…and even this poor remnant of a once powerful tribe is fast wasting away before those blessings of civilization “whisky and Small pox.”
—Ulysses S. Grant, Washington Territory, 1853
…a finer set of men would be difficult to find. All were full chested, and with features decidedly those of the American Indian.
—New York Herald, Washington, D.C., 1870
ULYSSES GRANT had allowed a personal concern to be visible in his inaugural address at only one point. The great formality of the occasion had not permitted him to say that when he himself was near despair in the Pacific northwest, he had seen Indians living in still greater misery and hopelessness. Instead, he promised to “favor any course…which tends to…[the] civilization and ultimate citizenship” of the “original occupants of this land.” Unsaid but understood was a commitment to prevent the extermination of the native Americans. This was the only issue, the only cause, mentioned in the speech in which Grant had a deep personal interest, and he followed his startling and heartening statement by making the most interesting of his appointments. He named an Indian commissioner of Indian affairs. On all other counts, the selection of Ely S. Parker was a most typical Grant appointment; Parker was a crony from army days. But that was exactly what made his appointment fascinating and encouraging. The president perceived this man, to whom he was giving charge of the enormously important relations between the federal government and “the original occupants of this land,” not as a symbol of a cause or as an exotic figure, but rather as a person he was used to having around during a working day. Parker was a reliable staff man; he also happened to be a Seneca Indian. Here was a chance for a breach in the racial barricade that had long stood between most red and white Americans.1
Not all Indians were as comprehensible to white Americans as Parker was to Grant. One of the brightest and in many ways the most attractive of the white Americans was Clarence King, who published his great book Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in 1872. In it he wrote powerfully of the funeral of an Indian woman, Sally the Old. Buck, her husband, “watched with wet eyes that slow-consuming fire burn the ashes of his wife,” and as King watched the man, he knew he was seeing “not a stoical savage, but a despairing husband.” Leaving the scene, King’s mountain-man friend Jerry said to him, “‘Didn’t I tell you Injuns has feelings inside of ’em?’ I answered promptly [wrote King] that I was convinced; and long after, as I lay awake through many night-hours listening to that shrill death-wail, I felt as if any policy toward the Indians based upon the assumption of their being brutes or devils was nothing short of a blot on this Christian century.” But the next morning, when King asked where Buck was, another Indian, Revenue Stamp, pointed to a hut and replied with an affable smile, “‘He whiskey drunk.’ ‘And who,’ I inquired, ‘is that fat girl with him.’ ‘Last night he take her; new squaw,’ was the answer.”2
A twentieth-century observer might venture the thought that Buck’s quick and full expunging of grief was true mourning. His return to the ordinary business of living may have done quite as much honor to the woman who had been his wife and the mother of many of his children as that which Clarence King’s friend Henry Adams paid his dead wife with a Saint-Gaudens statue. However, King, in 1872, could not see it that way. He banished Buck forever into membership in an inscrutable group. King resolved that hereafter he would “guardedly avoid all discussion of the ‘Indian question.’ When interrogated, I dodge, or protest ignorance; when pressed, I have been known to turn the subject; or, if driven to the wall, I usually confess my opinion that the Quakers will have to work a great reformation in the Indian before he is really fit to be exterminated.” If this is where a lover of the West as enlightened as Clarence King found himself on the “Indian question,” it is clear that anyone, including Ulysses Grant, would find arguing for a humane relationship with the Indians a huge and difficult job. Old warriors such as William Tecumseh Sherman—never mindful of his middle name—and George A. Custer simply sneered at the belated sentimentality of the man who had fought at Cold Harbor. But Grant told a Philadelphia friend that “as a young lieutenant, he had been much thrown among the Indians, and had seen the unjust treatment they had received at the hands of the white men.”3
This treatment was part of the process by which Americans were making the lands of the continent their own. White America had no thought of leaving the West in a state of permanent wilderness—in which wild Indians could roam and their wise men dream of a good life. A few rare spirits such as Clarence King dreamed of letting nature reclaim the beautiful country of the West from the ravages of all men, red or white. King was comforted to find that where there are “rude scars of mining and disordered heaps cumber the ground, time, with friendly rain, and wind and flood, slowly, surely, levels all, and a compassionate cover of innocent verdure weaves fresh and cool from mile to mile.” In reverie he delighted in an Eden empty of people and their imprint, and yet his job was to map the land so it could be used. Francis Parkman, well before the Civil War, wrote his elegies for the native American. He understood Pontiac and his people, and he admired them, yet he could see no