The Mammoth Book of the West (53 page)

Forsyth ordered the shaman to sit down. Another officer, James D. Mann, warned his men: “Be ready; there is going to be trouble.”

Two soldiers began struggling with a brave named Black Coyote, who refused to hand over his rifle. Then things happened with frightening speed. The holy man Yellow Bird threw a handful of dust up into the air, which the soldiers thought was a signal for an attack on them.

Four or five Sioux warriors pulled guns out from under their blankets. An officer was shot. And then all hell broke loose. Standing only eight feet away from the braves, a line of soldiers levelled their carbines and sent a volley into their ranks. Some warriors managed to shoot back, while from a low hill four Hotchkiss guns began to spew explosive shells into the scattering Sioux at the rate of a round a second. Tents were on fire, horses screaming in pain. In a few places warriors were fighting the soldiers with whatever they had to hand, and sometimes just their hands. Sioux women and children were trying to make it to a ravine, but the shells kept bursting around them. Maddened soldiers gave chase, killing groups of Indians as they huddled in the rocks and scrub cedar – or wherever they had run to. Dead women and children would be found strung out for three miles from Wounded Knee.

It is not known how many Sioux died at Wounded Knee. The smallest estimate is 153, but it may have been as high as 300. The Army suffered 25 casualties, some of them killed accidentally by their own side in the frenzy of firing.

In the darkening creek of Wounded Knee, where the snow was crimson with blood, a blizzard began to threaten. So the Sioux fallen, who numbered Big Foot, were left where they lay. Not until 3 January 1891 did a burial detail
go back to collect the dead. Their bodies were frozen in grotesque positions, and like this they were thrown into a common grave.

The scene was so grisly that it moved some of the civilians in the burial party to tears: “It is a thing to melt the heart of a man, if it was of stone, [wrote one] to see those little children, with their bodies shot to pieces thrown naked into the pit.”

The massacre at Wounded Knee caused the Sioux at the nearby Pine Ridge Agency to run off to the Badlands, where they gathered in a huge camp of 4,000 at White Clay Creek. When the 7th Cavalry went to probe the area, they became trapped by the Sioux in a valley. They were eventually rescued by the Black buffalo soldiers of the 9th Cavalry, who made an amazing forced march of 90 miles. General Miles then surrounded the Sioux, and made overtures of peace. The Indians were hungry and outnumbered – and disillusioned over the failure of the Ghost Dance shirts, most of which had been torn off and trampled underfoot.

Gradually, Sioux were coaxed out of the Big Badlands, without any more bloodshed. On 15 January, 1891, Kicking Bear and the last of the Sioux in the Badlands laid their rifles at the feet of General Nelson Miles at Pine Ridge Agency.

The Ghost Dance was over. And so were 300 years of resistance to the White man. A few individuals, even families, would hold out into the twentieth century, but there would be no more battles, no more war against the White man.

At Wounded Knee was buried the Indian’s last bid for freedom as a people. An era had ended.

When did the West end? In 1893 – the year Sitting Bull’s cabin was placed on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition – a young historian called Frederick Jackson Turner stood up before an audience of his peers and read a paper entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Briefly and brilliantly, Turner explained that the frontier had been the most important factor in shaping the character and uniqueness of the American people.

He also said that the frontier was now closed, for ever.

Certainly the great spaces, which had once seemed limitless, had closed in. With the steady defeats of the Indians and their removal to the reservations, the settlement of the Great Plains had moved forward with astonishing speed. More than anything else, this enormous population movement tamed – and thus finished – the Wild West.

And yet Turner’s imagery of the “closed” frontier did not quite match reality. Though the Census Bureau announced the frontier’s “closing” in 1890, this meant only that a line could no longer be drawn to separate the zone of settlement from the wilderness. There was still plenty of “free” land to be grabbed. There would be land “rushes” into Oklahoma until 1911, the 1893 rush alone opening up 6 million acres of the Cherokee Strip.

