A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (85 page)

For all his experience on the Plains, Custer grossly underestimated the size, capabilities, and leadership of the combined Sioux-Cheyenne forces arrayed against him. Against all established military doctrine, he divided his cavalry regiment into four parts—three roughly equal units commanded by himself, Major Marcus Reno, and Captain Frederick Benteen, and a small pack train—and personally led five troops of 265 men to their doom on June 25, 1876.

Despite Hollywood’s subsequent depictions, the engagement had little drama: most accounts (including recent archeological mapping of cartridges and body placement) suggest the shooting from Custer’s Ridge was over in less than twenty minutes. Reno’s men, farther behind the main column, survived only by fleeing to a hill and digging in. There they were reinforced by the third detachment of troops and the pack train.
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The Sioux had apparently done what no other Native Americans ever had by beating the regular U.S. Army in a head-to-head contest. But when the excited chiefs told Sitting Bull of their overwhelming victory, he reportedly noted that the white man was as numerous as the leaves on the trees, and he commanded the village to pack up and withdraw before Terry’s main body arrived.

The old adage about winning the battle but losing the war is most applicable in the case of Custer’s last battle. Word of Little Bighorn arrived in Washington just as the nation was preparing to celebrate the hundred-year anniversary of the American Revolution. Despite his many personal and professional flaws, Americans immediately embraced George Armstrong Custer as a martyr for the cause of American manifest destiny and sought to avenge his slaying. A mere four months after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sioux and Northern Cheyenne stood defeated, and they surrendered once and for all. On October 31, 1876, a new treaty sent the Sioux back to their Dakota reservation, ending the Plains Indian wars.

One more tragic, and perversely paradoxical, saga was to unfold. By 1890 the Sioux had been thoroughly demoralized. In this state of mind, they turned to spiritualism in the form of the cult of the Ghost Dance, performed in the desperate belief that dancing would banish the white men, return Indian lands, and make Indians invulnerable to bullets and cannons. Military governors, alarmed at the wild mysticism of the Ghost Dancers, ordered them to stop, and ominously sent in the Seventh Cavalry to make them desist. Two weeks earlier the Indian Agency had attempted to arrest Sitting Bull for supporting the Ghost Dancers, and in the process a gun battle broke out and the chief was killed, along with a dozen of his bodyguards and police.
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On December 29, 1890, troops bungled their attempt to disarm the Sioux at Wounded Knee, site of the Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. In subzero temperatures shooting broke out, although both white and Indian witnesses disagreed over who started the firing. Popularly viewed as a cold-blooded massacre—some 200 Sioux men, women, and children lay dead in the snow—the army lost 25 killed and 39 wounded.
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But it is certain that the Indians did not deliberately provoke a fight, since they could see they were surrounded by troops and artillery. Although Wounded Knee marked another dark episode in Indian-white relations, the government had already concluded that the reservation system was not working, leading to yet another direction in American Indian policy.

The Final Stages of Assimilation

The assimilation movement had gained momentum three years before Wounded Knee, with passage of the Dawes Severalty Act (1887), wherein Indian reservations (with some exceptions) were divided into approximately 160-acre plots for male family heads, with lesser amounts to individuals. Indians had four years to select their land, after which the selection was made for them by the agent. Supported strongly by President Grover Cleveland, who saw the government as a guardian to the wards of the state, the Dawes Act reflected Cleveland’s personal views of the Indians, which swung from “lazy, vicious and stupid” to “industrious, peaceful, and intelligent.”
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Along with other reformers who saw the Indians as needing guidance, but who also agreed that “barbarism and civilization cannot live together,” Cleveland preferred a process of civic and cultural instruction in which the Native Americans would learn English in government schools and gradually attain all the formal conventions of citizenship.
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In the Dawes Act, Congress also sought to move Native Americans away from the tribal system and fully into the market economy by making them landowners, but as with most dealings with the Indians, there were also ulterior, less noble, motives. Any unclaimed lands went on the open land market, which whites snapped up. But the purpose of Dawes was not to steal land—although that certainly happened—but to change the tribal organization and habits of the Indians. Supporters called it the Emancipation Proclamation for the Indian, and the Friends of the Indian (eastern religious leaders and humanitarians) also embraced the legislation. The gap between where the Indians were and where they needed to be in order to fully function in a market economy, however, was too great. Over the next decades, generations of Plains Indians born to reservation life fared little better than those who had openly fought U.S. soldiers. Alcoholism, high infant mortality, and poverty characterized the generation of Indians who struggled to make the transition from nomadic life to modernity. Congress finally gave up on the Dawes Act in the 1930s, by which time many Indians had lost their land, although others had doggedly survived and, in some cases, managed to flourish.