fate for the Indian other than to bow before the flow of progress that surged over the great stretches of forest and plains of the continent. The land would have to yield to those civilized men who would take axe and plow to it and prosper. The land was too good to be left to savage nomads. With the end of the Civil War the job of populating the West went forward with relentless fervor. Immigrants were carried out onto the plains and to the Far West on the great transcontinental railroads that were built. At any moment, Indians who had previously chosen or been driven to a particular location might find that settlers wanted to farm or mine their land or to build another railroad on it. In addition, the slaughter of the vast buffalo herds in the 1870’s killed the food source of hunting tribes. It destroyed the Indian economy.4
The United States Army had the job of protecting the white settlers against the Indians, who were sorely provoked by the invaders of the West. Not all white people in the nation were comfortable about the savagery with which the army sometimes disciplined the savages of the vast region, but Denver newspapers had applauded in 1864 when word came that Colonel John M. Chivington had tracked down a band of Cheyenne Indians who had made peace and turned in their guns, and, at Sand Creek, killed almost all of them. Black Kettle escaped, and when details of the vicious slaughter—of children and women as well as men—reached the East, there was a cry from the heart against the sadism of the Methodist minister turned soldier and his murderous troops.5
After the war, Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, committed to Andrew Johnson’s views with respect to the Negroes of the South and blind to the terrible attacks on the freedmen, opened his eyes to the inhumanity of the treatment of the Indians in the West. He brought about a congressional investigation and the establishment in 1867 of a peace commission that investigated the broad question of the settlement of the West and the future of the Indians who would be displaced. Nathaniel G. Taylor, commissioner of Indian affairs, chaired that panel, which included three other civilians and at first three and later four army generals, of whom William Tecumseh Sherman was the most forceful. The commissioners toured the territories, conducted hearings, and compiled their findings; these were released in January 1868. In Taylor’s words: “Nobody pays any attention to Indian matters. This is a deplorable fact. Members of Congress understand the negro question, and talk learnedly of finance, and other problems of political economy, but when the progress of settlement reaches the Indian’s home, the only question is, ‘how best to get his lands.’” Sherman had long argued that the cause of all the Indian attacks on white men was the injustices done the Indian, but he went on to draw conclusions in which he parted company with Taylor and other humanitarians. There was, this chilling thinker contended, no stopping the movement of civilization; unjust though it assuredly was, stone-age man would have to yield before the inevitable thrust of civilized man. He saw little point in putting off the grim day of extermination with ameliorative measures, but neither did he have any patience with the corrupt Indian agents that the commission found in such abundance. Reluctantly, Sherman did sign the report, because it called for replacement of dishonest agents with honest ones. Taylor and Doolittle’s work was the foundation of what was to become in 1869 the Grant Peace Policy. In 1868 treaties were signed with most of the Indians of the northern plains; three army posts in Indian territory were to be razed, and the Indians agreed to stay on reservations and accept the schools and other ministrations that the white men would bring to civilize them. Grant, as commanding general, ordered Sherman to carry out the destruction of the army bases “and to make all the capital with the Indians that can be made out of the change.” Peace in the West seemed a possibility.6
This hope was destroyed in August 1868 when fighting broke out between white settlers and the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux. Now Sherman moved with force. He placed Philip H. Sheridan in command of the Army of the Missouri and ordered a fall and winter campaign that would harass the Indians back onto reservations. When another army man was elected president that fall, the reformers were increasingly nervous; there might be no harnessing the soldiers once Grant reached the White House. Therefore, in the winter of 1869, prior to Grant’s inauguration, the reformers worked diligently and successfully to persuade him to protect the Indians. Two plans emerged, both with that goal. One proposal, called derisively at first, and later appreciatively, the Quaker Policy, was designed to replace entrepreneurs with missionaries as Indian agents. The men of God would not only look after the welfare of their flocks but bring them into the Christian fold. “Quaker Policy” was to a large degree a misnomer; the plan was indeed urged on Grant by members of the Society of Friends, but it was also sponsored with jealous zeal by the mainstream Protestant evangelical sects. Each tribe was assigned, for protection and proselytizing, to missionaries of a given denomination. One reservation—and hence one complete group of native Americans—was designated Episcopalian, the next Dutch Reformed, and so on; Grant, although not a church man, agreed.
