and mules.” The cornmeal often arrived damaged and caused diarrhea if they ate it—sometimes they did not even take the corn from the commissary, “thinking it not worth carrying home.” The Comanche chief Silver Brooch said his people were supposed to receive coffee, sugar, flour, seeds, and farm implements but their agent gave them nothing but cornmeal. Silver Brooch also asked where was the house he was promised? Kiowa men ranged west into the Texas Panhandle looking for buffalo, raided Wichita and Caddo villages for food and horses, and raided into Texas for horses and mules. The interpreter Philip McCusker intercepted one raiding party and asked why they were going to Texas and had so quickly forgotten their talk to the Peace Commission: “they told me that their Agent no longer cared for them, that he had induced them to move down into this country where they had been cheated with false promises and had given their goods and provisions away to other Indians.” The Kiowas and Comanches generally were displeased with Leavenworth and complained that he “always makes away with a large share of their goods.”93
FIGURE 6.9 The southern Plains, 1867–69. (Adapted from Francis Paul Prucha, Atlas of American Indian Affairs [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990], 101)
There was more to raiding Texas than stealing mules. Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches kept the peace they had made in Kansas but quickly resumed—or simply continued—their raids into Texas, carrying off captive children as well as livestock. They drew a distinction between the two places, between Americans with whom they signed a treaty and Tejanos whom they had been fighting for years. They asserted “their right to roam at will in Texas, they having been driven from their hunting grounds in that State by superior force, and never having relinquished there rights thereto.”94 For a time it seemed that the US government drew a similar distinction; after all, it, too, had been fighting the former Confederate state until quite recently. The Peace Commission had been primarily concerned with affairs in Kansas and the government did not immediately regard raids south of the Red River as constituting a breach of the treaty. But Leavenworth, his “patience with them and their promises” exhausted, recommended that the Kiowa and Comanche annuities be stopped, and if the guilty parties were not delivered up for punishment, the military should “make short and sharp work of them, until they can see, hear, and feel the strong arm of the government.” Leavenworth had become jittery, was constantly calling for troops, and soon left his post. But Commissioner of Indian Affairs Nathaniel Taylor agreed with him, and he questioned whether the treaty he had negotiated at Medicine Lodge should be ratified since the Kiowas and Comanches had clearly broken their treaty obligations.95 The Kwahadi Comanches who carried out many of the raids had not attended Medicine Lodge or agreed to the treaty. United States authorities criminalized the Kiowa and Comanche raids and brought in the military to force them back onto the reservations.96
Tensions increased in Kansas as well. The Cheyennes and Arapahos were dissatisfied with their barren reservation and claimed they never fully understood the boundaries prescribed in the Medicine Lodge treaty.97 Even so, the Arapaho chiefs Little Raven, Spotted Wolf, and Powder Face “came in” and expressed their desire to live in peace, as did Black Kettle’s Cheyennes. But chiefs such as Roman Nose and Medicine Arrows who had not attended the Medicine Lodge treaty felt no obligation to honor its terms, fueling accusations that all Indians were treaty breakers. Cheyennes and Arapahos did not stop raiding the Kaw or Kansa Indians and the Osages; whiskey traders caused trouble in the Indian camps; and angry young warriors committed raids and killings.98
General Sherman intended to settle the Indians on the reservations “one way or the other.” He took a hard line and was determined to punish not only the individuals who conducted raids but also the groups from which they came. “All of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes are now at war,” he declared in September 1868. “Admitting that some of them have not done acts of murder, rape, &c, still they have not restrained those who have, nor have they on demand given up the criminals as they agreed to do. The treaty made at Medicine Lodge is therefore clearly broken by them.” Because it would be difficult for troops “to discriminate between the well-disposed and the warlike,” the peaceful bands must go to the reservation in Indian Territory and stay there. The Cheyennes and Arapahos “should receive nothing and now that they are at open war I propose to give them enough of it to satisfy them to their hearts’ content,” wrote Sherman. “The vital part of their tribes are committing murders and robberies from Kansas to Colorado and it is an excess of generosity on our part to be feeding and supplying the old, young and feeble, whilst their young men are at war.” After the peaceful bands had been given a reasonable time to withdraw, all Indians who remained outside the reservation would be declared outlaws. Indians who wanted to hunt buffalo off the reservation could be regulated by issuing permits but, Sherman wrote, “the treaty having been clearly violated by the Indians themselves, this hunting right is entirely lost to them if we so declare it.”99 Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas Murphy took an equally hard line: in previous wars the Cheyennes and Arapahos had just cause for previous hostilities, but they had none now—every promise made to them at Medicine Lodge had been strictly carried out. “This time, I recommend that they be left to the tender mercies of our army until they shall be forced to sue for peace”—and that would be a peace they would keep for all time.100
Just one year after it had signed the treaty, the Peace Commission resolved:
That the recent outrages and depredations committed by the Indians of the plains justify the government in abrogating those clauses of the treaties made in October 1867, at “Medicine Lodge Creek,” which secure to them the right to roam and hunt outside their reservations: That all said Indians should be required to remove at once to said reservations and remain within them, except that after peace shall have been restored, hunting parties may be permitted to cross their boundaries with written authority from their Agent or Superintendent.
