In 1869, while touring Indian Territory, General Philip M. Sheridan was introduced to a Comanche man who was described to him as a “good Indian.” According to later reports, Sheridan replied, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” a statement eventually rephrased in the popular mind as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Even though Sheridan denied ever saying these words, they were to become a favorite quotation in discussions of the so-called Indian Problem—that is, what should be done about the Indians blocking the western expansion of the United States. Those seeking to annihilate the Indians found a rallying cry in Sheridan’s pithy phrase, whereas those hoping to assimilate tribal peoples quoted the words in horror.
Official Indian policy after the Civil War reflected both attitudes. Exhausted from warfare, the government under the Grant administration in 1869 adopted the Peace Policy, which proposed to end the Indian Problem without further bloodshed and without the expense of protracted military campaigns. Two years earlier, a commission had been sent west to negotiate with troublesome Indians treaties that would require them to stay within specified reservation boundaries, thus opening up vast areas of hunting grounds for white settlement. Treaties were negotiated with nearly all major Plains Indian tribes. Yet these agreements meant little. Most Indians neither understood nor accepted their provisions, and those few who did hardly felt bound to uphold them.
The treaties, however, were far from useless from the government’s perspective. Now if Indians left their reservations, it had justification for using the military to force their return. Non-Indian settlers fearful of “renegade” Indians often demanded this military protection, while unemployed Civil War veterans were eager to sign up to fight. As a result, the Peace Policy helped to usher in a new era of brutal and bloody Indian wars.
During the Indian Wars, many brilliant Indian leaders of great bravery and cunning emerged. There were Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull of the Lakota; Quanah Parker of the Comanche; Geronimo and Cochise of the Apache; and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, to name only a few. But despite their leadership, Indian forces, already weakened by disease and inadequate rations, were ultimately outarmed and outmanned when pitted against U. S. soldiers and state militiamen.
1866 to 1890
Military campaigns were only one means used to destroy traditional Plains Indian society. The railroads joining East and West disturbed the migrations of buffalo herds, thus threatening the animals on which Plains Indians relied for every necessity—from food to building materials to fuel. The buffalo’s doom was further sealed when eastern tanneries began to make leather from their hides in the 1870s. To cash in on the demand for this new product, white hunters flocked to the West and littered the Plains with bloody carcasses. Recognizing that Plains Indian culture could not exist without the buffalo, the military encouraged this mass killing, which in a matter of decades resulted in the near extinction of the once-great herds.
The ways of western Indians were under siege also by reformers, who hoped to see the Indians assimilated into mainstream, non-Indian society. Calling themselves the “Friends of the Indians,” they mounted missionary efforts to convert Indians to Christianity and supported legislation that would help transform Indian hunters into settled farmers. One of the Assimilationists’ most effective tools were Indian boarding schools. These institutions separated Indian children from traditional communities, then indoctrinated them in non-Indian customs. The value of this education was not always clear. Rather than assimilating into white society, many boarding-school students upon graduation found themselves adrift, alienated from both the Indian and non-Indian worlds.
Even more devastating to Indian society was the Friends of the Indian’s trumpeting of the Allotment policy. As the government whittled away at reservation lands, these reformers rightly feared that Indians were in danger of losing the small portions of their ancestral lands they still retained. Allotment supporters believed that the best means of protecting Indian lands was to divide reservations into small plots known as allotments. These tracts would be held as private property and thus would be legally protected from white encroachment. In part through reformers’ lobbying efforts, the U. S. Congress passed the General Allotment Act of 1887, which provided for the large-scale allotment of Indian lands, as well as the sale of “surplus land” left over after all qualified allottees received their tracts. The policy ultimately had the opposite effect from what its most benevolent supporters had envisioned: In a matter of decades, nearly 100 million acres of Indian land would pass into non-Indian hands as a direct result of Allotment.
Amid the many assaults on their traditional ways, reservation Indians in the late 19 th century increasing looked to new religions for comfort. The messages preached by Indian prophets such as Wodziwob, Nakaidoklini, and John Slocum varied in their particulars, but all promised adherents a return to the traditional world Indians had known before the arrival of non-Indians in their lands.
The most influential of these visionaries was the Northern Paiute (Numu) Wovoka. He told followers that if they lived in peace with whites and danced the Paiute’s traditional Round Dance, their dead ancestors would come back to life. Wovoka’s message spread quickly from his people to tribes of the Plains. Their version of his teachings, which became known as the Ghost Dance, prophesied that non-Indians would die as their ancestors were revived. To demoralized reservation populations, the appeal of the Ghost Dance was obvious. For reasons just as clear, it also greatly unnerved their non-Indian neighbors.
However understandable, white panic over the Ghost Dance led to tragedy. Army troops sent to subdue the “rebelling” Indians set upon a group of Ghost Dancers preparing to settle near the Pine Ridge Agency to show their desire to keep the peace. In the ensuing melee, more than 300 Lakota women, men, and children were slaughtered. Often cited as the end of Indian resistance in the West, the massacre at Wounded Knee created a wound in Indian and white relations that more than a century later has yet to heal fully.
World History