The second plan for the Indians was embodied in Grant’s Peace Policy. This called for (1) the end of the treaty system that presupposed that each tribe was a sovereign nation, (2) the treatment of Indians as individuals, responsible for their own welfare, rather than as members of a tribe, dependent on a community, (3) the containment of the tribes on reservations—a concept obviously incongruous with that of individual treatment—and (4) the use of education to compensate for all the economic and cultural lacunae in the policy, and to produce American citizens. Such a process had produced Grant’s aide Ely Parker, and the president-elect could see no reason why it would not work for all of Parker’s fellows. Grant never wrote explicitly on the subject of his famous Peace Policy, which emerged from his experiences and conversations prior to taking office. By the same logic that says it takes a thief to catch a thief, military men often are more capable of catching out other military men than are civilians. Grant had a good idea what Sherman and Sheridan thought about the Indians, and he did not subscribe to the view that the only good Indian is a dead Indian.7
One Indian who was very much alive was Ely S. Parker. The heavy-set copper-hued general was one of the members of the staff who had been so essential to Grant during the war. The president had every intention of keeping these men on the job when he moved into the White House. With a bit of simple logic that has escaped a great many other presidents when making appointments, Grant placed Parker in a post where one—though not all—of his concerns lay. It occurred to neither man to think of Parker exclusively in what we would call “ethnic” terms. Grant had talked to Parker about the Indians’ hopes for themselves just as he had talked to many white reformers about their prescriptions for the future of the people who were natives of the land and not yet part of the white man’s America.
The name “Parker” is said to have been that of a British captive who had lived with Ely’s forebears; already moving from one culture into another, they adopted it for use in tandem with Seneca names. Ely himself was known also as Ha Sa No An Da and Donehogawa. His father, William Parker, a Seneca chief, fought the British in the War of 1812, farmed, and married Elizabeth, also a Seneca, about 1820. They had six children: Levi, Nicholson, Caroline, Ely (born in 1828), Spencer, and Isaac Newton. Clearly, the Parkers’ ways of saying things were being anglicized; the Seneca culture was being overwhelmed and the language silenced, while the arts of basketry and beadwork became commercialized. The Senecas, once part of the proud but defeated Iroquois league of Five Nations, no longer farmed on a large scale, and white settlers were rapidly displacing them on their lands. As a boy, Ely responded to these changes by running away from home and finding work caring for horses at a Canadian military post. Then, taunted by white boys for being Indian, he came back determined to beat his tormentors at their own game by gaining an education. At the Tonawanda mission school, he was motivated not by desire for revenge, but by the urge to excel in order to be able to demand recognition.