Resolved further, that military force should be used to compel the removal into said reservations of all such Indians as may refuse to go …101
Major General Philip Sheridan, the new commander of the Department of the Missouri, dispatched troops into Indian country. Roman Nose died at the Battle of Beecher’s Island in September 1868. In November Sheridan launched a campaign on the Washita River, where Black Kettle’s Cheyennes, Little Raven’s Arapahos, and Kicking Bird’s band of Kiowas were in their winter encampments. Black Kettle had survived the massacre at Sand Creek but this time there was no escape. George Custer, back in action after his suspension, divided his command and hit Black Kettle’s village from four sides at dawn. Captain Louis Hamilton, who had been with the cavalry escort at Medicine Lodge, was shot off his horse as he charged through the village. Black Kettle and his wife both died in the ensuing melee. George Bent and Magpie were not in the camp—they had gone to visit Bent’s relatives near Fort Lyon, a move Bent said saved them from sharing the same fate. As warriors from the other camps along the valley hastened to join the fight, Custer pulled back. He left behind a detachment of seventeen men led by Major Joel Elliott who had gone in pursuit of fleeing women and children. Elliott and his men were cut off, killed, and mutilated by Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. Some of them may have recognized Elliott from Medicine Lodge.102 According to Edward Godfrey, Stumbling Bear had become friends with Elliott during his constant visits to the soldiers’ camp at Medicine Lodge. When Godfrey saw Stumbling Bear a couple of months after the Washita, the Kiowa had cut his hair “and gave me to understand that he was in mourning for the loss of his good friend Major Elliott.”103
Although Black Kettle was a Cheyenne, Silver Horn’s Kiowa calendar marked his death that winter—depicted by a death owl perched on the handle of a black bucket or kettle: not only were there Kiowas in the village on the Washita but the killing of a chief who had worked so hard for peace at Medicine Lodge was an ominous event for all the tribes.104 The year 1868 was a bad one for the Kiowas. A Kiowa war party carrying one of the tribe’s three taímes—the small figurine or doll that was central to the sun dance—was badly defeated in a battle with the Utes and the sacred medicine bag was lost. Edward Wynkoop said the loss of the medicine made the Kiowas “more subdued and humbled than he has ever known them to be.” Thomas Murphy suggested that the government buy the medicine from the Utes and then keep it—it would do more “than a regiment of soldiers” to keep the Kiowas in line and stop their raids into Texas.105 In December, during a parley, George Custer had Satanta and Lone Wolf seized and put in leg irons as hostages until the rest of the Kiowas came to the agency. “They are among the worst Indians we have to deal with,” Sheridan told Custer, “and have been guilty of untold murders and outrages, at the same time they were being fed and clothed by the Government. These two chiefs, Lone Wolf and Satanta, have forfeited their lives over and over again.”106 Slowly, the Kiowas came in and Lone Wolf and Satanta were eventually released—against Sheridan’s better judgment; he would much rather have hanged them. As far as Sheridan was concerned, the only way for Indians to live in peace was to succumb to the reservation regime. “I do not care one cent,” he told Custer to inform Cheyenne and Arapaho delegates who asked for peace, “whether they come in or stay out. If they stay out I will make war on them Winter and Summer as long as I live or until they are wiped out.”107
Tall Bull, the Dog Soldier chief who had reluctantly signed the treaty, died fighting the cavalry and Major Frank North’s Pawnee scouts at the Battle of Summit Springs in July 1869. That defeat ended the Cheyennes’ occupation of the country between the Platte and Arkansas rivers. Bull Bear, who had driven the pen through the paper when he signed the treaty at Medicine Lodge, was with Roman Nose when he died and he continued the fight for several years longer but it was the Dog Soldiers’ last stand. After the Cheyennes were forced onto the reservation, Bull Bear sent his son to school and endeavored to follow the new path.108
