The Mammoth Book of the West (48 page)

The hunters, now alert, took up positions in the buildings, and staved off repeated assaults with their new long-range Sharps rifles, fitted with telescopic sights. A warrior was knocked off his horse by one of the hunters – who included the soon-to-be-famous lawman Bat Masterson – at a distance of nearly a mile. As Red Cloud had found in the Wagon Box Fight on the Bozeman Trail, numbers or even unlimited courage were no match for innovations in gun technology. Although Quanah led the warriors to the very doors of the stockade, so that they could beat upon them with their rifle butts, the Indians could not break in. After three days of siege, Quanah called the warriors off. He was injured in the shoulder, and many of the best braves were dead. Isa-tai’s magic had failed to work.

The buffalo hunters had lost only three men, one of them killed by Quanah. When the Indians withdrew, the buffalo hunters decapitated the bodies of the warriors left behind and stuck their heads on the poles of the stockade.

For weeks following Adobe Walls, the Indians raided the southern plains from Texas to Colorado. To subdue them, the Army sent out columns from Fort Griffin, Fort Sill and Camp Supply. They adopted a scorched-earth policy to deny the warriors essential supplies, burning their camps and supplies, and killing their pony herds. In September 1874, at the vast chasm of Palo Duro – previously unknown to White men – Mackenzie routed a mixed camp of Comanche, Cheyenne and Kiowa, ransacking the village and slaughtering 1,000 ponies. Above all, the Army gave the Indians no rest, and pursued them all fall, all winter. Leading the pursuits were the 30 men who formed the Army’s elite scout unit, the Seminole Negro Indians, descendants of slaves who had escaped to the Florida swamps. At first in small bands, and then in large numbers the Indians began to come in.

The last were the Quahadis. Not until April 1875 did the first Quahadi, half starved, arrive at the reservation. Quanah and 400 followers continued to hold out until they received a message from Mackenzie, which informed them that if they surrendered they would be treated honourably. If they held out any longer, he would exterminate them. To the astonishment of the messenger, Quanah personally guaranteed to lead in the last of the Comanche.

On 2 June 1875 Quanah arrived at Fort Sill with his band, and over 1,500 horses in tow. The days of the free Native American on the southern plains were over – for ever.

For 30 years Quanah had fought the White man. Now he took up their road. He was fortunate to escape imprisonment, which was the fate of some Comanche and Kiowa chiefs (among them Satanta, re-arrested on a fake charge;
unable to endure prison, he committed suicide in 1876 by slashing his wrists and leaping from a window). After a period of model behaviour, Quanah was allowed to visit relatives of his mother, who made him welcome. He stayed with them, learnt some English and studied farm tasks.

As he had once led his people in war, he began to lead them in peace. He made a big business out of the grazing rights the Comanche owned, leasing pasturage to Texas stockmen like Charles Goodnight and Burk Burnett. Burnett built Quanah Parker – as Quanah now called himself, in deference to his White blood – a large ranch house near Cache, Oklahoma, which became known as the “Comanche White House”. Wearing a business suit, Quanah Parker lobbied governments, argued legal cases and invested in the railroads. He served as a judge, and in 1902 was elected deputy sheriff of Lawton, Oklahoma. Six years later, he was elected president of the local school district, which he had helped to create.

To do his duty by the Comanche, Quanah Parker was prepared to take up White ways. Yet he seldom compromised his Comanche cultural and spiritual heritage; he was a principal proponent of the ceremonial use of peyote, a spineless cactus which produces “buttons” containing a hallucinogenic drug. Over time the peyote rite became the focus for the Indian religion known as the Native American Church.

Quanah Parker died of pneumonia on 22 February 1911. In keeping with Comanche tradition, a medicine man flapped his hands over the body of Quanah like an eagle flaps its wings – and so the chief’s spirit was called to the afterworld.

Quanah Parker was buried next to his mother. Inside the White man’s coffin, he was dressed in the full regalia of a Quahadi chief.

When the final war between the Sioux and the Whites came, it began in the Black Hills of Dakota, to the Sioux a special, hallowed place. Although they had only arrived in the land themselves a century before, the Sioux had come to regard the Black Hills as the most sacred place on earth.