He next studied at Cayuga Academy, where the pioneer anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan—ten years his senior—had also been educated. “During his schooldays,” wrote Parker’s biographer, “Ely had already met many of the distinguished men of New York, and he had dined at the White House as a guest of President Polk.” How Parker leaped from his academy desk to President Polk’s dinner table is not explained; it would appear that the quickwitted adolescent accompanied lawyers and chiefs on their frequent trips to Washington in the ultimately futile efforts to hold their lands. On these trips, Parker was taken up by white hostesses charmed by a just-a-bit civilized—and handsome—young Indian. But Parker had a far greater role than this to play as a bridge between two cultures. Lewis Henry Morgan, outraged not only by the defrauding of the Indians but by the destruction of their culture, began to interview his native American neighbors, and three of his most important sources of information were Parker’s parents and Ely himself, whose biographer did not greatly exaggerate when he wrote, “The Parker house was in a measure the spot where a new American Science was born.” Morgan’s book League of the HO-DÉ-NO-SAU-NEE, Iroquois, one of the landmarks of anthropology and American intellectual history, is dedicated “$$$$$$$-DA, (Ely S. Parker,) a Seneca Indian.”8
Parker next moved into another white man’s enterprise—commerce—supervising work details at the western terminus of the Erie Canal and in a freight office in Rochester. Next, on assignments for the army, he worked at building lighthouses along the Great Lakes and later on the construction of the Chesapeake and Albemarle Canal. In 1857 Parker superintended the construction of a customhouse in Galena. Always a joiner, Parker was a Mason; he helped form Miners Lodge No. 273 in the lead-mining town of Galena, and in September 1858 became its Worshipful Master. He knew his new townsmen well, and legend has made much of Parker’s friendship with Galena’s most famous harness-shop clerk. The chances are that he knew Grant only slightly, but the connection was made. When the war came, Parker went back to New York State, won his father’s reluctant approval to enlist, and, never one to aim low, went to Washington to discuss an appointment with the secretary of state, his western New York neighbor William Henry Seward. Seward is reported to have said that the war “was an affair between white men and one in which the Indian was not called to act,” and for the moment, Parker went back to farming in New York, but by 1863 his lobbying for a commission had been successful. He was appointed captain of volunteers and joined Grant’s staff in the Vicksburg campaign. He served with the intimate band of staff men for the balance of the war and went along to Grant’s headquarters in Washington after its close. Even before the members of the cabinet had been selected, he knew he would be appointed commissioner of Indian affairs, and in February 1869, in anticipation of his new job and a change in governmental policy, he wrote to the Quakers and asked them to recommend agents for two tribal reservations.9
The new policy that Grant and Parker created was designed to encourage precisely the kind of transformation that Parker embodied. The Indians were to be helped to enter the mainstream of American life. They were to do what other Americans did; they were to become Christians and wear neckties. That was almost what had happened to Grant; it had happened to Parker. Grant had settled in his own mind that the great result of the Civil War was that America was one nation, with a national norm, a single idiom. What the president-to-be, with a nice naiveté, did not see was that Parker was an exception that proved a racist rule. Parker not only had been willing to try to be assimilated into the American culture but had succeeded in the attempt. A white man’s Indian, his detractors would call him, but having said that they had to concede that he was a general in the army. Only later, when the positions he was given were more minor than they would have been if he were white, did Parker learn that being an agreeable fellow who had served on General Grant’s staff did not make him immune to American racism.10
In March 1869 Parker still had a great opportunity. President Grant was listening—and at his inauguration, speaking. Americans in 1869 who thought the elimination of the Indians desirable could not miss the fact that Grant, by calling them “occupants of this land,” was giving the Indians a proprietary claim to an existence on it. By calling for their “civilization and ultimate citizenship,” Grant was categorically rejecting the twin notions that the Indians were evil savages incapable of change and that the course of civilization would inevitably carry past them. He was asserting that the Indians were capable of change and that the American society was capable of accepting them within it. He had laid the foundation stone of his Peace Policy. If it had worked as well as he and Parker hoped, it might have proved a monument worth as much as Appomattox. It still stands as an honorable milestone on a road strewn with markers of national disgrace.
From the perspective of the twentieth century—and decades of gross mismanagement of the Peace Policy—it is easy to condemn Grant’s approach as lacking in feeling for the deep cultural heritage of the Sioux, the Arapaho, the Navaho. In March 1869 it promised something better than Sand Creek or, to look ahead to American race relations during Grant’s second term, Little Bighorn. Grant’s words gave great hope to Americans who wanted the Indians alive rather than dead. Champions of the reform of American Indian policy were elated by the inaugural speech.
