10. AMERICA RECOVERS – 1865-1880
THE BATTLE FOR THE WEST
CONTENTS
 The American-Indian Wars during the Civil War
 The routes West
 Cowboys and farmers
 The Indians' "Last Stand"
The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
America – The Covenant Nation © 2021, Volume One, pages 329-339.
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A Timeline of Major Events during this period
| 1860s |
The Western frontier continues as a problem ... especially during the Civil War
1862 With the Civil War as
America's major military obsession, American Indians have resumed their attacks on
unprotected White settlers in the West ... with Sioux (Eastern Dakota) tribesmen killing
several hundred German settlers at New Ulm (Aug); Lincoln sends Federal
troops to stop the
attacks; 300 Indians are are convicted of murder ... though only 38 are
hanged
1863 Federal troops (led by Kit Carson) begin the round up
Navajo and Apache tribes ... in
order to relocate them to the bleak Pecos River region in New Mexico
1864 White
bitterness against Indians in the West brings ongoing conflict ... with
700 Federal troops attacking an
actually peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho community at Sand Creek, killing women and children ... while the men were away hunting buffalo (Nov)
In Northern Texas,
Federal troops under Carson moved to stop the Indian attacks on settlers following the Santa Fe
trail to the West ... and engaged a huge Comanche and Kiowa Indian coalition at the Battle of Adobe Walls (late Nov)
1867 The Chisolm
Trail is laid out ... to bring cattle north from southern Texas to the
railhead at Abilene Kansas
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| 1870s |
The struggle for the West intensifies as White farmers pour into the region
1875 With the
invention of barbed wire, homesteads on the Great Plains can protect
farmlands ... but also serve to block
the movement of cattle herds across those plains from Texas to Kansas
1876 A huge Indian coalition (led by Sitting Bull) – attempting to drive Whites from the Dakotas and Montana – are confronted by Federal troops led by Sheridan; one of his divisions led by Custer is grandly defearted by
the Indians (Jun) at Little Bighorn River ... merely strengthening the
resolve of Whites to finally end completely "the Indian Problem"
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| 1880s | The struggle continues
1880s The number of buffalo that once covered the Great Plains drops to almost the extinction level ... making life for the American Indian very difficult
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| 1890s | The West is "won" for White America
1890 The Indians undertake a supreme effort to remove the White Man from their world ... taking up the Ghost Dance in the belief that this would make them immune to the White Man's bullets; Sitting Bull is arrested ... but killed by Indian police (mid-Dec) ;
At the same time (late Dec) federal troops attack Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee Creek, with numerous
Indians killed ... basically ending any further Indian idea of
resistance to White expansion
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THE
AMERICAN-INDIAN WARS DURING THE CIVIL WAR |
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Wars between the American settlers and the
American Indians had been going on, of course, virtually since the
arrival of Englishmen to the shores of North America in the early
1600s. Certainly they continued even while America was caught up deeply
in its Civil War – and particularly during those times – because
federal troops protecting settlers had been pulled from Western service
to fight the Confederacy. Thus the Civil War days saw some intense
fighting between the settlers and the Indians. There were hundreds of
Indian attacks in an Indian effort to drive the White settlers off
their lands. There was no sparing of women, children and the elderly as
these were battles of whole communities over the matter of land
ownership, vital to the survival of both Indians and Whites. In the
span of the four years of the Civil War over a thousand settlers' lives
were lost to these Indian attacks
The Sioux War in Minnesota
The most intense action occurred in
Minnesota in 1862 when Dakota tribes attacked German settlements at New
Ulm and Hutchinson, killing several hundred (300-400) settlers. Local
militiamen did what they could to hold back the Sioux, and Lincoln
quickly sent federal troops to help them. Battles thus broke out
between the federal and Indian troops over a six-week period, resulting
finally in breaking the Sioux offensive. Over 400 Sioux were
subsequently arrested, 300 of which were convicted of murder and
sentenced to be hanged. Lincoln however pardoned most of them (much to
the great irritation of local White authorities) and only thirty-eight
of them were subsequently hanged, the largest such event nonetheless in
American history.
