By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
After the Civil War, the American government’s policy towards the Indians alternated between trying to destroy the Native Americans’ independent way of life, and trying to make treaties with them, to confine them in certain areas. Some influential figures, including William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union army hero of the Civil War, favored destroying their way of life altogether.
Encouraging Buffalo Hunting
Sherman anticipated that if the buffalo herds could be destroyed, the Indians’ way of life would become impossible, because if they were dependent on the animal and the animal went, that way of life would have to stop.
It was in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the same time that the transcontinental railroad was being built, that white hunters moved out onto the Plains, hunting buffalo in a commercial way, rather than just individually.
Commercial Enterprise
Buffalo tongues were valuable as a food delicacy back East, and the hides were also very valuable—both as a high-quality source of leather, and also to make machine belts for the new industrial factories.
Professional buffalo hunters like Buffalo Bill—William Cody—could shoot 100 animals in a day with new accurate rifles mounted on tripods that could fire over a long distance. They learned how to turn the herd into a milling circle, and then to fire repeatedly into the melee and bring down animals one after the next all through the day.
Much of the carcass of every animal was simply left rotting on the Plains and it led temporarily to an increase in the wolf population because there was so much buffalo meat available to be eaten.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
The Sand Creek Massacre
Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, there was a constant anxious confrontation between groups of Indians and groups of whites out in the huge Plains and mountains area, usually over land disputes. Sometimes the whites’ fear and greed led them to make completely unprovoked attacks, the most notorious example of which is the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. This was an attack on a group of the Cheyenne in eastern Colorado.
They’d gone there under the promise of safety to negotiate a treaty, and the Cheyenne chief, Black Cattle, actually had an American flag flying from his teepee, but the local militia from Denver, called ‘the Colorado Volunteers’, led by Colonel John Chivington, who was a Methodist minister—killed everyone they could, including all the women and children. The Sand Creek Massacre is one of the great atrocities of American history.
Two hundred and fifty of the Indians were killed. A regular army general described it as “the foulest and most unjustifiable crime in the annals of America”. But Chivington himself, and the people of Denver were absolutely delighted to hear that the Cheyenne had been annihilated, and the attackers themselves scalped the Indians; they put the scalps that they’d taken on display in the theaters in Denver, and crowds came out and cheered to witness what they regarded as a reduction in the hazards to which they were subjected.
Retaliation from Indians
Conversely, it is also true that the Indians, when they had the opportunity, would sometimes attack the whites in turn, particularly in places where they were thin and dispersed: isolated army posts, isolated settlers’ cabins, groups of miners, and so on.
For example, in December 1866, the Sioux chief Red Cloud was determined to prevent white development of the Montana gold fields, and so he cut the Bozeman Trail, the track that led from the Oregon Trail up towards the Montana gold fields. It was there that they ambushed an impulsive army officer named William Fetterman from Fort Phil Kearney nearby, and massacred the 77 men under his command.
Was the Violence Justified?
Thus, out on the Plains and the mountains there was a condition of mutual fear and suspicion. Each side did commit atrocities against the other, although from our point of view, we have to judge very harshly the whites’ constant greed and aggression.
We also have to take seriously the fact that they were absolutely terrified of the Indians. If we don’t understand that, it’s impossible to make sense of the aggravated assaults that each side made on the other.
Varying Views towards Indians
By then, back East it was common to find people who had a philanthropic attitude towards the Indians. For example, the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania was a place designed to educate young Indians and turn them into American citizens.
Every year, at Lake Mohonk in New York, a group of philanthropists—mainly clergy and missionaries—would get together to talk about benevolent ways of civilizing the Indians. The closer one got to the frontier, the rarer such views were, though. Out on the frontier, in close contact and immediate friction with the Indians, the whites tended to be violently antagonistic towards them.
Enforcing Treaties: An Uphill Task
When treaties were made, as they were regularly in the 1860s and 1870s, they proved very difficult to enforce, because usually the enforcement specified that the U.S. Army would prevent white settlers from going into treaty lands, into reservations. But quite often it happened that, for example, gold would be discovered inside the reservation, and there’d be a stampede of whites into the area to try to get rich from the gold.
The army was reluctant to police the people with whom it was really much more sympathetic in any case, that is the white settlers, on behalf of the Indians, whom they also tended to dislike and distrust.
Common Questions about Confrontations between the Indians and Whites
Buffalo tongues were valuable as a food delicacy back East, and the hides were also very valuable—both as a high-quality source of leather, and also to make machine belts for the new industrial factories.
The Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 was an attack on a group of the Cheyenne in eastern Colorado.
The whites had gone there under the promise of safety to negotiate a treaty, but the local militia from Denver, led by Colonel John Chivington, killed everyone they could, including all the women and children.
The Carlisle School in Pennsylvania was a place designed to educate young Indians and turn them into American citizens.
