The Searchers (17 page)

The next morning, they heard even more of it. Ten Bears, the old Comanche warrior chief, gave a ringing address—one of the most poignant and memorable in the history of Native American oratory. Ten Bears said he was glad to come and talk peace because his people had suffered from fighting and the loss of many braves and warriors. He said soldiers had begun the hostilities two years earlier by attacking his young men. The warriors had merely fought back. “
The Comanches are not weak and blind
like the pups of a dog when seven sleeps old. They are strong and farsighted, like grown horses. We took their road and we went on it. The white women cried, and our women laughed.”

Ten Bears had visited Washington recently and said the Great White Father had promised that he and his people could roam free in designated land. But he found unacceptable the puny size of the area now on offer. “If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace,” he told the commissioners. “But that which you now say we must live on is too small.”

Ten Bears also rejected the demand that his people move permanently to reservations and live in houses. “I was born upon the prairie,” he declared, “where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls.”

Senator Henderson replied as bluntly as Satanta and Ten Bears.
The Indian “must change the road
his father trod, or he must suffer, and probably die,” he warned. “The whites are settling up all the good lands … When they come, they drive out the buffalo. If you oppose them, war must come. They are many, and you are few.”

Despite their strong misgivings, both Satanta and Ten Bears did indeed
bow to the inevitable by signing the treaty at Medicine Lodge. It allotted large portions of the area south of the Arkansas River—most of Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle—to the tribes. They were given to understand that white hunters would be prevented from crossing the Arkansas into their designated territory, although this was not put in writing. The treaty's first article was more a promise than an enforceable reality: “From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease.”

The tribes relinquished the right to occupy permanently the territories outside their reservation. They were to allow the peaceful completion of railway lines throughout the region. And they promised to cease raiding white settlements and families. “They will never capture or carry off from the settlement white women or children … [and] never kill or scalp white men nor attempt to do them harm.” In return, they were allowed “the right to hunt on any lands south of the Arkansas River, so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.”

Article Three of the treaty committed up to 320 acres for each Kiowa and Comanche family head to be recorded in a land book. The notion was to push the Indians into the alien realm of private property and farming. The nomads of the plains overnight were to become gentlemen farmers—the treaty pledged to each head of family up to $100 in seeds and agricultural implements for the first year and $25 each for the next three, as well as a suit of clothes. And educated as well: Article Seven stated that all the Indian signatories “pledge themselves to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school.”

Quanah listened, but he lacked the standing of the Comanche chiefs and was not asked to speak. “
I went and heard it
—there were many soldiers there,” he would recall. “… The soldier chief said, ‘… You must remember one thing and hold fast to and that is you must stop going on the warpath …' “

The treaty in essence was a story of peace and reconciliation that each side told the other but neither truly believed. Quanah listened to it, but he had no intention of honoring it. Neither he nor any of the Quahadi band signed on. The raiding continued.

AMONG THE PEACE COMMISSIONERS sitting in their hard, stiff-backed wooden chairs that week in southern Kansas was another warrior who
was just as skeptical and contemptuous of the proceedings as Quanah. General William T. Sherman,
the Civil War's ruthless apostle
of total war, was placed in command of the Military Division of the Mississippi in July 1865, three months after the war ended. The position gave him responsibility for military affairs and domestic security from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, all except for Texas. The Plains Indians—from the Lakota Sioux in the north down through the Comanches and Kiowas in the south—were his special burden. Sherman felt sorry for Indians, but they exasperated him. He had no patience with their recalcitrance nor with the sympathy they engendered back east among those who knew them only from newspaper articles, James Fenimore Cooper novels, and the new phenomenon of dime novels. “He viewed them as stubborn children who needed disciplining,” wrote one of Sherman's biographers.

Sherman was widely attributed to have first uttered the saying “
The only good Indian
is a dead Indian,” although he always claimed Miles Standish deserved the credit. Still, he firmly adhered to the idea. He believed the Indian way of life was anarchic and slovenly. Although he did not seek their extermination, he was repelled by their culture. For them to survive in the modern world, he insisted, they would have to become productive and orderly members of society. Indians, he told a graduating class at West Point, refused “to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.” They were a barrier to progress. Some twenty thousand Indians could barely manage to subsist in Nebraska, “while whites will be able to feed two million off its soil.”

Still, while they might be living at a mere subsistence level, Indians were a powerful military threat. There were after the Civil War some 100,000 potentially hostile Indians out of a native population of 270,000 nationwide, and they were highly mobile and increasingly well armed. Sherman had but 20,000 soldiers. He knew he had to stay on the offensive and keep his enemy on the run. He had in mind a winter campaign to destroy Indian horses and supplies and harass them into surrender. It was the same strategy that had crippled Georgia and the Deep South during the Civil War. “
In the end they must be removed
to small and clearly defined reservations or must be killed,” Sherman wrote.

Sherman and his soldiers were not exterminationists. Unlike the Texans, they would fight until their enemy was subdued, not destroyed. For the cavalry, the war against the Comanches was a military campaign with strategies and tactics, not a blood feud. Their methods could be brutal and ruthless: soldiers killed women and children, destroyed livestock,
and torched homes. But they operated out of a sense of professional duty more than personal hatred. The Comanches themselves could tell the difference.

Some, like Quanah, maintained their fiercely independent, nomadic lives and kept their distance from the reservations and agencies. But other bands settled on the outskirts of the agency, living off government beef and grain in winter. While the older warriors preached peace, many of the young men fed and sheltered over the winter months, fattening their ponies, and then set off south in spring to raid in Texas and Mexico.
In a two-and-one-half-year period
between 1865 and 1867, thirty-five counties in Texas reported a total of 162 people killed, 24 wounded, and 43 captured, along with more than 30,000 stolen livestock.