Shortly after inauguration day, on March 24, 1869, President Grant and Secretary of the Interior Cox were visited by a delegation of well-placed Pennsylvanians which included William Welsh, a rich Philadelphian and an Episcopalian; George H. Stuart, also a Philadelphian and a Presbyterian; and Judge William Strong, of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. These men urged that an autonomous commission be established to ensure that the provisions of a recent treaty with the Sioux were carried out fairly. Welsh told Cox that although he was a fine gentleman, a private commission was necessary. Without such a commission, Stuart told Grant and Cox, no reform was possible because no one trusted the Interior Department to prevent corruption. Cox was enough of a reformer himself to acknowledge the accuracy of the accusation, and disguised his feelings about the self-righteous Philadelphian because he knew that the gross mismanagement of Indian affairs in the past did indeed argue for the kind of supervision of a private Board of Indian Commissioners that Welsh proposed. He probably guessed, from this first meeting, that what lay ahead was a clash between the elite members of a private board of overseers on the one hand and a governmental employee, the commissioner of Indian affairs, on the other. (The very confusion in terms—the Board of Indian Commissioners, upon which the commissioner of Indian affairs did not sit—suggested the clash to come.) Grant and Cox agreed that a board was needed—but not for the Sioux (or the Episcopalians) alone. It should supervise the whole of the government’s Indian policy.11
Indian matters got priority in Congress during the first month of the Grant administration, and on April 10, legislation was passed creating the Board of Indian Commissioners. Grant called on one of his Philadelphia friends: “Stuart, you and Welsh have got me in difficulty with this bill.” Now Grant wanted Stuart to get him out of trouble by naming “some leading men from different sections of the country, who will be willing to serve the cause of the Indians without compensation.” Stuart was an excellent man to ask; earlier, General O. O. Howard, seeking money for freedmen’s schools, had found the Philadelphia philanthropists—and Stuart in particular—more forthcoming with cash and organizing energy than their brethren in New York and Boston, and now Stuart’s suggestions produced a board of ten, including Felix R. Brunot, a steel man and an Episcopalian from Pittsburgh, and William E. Dodge of New York, immensely rich as a result of shrewdly investing his wife’s vast inheritance and a dedicated Presbyterian. Not surprisingly, there was no one from the South. Significantly, there was no one from west of St. Louis and Chicago; no attempt was made to enlist western support by the appointment of a popular westerner. Similarly, no effort was made to coerce military co-operation by the inclusion of some generals, as had been done in the selection of the peace commission in the Johnson administration. There were no Quakers, nor were there any representatives of the government’s other foray into the world of welfare administration, the Freedmen’s Bureau. People like Stuart and Dodge had contributed to private schools established with Bureau assistance, but General Howard and other Freedmen’s Bureau men were conspicuously absent in the administration of Grant’s Indian policy.12
In accordance with the Peace Policy which the board was to oversee, under Welsh’s direction, the Indians were to be held on the reservations, so that they would be protected from white incursions while the incoming white settlers were protected from Indian attack. On the reservations, the members of each tribe were to be educated to the ways of social and economic life in civilized American society. Critical in this process was the Indian agent, who was a combination governor, teacher, supplier, and—in theory, at least—representative of the interests of the Indian in transactions with those who, for whatever reason, wanted to have dealings with him. Since the agent was paid only $1,500 a year, the opportunity for graft was enormous. The Indians, often destitute because they had been removed from good hunting lands to poor farming lands, were dependent on the government for food, clothing and blankets, and tools. The supplier who paid the agent the most got the government contract. One keen observer, the Episcopalian bishop Henry B. Whipple, noted that it was “a tradition that an agent” paid $1,500 a year could “retire upon an ample fortune in three years.” The bishop did not greatly exaggerate; the cost to the government in overcharges easily exceeded that of all the agents’ salaries. The cost to the Indians of disgustingly inferior supplies was harder to calculate.13
Not all of the agents were crooked, but many were. Not all of those who made a profit were cruel in their treatment of the Indians, but many were. Therefore, obtaining honest and humane agents was the immediate goal of the reformers, including Grant. He retained his contempt for the sutlers he had encountered during the war, and recognizing the Indian agents as kin to them, he trusted instead the missionaries who—assigned by denomination to the various tribal groups—were willing to live on the $1,500 salary in exchange for the opportunity to convert the Indians. He also trusted his own kind, army men, who could be expected to accept the responsibility of serving as Indian agents as a standard army assignment. This attitude resulted in the odd pairing of missionaries and soldiers as Indian agents in the Grant era.