Under the terms of the Treaty of 1868, which the victorious Red Cloud had secured from the government, the Black Hills were promised to the Sioux for “as long as the grass shall grow.” They would also hold forever the Powder River Buffalo range.

The ink of the treaty was hardly dry before small clouds of war began to hover over the Black Hills and the other lands held by the Sioux. White homesteaders were outraged that good land had been given to the Indians. Twenty Sioux chiefs, including Red Cloud, travelled east to Washington DC to put their case to President Grant. The talks petered out without conclusion, but what Red Cloud saw of the White man’s power in the East persuaded him that a military struggle against the US was fruitless. Red Cloud, on his return home, hung up his war lance for ever, and reluctantly agreed to move to an agency south of the Black
Hills. Many went with him and gave up the old way of life.

The decision of Red Cloud split the Sioux, for many also refused to leave the Powder River. Increasingly, the holdout Sioux began to look for guidance to a Huncpapa medicine man called Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake), who was as stubborn as his name suggested. In boyhood Sitting Bull had been nicknamed “Slow”, for his wilful deliberation, and this aspect about him had never changed. Almost as influential as Sitting Bull was the Oglala warrior Crazy Horse. Although many found Crazy Horse strange – he believed that he lived in the world of dreams, and he always went into battle naked save for a loincloth – he was a fearless and inspired warrior. Such was his utter suspicion of and contempt for the White man that he refused to have his photograph taken by their cameras.

As each year passed, more and more little clouds of war began to accumulate over the northern plains. The slaughter of the American buffalo was continuing apace, and threatening the last big herd, located in Montana–Wyoming. Settlers were edging onto Sioux lands. And then a second transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific, began to reach out into the Far West, with surveying parties entering the Yellowstone River region – Teton Sioux land – in 1873. In the summer of that year, bands of Sioux under Crazy Horse skirmished with the cavalry assigned to protect the surveyors. The White horse soldiers were from the 7th Cavalry and were led by George Armstrong Custer. After his victory at the Washita, Custer had thrown himself into the role of frontier Indian fighter, and dressed in buckskin, complete with tassels. Custer relished fighting Indians, but was also attracted to them, to their heroic glory and their freedom. He had even taken an Indian mistress, Mo-nah-se-ta, daughter of the Cheyenne leader Little Rock.

The skirmishes in the Yellowstone were sharp probing engagements, curtain-raisers to a bigger affair. Second Lieutenant Charles Larned described one in a letter home:

At early dawn on the 10th our efforts to cross [the Tongue River] commenced, and it was not until 4 in the afternoon that they were reluctantly relinquished, after every expedient had been resorted to in vain. The current was too swift and fierce for our heavy cavalry. We therefore went into bivouac close to the river bank to await the arrival of the main body, and slept that night as only men in such condition can sleep. We hardly anticipated the lively awakening that awaited us. Just at daylight our slumbers were broken by a sharp volley of musketry from the opposite bank, accompanied by shouts and yells that brought us all to our feet in an instant. As far up the river as we could see, clouds of dust announced the approach of our slippery foes, while the rattling volleys from the opposite woods, and the “zip,” “zip” of the balls about our ears told us that there were a few evil disposed persons close by.

For half an hour, while the balls flew high, we lay still without replying, but when the occasional quiver of a wounded horse told that the range was being acquired by them, the horses and men were moved back from the river edge to the foot of the bluffs, and there drawn up in line of battle to await developments. A detachment of sharpshooters was concealed in the woods, and soon sent back a sharp reply to the thickening compliments from the other side. Our scouts and the Indians were soon exchanging chaste complimentary remarks in choice Sioux – such as: “We’re coming over to give you h—l;” “You’ll see more Indians than you ever saw before in your life,” and “Shoot, you son of a dog” from ours. Sure enough, over they came, as good as their word, above and below us, and in twenty minutes our scouts came tumbling down the bluffs head
overheels, screeching: “Heap Indian come.” Just at this moment General Custer rode up to the line, followed by a bright guidon, and made rapid disposition for the defense. Glad were we that the moment of action had arrived, and that we were to stand no longer quietly and grimly in line of battle to be shot at. One platoon of the first squadron on the left was moved rapidly up the bluffs, and thrown out in skirmish line on the summit, to hold the extreme left. The remainder of the squadron followed as quickly as it could be deployed, together with one troop of the Fourth Squadron.

