Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (22 page)

In 1794, in an effort to quell growing unease among the Six Nations tribes, also known as the Haudenosaunee, President George Washington helped create the Canandaigua Treaty, which came about because private opportunists were cheating Native Americans of their lands. Washington worried these “jobbers, speculators, and monopolizers” were undermining his efforts to nurture his fragile young nation.

Terms of the treaty included an affirmation of the six tribes' rights to their own lands. It was hoped the pact would help establish “firm peace and friendship” among the tribes and the United States. The United States agreed to a one-time payment of $10,000 and annual tithes of $4,500 in goods, among them an annual supply of calico cloth, of which the Indians were fond. Washington also commissioned a six-foot Wampum belt, a symbolic item to commemorate the event.

A shadow of the agreement, now referred to as the Calico Treaty, is still in place. A token payment of cloth is still sent to the tribes of the Six Nations. The once-fine calico cloth has diminished over time to lengths of cheap muslin. As to the lands owned by the tribes, they have long since been subsumed into the ever-growing republic.

Though preparations began many decades before, with proposals for “cultural transformation” made by George Washington and Henry Knox, in 1830 President Andrew Jackson helped usher passage of the Indian Removal Act through Congress. This allowed the US government to remove all title Native Americans may have had to land in the southern states. The act freed up desirable land for white settlers, whose growing demands for property, particularly in the deep South and Southeast, were fast proving insatiable.

In 1831 the Choctaw Nation was removed and ushered westward. The Seminole fought tooth and nail but lost all, and in 1832 they were also removed. Two years later the Creek were driven out, then the Chickasaw in 1837.

In 1838 the US Army forced 16,542 Cherokee off their ancestral lands in Georgia, herding them like cattle all the way to modern-day Oklahoma. The 2,200-mile walk came to be known as the Trail of Tears, and for good reason. Approximately four thousand Cherokee died of exhaustion, disease, and starvation along the way.

By the end of the decade, roughly 46,000 Native Americans had been driven off their ancestral lands, some twenty-five million acres worth, and were pushed west of the Mississippi River, even as white settlers flooded in, many of whom were already giving thought to what lay to the far West.

In 1863, in response to Navajo uprisings in Arizona Territory, Colonel Kit Carson was given orders to quell the situation. He led his troops in decimating crops, slaughtering livestock, destroying precious water sources, and razing entire villages. And then he got tough.

Nine-thousand Navajo surrendered to Carson and his troops, and for their acquiescence were forced on a torturous three-hundred-mile walk from their homeland in Arizona, called “Dinétah,” to Fort Sumter in southeastern New Mexico. On the journey hundreds of Navajo died from afflictions such as exposure, frostbite, starvation, and exhaustion. Others were shot for showing signs of anger or for traveling too slowly. Official records state that 336 Navajo died on the journey, though two thousand remain unaccounted for.

Bodies were left by the roadside, along with those too weak to continue. Nighttime brought its own terrors, as tribes whose lands the Navajo were herded through stole into camp and made off with women and children. Soldiers looked away, finding it easier to not engage this fresh enemy.

They made it to Bosque Redondo, an internment camp they were forced to share with longtime enemies the Mescalero Apache. There the Navajo became a huge labor force, much needed to achieve Major General James Carleton's lofty goals of creating an agricultural Eden in what was intended to be the first Indian reservation west of Indian Territory. From the start the Navajo were treated as little more than slave laborers, endured brutally long hours, and received the barest of sustenance and clothing.

By 1868, with its agricultural schemes and dreams collapsing, Bosque Redondo was declared an abysmal failure—conditions were tight, with ten thousand people crowded into a space intended for half that. Crops died, water supplies were foul and brackish, food was brought in at great expense, the Pecos River flooded, firewood was scarce, and tribes raided incessantly. On June 1, 1868, the Navajo, weakened and spent, reluctantly agreed to a lopsided treaty that nonetheless allowed them to return to their beloved—albeit ruined—homeland, Dinétah.

Colonel John Chivington, US Army hothead and commander of the Third Colorado Cavalry, bellowed orders of attack on November 29, 1864, on the long-peaceful camp of Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle and the two hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho who lived there in southeastern Colorado Territory. Never mind that Black Kettle had long flown the United States flag over his tent, Chivington's men, some seven hundred strong, rode down hard on the unsuspecting camp—a camp two-thirds filled with women and children. When the firing commenced, Black Kettle ran the white flag of truce up the flag pole, to no avail.

Popularly known as the Sand Creek Massacre and the Battle at Sand Creek—though the notion of it being a battle suggests it was two-sided—it is more appropriately called the Chivington Massacre. When the gun-smoke cleared, as many as 163 Cheyenne lay massacred. But Chivington and his men weren't through. They scalped one hundred, looted the camp and bodies, and mutilated as many corpses as they could lay hands on, hacking body parts off men and women and adorning their hats and saddles with them. They cut off ears and fingers for their jewelry, bashed in the heads of women and babies, and the scrotums of men were later made into tobacco pouches.

Colonel Chivington, himself a Methodist preacher and opponent of slavery, and his men escaped unscathed, never having been held accountable for their foul atrocities.

Though Chief Black Kettle's wife was shot nine times at Sand Creek, the distraught chief carried her to nearby Fort Lyon, where she survived her operation. Almost four years to the day later, at the Battle of Washita River, Black Kettle and his wife, still promoting pacifism, were shot in the back and killed by Custer's men while trying to cross the river.

In 1868, with the Treaty of Laramie, the US government officially ceded six thousand square miles of the Black Hills region of Dakota Territory, land sacred to the Sioux. But six years later, in July 1874, under orders from General Philip Sheridan, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills. Consisting of one thousand soldiers, nineteen hundred mules and horses, three Gatling guns, sixty-one Indian scouts, plus scientists, journalists, a photographer, and a sixteen-man military band, Custer's mission was ostensibly to scout an ideal spot to locate a fort to help westward-bound emigrants.

Custer was actually under orders given him by General Sheridan to scout for gold in the Black Hills, which he found in promising quantities. The region, Custer reported back, offered “gold in paying quantities,” and that a man might “reasonably expect . . . to realize from every panful of earth a handsome return for his labor.” This news was met with much excitement, as the US government's postwar coffers were still quite bare, made worse by the widespread financial panic of 1873.

Before it could renegotiate treaties with the Sioux, however, civilian gold seekers, tipped off by Custer's pet journalists, flooded into the Black Hills, prompting numerous treaty violations and renewed attacks by the Lakota Sioux.

The US government, hoping to prevent further bloodshed, offered the Sioux $6 million for the Black Hills, ignoring the fact that as ground sacred to the Sioux, it was not for sale. The government said fine, have it your way, and began withholding guaranteed winter provisions it was lawfully beholden to provide to the Sioux. Faced with bitterly cold weather and encroaching starvation, the Sioux reluctantly surrendered their six-thousand-square-mile home so that they might eat. Long before negotiations were finalized, ten thousand whites had flooded into the Black Hills seeking gold.

In July 1980 the Sioux Nation pursued a lawsuit against the US government all the way to the Supreme Court for violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The court ruled that the Black Hills had indeed been taken illegally from the Sioux. The Sioux won the 1980 lawsuit, a hollow victory, as the government refused to return the land.

Though the court mandated that remuneration of the initial cash payment offered in 1876, plus interest, must be paid, the Sioux refused the money. So it resides in an escrow account, slowly gaining interest, and is rumored to total roughly $800 million today.