[CHAPTER XV]
THE CHEYENNE WAR
It has long been the custom to attribute the dangerous restlessness of the Indians during and after the Civil War to the evil machinations of the Confederacy. It has been plausible to charge that agents of the South passed among the tribes, inciting them to outbreak by pointing out the preoccupation of the United States and the defencelessness of the frontier. Popular narratives often repeat this charge when dealing with the wars and depredations, whether among the Sioux of Minnesota, or the Northwest tribes, or the Apache and Navaho, or the Indians of the plains. Indeed, had the South been able thus to harass the enemy it is not improbable that it would have done it. It is not impossible that it actually did it. But at least the charge has not been proved. No one has produced direct evidence to show the existence of agents or their connection with the Confederacy, though many have uttered a general belief in their reality. Investigators of single affairs have admitted, regretfully, their inability to add incitement of Indians to the charges against the South. If such a cause were needed to explain the increasing turbulence of the tribes, it might be worth while to search further in the hope of establishing it, but nothing occurred in these wars which cannot be accounted for, fully, in facts easily obtained and well authenticated.
Before 1861 the Indians of the West were commonly on friendly terms with the United States. Occasional wars broke this friendship, and frequent massacres aroused the fears of one frontier or another, for the Indian was an irresponsible child, and the frontiersman was reckless and inconsiderate. But the outbreaks were exceptional, they were easily put down, and peace was rarely hard to obtain. By 1865 this condition had changed over most of the West. Warfare had become systematic and widely spread. The frequency and similarity of outbreaks in remote districts suggested a harmonious plan, or at least similar reactions from similar provocations. From 1865, for nearly five years, these wars continued with only intervals of truce, or professed peace; while during a long period after 1870, when most of the tribes were suppressed and well policed, upheavals occurred which were clearly to be connected with the Indian wars. The reality of this transition from peace to war has caused many to charge it to the South. It is, however, connected with the culmination of the westward movement, which more than explains it.
For a setting of the Indian wars some restatement of the events before 1861 is needed. By 1840 the agricultural frontier of the United States had reached the bend of the Missouri, while the Indian tribes, with plenty of room, had been pushed upon the plains. In the generation following appeared the heavy traffic along the overland trails, the advance of the frontier into the new Northwest, and the Pacific railway surveys. Each of these served to compress the Indians and restrict their range. Accompanying these came curtailing of reserves, shifting of residences to less desirable grounds, and individual maltreatment to a degree which makes marvellous the incapacity, weakness, and patience of the Indians. Occasionally they struggled, but always they lost. The scalped and mutilated pioneer, with his haystacks burning and his stock run off, is a vivid picture in the period, but is less characteristic than the long-suffering Indian, accepting the inevitable, and moving to let the white man in.
The necessary results of white encroachment were destruction of game and education of the Indian to the luxuries and vices of the white man. At a time when starvation was threatening because of the disappearance of the buffalo and other food animals, he became aware of the superior diet of the whites and the ease with which robbery could be accomplished. In the fifties the pressure continued, heavier than ever. The railway surveys reached nearly every corner of the Indian Country. In the next few years came the prospectors who started hundreds of mining camps beyond the line of settlements, while the engineers began to stick the advancing heads of railways out from the Missouri frontier and into the buffalo range.
Even the Indian could see the approaching end. It needed no confederate envoy to assure him that the United States could be attacked. His own hunger and the white peril were persuading him to defend his hunting-ground. Yet even now, in the widespread Indian wars of the later sixties, uniformity of action came without much previous coöperation. A general Indian league against the whites was never raised. The general war, upon dissection and analysis, breaks up into a multitude of little wars, each having its own particular causes, which, in many instances, if the word of the most expert frontiersmen is to be believed, ran back into cases of white aggression and Indian revenge.
The Sioux uprising of 1862 came a little ahead of the general wars, with causes rising from the treaties of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux in 1851. The plains situation had been clearly seen and succinctly stated in this year. "We are constrained to say," wrote the men who made these treaties, "that in our opinion the time has come when the extinguishment of the Indian title to this region should no longer be delayed, if government would not have the mortification, on the one hand, of confessing its inability to protect the Indian from encroachment; or be subject to the painful necessity, upon the other, of ejecting by force thousands of its citizens from a land which they desire to make their homes, and which, without their occupancy and labor, will be comparatively useless and waste." The other treaties concluded in this same year at Fort Laramie were equally the fountains of discontent which boiled over in the early sixties and gave rise at last to one of the most horrible incidents of the plains war.
In the Laramie treaties the first serious attempt to partition the plains among the tribes was made. The lines agreed upon recognized existing conditions to a large extent, while annuities were pledged in consideration of which the savages agreed to stay at peace, to allow free migration along the trails, and to keep within their boundaries. The Sioux here agreed that they belonged north of the Platte. The Arapaho and Cheyenne recognized their area as lying between the Platte and the Arkansas, the mountains and, roughly, the hundred and first meridian. For ten years after these treaties the last-named tribes kept the faith to the exclusion of attacks upon settlers or emigrants. They even allowed the Senate in its ratification of the treaty to reduce the term of the annuities from fifty years to fifteen.