The missionaries, exemplified by Lawrie Tatum (whose famous account tells us much about the work of the agents), were often sympathetic if demanding guardians of the Indians. The best of them were resourceful men—and women, for the wives of many of the agents clearly performed a function as large as that of their husbands. Less is known about the quality of the governing done by the army men, but surely the behavior of the individual army agents was distinct from that of their fellows in army units with a totally different assignment, keeping the peace. These units were the source of danger to the Indians. Even a rumor of Indian discontent might cause an army officer in the field, without first discussing the complaint with the agent in charge, to move directly against the Indians—often with savagely fatal results.14
In January 1870 one such attack, which gravely undercut the trust the Indians had in Grant’s nascent Peace Policy, was made by Colonel E. M. Baker, with General Sheridan’s enthusiastic approval, on a settlement of Piegan Indians. Once again there was indiscriminate slaughter. The details were sickening—and well publicized by Vincent Colyer, an outspoken member of the board. Such occurrences pricked the conscience of many Americans and put the reformers in a strong position. With so much to work toward from that position it is extremely odd that William Welsh spent so much of his energy trying to get rid of the one Indian involved in making decisions about Indian affairs. Welsh hated Parker and would brook no competition from him in his determination to be the spokesman for the Indian cause. When government-employee Parker refused to consult private-gentleman Welsh, and when a budget, which is to say power, was not given Welsh’s Board of Indian Commissioners, the Philadelphian resigned. His early resignation, however, did not end his vendetta with Parker. His successor, Felix R. Brunot, was a close friend, and Welsh stayed in sufficient contact with the board to be able to harass Parker.15
Parker and Welsh were at an extraordinary and illuminating standoff. Welsh’s determination to protect the Indians from extermination and from being cheated was genuine, and even after his resignation, he was indefatigable in pursuit of these aims. However, when he traveled in the West to visit his Indians on their native ground he chose to see them as a remote people, attractive both for their seductively different ways and for the splendid challenge that their culture afforded those who would have the joy of cleansing it with Christianity. In Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux, Welsh saw a majestic and exotic chief, and he vastly preferred this picture of an Indian spokesman to the spectacle of Ely Parker, who sat slouched on a camp chair or a White House couch swapping bureaucratic lore with the likes of Orville Babcock and Ulysses Grant. The Episcopalian gentleman regarded the Indians as a people to be brought into godliness, rather than into the Republican party. He hated corruption. He did not want civilization to mean for the Indians the opportunity to do all the things (including cheat) that white Americans could do. Paradoxically, the savages, in Welsh’s view, were cut out to be something nobler than ordinary Americans. But Grant had said his goal was to civilize and ultimately make citizens of the Indians, and Ely Parker was exactly the kind of citizen Grant wanted in his administration. There was less hypocrisy or fantasy in Grant’s vision of what the Peace Policy would provide than there was in Welsh’s.
In Welsh’s conception, the Indian was purer than pure. When Parker proved to be mortal instead, Welsh made him more the target of his disgust than the white suppliers of goods who were cheating the Indians. In arranging purchases, Parker’s new method was the ostensibly fair one of advertising the need for supplies and giving the contract to the lowest bidder. The problems were two. First was the matter of quality; the lowest bidder might supply goods of a low grade. Second, the contract system was corrupt. A “low” bidder might agree to sell six hundred blankets at a low price and a hundred hoes at a very high price, with the total bid being the lowest offered. Then he would supply fifty blankets and a thousand hoes, and the agents, perhaps bribed, would accept a shipment that was highly lucrative to the contractor.
