About 150 Northern Cheyenne under the leadership of Dull Knife remain imprisoned at Fort Robinson in Nebraska after trying to escape their Indian Territory reservation (see entry for SEPTEMBER 9, 1877). The Cheyenne captives frustrate the officials at the fort by insisting that they would rather die than go back to the reservation. In order to force the defiant Indians into submission, the troops chain the Cheyenne’s barracks shut and, on January 3, stop giving them provisions. After six days with no food or water, the desperate prisoners burst from the barracks, jumping out of the building’s high windows and racing for cover in the surrounding forests. About half escape; the others are gunned down by soldiers as they flee the fort.
Less than three weeks later, the survivors are discovered by U. S. troops at Antelope Creek. The Northern Cheyenne are defeated in the battle that follows. In the end, 78 of Dull Knife’s followers are taken alive, 64 are dead, and only seven manage to escape.
“We bowed to the will of the Great Father [president] and went far into the south where he told us to go. There we found a Cheyenne cannot live. Sickness came among us that made mourning in every lodge. Then the treaty promises were broken and our rations were short. . . . [W]e thought it better to die fighting to regain our old homes than to perish of sickness.”
—Northern Cheyenne leader Dull Knife on his followers’ 1877 escape from their reservation
Chief Joseph lectures Congress on the plight of the Nez Perce.
After their surrender in the Nez Perce War (see entry for OCTOBER 5, 1877), the followers of Nez
Perce leader Chief Joseph were sent to a reservation in Indian Territory. The conditions there are miserable. Already ill and weak with hunger, many of the Nez Perce die on the reservation. Among them are five of Chief Joseph’s children.
Chief Joseph obtains permission to travel to Washington, D. C., to ask for the government’s help. Before Congress, he delivers an eloquent speech recording the suffering of his people and the many injustices the United States has committed against them. His plea to be allowed to return to his homeland in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley, however, is greeted with little enthusiasm by western congressmen. Chief Joseph’s speech, however, does impress the members of the Indian Rights Association (see entry for DECEMBER 1882) and other eastern philanthropists. Widely circulating Chief Joseph’s speeches, they will make the return of the Nez Perce to the Northwest a cause of national interest. (See also entry for MAY 22, 1885.)
The Bureau of Ethnology is established.
By an act of Congress, the Bureau of Ethnology (later renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology) is formed to collect information about American Indian tribes and their cultures. John Wesley Powell, a major in the U. S. Army, is chosen as the bureau’s first director. Over the next 85 years, the organization will compile a huge amount of research material, although much of it will be colored by racial bias. The essays published by the bureau in its annual reports and bulletin will have a great influence on generations of scholars of Indian history and anthropology.
Standing Bear v. Crook defines Indians as human beings.
In January 1879, Ponca leader Standing Bear and 66 of his followers left their reservation in Indian Territory to return to their ancestral lands in present-day Nebraska. The Ponca had been forcibly removed to Indian Territory two years earlier after U. S. officials negotiated a treaty in which they mistakenly granted the Ponca homeland to the Sioux. The Ponca suffered horribly during their removal: more than one-fourth of them died en route, including Standing Bear’s children. Against the orders of the U. S. Army, he was determined to travel home in order to bury his son in Ponca territory.
About halfway there, Standing Bear and the other Ponca were stopped by General George Crook, who placed them under armed guard as he prepared to return them to Indian Territory. Newspaper accounts protested the harsh treatment of the Ponca, and several attorneys called for their release. The lawyers presented Crook with a writ of habeas corpus, demanding that he present his prisoners and declare the reason for their imprisonment. A U. S. attorney countered that habeas corpus could not apply to the Ponca because, as Indians, they were not legally considered human beings.
The dispute is resolved in court with the ruling in Standing Bear v. Crook that Indians are in fact people under U. S. law. Standing Bear’s own testimony plays a crucial role in this landmark case. “My hand is not the same color as yours,” he explains to the court, “but if you pierce it, I shall feel the pain. The blood will be the same color.” (See also entries for OCTOBER 31, 1879, and for NOVEMBER TO DECEMBER 1879.)
When five Chinese and two American prospectors are murdered in present-day Idaho, the army believes the culprits are the Sheepeaters, a group of about 30 Bannock and Shoshone Indians in the area. Troops sent out to subdue the Sheepeaters are met by a small war party that initially forces them to retreat. As the public clamors for the Sheepeaters’ capture, more soldiers are dispatched. For months the Sheepeaters successfully evade the troops, but they are forced to abandon their property and food stores. Exhausted and hungry, most surrender in early October. Although they claim they are innocent of the murders, they are sent to prison in Vancouver, Washington Territory, then relocated to Idaho’s Fort Hall Reservation.
Ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing comes to live among the Zuni.
