Oh What a Slaughter (16 page)

In time a good many Apaches came to trust Crook, who fought them hard when he fought but who had never been an exterminationist. Once he had subdued a given group of Indians, he did his best to secure decent treatment for them.

The Aravaipa leader Eskiminzin lost two wives and five children at Camp Grant. He fled into the mountains and did not come back. He also may have taken revenge when an opportunity presented itself. J. P. Dunn, who liked statistics, reckoned that there were fifty-four attacks by Apaches on whites following Camp Grant, which is more or less what happened after Sand Creek.
When Crook returned to fix what could be fixed, Dunn had this to say about the difficulties he faced:

It must be remembered that he had left to him a legacy of hatred of three centuries between the people he had to pacify; that a large proportion of the white population were as barbarous in their modes of warfare as the Apaches themselves; that Arizona was still a refuge for the criminal and lawless men of other states; that war and pillage had been bred into the Apache, until they were the most savage and intractable Indians in the country; that large bands of their nation infested northern Mexico, and had almost impenetrable strongholds there; that Mexico still pursued war in the old way and still paid bounty for Apache scalps, no matter where procured; that slaving still existed in Mexico, and it was next to impossible to recover Indians once carried over the line.

All true. The president's man, Mr. Colyer, did a conscientious job of trying to sort things out, but the local white power structure was wholly hostile to him; for a long time the situation remained unsatisfactory and unsettled. Apaches, like most people, naturally have a strong preference for their own particular kind of country, whether desert, mountain, or plain. Shuffling them around from one poor reservation to another seldom improved anybody's mood; and yet remnants of that system are evident in Arizona today.

Red Cloud's old remark about the white man promising to take their land and then taking it is everywhere evident in Arizona. As soon as a given bunch of Apaches, attempting to make
the best of a bad situation, began to adapt to one reservation, likely as not they would be shifted to another.

If the Apaches succeeded in making a given location cultivatable, then the whites would inevitably want it.

Neither General Crook nor his successor, Colonel Kautz, liked this way of doing things; but they were soldiers, not bureaucrats; and by this time management of Native American affairs came more and more to be the domain of bureaucrats. In the end the Indians always lost. What applied to Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker, or Crazy Horse turned out to apply, as well, to Cochise, Victorio, Geronimo, and the rest.

In the Southwest this pattern has been established as far back as 1863, when some soldiers captured the Apache leader Mangus Coloradas, killed him, and cut off his head. That the struggle then continued for more than twenty years was mainly because Geronimo—the last of the desert Apache leaders—was far from easy to catch or kill.

In the end, though, as was to be the case from sea to shining sea, the whites had better equipment, and always prevailed.

The two decades between the Camp Grant Massacre in 1871 and the final carnage at Wounded Knee Creek at the very end of 1890, were years in which the Indians of the West, from southern Arizona and northern Texas all the way north to Canada and west from the Missouri River to the lava beds of northern California, where the Modocs mounted their final, futile resistance, slowly lost their freedom, their land, and their way of life.

Though there were brilliant victories—Fetterman, the Rosebud, the Little Bighorn—the contest was always unequal and its end inevitable.

The whites—the people with the better equipment—won. Most of the fighting Indians whose names have survived in popular memory—Captain Jack of the Modocs, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, Quanah Parker of the Comanches, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse of the Oglala Sioux, Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa, Spotted Tail of the Brulé, Cochise and Geronimo of the Apaches, fought, died, or surrendered during this period.

Captain Jack was hanged in 1873.

Chief Joseph, after declaring that from where the sun stood then he would fight no more, forever spent the rest of his days in places he did not want to be.

Crazy Horse, the most inspired of all the Sioux warriors, was killed at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, a victim in the main of his own people's jealousy. Without quite realizing it, he had become too big a star.

Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa took his people to Canada for a few years, but received no help and finally came back and surrendered. He was killed by native policemen on the Standing Rock Reservation while resisting arrest. His death occurred about two weeks before the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Quanah Parker of the Quahadi (Antelope) Comanche surrendered in 1875 and became an effective leader of his people during the painful years of transition from free life to reservation life.

Red Cloud, the Sioux's most able negotiator, lived until 1909 and died in his bed, a wise but not a happy man.

Spotted Tail, cautious leader of the Brule Sioux (and Crazy Horse's uncle) was also killed by one of his own people.

Geronimo, the Apache warrior who held out the longest, surrendered in 1886 and died at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, also in 1909.

Quanah Parker died in 1911, also at Fort Sill.

A number of distinguished military men had their careers defined by the efforts they made in the West to bring the Indian wars to a close.

The most famous of these of course was George Armstrong Custer, who died at the Little Bighorn, his great folly, with a smile on his face.

George Crook did honest service, both against the northern tribes and the desert Apache. He died in 1890, without having to witness the shame of Wounded Knee. His old adversary Red Cloud remarked, almost fondly, of Crook: “He never lied to us. His words gave the people hope.”

One of the most able Indian fighters of all was Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. He fought far out on the Staked Plains, where few officers dared to go. In 1875 he broke the power of the Comanches and was sent north to help out with the northern tribes. On the day when he was supposed to be married, Ranald Slidell Mackenzie went permanently insane.