To prevent such abuses, men far above the battle came down to the accountant’s desk and dutifully sought to prevent disreputable entrepreneurs from cheating defenseless Indians. William E. Dodge and George H. Stuart, committed to Christian benevolent enterprises and now so rich that they no longer had to touch the rust of day-to-day commerce, sat down like two Dickensian clerks and diligently audited stacks of vouchers passed for Indian supplies. Their eye was acute, but Stuart could never quite understand why, after he had disallowed contracts that flagrantly wasted the government’s money on bad beef and inferior goods, there was criticism when large new contracts were awarded to his good friend the exemplary Christian businessman John Wanamaker. Earlier, the auditors’ work had produced more severe criticism of Ely Parker. Welsh leaped at every bit of evidence of graft, and at his insistence, the House of Representatives in December 1870 began an investigation into Parker’s acquiescence in violations of the government requirement that contracts be advertised. Welsh and others testified and, by implication only, linked Parker to abuses of the Indians carrying far beyond the matter of contracts at hand. The congressmen exonerated Parker, but Welsh won nonetheless. The reformers had succeeded in shaking public confidence in the commissioner, and in July 1871, Grant yielded and Parker resigned. Parker was replaced temporarily by H. R. Clum and then by Francis Amasa Walker, who needed a salary to continue his demographic work, based on the 1870 census. Walker, however great his intellectual talents, was astonishingly cold-blooded about his Indian clients; he was succeeded as commissioner in 1873 by E. P. Smith, a Congregational minister, and he, in turn, was followed in 1876 by J. Q. Smith, an Ohio politician. When he set out to replace Parker, Grant assured Stuart that the man he chose not only would have “the full confidence” of the Board of Indian Commissioners, but would be “fully in sympathy with a humane policy towards the Indians.” All of Parker’s successors named by Grant, however, were white, and none was a truly powerful champion of his clients.16
Parker moved to New York and, in the manner of the age, sought to prove his worth by succeeding on Wall Street. He did well enough to have a house in town and a country place in Fairfield, Connecticut, but the prosperity did not last. When his business career failed, he sought another government position, but no official post commensurate with his past eminence was open to him. He resurrected his skills as an engineer and became the architect of the New York City Police Department. Later he was its supply clerk. The “last grand sachem of the Iroquois” died in 1895 in Fairfield. Donehogawa was given an Episcopalian funeral and buried in Connecticut, but later his body was moved to an upstate New York cemetery on ground where the Seneca once counseled together.17
The attacks on Parker in 1870 and 1871 were reminiscent of those relentless demands for purity with which any black politician who had even looked smilingly on a contractor was tracked down in the later days of Reconstruction. Often the demands were made by fellow politicians who were themselves not above friendly commerce. In the attacks on Parker, it was almost as if the William Welshes, in a perversion of their fascination with the noble in full regalia on the plains, needed to prove the innate depravity of those whom they hoped to conduct into Christianity and capitalism. And so Welsh branded Parker—and by implication all Indians—as “but a remove from barbarism” and not capable of honesty. Welsh got rid of Parker, but his position on the Board of Indian Commissioners did not give him enough power to become the Christianizing czar of the Indians; over the years he became embittered, and was by 1876 an advocate of transferring jurisdiction over Indian affairs from the Department of the Interior to the War Department. Welsh’s successor, Felix R. Brunot, led the fight to block the repeated attempts to achieve this transfer, which would have destroyed the Peace Policy.18
The reformers were right in viewing their cause as difficult. Their efforts at amelioration of the Indian’s lot were, after all, carried out in the context of the unremitting Indian wars. During the years of Grant’s presidency, over two hundred battles were fought. The cause of reform suffered terrible setbacks—a great many in the years of the Grant administration and beyond—but repeatedly there occurred a new massacre or other outrage by white Americans that was sufficiently disgraceful to convince other white Americans that the Peace Policy was at least better than annihilation. What the reformers had wrought, with Grant’s indispensable help, withstood even the demand after the defeat of Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876 that the army be allowed to finish the job on the Indians. The attempt to transfer jurisdiction over Indian affairs to the War Department failed once again then, even amid the cries that Custer’s martyrdom had to be avenged. The Peace Policy lived on after Grant was gone.19
