Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

When Ulysses S. Grant became president, he took the unprecedented step of selecting an Indigenous leader to the position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs—Ely Parker (Donehogawa), an Iroquois leader from New York State. The Indian Office was thoroughly corrupt and required a clean sweep, and Parker instituted oversight and accountability policies, including the selection of agents from religious bodies rather than from military or bureaucratic backgrounds. His agenda ran into trouble, however, when accounts of abuses emerged from Indian agencies in the Plains states, beginning with the massacre of Piegan Blackfeet at the hands of US soldiers in Montana. Red Cloud was also at the forefront of tensions again, resisting a US plan to transplant his Sioux bands from the Powder River basin to a reservation far to the east, on the Missouri River. Commissioner Parker invited Red Cloud for a visit to Washington, DC, and the Sioux leader arrived in June of 1871.

It fell to Commissioner Parker to explain to Red Cloud that the treaty he had signed in 1868, in which the US gave up its settlement ambitions to Powder River Country, also had articles that designated a Sioux reservation on the Missouri. Nevertheless, Parker negotiated a settlement within the terms of the old treaty that permitted Red Cloud to continue living in the Powder River region, even if it was not in the reservation. Unfortunately, Parker soon fell out of favor in Washington for being too sympathetic to Indigenous interests, and within two years the hard-fought accommodations he had won for Red Cloud disappeared. The trading agency for the Sioux was shifted eastward, beyond where Red Cloud’s people could use it unless they also moved east, thus making room for settler exploitation of the Wyoming territory.

Commissioner Parker had also invited the Apache leader Cochise to Washington in 1871, but unlike Red Cloud, Cochise declined. Tensions had simmered between the Apache nation and white settlers for some time, and most Apache bands made no effort to use the four small reservations set aside for them in New Mexico and Arizona. Cochise’s own involvement had begun in 1861, after a violent standoff with a US lieutenant. “For a quarter of a century,” Brown writes of the aftermath of that event, “they and other Apaches would fight an intermittent guerilla campaign that would be more costly in lives and treasure than any of the other Indian wars” (194). After a pair of soldiers murdered the Apache leader Mangas, Cochise launched a long but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to drive back white encroachment.

Meanwhile, a new possibility was being explored by Lieutenant Royal Whitman, who established a peaceful employment camp for the Apache leader Eskiminzin in his own territory rather than sending him away to a reservation. The new model showed promise until the white citizens of nearby Tucson falsely blamed Eskiminzin’s people for a raid, using this spurious accusation as the pretext to massacre an entire Apache village. Brown records Eskiminzin’s reflections on the episode: “When I made peace with Lieutenant Whitman my heart was very big and happy. The people of Tucson […] must be crazy. They acted as though they had neither heads nor hearts” (206). In the aftermath, an Indian Bureau commissioner came to the area to meet with Apache leaders, but all official attempts to coax Cochise to a reservation failed until he finally convinced an official to include part of his beloved Chiricahua Mountains in the new reservation plans. By 1875, the entire Apache nation had either fled south to Mexico or had resigned themselves to reservation life.

Brown shifts his focus westward, to the Indigenous nations of California, most of whom vanished after centuries of Spanish oppression left them vulnerable to US expansion. The Modoc people of northern California, however, managed to resist the influx of settlers and miners until the 1870s, when they were forced to emigrate to the Klamath Reservation in Oregon. The Klamath nation, however, did not want the Modoc people there. So, a Modoc leader called Captain Jack led his people off the reservation, which brought them into confrontation with a US army company. The Modoc people retreated to one of the sanctuaries of their territory, a region of caves and fissures known as the Lava Beds, where they hid out over the winter of 1872-73. Several officials attempted negotiations with Captain Jack, but talks were complicated after killings took place on both sides. Captain Jack would not give up the perpetrators on his side for judgment by a white jury unless the perpetrators on the other side could be tried by Modoc leaders, but this arrangement was refused. In the end, Captain Jack simply made a plea to be left alone on that last barren fragment of his people’s land: “Give me this Lava Bed for a home. […] Nobody will ever want these rocks; give me a home here” (232). But the US refused to grant even this unless justice was done against the Modoc perpetrators of violence. At a final set of negotiations, Captain Jack shot and killed the US official, General Canby. In retaliation, the US army attacked the Modoc camps in the Lava Beds, and Captain Jack was captured and hanged. Only 153 Modoc people survived; they were exiled to the distant Indian Territory to the east (present-day Oklahoma).

In the aftermath of the 1868 massacre of Black Kettle’s village, the other nations who shared the Cheyenne range south of the Arkansas River were ordered to surrender themselves at Fort Cobb. The Kiowa and Comanche, however, would not submit to such orders, so at a negotiation, George Custer had two Kiowa leaders—Satanta and Lone Wolf—placed under arrest and led back to the fort with their followers. Along the way, however, the other Kiowa prisoners slipped away from their army escort, leaving only the two leaders in captivity. General Sheridan, in charge of the operation, was so incensed that he declared the two would be hanged unless all of the Kiowa re-surrendered: “This was how by guile and treachery most of the Kiowas were forced to give up their freedom” (244). The Kiowa, however, refused to adapt to an agricultural lifestyle on the reservation, as their culture was based on hunting buffalo. They were furious at the white hunters’ practices of slaughtering buffalo in wanton, needless massacres. As tensions rose, young Kiowa warriors lashed out, and two leaders, including Satanta, were arrested and condemned to life imprisonment. On a visit to Washington, DC, Lone Wolf negotiated for the two leaders’ release, but the US officials back in the Plains failed to live up to the agreements that had been made.

By the spring of 1874, it was clear to the Kiowa and Comanche nations that something must be done to save the buffalo, and that submitting to reservation life would only allow white hunters to complete the eradication of the species: More than three and a half million buffalo had been slain for their hides between 1872 and 1874. So Lone Wolf, Satanta, and the Kiowa joined the Kwahadi led by Quanah Parker, and launched a war to save the buffalo. They ended up hiding in the Palo Duro, an isolated system of canyons where they and their buffalo herds were shielded from sight, but even this proved an unsafe shelter: “Thousands of Bluecoats armed with repeating rifles and artillery were in search of a few hundred Indians who wanted only to save their buffalo and live out their lives in freedom” (269). A few survived the army’s assault, but even they eventually had to surrender and turn themselves in at the reservations, forced to give up their way of life.