Change came painfully slowly: not until the middle of the twentieth century did the lives of a significant number of Indians improve. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the brave Plains warriors fought with distinction as American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Gulf and Iraq wars. (Perhaps the most famous was one of the flag raisers on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, Ira Hayes.) Indians learned to speak English, embraced both Protestant and Catholic Christianity, and slowly began to assimilate into mainstream culture. Problems persisted, but by the late twentieth century, individual American Indians enjoyed success on almost every social, political, and economic front.

By that time, after three centuries of depopulation, Indians finally began to see their numbers increase. Alcoholism abated somewhat, and with that so too did infant mortality rates and fetal alcohol syndrome. Tribal elementary and secondary schools ultimately spawned tribal colleges; many Indians left to attend state and private colleges and universities. Native American politicians entered government, rising as high as the vice presidency of the United States (Republican Charles Curtis of Kansas) and the United States Senate (Republican Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado). Some Indians earned law degrees and returned home to file suit and win enforcement of Indian treaty rights (including fishing) in state and federal courts. Others formed tribal corporations and harvested their reservations’ natural resources—timber, ore, oil, agriculture, and fish—to vastly increase their per capita income and standard of living. Others hunted in the most fertile new grounds, the tourism market, building hunting lodges, museums, and gambling casinos to mine an increasing number of non-Indians who yearned to visit and experience “Indian Country.”

Success, however, remains a relative term when describing efforts to move Native Americans into the market economy (many reservations have unemployment rates of over 40 percent). In light of these challenges, perhaps the greatest story of Native American assimilation and achievement has been that of the Mississippi Choctaw under the leadership of Chief Philip Martin. In 1975, Martin determined that the tribe’s future lay in attracting private enterprise, and he convinced the tribal council to give him nearly absolute power to negotiate contracts, to enforce work rules, and to make the Choctaw reservation as competitive as any place in the private sector.
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Using government guarantees and a couple of small federal grants, Martin constructed the infrastructure for a business park—roads, sewage, water, and other facilities. Then the tribe sent out 150 advertising packages to companies. General Motors responded, contracting the Choctaw to assemble wire harnesses for electrical parts, requiring Martin’s agreement that the Indians perform as well as any white company. He dealt with employees firmly and even ruthlessly: no tardiness, no sloppy dress, and above all, perfect workmanship.

Soon a greeting card company, then Ford, then other companies began moving into Choctaw land, and Martin’s positions were vindicated. Ford gave the tribe a quality performance award, and unemployment, which had reached 75 percent before Chief Martin took control, dipped to under 20 percent, a level high by white standards, but amazingly low for an Indian reservation. By 1993 the Choctaw Indian tribe was the tenth largest employer in the state of Mississippi.
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The Choctaw notwithstanding, it would be unwise to declare a happy ending to a four-hundred-year history of warfare, abuse, theft, and treachery by whites, and of suffering by Indians. Yet it is absolutely correct to say that the end result of Indian-white cross-acculturation has been a certain level of assimilation, an aim that had once seemed hopeless. Modern Indians are proud Americans who simultaneously embrace their Indian ethnicity and folk traditions, Christianity, western legal traditions, capitalism, and all facets of mainstream American civilization. But getting there has been a difficult, bloody, and tragic struggle.