The year after Medicine Lodge, 1868—the same year in which the novelist Alan LeMay would later set
The Searchers
—was typical, according to the agents and scouts. The official reports read like a depressing frontier police blotter. In a raid in January,
Kiowas killed “several families
and took seven children prisoners, who all froze to death,” according to Indian scout Phil McCusker's report. In February they killed several people in another raid and took five captives, all of whom were later freed. In May, Comanches plundered and burned a local trading post and warned residents not to cut down any more trees or erect new buildings. That same month
Kiowas hauled out to the prairie
Colonel Jesse H. Leavenworth, the agent who helped arrange the Medicine Lodge treaty, tied a rope around his neck, and ordered him to abandon his post. He did so promptly, failing to inform his deputy, S. T. Walkley, of his sudden departure. Walkley himself reported that three raiding parties returned from Texas over the summer with a total of thirteen scalps, three captive children, and an unspecified number of horses and mules. In August Comanche bands killed eight Texans, three of them children.

Walkley recovered five white captives
over the summer. The older chiefs were “doing all they can to keep not only their own bands but all wild Indians from committing depredations … and when their young men have stolen away in the night to go on marauding expeditions to Texas, they have sent after them and brought them back in the morning,” Walkley reported to Major General William B. Hazen, the regional commander.

Hazen forwarded these reports on to General Phil Sheridan, Sherman's deputy, along with two letters from grief-stricken parents in Texas seeking the whereabouts of their abducted children. In an accompanying note, Hazen proposed “to hang all the principal participants in this
outlawry, and to disarm and dismount the rest.” This, he said, was “
the mildest remedy
that promises a certain cure.”

Sheridan agreed. “
If a white man commits murder
or robs, we hang him or send him to the penitentiary,” he wrote. “If an Indian does the same, we have been in the habit of giving him more blankets.”

With Sherman's blessing, Sheridan launched the Winter Campaign of 1868–69 against the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes in their winter quarters, seizing their supplies and livestock, killing those who resisted, and driving the rest back into the reservation. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the great mythmaker, marching under Sheridan's orders, struck the biggest and most controversial blow in late November in a surprise attack on a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment on the Washita River near modern-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Traveling through a foot of fresh snow, Custer and eight hundred men overran a winter village of fifty-one lodges, killing dozens of men, women, and children. Among the victims were Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief who was a signatory at Medicine Lodge, and his wife. In an eerie premonition of Custer's own demise at Little Big Horn eight years later, two officers and nineteen enlisted men were killed when they ran into a superior force of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa braves coming to Black Kettle's aid. Custer burned the lodges and winter food supply, slaughtered hundreds of Indian ponies and mules, and brought back fifty prisoners.

Sheridan justified the slaughter of Indian women and children by accusing Black Kettle of engaging in the same deeds. Custer's men had found the bodies of two white captives, Clara Blinn and her two-year-old son, Willie, both of whom had been killed by Cheyenne warriors. The troopers, Sheridan, wrote in his report, “had struck a hard blow, and wiped out old Black Kettle and his murderers and rapers of helpless women.”

He flung the most hideous of accusations, characterizing whites who sympathized with the Indians as accessories to murder and rape—“
the aiders and abettors of savages
who murdered, without mercy, men, women, and children; in all cases ravishing the women sometimes as often as forty and fifty times in succession, and while insensible from brutality and exhaustion forced sticks up their persons, and, in one instance, the fortieth or fiftieth savage drew his saber and used it on the person of the woman in the same manner. I do not know exactly how far these humanitarians should be excused on account of their ignorance …”

Sheridan believed such women were no longer worth rescuing, having suffered the classic “Fate Worse than Death,” and it might be best if they perished by murder, suicide “or the providentially directed bullet of a would-be rescuer.”

While it seemed like a deranged and twisted notion, Sheridan's formula captured the nightmares and obsessions of many whites—their need for retribution, yet at the same time their deep-seated belief that women sexually abused in such a fashion were fit only for death. Nearly a century later, the director John Ford would take the same theme and build
The Searchers
around it.

PRESIDENT ULYSSES S. GRANT had seen enough. In an effort to end the Plains Indian wars, he met with a delegation of Quakers shortly after his election to the presidency in 1868 and agreed to appoint their clergy as Indian agents. Grant, as usual, put it simply: “If you can make Quakers out of the Indians it will take the fight out of them,” he told the group. “
Let us have peace
.”

Lawrie Tatum, a balding, bearded forty-seven-year-old teacher living on a farm in Iowa, was one of those pressed into government service in the name of Grant's peace policy. Tatum was a prominent Iowan known for his involvement with helping runaway slaves before the Civil War. Despite having no experience in dealing with Indians, he was named Kiowa-Comanche agent in 1869.

Tatum came to the agency in Anadarko with few illusions. Kiowas and Comanches “were still addicted to raiding in Texas, stealing horses and mules, and sometimes committing other depredations …,” he wrote. “They were probably the worst Indians east of the Rocky Mountains.” The warriors saw themselves at war with Texans, not with the Army. But a prominent Comanche chief told Tatum flatly that “if Washington don't want my young men to raid in Texas, then Washington must move Texas clear away, where my young men can't find it.”

Tatum quickly figured out how the warriors were exploiting the reservation system. “They told me a number of times,” he wrote, “that the only way that they could get a large supply of annuity goods was to go out onto the warpath, kill some people, steal a good many horses, get the soldiers to chase them awhile, without permitting them to do much harm, and then the Government would give them a large amount of blankets, calico, muslin, etc. to get them to quit!”