Ultimately such Indian attacks brought a
bitter White response, in the form of countering attacks of White
militia and federal troops on the Indians. There was an attempt to be
fair in the size of the response. But the anger raging between both
sides made this a matter very difficult to manage. A huge and
unwarranted loss of Indian life during this period occurred at Sand
Creek in eastern Colorado in late November of 1864, when some 700
federal troops attacked a peaceful community of Cheyenne and Arapaho
Indians, most of whose men were away hunting buffalo. 130 were killed
or wounded, mostly women and children but also a number of the members
of the Cheyenne Council, tragically those most supportive of the idea
of peace with White society. This action thus strengthened the hand of
the pro-war Indian Dog Soldiers. It also brought into action a federal
court of inquiry and condemnation of the federal officers involved. But
no other punishment resulted.
 Kit Carson and the Navajo, Kiowa, and Comanches
Meanwhile in the American southwest, action
led by Union General Carleton – but carried out largely by the living
legend Kit Carson1 – was
undertaken in early 1863 to round up the Navajo and Apache tribes and
move them to a reservation along the bleak Pecos River, where they
could be more easily prevented from making raids on the White settlers
in the New Mexico Territory. The roundup proved difficult because the
Indians knew how to hide themselves in the mountains, driving Carson to
take harsher measures to break the will of the Navajo (the ones who had
not already joined the Apache in a flight to the West to form an
anti-White army.) By early 1864 Navajo resistance had been broken and
thousands of them were rounded up and sent off to the reservation,
where many died of cold and hunger. Eventually they were allowed to
return to their former homes, though as a submissive people.
By late 1864 Carson had turned his
attention to the Kiowas and Comanches who had been conducting raids on
White settlements in the Texas Panhandle region. In November Carson and
his men met a grand Indian coalition of several thousand warriors at
the Battle of Adobe Walls. Carson's men were vastly outnumbered and
quickly out of ammunition and thus forced to retreat, but managed to
inflict massive casualties on the Indians in the process. This battle
proved to be a turning point in the Indian wars in the region, greatly
undermining the power of both tribes and ultimately bringing the Kiowas
and Comanches to sue for peace in 1865.
1Penny novels were already being written about his exploits as a mountain man and Indian hunter.
Settlers under militia protection
during the Dakota or Sioux War of 1862 in Minnesota
Lt. Colonel George
Armstrong Custer with his favorite Indian scout, Bloody Knife (kneeling
left) 
Gen.
William T. Sherman and commissioners in council with Indian chiefs at Ft. Laramie,
Wyoming – ca. 1867-1868
The National Archives
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Geronimo and his Apache raiders
But alongside Kit Carson, the Indians could
provide heroics of their own, such as the Apache raider Geronimo. He
was part of a military tradition that reached back to the wars earlier
in the 1800s between the Apaches and the Mexicans. These wars were
constant and without definitive results. Then when the American
frontiersmen came on the scene, Geronimo included their settlements in
his raids. He actually never commanded a band larger than forty or
fifty warriors. Yet his skills brought his name to some kind of fame
among the Apache – and the White settlers as well! He eventually was
forced into retirement on the Apache reservation by the U.S. military
(with also Mexican cooperation), breaking out three times between 1876
and 1886 when he grew restless under the restrictions of reservation
life. Eventually he and his Chiricahua tribe were moved to Florida and
then to Oklahoma. But his name was so well known that several times he
was featured at several major expositions back East and even rode
horseback (in native attire, of course) in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural
parade in 1905!
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Apache warrior Geronimo
A scene in Geronimo's Apache Natches' camp prior to surrender to Gen. Crook -
March 27, 1886
The Library of Congress
A band of Apache Indian prisoners at a rest stop beside a South Pacific
train – Sep 10, 1886
Among
those on their way to exile in Florida are Natchez (center front) and,
to the right, Geronimo and his son in matching shirts.
The National Archives
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The grand Western migration
On they came – White men, women and children – by
steamer or river barge (as far as the rivers would take them westward),
then by wagon train, following trails set out by trail-blazing
frontiersmen, and eventually by train as the American railroads pushed
West and Southwest deep into Indian lands. They laid claim to railroad
land and set up their own farms, as well as towns to service the
fast-growing farming world of the West.
Some such as the Mormons came looking for
religious utopias, much in the manner that had brought the Puritans to
America in the early 1600s. Indeed, Brigham Young's Mormons were
particularly successful in this matter, developing communities centered
on their City of Zion of Salt Lake City (founded by Young in 1847), but
reaching far and wide from Utah into Idaho, Arizona, Nevada,
California, Colorado, and even northern Mexico.
In 1857 a war began to brew between the
Mormons and the U.S. government, the latter in 1850, after having
secured the area from Mexico in the Mexican-American War, declaring the
region to be off limits to the practice of polygamy (a common practice
among the Mormons). U.S. troops were sent to Utah to enforce the ruling
against the rebellious Mormons, although the Mormons fought back mostly
by simply refusing to supply the troops with needed food and material.