General Grant’s inauguration as president in 1869 brought a new “Peace Policy” toward the Indian tribes of the West, at least those who accepted the reservation system. Indians were under the control and jurisdiction of their agents when they were “on their proper reservations”; Indians outside the reservation were under military jurisdiction and were considered hostile.109 A Quaker named Lawrie Tatum took over as agent for the Kiowas and Comanches at the new agency near Fort Sill. He told the Indians that they would be protected as long as they remained on the reservation but punished if they left without permission. It was “peace on the Reservations,” said Tatum, and “it was war off of them.”110 In August Grant established the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation by executive order, changing its location. The new reservation lay between the Cimarron River and the ninety-eighth meridian in the east and the one hundredth meridian (the Texas state line) in the west, bounded by the Cherokee Outlet on the north and the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation on the south. Another executive order in 1872 assigned the southwestern part of the area to the Caddos, Delawares, Wichitas, and other Indians. George Bent accepted a position as government interpreter at the Cheyenne-Arapaho agency.
In March 1870, the secretary of the interior informed the president that Indians from the Canadian border to the Mexican frontier were complaining “of what they declare to be a lack of faith on our part, in carrying out the stipulations of treaties heretofore made with them, and redeeming the promises which, as they allege, induced them to consent to the peaceable construction of railroads to the Pacific coast.” The situation was acute among the tribes who signed the Medicine Lodge treaties, and only “the greatest exertions” by civil and military officers had prevented war. Determined that if an Indian war was inevitable the government should not be responsible for it, Grant urged Congress to make the necessary appropriations in order to carry out the treaties made by the Peace Commission.111
Tatum’s “peace on the reservations, war off of them” became an accurate description of the situation by the end of the decade as Kiowa and Comanche men, frustrated at their confinement and dependence on government rations that were shoddy, inadequate, and irregular, left the reservations, stole horses and livestock, took captives and scalps, and then returned as winter approached and the raiding season ended.112 In the spring of 1870 Satank’s eldest son was killed during a raid into Texas. The grief-stricken old man carefully wrapped his son’s bones in a blanket, placed the bundle on a separate pony, and carried it with him wherever he went. “Satank, who had pledged eternal friendship with the whites at Medicine Lodge, now burned with hatred for them.”113
The public was outraged at a policy that seemed to feed and supply Indians who then went out and killed whites, and the army was determined to put a stop to the raids. Public indignation peaked after the infamous Warren Wagon Train Massacre in Texas in May 1871 when Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache warriors killed and mutilated seven teamsters, one of whom was tied to a wagon tongue and burned. Satanta, who boasted he had led the raid, Satank, and Big Tree were arrested when they returned to the reservation. Kicking Bird tried to prevent it: “You and I are going to die right here,” he told General Sherman. But Sherman had no doubts about what should become of Satanta: “I think it is time to end his career,” he wrote Sheridan. “He has been raiding in Texas to regain his influence as a great warrior.” Sherman also announced that “Old Satank ought to have been shot long ago.” Satanta’s impudence in boasting of his murders showed that the Kiowas needed “pretty much the lesson you gave Black Kettle and Little Raven.” As for Lone Wolf, he “ought to have been hung when you had him in hand.” Sherman thought Kicking Bird was “about the only Kiowa that seems to understand their situation.”114 Kicking Bird understood more than Sherman knew. He remained committed to peace but he worried that his people could not take to the “new road for all the Indians in this country,” and he feared the consequences. “The white man is strong,” he said in a letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs, “but he cannot destroy us all in one year, it will take him two or three, maybe four years and then the world will turn to water or burn up. It cannot live when all the Indians are dead.”115
The chiefs were to be sent back to Texas, for trial and hanging if found guilty. Satank was determined to die rather than go to Texas. When he was loaded into a wagon to transport him to Fort Richardson, he called to a Caddo scout who rode alongside the wagon, asking him to tell the Kiowas that Satank was dead. He then began to sing his death song:
“O sun, you remain forever, but we Kâitse´ñko must die.