On they came as before, 500 or 600 in number, screaming and yelling as usual, right onto the line before they saw it. At the same moment the regimental band, which had been stationed in a ravine just in rear, struck up “Garry Owen.” The men set up a responsive shout, and a rattling volley swept the whole line.

The fight was short and sharp just here, the Indians rolling back after the first fire and shooting from a safer distance. In twenty minutes the squadrons were mounted and ordered to charge. Our evil-disposed friends tarried no longer, but fled incontinently before the pursuing squadrons. We chased them eight miles and over the river, only returning when the last Indian had gotten beyond our reach.

No less than a thousand warriors had surrounded us, and we could see on the opposite bluffs the scattered remnants galloping wildly to and fro. Just at the conclusion of the fight the infantry came up, and two shells from the Rodman guns completed the discomfiture of our demoralized foes. Our loss was one killed, Private Tuttle, E Troop, Seventh Cavalry, and three wounded. Among the latter, Lieutenant [Charles] Braden, Seventh Cavalry, while gallantly holding the extreme left, the hottest portion of the line, was shot through the thigh, crushing the bone
badly. Four horses were killed and eight or ten wounded, and deserve honorable mention, although noncombatants. Official estimates place the Indian loss at forty killed and wounded, and a large number of ponies.

To the disappointment of the 7th Cavalry they were suddenly withdrawn from the Yellowstone. So were the railwaymen. Overbuilding on the Northern Pacific had caused the bank backing the company to collapse. Within days the entire US financial system was in collapse. Within months a million Americans were out of work.

The year 1873 was destined to be a bad year for America; it also saw drought on the Great Plains, and swarms of locusts that devoured the crops, even the paint on houses.

A desperate nation began to seize on desperate solutions. There were rumours of gold in the Black Hills, the Sioux’s hallowed ground, the ground given to them “forever”. In July 1874, Custer, 600 soldiers and several newspapermen left Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, Dakota, on an expedition to the Black Hills. Ostensibly the purpose of the expedition was scientific and exploratory. But as everyone knew, its real mission was to determine whether there was gold in the hills; accompanying the soldiers were two prospectors.

On 27 July 1874 the prospectors found traces of gold at French Creek. By the spring of 1875 the Black Hills were alive with the sound of thousands of illegal White picks. Red Cloud and the other reservation leaders furiously demanded that the Whites should be removed, and called Custer “The Chief of all the thieves.” Equally furiously, Whites demanded that the Indians be removed:

This abominable compact [the Treaty of 1868] is now pleaded as a barrier to the improvement and development of one of the richest and most fertile sections in America.
What shall be done with these Indian dogs in our manger? They will not dig gold or let others do it.

The government tried to buy the Black Hills from the Sioux for $6 million, or lease mining rights at $400,000 a year. Red Cloud and the reservation Sioux met in council and turned the offer down.

As soon as the negotiation failed, the White invaders became totally brazen, laying out towns and organizing local governments in the Black Hills. Then they demanded troops to protect them.

Although the White settlers were acting illegally, Washington decided to remove the Indians instead. It was easier. In December, President Grant signed an executive order requiring all Indians in the “unceded land” to go voluntarily on to reservations by 31 January 1876. If they did not, they would be treated as “hostiles” and driven in. By this order, the government seized the Powder River country as well as the Black Hills.

News of the order was to be taken by messenger from the agencies to the camps of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, Rain-in-the-Face, Low Dog and the other Indians living up on the buffalo ranges. Blizzards and snowdrifts held up the messengers. Some camps never even received the order.

When the deadline came and the Powder River camps had not entered the reservation, the Secretary of War received a brief dispatch: “Said Indians are hereby turned over to the War Department for such action as you may deem proper.”