Territorial Government and Statehood

The legal status of western territories and the means by which they were to become states in the Union is not even mentioned in the Federal Constitution. Beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a series of Organic Acts, as they were called, set down the rules whereby frontiersmen could gain equal citizenship in the United States of America. Westerners often grew disgruntled under the rule of federally appointed territorial officials and what they saw as inordinately long territorial periods. A variety of factors weighted the length of time it took a territory to become a state: American domestic politics, foreign policy, and even social mores and religion played a role. Although most of the western states had joined the Union by 1912, it was not until 1958 and 1959 that Alaska and Hawaii at last completed their journeys through the territorial process.

Territories west of the Mississippi slowly became states in the Union before the Civil War because of the politics of slavery. Louisiana (1803), Texas (1845), and California (1850) entered under special agreements tied to American foreign policy; the remaining territories (like Oregon and Nevada, which became states in 1859 and 1864, respectively) fell under Organic Acts resembling the Northwest and Southwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789. By the late nineteenth century, nearly all of the western territories had reached the requisite population necessary for admission to the Union. But, as before, political complications characterized their attempts to achieve statehood.

Washington Territory provides a good case study of the territorial process. Carved out of the huge Oregon Territory six years before Oregon proper became a state, Congress divided Washington Territory twice again during the nearly four decades its citizens awaited statehood. Today’s Idaho, Montana, and parts of Wyoming all, at one time or another, composed the Washington Territory.

Like that of other territories, the early history of Washington was dominated by political bickering between Whigs (and Republicans) and Democrats and a strong territorial governor, Isaac Ingalls Stevens. A lifelong Democrat and West Point engineering graduate, Stevens represented the best and worst of the territorial system. He was intelligent, efficient, and tireless, and he left an indelible legacy of strong territorial government, a railroad, and a vast Indian reservation complex in the Pacific Northwest. But he ruled with an iron hand. Stevens’s authoritarianism is exemplified by the fact that, during his 1853–57 term of duty, he served simultaneously as territorial governor, federal Indian superintendent, federal Indian treaty negotiator, and U.S. Army surveyor for the northern transcontinental railroad!

With this kind of authority, and conflicts of interests, Stevens engaged in an aggressive Indian policy to make way for what he sincerely viewed as God-ordained white progression onto Indian lands. Unable to resist Stevens’s persuasion and intimidation, between 1854 and 1856 northwestern coastal and plateau Indians surrendered 64 million acres in return for fishing rights, a few gifts, and reservations. Yet these treaties immediately led to warfare between Stevens’s troops and Indians angered by what they perceived as his duplicity and heavy-handedness. Meanwhile, Whig political opposition to Stevens resulted in a bitter court fight over his suspension of habeas corpus and declaration of martial law during the Indian war, unconstitutional actions for which Stevens was later convicted and fined fifty dollars.

When Stevens left Washington to serve as its territorial congressman in the other Washington in 1857, he had cut a wide swath across the territorial history of the Pacific Northwest. In 1861 he rejoined the army as a general. In characteristic fashion, Isaac Stevens died in a blaze of glory, carrying his Union detachment’s colors in the 1862 Civil War battle of Chantilly, Virginia.
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Nearly four decades passed between Stevens’s governorship and the final admission of Washington to the Union in 1889, even though the territory had sufficient population and could have produced an acceptable constitution by the 1870s. Why did it remain a federal territory? Most of the reasons for delay were political. First, the Civil War intervened. At war’s end, as Democrats were reintegrated into national political life, Washington found its solid Republican leanings a distinct disadvantage. After 1877, Democratic congressmen mustered enough votes to thwart Washington’s admission. Then too, the territory’s image, true or not, as a hotbed of anti-Chinese violence, advocacy of woman suffrage, and home for socialist labor groups, definitely made federal politicians look askance.