O earth, you remain forever, but we Kâitse´ñko must die.”
Slipping his handcuffs, he grabbed one of the guards’ rifles and died in a hail of bullets, as he had intended.116
Satanta and Big Tree went on trial for the murder of the seven teamsters. The jury found them guilty and the judge sentenced them to hang. Agent Tatum persuaded Governor Edmund Davis of Texas to commute the sentence to life imprisonment (he thought it would be easier to control the Kiowas with Satanta in jail than with Satanta dead) and the two Kiowas were shipped to the state penitentiary in Huntsville.117 Meanwhile, a delegation of Kiowa and Comanche chiefs was taken to Washington where they met with the commissioner of Indian affairs, received large silver medals, and saw the sights. The delegates included several Medicine Lodge signatories: Ten Bears, Lone Wolf, Stumbling Bear, and Woman’s Heart. The trip took its toll on Ten Bears. By the time he returned to Fort Sill the old man was sick. The agent gave him a bed in his office and Ten Bears died there—in Colonel W. S. Nye’s view “a pathetic figure, alone in the midst of an alien people, in an age he did not understand.”118 Shortly after Lone Wolf’s trip to Washington, his son was killed by cavalry in December 1873.119
Kiowas continued to raid, however. Christopher C. Augur, now a brigadier general and commander of the Department of Texas orchestrating expeditions against the tribes, believed the Kiowas were “the meanest and cruelest Indians of the plains.” He recommended to Sheridan that the whole tribe “be taken possession of and disarmed, and taken entirely out of the Indian Country, and distributed among Military posts at the North—not breaking up families, and that the Kiowas as a tribe be no longer recognized.”120
Satanta and Big Tree worked on a chain gang laying railroad tracks (although they were taken out of prison to travel to St. Louis and meet the delegation of chiefs en route to Washington). The delegation carried on to Washington, and Satanta and Big Tree returned to Huntsville. In a controversial move that outraged the citizens of Texas as well as General Sherman, Governor Davis granted the chiefs a parole on condition that they made sure that Kiowa raids ceased. However, when the Red River War broke out in 1874, Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches attacked the buffalo hunters invading their hunting grounds.