A fourth able leader was General Nelson Miles, who fought in Texas in the Red River War and then went north with Mackenzie. Miles chased both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse with mixed success, but he survived and, as I said, took the surrender of both Chief Joseph and Geronimo—although, in both cases, he did little of the chasing.

The three chiefs who more or less mastered the diplomatic skills necessary to deal with the white officials and their bureaus were Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Quanah Parker; the latter was the half-white son of Cynthia Ann Parker, the most famous of the Comanche captives.

Sitting Bull, who hated the whites from first to last, was surly, impatient, and never a particularly good negotiator. The only white he unstintingly admired was Annie Oakley, his “little sure-shot.” Sitting Bull also came to have some respect for Buffalo Bill Cody, in whose show he appeared for a season. Cody, the great showman, in one of his rare understatements, called Sitting Bull “peevish.”

In fact the great Hunkpapa was a good deal more than peevish. Even at the very end of his life he still so frightened the whites that, when the Ghost Dancers began to dance and he refused to stop them, the authorities sent the Indian police and some cavalry as well to bring him in.

Though the time between the Camp Grant Massacre and Wounded Knee was almost twenty years, it only took about a half-dozen of those to essentially defeat the Plains Indians.
Geronimo was a special case, protected by a harsh but helpful environment.

The government made treaties and broke them constantly. Most of the Indians knew how little chance they had; they knew, if from nothing more than the rapid disappearance of the buffalo, that their way of life was gone. The gathering at the Little Bighorn was their greatest conclave, and their last. They wiped out the arrogant Long Hair and then just melted away, into the vast spaces of the West. With the possible exception of the Fort Laramie council in 1854 they had never gathered in such numbers and they never would again.

After Custer the whites made a great outcry for vengeance, but it was not easy to find Indians to wreak vengeance on. Buffalo Bill, by then a showman, rushed back west and took what he claimed was the first scalp for Custer, that of the Cheyenne warrior Hay-o-wei, or Yellow Hair. Whether or not Cody actually killed Hay-o-wei is not absolutely clear, but he
did
take the man's scalp, which he sent to his estranged wife as a trophy, hoping it would somehow mollify her. Understanding of the ways of the female heart was not one of Cody's strengths.

General Crook, the gray fox, with a huge contingent of some four thousand men, lumbered around the northern prairies for a while, finding no one to fight. General Miles chased Sitting Bull to Canada but had to let him go. In the dreadful winter of 1876–1877 Crook did hit a Cheyenne village, on a night so cold that eleven babies froze to death.

General Miles switched his attention to Crazy Horse and harassed him into the depths of the winter, but didn't catch him. In the spring Crazy Horse concluded that, for a time at least, the game was up. He came in, with nine hundred people and a lot of horses.

Not long after the army disarmed Crazy Horse, the Nez Percé roared out of Idaho into Montana and made for Canada, mopping
up everyone who got in their way. The army, horrified by this unexpected outbreak, seems to have briefly concluded that Crazy Horse might be the only man who could stop them. Bizarrely, as it must have seemed to him, they offered to arm him again if he would go fight the Nez Percé. The offer must have confused him—if he understood it. Puzzled, perhaps, he may have said okay, he would go fight the fugitives until every last Nez Percé was killed. The interpreter at this council, Frank Grouard, who knew Crazy Horse and may have been jealous of him, apparently told the white officers that Crazy Horse had intended to fight until every last white man was dead. Some of the listeners who understood Sioux were horrified; they tried to persuade the officers that Crazy Horse hadn't said anything of the sort, but a dark doubt had been planted in the officers' minds, the fruit of which was the decision made by General Crook to arrest Crazy Horse at once and have him shipped to the Dry Tortugas, to the dreadful prison for incorrigibles.

As is well known, when an effort was made to arrest him, Crazy Horse resisted and was bayoneted by a white soldier, while Little Big Man—once his friend, now an Indian policeman—held his arms.

Crazy Horse died in 1877. The years between his death and 1890 were sad and unheroic times for the native peoples. As it was in Arizona, so it was in Wyoming, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. The government was constantly trying to position these defeated, demoralized people in places where they would do the least harm; this meant, in most cases, allocating them the worst land—even though what at first seemed the worst land soon enough turned out to be land that the whites thought they might just have a use for after all. Few places in the whole West turned out to be so bleak that the whites wouldn't eventually want it.

There was little happiness among these reservationed peoples.
There were a few decent, honest Indian agents, but there were many more who were corrupt, interested only in greasing their own palms at their wards' expense. J. P. Dunn rightly excoriated this all too numerous breed.

Then, in the 1880s, out of the desert places, there arose a prophet, a messiah of sorts, who soon began to attract a following; he preached a message of Renewal and Return, to be achieved through a dance ritual that came to be known as the Ghost Dance, since one of its purposes was to have the dead rise up.

This prophet was a short, stocky Paiute named Wovoka—though when he lived with a white family, as he often did, he introduced himself as Jack Wilson. Wovoka, or Jack Wilson, lived into the 1930s—he may even have appeared in a silent movie.

The doctrine he preached—mildly, it should be said—the doctrine of a Return, common to many preachers of various faiths, nonetheless set the stage for the final conflict at Wounded Knee Creek.

Why it should have been thus is a complicated story.