The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

On Saturday the 23d Little Crow came down the river again to renew his fight upon New Ulm, which, unmolested since Tuesday, had been increasing its defences. Here Judge Flandrau led out the whites in a pitched battle. A few of his men were old frontiersmen, cool and determined, of unerring aim; but most were German settlers, recently arrived, and often terrified by their new experiences. During the week of horrors the depredations covered the Minnesota frontier and lapped over into Iowa and Dakota. Isolated families, murdered and violated, or led captive into the wilderness, were common. Stories of those who survived these dangers form a large part of the local literature of this section of the Northwest. At New Ulm the situation had become so desperate that on the 25th Flandrau evacuated the town and led its whole remaining population to safety at Mankato.

Long before the week of suffering was over, aid had been started to the harassed frontier. Governor Ramsey, of Minnesota, hurried to Mendota, and there organized a relief column to move up the Minnesota Valley. Henry Hastings Sibley, quite different from him of Rio Grande fame, commanded the column and reached St. Peter's with his advance on Friday. By Sunday he had 1400 men with whom to quiet the panic and restore peace and repopulate the deserted country. He was now joined by Ignatius Donnelly, Lieutenant-governor, sent to urge greater speed. The advance was resumed. By Friday, the 29th, they had reached Fort Ridgely, passing through country "abandoned by the inhabitants; the houses, in many cases, left with the doors open, the furniture undisturbed, while the cattle ranged about the doors or through the cultivated fields." The country had been settled up to the very edge of the Fort Ridgely reserve. It was entirely deserted, though only partially devastated. Donnelly commented in his report upon the prayer-books and old German trunks of "Johann Schwartz," strewn upon the ground in one place; and upon bodies found, "bloated, discolored, and far gone in decomposition." The Indian agent, Thomas J. Galbraith, who was at Fort Ridgely during the trouble, reported in 1863, that 737 whites were known to have been massacred.

Sibley, having reached Fort Ridgely, proceeded at first to reconnoitre and bury the dead, then to follow the Indians and rescue the captives. More than once the tribes had found that it was wise to carry off prisoners, who by serving as hostages might mollify or prevent punishment for the original outbreak. Early in September there were pitched battles at Birch Coolie and Fort Abercrombie and Wood Lake. At this last engagement, on September 23, Sibley was able not only to defeat the tribes and take nearly 2000 prisoners, but to release 227 women and children, who had been the "prime object," from whose "pursuit nothing could drive or divert him." The Indians were handed over under arrest to Agent Galbraith to be conveyed first to the Lower Agency, and then, in November, to Fort Snelling.

The punishment of the Sioux was heavy. Inkpaduta's massacre at Spirit Lake was still remembered and unavenged. Sibley now cut them down in battle in 1862, though Little Crow and other leaders escaped. In 1863, Pope, who had been called to command a new department in the Northwest, organized a general campaign against the tribes, sending Sibley up the Minnesota River to drive them west, and Sully up the Missouri to head them off, planning to catch and crush them between the two columns. The manœuvre was badly timed and failed, while punishment drifted gradually into a prolonged war.

Civil retribution was more severe, and fell, with judicial irony, on the farmer Sioux who had been drawn reluctantly into the struggle. At the Lower Agency, at Redwood, the captives were held, while more than four hundred of their men were singled out for trial for murder. Nothing is more significant of the anomalous nature of the Indian relation than this trial for murder of prisoners of war. The United States held the tribes nationally to account, yet felt free to punish individuals as though they were citizens of the United States. The military commission sat at Redwood for several weeks with the missionary and linguist, Rev. S. R. Riggs, "in effect, the Grand Jury of the court." Three hundred and three were condemned to death by the court for murder, rape, and arson, their condemnation starting a wave of protest over the country, headed by the Indian Commissioner, W. P. Dole. To the indignation of the frontier, naturally revengeful and never impartial, President Lincoln yielded to the protests in the case of most of the condemned. Yet thirty-eight of them were hanged on a single scaffold at Mankato on December 26, 1862. The innocent and uncondemned were punished also, when Congress confiscated all their Minnesota reserve in 1863, and transferred the tribe to Fort Thompson on the Missouri, where less desirable quarters were found for them.

All along the edge of the frontier, from Minnesota to the Rio Grande, were problems that drew the West into the movement of the Civil War. The situation was trying for both whites and Indians, but nowhere did the Indians suffer between the millstones as they did in the Indian Territory, where the Cherokee and Creeks, Choctaw and Chickasaw and Seminole, had been colonized in the years of creation of the Indian frontier. For a generation these nations had resided in comparative peace and advancing civilization, but they were undone by causes which they could not control.

The confederacy was no sooner organized than its commissioners demanded of the tribes colonized west of Arkansas their allegiance and support, professing to have inherited all the rights and obligations of the United States. To the Indian leaders, half civilized and better, this demand raised difficulties which would have been a strain on any diplomacy. If they remained loyal to the United States, the confederate forces, adjacent in Arkansas and Texas, and already coveting their lands, would cut them to pieces. If they adhered to the confederacy and the latter lost, they might anticipate the resentment of the United States. Yet they were too weak to stand alone and were forced to go one way or other. The resulting policy was temporizing and brought to them a large measure of punishment from both sides, and the heavy subsequent wrath of the United States.

John Ross, principal chief in the Cherokee nation, tried to maintain his neutrality at the commencement of the conflict, but the fiction of Indian nationality was too slight for his effort to be successful. During the spring and summer of 1861 he struggled against the confederate control to which he succumbed by August, when confederate troops had overrun most of Indian Territory, and disloyal Indian agents had surrendered United States property to the enemy. The war which followed resembled the guerrilla conflicts of Kansas, with the addition of the Indian element.

By no means all the Indians accepted the confederate control. When the Indian Territory forts—Gibson, Arbuckle, Washita, and Cobb—fell into the hands of the South, loyal Indians left their homes and sought protection within the United States lines. Almost the only way to fight a war in which a population is generally divided, is by means of depopulation and concentration. Along the Verdigris River, in southeast Kansas, these Indian refugees settled in 1861 and 1862, to the number of 6000. Here the Indian Commissioner fed them as best he could, and organized them to fight when that was possible. With the return of federal success in the occupation of Fort Smith and western Arkansas during the next two years, the natives began to return to their homes. But the relation of their tribes to the United States was tainted. The compulsory cession of their western lands which came at the close of the conflict belongs to a later chapter and the beginnings of Oklahoma. Here, as elsewhere, the condition of the tribes was permanently changed.

The great plains and the Far West were only the outskirts of the Civil War. At no time did they shape its course, for the Civil War was, from their point of view, only an incidental sectional contest in the East, and merely an episode in the grander development of the United States. The way is opening ever wider for the historian who shall see in this material development and progress of civilization the central thread of American history, and in accordance with it, retail the story. But during the years of sectional strife the West was occasionally connected with the struggle, while toward their close it passed rapidly into a period in which it came to be the admitted centre of interest. The last stand of the Indians against the onrush of settlement is a warfare with an identity of its own.