The Wild Frontier (43 page)

The Wounded Knee Massacre ended the American-Indian War on December 29, 1890, 268 years after it began, even though there was a skirmish the following day. Wounded Knee caused Sioux factions to unite, and the day after the battle, they ambushed the Seventh Cavalry near the Pine Ridge agency. General Miles marshaled 3,500 troops and slowly and with patience contracted the ring of soldiers around the Sioux while urging them to surrender and promising them good treatment. They surrendered on January 15, 1891.
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After the battle was lost by the Indians, a shocked Wovoka started emphasizing peace with the settlers. His cult gradually died out, and he too finally died in 1932 at the Walker River Reservation in Nevada.
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No organized Indian warfare followed Wounded Knee.

W
HEN CONSIDERING
Wounded Knee, it is easy to forget that the Sioux had had a fierce reputation for warfare in the period from 1850 to 1890. The year 1876 was the worst year for the army since the end of the Civil War. An extraordinary number of soldiers died at the hands of the Sioux and their allies that year.
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The events that have been called the Sioux Wars included the Grattan Massacre in 1854-55 (the Mormon Cow War), the Santee Sioux Uprising in 1862-64, the War for the Bozeman Trail in 1866-68 (which included Fetterman’s Massacre and the Wagon Box Fight), and the War for the Black Hills, which included 8 battles, one of which was Custer’s Last Stand.
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The Sioux were the predominant tribe in each of these wars, and they were not to be taken lightly anywhere, including at Wounded Knee, but they had suffered defeats in the last 5 battles in the War for the Black Hills, and, as Carl Waldman put it, the Sioux, “desperate in defeat for any glimmer of hope, took to the new religion”—that is, the Ghost Dance religion.
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Several conclusions were reached by officials who investigated Wounded Knee. The army investigation by General E. D. Scott found (perhaps predictably) the following: (1) There was nothing for the army to apologize for; (2) The firing was started by the Indians; (3) the killing of the women and children must have been mostly by Indian bullets; (4) the attack by the Indians was treacherous; and (5) their attack was explained in that they were under inexcusable religious hallucination.
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Scott also concluded that “the wholesale slaughter of the women and children was unnecessary and inexcusable.”
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Marshall properly concluded that in the Scott report “there was some whitewash and some truth.”
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Although it was true that the Indians started the battle, it was also true that the killing of the Sioux, including women and children, in the dry ravine was unnecessary and inexcusable, an atrocity.

Mooney concluded that “the medicine man, Yellow Bird, at the critical moment urged the warriors to resist and gave the signal for the attack; that the first shot was fired by an Indian; and that the Indians were responsible for the engagement.” “Suddenly Yellow Bird stooped down and threw a handful of dust in the air.”
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S. L. A. Marshall in
Crimsoned Prairie: The Indian Wars
concurred:

Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn concluded in
Indian Wars
that Wounded Knee was “a tragic accident of war that neither side intended … for which neither side as a whole may be properly condemned.”
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The frontier also ended in 1890. That year, the Census Bureau announced it could no longer designate a frontier on its map as it had done in previous decades.
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Even more important, wrote Alan Axelrod, “it was becoming clear even to the most resolute that the [Indian] cause was hopeless … and [that] four centuries of war between white man and red had come to an end bitter and inglorious, suffused with exhaustion, sorrow, and shame.”
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S
OME CONCLUSIONS
can be reached about the atrocities. There were many more atrocities committed in this war than in all other United States wars combined. As Gilbert noted, the war was one of “unique ferocity” in which “the savages—red and white—did things to each other which sensitive outsiders found unbelievable.”
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The reader may understandably find them unbelievable as well, but they are documented in the literature by credible historians, and it would appear that they are not disputed even by Indian advocates.

There is some irony in the fact that the war started with a hat—Trader Morgan’s hat—which led to the Powhatan Wars and ended with some shirts—the Ghost Shirts that Yellow Bird at Wounded Knee claimed would protect the Sioux warriors from the soldiers’ bullets. Two items of clothing played a part in starting a long, bitter war and bringing about its end as well. There isn’t a moral here, but it is an interesting coincidence.

More than 16,000 atrocities connected with a death
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are recorded in the atrocity chapters. This fact (an average of 60 atrocities each year during the 268-year war) is depressing. No attempt has been made here to calculate additional death figures not connected with atrocities.

Some historians and writers have attempted to estimate all deaths resulting from specific parts of the war. Indian casualties are especially
hard to determine because of the Indian practice of carrying their dead from the field of battle whenever possible.

Carl Waldman’s
Atlas of the North American Indian
estimated that “many tribal populations declined by more than 10 percent from Indian-white conflicts” (over a period of time not stated).
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If we accept the estimate that there were 295,500 Indians in the United States in 1630, then more than 29,000 Indians (presumably mostly warriors) may have been killed when the Indians fought around that time. That was a big loss.