A largely self-trained ethnologist employed by the Smithsonian Institution, Frank Hamilton Cushing, at age 22, travels to the Southwest as part of the Bureau of Ethnology’s (see entry for MARCH 3, 1879) first expedition to the region. He is charged with collecting Zuni artifacts and learning as much as possible about the Indians’ culture, a daunting task considering their reluctance to discuss their ways with non-Indians. To gain their confidence, Cushing leaves the expedition’s camp and moves into the house of the Zuni’s governor. Cushing’s willingness to adopt Zuni dress and customs and to learn their language endears him to the governor, who adopts him into his family. When, after two months, the expedition leaves the Zuni pueblo, Cushing chooses to remain behind.
For the next four years, Cushing will live as a Zuni, while taking notes about Zuni life, ways, and beliefs, particularly their complex mythology. Cushing’s years among the Zuni will provide data for his later writings, which will be among the first in-depth anthropological studies of southwestern Indians. They will also establish a new model for the ethnologist as equal parts observer and participant in the culture under study.
The Carlisle Indian boarding school is founded.
The first non-reservation school sponsored by the U. S. government, the Carlisle Industrial Indian Boarding School is established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, by Richard Henry Pratt. While serving in the army, Pratt supervised Indians held in a prisoner-of-war camp in St. Augustine, Florida (see entry for 1875). His experience convinced him that boarding schools could be the most effective tools for peaceably assimilating Indians into non-Indian society. Only by taking children and young adults out of the “corrupting” environment of their own Indian communities, he reasoned, could they learn to prosper in the mainstream. Pratt summarized his philosophy in the slogan “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
When students arrive at Carlisle, they are forbidden to speak their own language, wear Indian clothing, or practice any customs that appear too “Indian” to their non-Indian instructors. In addition to receiving a modest academic education that stresses learning the English language, they are given vocational training to help them find manual work when they graduate. The boys are taught mechanical skills and farming, while the girls learn to sew, cook, and do housework.
American troops defeat the Ute in the Ute War.
To force the Ute at the White River Agency in Colorado to give up gambling and take up farming, their agent Nathan Meeker plows up their race track and prime horse pastures. Frightened by the infuriated Ute, Meeker asks the U. S. government to send troops to the agency to protect him. It responds by dispatching 175 soldiers under the command of Major Thomas T. Thornburgh to subdue the Indians.
When the troops reach White River, Ute warriors led by Chief Jack (Nicaagat) attack them and kill Thornburgh in the Battle of Milk Creek. The Ute continue the battle for seven days, until American reinforcements arrive, forcing the Indian warriors to retreat. The Ute War ends when a treaty is negotiated with the U. S. government by Ouray, the leader of the Uncompahgre Band. The treaty forces the Ute to cede their lands at White River and relocate to the Uintah Reservation in what is now Utah.
Carlisle Indian school students, photographed before and after their arrival at the institution. The photograph with the students wearing Indian dress shows, left to right, Richard Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, and Chauncey Yellow Robe. In the photograph with them wearing uniforms, Chauncey is to the left and Richard is to the right. (Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA)
Victorio’s men attack a cavalry camp.
Led by Victorio (see entry for SEPTEMBER 2, 1877), 60 Apache warriors set upon the camp of cavalrymen outside the Indians’ former reservation at Ojo Caliente. They kill eight soldiers and steal the troops’ horses. The incident sparks an all-out war between Victorio’s followers and the U. S. Army.
Joined by other renegade Apache, Victorio’s forces will soon grow to 150 warriors. For more than a year, these fighters will inflict a reign of terror on American and Mexican settlements in Texas, northern Mexico, and what is now New Mexico and Arizona, all the while pursued by soldiers intent on capturing the runaway Apache. (See also entry for OCTOBER 15 TO 16, 1880.)
Big Snake is murdered at the Ponca Indian Agency.
In Standing Bear v. Crook (see entry for APRIL 18, 1879), a federal judge ruled that the army cannot forcibly relocate Standing Bear and his band to the Ponca’s reservation. Believing this ruling also applies to him, Big Snake, Standing Bear’s brother, moves to a Cheyenne reservation about 100 miles away from the Ponca’s assigned land. Troops arrest Big Snake and return him to his reservation.
The agent there orders his imprisonment, but Big Snake, claiming he has committed no crime, refuses to go to the jail. After he shows the troops sent to capture him that he is unarmed, they beat him with rifle butts and shoot him dead.
Standing Bear travels through the East on a lecture tour.
Inspired by newspaper accounts sympathetic to his tribe’s plight (see entry for APRIL 18, 1879), Ponca leader Standing Bear tours several cities in the East, delivering speeches about his people’s removal from their homeland. To large audiences of non-Indians, he tells his story through the two translators, Omaha Indians Susette and Francis La Flesche. (Susette will later gain renown as an Indian activist, while her brother Francis will become one of the first Native American ethnologists.) Despite a public outcry for justice following Standing Bear’s incarceration and tour, the Ponca in Indian Territory are forced to stay on their reservation.
“For the past hundred years the Indians have had none to tell the story of their wrongs. If a white man did an injury to an Indian he had to suffer in silence, or being exasperated into revenge, the act of revenge has been spread abroad through the newspapers of the land as a causeless act, perpetrated on the whites just because the Indian delighted in being savage.”
—Omaha activist Susette La Flesche during her 1879 lecture tour
World History