Then in the summer of 1858, just as the Mormons were making a move to
leave Utah, pressure from Congress brought U.S. President Buchanan to
declare an end to the Mormon suppression. The war was now officially
over and the Mormons returned to their homes in Utah.
One unfortunate result of the war however was the massacre2
by Mormons (disguised as Indians) in 1857 at Mountain Meadows in
southern Utah of a party of 120 to 140 adult Arkansas "Gentiles"
(non-Mormon Whites) passing through Mormon territory with a huge herd
of cattle on their way West to California. All were killed, except
children under six who were spared however and taken in by Mormon
families. Blame for the massacre was never fully ascertained (Young
claimed to have had no involvement in the decision to execute the group
of Gentiles), and only in 1877 was one of the supposed perpetrators
finally successfully tried and executed.
The
rumors of gold (but also silver and
copper) also brought Americans west, though not usually entire families
but instead merely single male fortune hunters. States such as
California, Nevada (with its fabulous Comstock Lode), Montana, Idaho,
and Washington were states particularly sought out by these fortune
hunters. Towns would quickly appear wherever mineral sites were
discovered, bringing not only the fortune-hunting miners, but also
barkeeps and prostitutes to entertain the miners, but also bankers,
clergy, and general store operators to bring some degree of American
civilization to the towns as well. Then when the mines yielded up all
their bounty, everyone moved on to opportunities elsewhere – and then
yet another bustling mining town would turn into a deserted ghost town.
2The
decision to massacre the entire group was made when the Mormons feared
that some of the Gentiles had discovered that their attackers were
Whites (Mormons) and not really Indians.
 Directors of the Union
Pacific Railroad, approximately 250 miles west of Omaha -
1866
The train in the
background awaits the party of Eastern capitalists, newspapermen and other
prominent figures invited by the railroad executives
The National
Archives  Approximate areas of federal land grants to the railroads are shown by the dark lines on the map. Part of the cost of building these railroads was met by selling some of this land to farmers who came to settle there.
American Heritage New Illustrated History of
the United States, 1971, p. 853 End of the track – near Humboldt River Canyon -
1868
Campsite and
train
of the Central Pacific Railroad at the foot of mountains
The National Archives  Joining the tracks for the first
transcontinental railroad, Promontory, Utah Territory – 1869
The National Archives
A column of cavalry, artillery, and
wagons, commanded by Gen. George A. Custer,
crossing the plains of Dakota
Territory – 1874 Black Hills expedition
The National Archives
 An ox train used to transport supplies in the
Arizona Territory – 1883
The National Archives   
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The West's Cattle Kingdoms (1860s–1880s)
Cow trails and cattle barons.
With the advent of the railroads into the West, new opportunities
opened up for the lucrative trade in beef cattle. Thousands of cattle
would be herded north from the grasslands of Texas, through the Indian
territory of Oklahoma, to the various railheads of the Kansas Pacific
Railroad. For instance, in 1867, when the new Chisholm Trail was first
laid out, 35,000 head of cattle were brought up from Texas to the
railhead at Abilene in that first year alone. From Kansas the cattle
were then herded onto boxcars and shipped up to Chicago (or west to
Denver for shipment to the Pacific coast). In Chicago the
slaughterhouses would be kept busy preparing meat to be shipped up the
Great Lakes waterway to the populous Eastern cities.
The fabled cowboy.
From the end of the Civil War to the mid–1880s the cattle business
boomed, making a lot of cattle barons very rich – and creating a fabled
American proto-type, the American cowboy. The battalions of cowboys
conducting these drives were hard-working, hard drinking, young men on
whom endless popular stories of American fortitude would be based. They
were a restless lot, not destined to set down family roots while they
remained in the business of cattle herding. Greatly exaggerated however
were the multitude of stories of gun battles conducted by them in the
Kansas bars, where, being finally paid for their work, they were
supposedly emboldened by booze and prostitutes to the point of
murderous manliness (but still, these stories made for great reading!).
Nonetheless, the cowboy exemplified a spirit that seemed to simply roll
out of the manliness demanded of the American male during the Civil
War. The cowboy was, indeed, an inspiring symbol of a young,
aggressive, expansive America, a nation with a growing sense of destiny.