Moreover, the frontier habit of violence had a 300-year momentum behind it; it could not simply be stopped dead. When Blacks and Native Americans allied under Chitto Hajo (Crazy Snake) to restore tribal government in Oklahoma it ended in a “rebellion” in 1909 which came complete with the sounds of rifle fire and death. Indians in Nevada were massacred as late as 1911. This was the family of Shoshoni Mike, who formerly lived in the mountains near Twin Falls, Idaho. When one of Mike’s sons was murdered by a White horse thief, the Shoshoni family, in turn, killed the horse thief. This caused Shoshoni Mike to move to Nevada, where the family survived by killing cattle. When this was discovered, they fought a battle with four ranchers, who were all killed. Shoshoni Mike and his family then fled on horseback, but were chased nearly 300 miles by a posse. They were finally caught on 26 February 1911, and four Shoshoni men, two women and two children were killed by the posse. The four survivors (all children) were later sent to the Fort Hall reservation in Idaho.

The family of Shoshoni Mike had refused to submit to the reservation. There were other such “renegades”, especially in Arizona. The famed Apache Kid, a former scout who turned “renegade”, lived in the Sierra Madre, raiding Mexican and American settlements throughout the 1890s. Massai, a Chiricahua who fought with Geronimo in his last campaign, jumped Geronimo’s prison train before it reached St Louis, Missouri, and then stole his way back to Arizona undetected. Since his family had been on the train and thus carried into exile in Florida, he seized a Mescalero Apache woman as his wife, and lived for many years by raiding the “Pinda-lick-o-yi” (White Eyes) in the traditional way. Finally he was killed, and his wife took his new family to live on the Mescalero reservation. Other Apaches are reported to have lived wild in the Sierra Madre until as late as 1935.

Meanwhile, Western outlawry in 1893 was still to have a heyday with the Wild Bunch of Butch Cassidy, while other – if lesser – bandits would be perpetrating Old West-type hold-ups for decades to come. Roy Daugherty (“Arkansas Tom Jones”) was still robbing banks in the 1920s. And where there was Western outlawry, there was Western law. Vigilante committees were lynching until 1917. The legendary Bill Tilghman sported a tin star up to 1924, the year he was shot dead by a drunk outside Murphy’s Restaurant in the oil town of Cromwell, Oklahoma.

And yet, if the West did not end abruptly in 1890, it was in the process of dying. Like the buffalo – of which only 12 were left alive in the USA in 1890 – its glory days were all behind it. As it receded into the past, so people found the need to celebrate its wildness, which grew ever larger in the imagination, helped by such spectacles as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, rodeo and the silver screen of Hollywood.

There seemed to be nothing to see: no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields, There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

They who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.

The Great Plains were the last frontier – a sea of grass, beautiful but unforgiving, stretching off to lonely horizons. Onto it, between the 1860s and 1890s, rolled the greatest population movement in US history, anxious to take up land given under the Homestead Act, land freed from the ownership of the Native Americans by money, guile or force of arms. More American soil was occupied and placed under cultivation between 1870 and 1890 than in the entire two and a half centuries since the landings at Jamestown. Some 430 million acres were claimed between 1870 and 1890.

For decades the plains had been ignored by westering settlers, who clung to the cherished American belief that timberland had the finest soil and that the land west of the 98th meridian was the Great American Desert. And
then one day, all the timberland was used up, and sons of farmers were forced to look elsewhere to start up a place of their own. One such son, his name unknown to history, idly walked on to the land where the trees gave out and the prairie grass began, pulled up a root – and found to his disbelief that thick black soil clung to its roots. He dug down with his hands and came up with armfuls of fertile loam. One excited pioneer, Hubbel Pierce of Abbotsville, North Dakota, wrote back to his wife in 1879: “First the land is a black clay loam from two to three feet deep, the first plowing is rather hard [but] after one crop it is soft as can be, [and] any team [of horses] can work it.”

Even so, the homesteaders faced a daunting task. There were almost no trees for lumber, little water, and few neighbours. The free 160 acres of plain was barely sufficient to support a family on a subsistence farming basis. When the grass on the prairie dried in summer it was liable to set alight. “It is a strange and terrible sight to see,” wrote one pioneer, “to see all the fields a sea of fire. Quite often the scorching flames sweep everything along in their path – people, cattle, hay, fences. In dry weather with a strong wind the fire will race faster than the speediest horse.”