The Treaty of Medicine Lodge had established an informal boundary between white settlers (and railroad construction crews) north of the Arkansas River and Indian hunters south of the river, but it did not expressly forbid white hunters from the southern buffalo ranges, only from the Indian reservations. Bison hunters consequently paid little regard to the treaty. The treaty agreements, in Andrew Isenberg’s words, “were ephemeral because the United States’ recognition of autonomous Indian hunting territories was due to expire with the bison.” Increasing human and environmental pressures had been pushing bison numbers downward for years and the Indians as well as the treaty commissioners understood that the herds were diminishing. Now, roads and railroads brought immigrants and hunters by the hundreds to the Indians’ hunting grounds and in 1871 a Pennsylvania tannery found that buffalo hides could be used to manufacture machine belts. Thousands of hides were loaded onto trains and shipped east, feeding a growing tanning industry that produced the leather belts that drove the machinery of industrializing America. Buffalo hunters embarked on a systematic slaughter of the southern herds that in just a few short years brought the species to the brink of extinction. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who was stationed at Fort Dodge at the time, witnessed the slaughter firsthand. In 1871, he wrote, there was “apparently no limit to the numbers of buffalo.” In 1872, he went out on many hunting expeditions, including one in the fall with three trigger-happy British gentlemen who “in their excitement bagged more buffalo than would have supplied a brigade.” In the fall of 1873 he went with some of the same gentlemen over the same ground. “Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.” The next fall, there seemed to be more buffalo hunters than buffalo. All this slaughter, Dodge acknowledged, was “in contravention of solemn treaties made with the Indians.”121
The architects of US Indian policy always assumed that, faced with starvation, Indians would give up their hunting culture and settle down to become farmers. But one Yamparika Comanche chief named Tananaica (Hears the Sunrise, or Voice of the Sunrise) spoke for many of his people when, in a council held with American agents in 1872, he proclaimed in a booming voice that he would rather stay out on the prairie and eat dung than come in and be penned up in a reservation.122 Rather than succumb to the government’s starvation policies, the Indians struck back against the men who were slaughtering their food source.123
The Red River War, or Buffalo War as it was sometimes called, produced atrocities on both sides, but the attack by Cheyenne Dog Soldiers on the family of John and Lydia German in western Kansas in September 1874 and the lurid reports it generated of murder, mutilation, and gang rape fueled demands for rapid retribution.124 The same year Colonel Ranald Mackenzie attacked a large village of Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes encamped at Palo Duro Canyon. Few Indians died but Mackenzie destroyed their lodges and food supplies and slaughtered more than one thousand ponies. With winter approaching, other army columns pressing them hard, and the once-vast buffalo herds dwindling to near extinction, southern Plains warriors began to straggle in to Fort Sill. Grey Beard, one of the Dog Soldiers who had refused to sign the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, was one of the last Cheyenne chiefs to surrender.125 Leaders like Woman’s Heart and White Horse were placed in cells. More than one hundred other warriors were confined under guard in an unfinished ice house; once a day soldiers tossed chunks of raw meat over the walls. “They fed us like we were lions,” recalled one Kiowa.126
Satanta was inevitably assumed to be in the thick of the trouble, even though the evidence for his involvement was shaky at best. In late 1874 he was sent back to prison, this time for life. On October 10, 1878, in his sixties and growing feeble, Satanta asked if there was any chance of his being released. He was told there was none. “I cannot wither and die like a dog in chains,” he said. The next day he slashed several arteries. Taken to the prison hospital, he jumped from the second-floor landing and died. He left two daughters and two sons. One of his sons enlisted in Troop L, the all-Indian troop of the Seventh Cavalry organized at Fort Sill in 1892; another attended boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Big Tree, who was not sent back to prison with Satanta, converted to Christianity in his forties and became a deacon and Sunday school teacher in a Baptist church.127
Other warriors who fought in the Red River War were arrested for murder. Frontier feeling against the Indians was so intense that they had no chance of a fair trial. “It was therefore concluded,” recounted Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, “best to punish the most notorious of the recent offenders by arbitrarily sending all of them to some remote eastern fort to be held indefinitely as prisoners of war.” Pratt, who as an officer in the Tenth Cavalry had led African American “buffalo soldiers” and Indian scouts in the war, was now assigned to be the jailor. Seventy-two prisoners—thirty-two Cheyenne men and one Cheyenne woman, twenty-seven Kiowas, nine Comanches, two Arapahos, and one Caddo—were selected, shackled, and sent to Fort Sill, loaded on trains bound for Fort Leavenworth, and finally shipped to Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida.128 Kicking Bird assisted the government in selecting those Kiowas to be exiled. Soon after he was assassinated by poison, although some Kiowas attributed his death to the prayers of Maman-ti, or Touching the Sky, also known as Dohate, the Owl Prophet, who was reputed to have led the wagon raid in 1871 and had great power.129 Kicking Bird was given a Christian burial.