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But three things would bring this era to a close:
the steel-bladed plow, the barbed-wire fence, and the overgrazing of
the cow trails. The grassy plains through which the cattle trails led
were covered by a thick undergrowth of tough grass with deep roots,
which made the land prohibitively difficult to plow – that was until
the steel plow began to come under wide usage (sometime in the 1870s
and 1880s). With this invention, homesteaders could now begin to settle
the plains, with their plowed fields and domestic animals able to
support the lives of their families. To protect their investment, they
began to secure their landholdings by the relatively cheap means of the
new barbed wire fencing (developed in the mid–1870s).
Now the cattle herds found their paths along
their cow trails blocked here and there by these fenced-in homesteads,
and trouble began to brew between these two categories of Westerners,
the farmer and the cattleman. For years the cattlemen had been allowed
freely to graze their herds on the vast federal lands of the Great
Plains (reaching from Texas to the Dakotas). But now homesteaders were
rapidly filling these open lands. Little by little the cattle herding
business was pushed ever more westward, increasing the difficulty and
costs of the herding itself.
Furthermore, the herds had expanded to such a
size that the price of beef began to drop – at a time in which the
cattle lands and trails were beginning to be overgrazed by this vast
number of cattle. When a very bad winter hit in 1886–1887, hundreds of
thousands of cattle died from exposure and the lack of sufficient grass
or even grain for feed. A number of cattle barons never truly recovered from this bitter blow.
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The Rapid growth of the American West
The rise of the American farmer.
Anyway, the business of farming was slowly taking over from the
business of cattle herding. And truly a business it was. The families
who came West and acquired their 160-acre tract of land found that 160
acres in the West did not provide the financial security that 160-acres
in the East once had. At best these small homesteads could feed their
large families. But beyond that, there was little additional income
from their fields that could allow them to purchase the extras needed
for the good life. For instance, the Great Plains was devoid of
woodlands and thus wood had to be purchased rather than simply cut from
the surrounding woods as was the case back East. Sadly for many
homesteaders, their sole building material was the sod they cut from
the ground and turned into something like bricks to frame their houses
and barns. The sod houses that dotted the landscape of the Great Plains
were hardly a lasting solution to the challenge of settling the West.
In short order, numerous homesteaders (perhaps as many as
three-quarters of them) had to simply abandon the effort and move on to
try their luck elsewhere.
But this opened the opportunity for the
more entrepreneurial-minded homesteader to pick up abandoned
neighboring land, adding to his holdings until he possessed many
hundreds of – even a thousand – acres of farmland.
This was nicely timed with the invention
of farming machinery that made the plowing, cultivation and harvesting
of vast fields an attainable goal for an industrial farmer. And indeed,
America began to see such industrial farms grow in number during the
latter part of the 1800s. In America, farming had finally become very
big business, the Western farms fully able to feed the Eastern cities
which were also growing rapidly in size.
Urbanization comes to the West.
Towns located along the growing number of rail lines crisscrossing the
American Great Plains or Midwest began quickly to develop as economic
and social centers for the agricultural industry of entire counties.
Thus as the farming business boomed, churches, schools, banks, and
general stores began to appear in these towns, bringing American
civilization to the Midwest. In many ways this too, along with the
cowboy, was fast becoming a major cultural symbol representing the
young and fast-growing America.
Meanwhile... the American South.
Sadly the South had slipped out of the picture, caught up locally in
trying to heal the economic and cultural wounds left by the Civil War.
It would take many generations before the South was finally able indeed
to rise again.
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Dodge City, Kansas 1876
A saloon (with attentive ladies) in Cripple Creek, Colorado.
And a brothel in Montana to entertain the boys
 And lawmen to keep some semblance of order in the midst of the rowdy crowd
And there were the celebrities to add a sense of adventure
to those watching frontier life from afar
James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok
William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody
Annie Oakley
THE
INDIANS' "LAST STAND" |
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At the end of the Civil War whatever Indian
communities still remained East of the Mississippi were quite small and
isolated, hardly registering at all in the social-political scheme of
things. However, in the American Southwest, widely scattered
communities of Navajo and Hopi maintained something of an undisturbed,
though marginal, agricultural existence (their land was arid, even much
of it desert.) Neighboring Apache meanwhile led a nomadic lifestyle
hunting game from horseback. In the American Northwest a number of
tribes led fairly comfortable and quiet agricultural lives, along the
lines that the Eastern Indians had once led, prior to the arrival of
the Europeans.
The most active, and violent,
Indian-European dynamic was on the Great Plains, where Indians
constantly struggled against White Americans for control of the land.