There were, however, two fundamental issues that Grant and the men who with him formulated the Peace Policy did not address. Francis Paul Prucha recently observed, “These friends of the Indian had little acquaintance with Indian character; they did not appreciate the human nature of the people. They did not know that their minds were already occupied by a multitude of notions and beliefs that were firmly fixed there—rooted and grounded by an inheritance of a thousand years.” In a word, the Indians did not want President Grant’s civilization. Second, there was no recognition of the basic political economy of the people. The relationship to the land of Indians remanded to a reservation was completely different from the relationship to the land of free hunters. Even in “civilized” Lockean terms the Indians were given nothing that could ensure their liberty. Transplanted from good hunting territory, they were expected to undertake farming on desolate land from which they might be evicted at any time if white men found on it anything valuable. Individual Indians were not exterminated; they struggle still to prove that Sherman was wrong, that they are not doomed to extinction by the inevitable wave of someone else’s civilization, but they struggle from a position of poverty that would more than justify a Helen Hunt Jackson’s writing now of a second century of dishonor.20
Much had changed, and yet not so very much, since Ulysses had written Julia in 1853, “You charge me to be cautious about riding out alone lest the Indians should get me. Those about here are the most harmless people you ever saw. It really is my opinin that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites.” In 1869 President Grant made a sensible beginning by calling for civilization of the Indians and, more, by saying no to their extermination. Ely Parker was his friend, and he had reason to believe an Indian as commissioner would be a protector and friend of the Indians. Grant’s eight years in the presidency were years of savage warfare with the Indians, but they were also the years of his Peace Policy, which never fully lost out.21
In May 1870, Spotted Tail and a delegation of Oglala Sioux arrived in Washington and crowded into a suite in a hotel. A reporter found them sitting cross-legged on beds, cots, and the floor. There was more naked flesh than the Herald’s man in Washington often saw in his encounters with distinguished visitors to the capital, and he was impressed: “Physically a finer set of men would be difficult to find. All were tall, full chested, and with features decidedly those of the American Indian.” Red Cloud, the Oglala chief who most assiduously pursued an accommodation with the United States government, was “like a statue”; Big Bear, who arrived to join Spotted Tail’s contingent, seemed “fierce.” Putting on splendid beaded shirts and leggings, as well as buffalo robes, the delegation asked Secretary of the Interior Cox and Commissioner Parker for protection of their treaty rights. The reporter, who could see that Red Cloud was “no innocent,” detected Cox talking to him and the other Sioux as if they were babies. The conversation reached the usual conditional conclusion: if you keep the peace, you will not be disturbed. Even under Parker, the onus always fell on the Sioux. Then, their business transacted, they climbed into carriages to make a formal call on President Grant.22
It was seven-thirty in the evening and the light in the East Room was dim as they stood with Cox and Parker and watched official Washington perform its tribal dances. President Grant entered with Mrs. Grant on his arm, accompanied, according to strict protocol, by the cabinet and the diplomatic corps. After brief formal greetings, the curious white people tried to find ways to chat with these men who seemed so strange to them. Edward Thornton, the British minister, spoke to Red Cloud in his impeccable English and had no more luck at being understood than did the Russian ambassador, who tried French. The light grew weaker, the chiefs more silent and ominous, and Grant, at last, moved to revive the doomed occasion. He led the party of Sioux into the brightly lit dining room, where the buffets were heaped with bowls of strawberries and pitchers of cream. This friendliest of white American gestures only confused the red men more. With the berries uneaten, Parker escorted the chiefs through the grave ceremony of shaking hands with the president and his entourage, and they departed.23
When in 1871, splashed with the paint of corruption, Parker resigned as commissioner of Indian affairs, Grant lost a friend who, by chance, was an Indian. Parker’s removal somehow discredited Grant’s concern for the native Americans. The president did not turn on them, but thereafter he was only a brake on the excesses of their exterminators. His contacts with the Indians were not those of a sympathetic young captain who knows some troubles himself; instead, Grant was the Great White Father receiving delegations of Indians, who spoke of their lost world in words that, in the White House, no one understood.