Here are some other estimates. Gallatin wrote that it was his opinion that more Indians were killed from 1600 to 1791 by the Iroquois alone than were killed by the Europeans.
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Wilcomb E. Washburn estimated that in King Philip’s War in 1675-76, the English (which included the Americans who fought with them) lost 600 men and the Indians 3,000.
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Bil Gilbert in
God Gave Us This Country
calculated that 360 settlers were killed in the Wyoming Valley Massacre in 1778, 500 at Fort Mims in 1813, and 200 Cheyenne at Sand Creek in 1864.
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Richard VanDerBeets concluded in his
Held Captive by Indians
that between 1782 and 1790, 1,500 settlers along the Ohio River were injured, killed, or captured.
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Clark Wissler, author of
Indians of the United States
, figured that between 1707 and 1814 there were about 100 battles between Indians and whites. In addition, there were at least 1,000 raids on both sides. The losses from the raids alone were 8,000 whites and 4,000 Indians.
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Washburn made an estimate that for the period from 1798 to 1898, not more than 4,000 Indians and some 7,000 soldiers and civilians were killed.
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This is consistent with the figures reported from the atrocity information to the effect that more whites than Indians were killed.

Elliott West in
The Contested Plains
approached the question this way: The 1855 Census reported only 2 men for every 3 women among the Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Comanche. The situation was even worse among some eastern tribes. West concluded the cause of this ratio was death from either hunting or fighting. A family among these tribes was 3 or 4 times as likely to lose a husband or son to fighting as a white family in the bloody Civil War at a later time. In short, the Civil War carnage did not approach that of these wars.
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In 1885, Helen Hunt Jackson in
A Century of Dishonor
held the opinion that “the Indian has no redress but war. In these [Indian] wars ten white men were killed to one Indian.”
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To put the matter into perspective, the battle deaths in the other major wars in the history of the United States are: Revolutionary War,
6,824; War of 1812, 2,260; Mexican War, 1,733; Civil War, 140,414 (Union) and 74,524 (Confederacy), for a total of 214,938; Spanish-American War, 385; World War I, 53,513; World War II, 292,131; Korean War, 33,629; and Vietnam War, 47,393.

Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical entitled
Veritas Splendor
(“The Splendor of Truth”) in late 1993, which asserted that there is a basic morality that transcends
all eras and cultures
and absolutely forbids certain actions.
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History has given us some fundamental rules of conduct in hostile times, violation of which invokes the strong disapproval of contemporaneous and succeeding generations. Some of those rules are these: (1) Do not knowingly kill children; (2) Do not knowingly kill women unless they are showing hostility; (3) Do not torture your enemy; (4) Do not eat human flesh; (5) Do not kill your prisoner; and (6) Do not deliberately mutilate your enemy’s body. Indians violated all these rules, and settlers and soldiers violated some of them, although the author has found no white cannibalizing of Indians and few instances of their torturing Indians.

The atrocities make it is easy to understand why this time and place in our history was called the wild frontier. The cataloging of these hard-to-believe atrocities is at an end.

M
OST OF US
are baffled by atrocious acts. Fortunately, we do have some clues that help us analyze the motives of those who committed them. Several of the causes have been mentioned above: hatred, revenge, unauthorized conduct, Indian love of warfare and desire to torture, desperation, cannibalism, and Indian conduct during the Revolution.

Two additional causes are the atrocities themselves and sadism. An atrocity was committed, word of it spread in the offended settler or Indian community, then a counteratrocity was committed in an escalating effect that sometimes led to full-blown war. Specific examples are the Raisin River Massacre of 1813, where 80 American prisoners were tortured and killed by Indians, which increased American resolve and “morally justified more or less anything they [the settlers] might be able to do to the savages”;
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the Santee Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862, which caused white goodwill to “run out,” according to S. L. A. Marshall, and which “would not be forgotten by the whites on the frontier”;
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and Sand Creek, which “the Plains Indians could neither forget nor forgive.”
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Sadism is a little-understood mental illness characterized by the obtaining of pleasure from hurting someone else. Fanny Kelly reported
that the Sioux were fond of recounting their exploits of torture. They would

Regardless of whether or not it was proper, the settlers frequently attempted to justify their own atrocities on the grounds that the Indians were committing atrocities. Bil Gilbert said, “Whites frequently justified their own atrocious conduct on the grounds that it was necessary to fight fire with fire, that they had to be vicious because the savages were so vicious.”
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Denis Brogan also took this view: “The early settlers long needed to acquire a craft equaling the craft of the savages and a savagery not much inferior. It is hard to remember this today…. But it has to be remembered all the same.”
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B
ELLIGERENTS IN
any war have enemies. The enemies in this war were different. The principal enemy of the settlers, of course, was the Indians who fought them and committed many atrocities against them, but another enemy at times was the federal government, which spasmodically prevented settlers from encroaching on land occupied by Indians. One enemy of the Indians was the government that fought them and from time to time improperly assisted the settlers against them. A greater enemy was the settlers themselves, without right seizing land occupied by Indians and committing numerous atrocities against them. But paradoxically, the greatest enemy of the Indians was Indians themselves who warred ferociously with one another, weakening their ability to fight the settlers, and who refused to unite in defeating them.