The Plains Indians had once been farmers. But with the rapid growth of
the herds of Spanish horses that had escaped to the wild – horses that
the Indians learned how to tame – the Indians had developed great skill
as horsemen and left the farming world for the world of the hunter,
becoming dedicated hunters of the vast bison herds which covered the
Great Plains. They had so completely adapted to the lifestyle of
bison-hunter that without these herds to hunt they would not know how
to survive. And therein lay one of the biggest problems for them.
The other problem of course was like the
one also faced by the American cowboy: the American homesteaders who
were moving onto the Great Plains to establish fenced-in farmlands for
themselves and their families. By the last quarter of the 1800s it was
increasingly apparent to the Plains Indians that the two societies
could not coexist. For the Indians, survival meant simply chasing the
American homesteader off the land. Thus Indian-American war loomed.
The decline of the buffalo herds
Concerning the bison or buffalo herds and
their rapid decline, there is still much controversy as to the cause.
But certainly the effect was clear enough: deprived of their buffalo,
the Plains Indians could not survive as a society. Explorers to the
West prior to the Civil War were astounded by the size of the buffalo
herds, hundreds of thousands of them in a single herd. But already by
the time of the Civil War the herds were beginning to thin out. The
Plains Indians themselves were well-known for their extravagance in the
killing of the herds, given their own marksmanship with the hunting
rifle and skill on horseback. The herds also lacked protective
instincts and so they were easily slaughtered in vast numbers.
The Whites of course also participated in
the slaughter, hunting them for their hides, sometimes just hunting
them (for instance from passing trains) for sport – or ultimately to
deprive the Plains Indians of their sustenance. By the 1880s the total
number of buffalo had dropped to only mere hundreds, to the point of
near specie-extinction.
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The debate over what to do about "the Indian Problem"
While events on the frontier itself seemed to
take their own course as frontiersmen saw the necessity, back East a
huge debate raged over what the proper policy toward the Indian should
be.
Humanism was a response natural to those back
East who were comfortably removed from the terror of frontier life. In
a Rousseauian fashion,3 Humanists took the rather romantic view of the
Indian as the pre-civilized natural man, possessing all the pure or
sinless qualities of man that he possessed before Adam and Eve's Fall
into sin (or before the corruptions of civilization had produced their
disastrous effect). Humanists thus believed that the Indians should be
simply left alone, that White intrusion into the West should be slowed
up or even halted completely. But that romantic dream was also simply
not going to happen. Thus the Humanist program was largely irrelevant
to the solution of the Indian Problem.
Others, notably evangelical Christians, felt
strongly that God wanted Christian Americans to help the Indians come
out of their primitive (and pagan) ways, to personally bring them the
good news of the higher life to which God called all his American
children (including the American Indians). Thus missionaries took
themselves to the tribal lands of the Indians to bring them to
Christian ways and to the life-style of Anglo-Americans – setting up
schools and churches to show the Indians the way to proper or civilized
life.
But as the Cherokee and other Southeastern
Indians themselves had discovered earlier in the 1800s, converting to
the settled, agricultural, Christian life-style of the White
frontiersman did not guarantee any kind of larger protection when these
White frontiersmen sought their land. Thus ultimately this was not a
terribly good solution to the Indian Problem, at least not from the
Indian point of view.
Ultimately the decision came in the form of the
policy of rounding up the nomadic Plains Indians tribes and placing
them all on Indian reservations, promising that within those
reservations they could live as they chose – but that they were not
ever to leave those reservations or they would face the wrath of the
U.S. military sent to enforce the reservation policy of Washington's
Bureau of Indian Affairs.
As Commander of the U.S. military enforcing
that policy, Civil War veteran cavalry leader General Philip Sheridan
proved to be a strict enforcer. The only problem here was that the
Indians themselves knew from previous treaties undertaken with the U.S.
government that these reservations were generally only temporary
promises of respect for Indian rights, before such reserved territory
was once again taken away from them by land-hungry Whites.
Ultimately, the Indians understood that they
were going to have to have their own say in shaping policy, which meant
only one thing: they were going to have to fight – and fight savagely –
to protect themselves from extinction as a unique society or people.
Meanwhile, wars between the Indians on the one hand
and White settlers and U.S. Army units on the other had been fairly
constant on the American Plains since the days of the Civil War, with
the Indians typically receiving the worst end of these encounters. But
by the mid–1870s the Indians were putting aside their ancient tribal
differences and beginning to work in concert with each other.