Every season had its woes. Aside from fire, summer brought drought and plagues of grasshoppers which could eat a field of corn in hours. The Great Grasshopper Year of 1874 witnessed the insects landing in clouds 150 miles long and 100 miles wide. Union Pacific trains in Nebraska were forced to stop because the crushed insects made the wheels too oily to grip the track. Some Western states issued “Grasshopper Bonds” to help families who had been eaten out of their livelihoods.

In winter, the temperature on the plains frequently reached 40 below freezing. Blizzards came out of nowhere. In January 1888, 200 people died of exposure on the plains in one day, victims of a northeast snowstorm that arrived
so quickly that children at one Dakota school were unable to get from the play yard into the safety of the schoolhouse. Nine were frozen to death.

Spring meant floods, fall more prairie fires. Tornadoes came at any time.

Many people were broken by the plains. A note found stuck to one deserted settler’s home read: “250 miles to the nearest post office; 100 miles to wood; 20 miles to water; 6 inches to hell. Gone to live with the wife’s folks.”

Many pioneers, with courage and ingenuity, endured.

The prerequisite for the settler, after selecting and claiming his land, paying a $14 filing fee (at a land office anything up to 100 miles away), was shelter. Tents were blown away by the incessant wind, so pioneers dug holes in the ground, or in the side of a rise. When they had more time, they built sod huts, probably borrowing techniques from English turf shelters and Indian earth-covered lodges. Using a “grasshopper plow”, and yoked oxen, plainsmen cut the turf into blocks – “Nebraska marble” – which they laid like giant bricks. Door, window, and timber for the sod roof were bought by mail order or from a distant town. A settler could erect a 24-foot long “soddy” in a week. Inside it was dark and dank, and insects and snakes dropped from the ceiling with alarming frequency. The sod house was also cheap (a 24-foot soddy might cost as little as $8 to build), warm in winter, cool in summer, bullet-proof, fireproof, and would last for a decade or more (sod houses were still common in Nebraska and Kansas until the 1930s). Some soddies were intricate and elegant, complete with wallpaper and lace curtains. Belgian Isadore Haumont built a magnificent sod “castle” in 1884, for only $500.

Where there was no firewood for heating and cooking, homesteaders used buffalo chips, cow chips (“prairie lignite”), mesquite sprouts, hay or sunflowers.

After a shelter was built, the sodbuster turned his or her mind to the farming by which they and their families would live. Essential was a supply of water. Nature forgot to provide enough, except on the western fringes of the plains, and eastern Texas and Kansas. Therefore farmers dug open wells, or hired professional diggers to do so; one professional digger, “Dutch Joe” Grewe, was reputed to be able to dig at 30 feet a day. The fee was 20 cents per foot. Many High Plains farmers had to dig down 200 feet before they found water (at least one had to go down to 500 feet). At first, water was raised by buckets or hand pumps, but in the late 1860s windmill manufacturers – especially Daniel Halladay in Chicago – began to develop a product suited to Western needs; it had small blades and a governor which reduced the pitch of the blades when high winds made them revolve too rapidly. The cost of such a windmill was high at $100, but by the 1890s they dotted the plains as the very symbol of sodbusting agriculture. Many were home-made, since instructions on how to make them were freely available. Popular with farmers with a shallow well was a “Jumbo”, a fan-wheel in a box, made from old crates, gunny sacks, and salvaged farm machinery.

Even a windmill did not solve the water problem. Once a farmer had ploughed up the moisture-holding grasslands, he found that the earth baked dry and winds blew the topsoil away in huge dust clouds. “Real estate moved considerably this week,” one Western newspaper wryly reported in 1880. To prevent this soil erosion, experimental farmer Hardy W. Campbell invented “dry farming”, where farmers harrowed their fields after every rainfall, creating a dust mulch which would stop evaporation, thus keeping the water near the roots. The system worked and opened up some dry regions, but it had the distinct disadvantage of not working at all in unusually dry years.

Few homesteaders could afford machinery; most first
crops were put in with spade, hoes and mattocks. Flax grew well in Dakota but beyond the line of the Missouri wheat was found to thrive, and the country began to take on a golden hue. Pioneers wanted a cash crop that would give them a maximum return.