Among the prisoners, Heap of Birds had signed the Treaty of Medicine Lodge for the Cheyennes; Mayetin, or Woman’s Heart, now an old chief, had signed for the Kiowas. Grey Beard, who refused to sign, attempted suicide while he was in prison in Fort Leavenworth and never made it to Florida. Pratt, who accompanied the Indians on their cross-country journey, encountered him on the train:
Going through the cars with my oldest daughter, then six years of age, I stopped to talk with Grey Beard. He said he had only one child and that was a little girl just about my daughter’s age. He asked me how I would like to have chains on my legs as he had and to be taken a long distance from my home, my wife, and little girl, as he was, and his voice trembled with deepest emotion. It was a hard question.
As the train neared the Georgia-Florida state line, Grey Beard jumped from a window at night and was shot trying to escape. Before he died, he said “he had wanted to die ever since being chained and taken from home.” Another Cheyenne, Lean Bear, stabbed himself several times in the neck and chest on the journey and starved himself to death at Fort Marion.130 Woman’s Heart was reputed to be one of the most notorious Kiowa raiders but Pratt said he was “especially noted for the strength of his family affection.” In prison in Florida he suffered from homesickness and wore the little moccasin of one of his children around his neck.131 Maman-ti, who was said to have predicted his own death for using his power to kill Kicking Bird, died of tuberculosis at Fort Marion in July 1875.132
At Fort Marion, Pratt subjected his Indian prisoners to an immersion program that he later incorporated into the Indian Industrial School he opened in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and that became the core of federal assimilation policy for thousands of Indian children for more than half a century. Freed of their shackles, the prisoners were stripped of their clothing and had their hair cut short. Pratt gave them military uniforms, organized their daily lives according to a strict military regimen, and taught them reading, writing, Christianity, and American values. Some of the Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne men, bored and restless in confinement and with access to paper and drawing materials, depicted new sights and experiences in Florida as well as old scenes of fighting and hunting on the Plains. Some of the artists sold their drawings to tourists; some continued to draw after their release. Howling Wolf, one of the most prominent of the Fort Marion artists, made a drawing of the Medicine Lodge treaty council (figure 6.6); as a young unmarried man he would have been living in Black Kettle’s village at the time.133
Woman’s Heart was one of the first prisoners to return home. In the spring of 1877 he was allowed to accompany an old and ailing Kiowa named Coming to the Grove on his trip out of exile. Back on the reservation, Woman’s Heart lobbied for the release of the other prisoners. He also urged his people to follow the new road, settle down, and attend church, although when Pratt’s son visited him in 1882 just before he died, the old man looked like “a regular Indian” and had “turned against the agency.”134 The Fort Marion prisoners who returned home faced dark days and hard times. Kiowa calendars recorded the summer of 1879 as the “horse-eating sun dance”: with the buffalo gone and government rations woefully inadequate, the people had to kill and eat their own horses.135 Lone Wolf died of malaria in 1879 shortly after being allowed to return home. Before he died, he passed his name, together with his shield and his medicine, to his adopted son, Mamaydayte.136 Lone Wolf “junior” carried the story of Medicine Lodge into the twentieth century.
In 1917 the citizens of the town of Medicine Lodge initiated efforts to commemorate the treaty that occurred fifty years before. World War I delayed things and it was another ten years before the town first marked the event with a historical pageant. I-See-O, a Kiowa who had attended the treaty as a young boy and later served as a sergeant in the US army, identified the site and the pageant was staged in a natural amphitheater designated as the Memorial Peace Park. Every five years until the 1960s, and since then every three years, citizens of Medicine Lodge and its vicinity and members of the tribes who attended the treaty council participate in a pageant billed as a commemoration of “the great Peace Council of 1867 between the US government and the proud civilization of the Plains Indians.” In fact, the Medicine Lodge treaty reenactment “compresses 300 years of history into two hours of entertainment and education.” Visitors watch history unfold as Coronado, Lewis and Clark, and other historical actors “come alive on the prairie” and Medicine Lodge “transforms into a frontier town,” complete with parades and a reenactment of a bank robbery.137 As the French historian Ernest Renan said, “forgetting … is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”138