Thus in 1875, Sioux (or Lakota) Chief Sitting
Bull and his tactician Crazy Horse decided it was time to leave the
Dakota Reservation to take to the offensive against settlers invading
the Dakota Black Hills, sacred Sioux land. By the summer of the next
year (1876) Sitting Bull had linked up with a large number of Northern
Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors in Southern Montana. Sent to deal with
this huge gathering of thousands of Indians was Sheridan's cavalry.
Sheridan divided his cavalry into separate units, to converge on the
huge Indian gathering from three different directions and force these
Indians back onto their reservations.
Things did not go well for Sheridan, as the
Indians took on one of these detachments and forced them into
humiliating retreat. Trying again, Sheridan sent out 700 troops under
the colorful Civil War celebrity, George Custer, Custer dividing his
force into a number of units, he himself leading a large detachment of
those men. On June 25-26 at the Little Bighorn River he and his
soldiers were also to discover the fighting prowess of the Indians,
when his entire detachment, including Custer himself, was either killed
(268 men) or severely wounded (55 men, 6 later dying from their wounds)
in an encounter with Crazy Horse and his warriors.
But this massacre did not break the will of the
U.S. military. Ironically it had the opposite effect, turning Custer
into some kind of iconic martyred hero, and merely deepening the
determination of the military to crush definitively all Indian power.
Realizing that his actions had simply awakened an angry and massive
White nation, Sitting Bull reappraised the situation and decided simply
to take himself and his people back to their Dakota reservation. And
this would be the last of the great Indian efforts to hold off by force
the advancing White Americans.
3Jean-Jacques
Rousseau was a French-speaking Swiss philosopher of the mid–1700s who
in his widely-read book, Social Contract, idealized the "natural man" –
even citing the American Indian as a perfect example – claiming that
sin and corruption was not itself natural to man, but came upon the
social scene only with the rise of civilization. Of course he had the
very obvious corruptions of the European royal courts in mind as he
wrote, and from a commoner's point of view such highly "civilized"
courts (as kings and their attendants saw themselves) were indeed very
corrupt, with their perfumed wigs, expensive entertainment, and general
uselessness as overseers of the lives of the multitudes of Europeans
not part of the privileged class.
Colonel George Custer
Chief Sitting Bull
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Indians assigned to Reservations
under the Dawes Severalty Act (1887).
Indians assigned to Reservations under the Dawes
Severalty Act (1887). Finally in 1887, Washington came to some kind of
conclusion about the Indian Problem when it passed the Dawes Severalty
Act. It attempted to turn the Indian reservations into homesteading
territories, each Indian family assigned the proverbial 160 acres, all
Indians to receive English instruction, and eventually all becoming
U.S. citizens. That these proud nomads however were not naturally
farmers was clearly demonstrated in the crushing of the Indian social
morale, and the widespread alcoholism that quickly descended upon the
reservations. But at least from White America's point of view, the
Indian Problem had been solved.
In keeping with the moral climate of the
times, it was not long until the Bureau of Indian Affairs fell right
alongside the railroad business into deep corruption. Government money,
unaccountable to market forces but distributed solely through political
considerations, invited all sorts of patronage appointments, at a cost
(kickbacks) of course. But it was not long before a vigilant news media
caught wind of the corruption, and scandals erupted into the public
view, dirtying the reputations of a number of American politicians.
The Ghost Dance, Sitting Bull, and Wounded Knee (1890).
But White Americans were not the only ones
to take note of the corruption, which merely added to the Indians'
sense of demoralization. Nothing that they could do seemed to improve
the Indians' sense of social significance. They were an entirely
defeated people. Thus it was that in 1890 the Sioux got caught up in
the Ghost Dance craze, believing that the performance of this ritual
would finally clear the land of the White man, even with the wearing of
special shirts to make the Indians invulnerable to White man's bullets
if it should come to armed conflict. And it soon came to such conflict
– in which Sitting Bull was killed along with a dozen of his warriors.
Then the 7th Cavalry was sent in to impose order and at Wounded Knee
even greater fighting broke out, in which 200 Sioux men, women and
children were killed – along with 25 U.S. soldiers killed and 39
wounded. It would be the last sad (and probably accidental) such
episode in the long-standing feud between the American Indian and the
American White.
Indeed, the Indian Problem had now been solved definitively.
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Indian Scouts serving the U.S.
Cavalry
Indian bodies gathered for mass burial after the
battle at Wounded Knee Creek – 1890
Go on to the next section: Capitalism in the "Gilded Age"
 Miles
H. Hodges
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