The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

[CHAPTER XVII]
THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY

The crisis in the struggle for the control of the great plains may fairly be said to have been reached about the time of the slaughter of Fetterman and his men at Fort Philip Kearney. During the previous fifteen years the causes had been shaping through the development of the use of the trails, the opening of the mining territories, and the agitation for a continental railway. Now the railway was not only authorized and begun, but Congress had put a premium upon its completion by an act of July, 1866, which permitted the Union Pacific to build west and the Central Pacific to build east until the two lines should meet. In the ensuing race for the land grants the roads were pushed with new vigor, so that the crisis of the Indian problem was speedily reached. In the fall of 1866 Ben Holladay saw the end of the overland freighting and sold out. In November the terminus of the overland mail route was moved west to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, whither the Union Pacific had now arrived in its course of construction. No wonder the tribes realized their danger and broke out in protest.

As the crisis drew near radical differences of opinion among those who must handle the tribes became apparent. The question of the management by the War Department or the Interior was in the air, and was raised again and again in Congress. More fundamental was the question of policy, upon which the view of Senator John Sherman was as clear as any. "I agree with you," he wrote to his brother William, in 1867, "that Indian wars will not cease until all the Indian tribes are absorbed in our population, and can be controlled by constables instead of soldiers." Upon another phase of management Francis A. Walker wrote a little later: "There can be no question of national dignity involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power. The proudest Anglo-Saxon will climb a tree with a bear behind him.... With wild men, as with wild beasts, the question whether to fight, coax, or run is a question merely of what is safest or easiest in the situation given." That responsibility for some decided action lay heavily upon the whites may be implied from the admission of Colonel Henry Inman, who knew the frontier well—"that, during more than a third of a century passed on the plains and in the mountains, he has never known of a war with the hostile tribes that was not caused by broken faith on the part of the United States or its agents." A professional Indian fighter, like Kit Carson, declared on oath that "as a general thing, the difficulties arise from aggressions on the part of the whites."

In Congress all the interests involved in the Indian problem found spokesmen. The War and Interior departments had ample representation; the Western members commonly voiced the extreme opinion of the frontier; Eastern men often spoke for the humanitarian sentiment that saw much good in the Indian and much evil in his treatment. But withal, when it came to special action upon any situation, Congress felt its lack of information. The departments best informed were partisan and antagonistic. Even to-day it is a matter of high critical scholarship to determine, with the passions cooled off, truth and responsibility in such affairs as the Minnesota outbreak, and the Chivington or the Fetterman massacre. To lighten in part its feeling of helplessness in the midst of interested parties Congress raised a committee of seven, three of the Senate and four of the House, in March, 1865, to investigate and report on the condition of the Indian tribes. The joint committee was resolved upon during a bitter and ill-informed debate on Chivington; while it sat, the Cheyenne war ended and the Sioux broke out; the committee reported in January, 1867. To facilitate its investigation it divided itself into three groups to visit the Pacific Slope, the southern plains, and the northern plains. Its report, with the accompanying testimony, fills over five hundred pages. In all the storm centres of the Indian West the committee sat, listened, and questioned.

The Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes gave a doleful view of the future from the Indians' standpoint. General Pope was quoted to the effect that the savages were rapidly dying off from wars, cruel treatment, unwise policy, and dishonest administration, "and by steady and resistless encroachments of the white emigration towards the west, which is every day confining the Indians to narrower limits, and driving off or killing the game, their only means of subsistence." To this catalogue of causes General Carleton, who must have believed his war of Apache and Navaho extermination a potent handmaid of providence, added: "The causes which the Almighty originates, when in their appointed time He wills that one race of man—as in races of lower animals—shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place to another race, and so on, in the great cycle traced out by Himself, which may be seen, but has reasons too deep to be fathomed by us. The races of mammoths and mastodons, and the great sloths, came and passed away; the red man of America is passing away!"

The committee believed that the wars with their incidents of slaughter and extermination by both sides, as occasion offered, were generally the result of white encroachments. It did not fall in with the growing opinion that the control of the tribes should be passed over to the War Department, but recommended instead a system of visiting boards, each including a civilian, a soldier, and an Assistant Indian Commissioner, for the regular inspection of the tribes. The recommendation of the committee came to naught in Congress, but the information it gathered, supplementing the annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the special investigations of single wars, gave much additional weight to the belief that a crisis was at hand.

Meanwhile, through 1866 and 1867, the Cheyenne and Sioux wars dragged on. The Powder River country continued to be a field of battle, with Powell's fight coming in the summer of 1867. In the spring of 1867 General Hancock destroyed a Cheyenne village at Pawnee Fork. Eastern opinion came to demand more forcefully that this fighting should stop. Western opinion was equally insistent that the Indian must go, while General Sherman believed that a part of its bellicose demand was due to a desire for "the profit resulting from military occupation." Certain it was that war had lasted for several years with no definite results, save to rouse the passions of the West, the revenge of the Indians, and the philanthropy of the East. The army had had its chance. Now the time had come for general, real attempts at peace.

The fortieth Congress, beginning its life on March 4, 1867, actually began its session at that time. Ordinarily it would have waited until December, but the prevailing distrust of President Johnson and his reconstruction ideas induced it to convene as early as the law allowed. Among the most significant of its measures in this extra session was "Mr. Henderson's bill for establishing peace with certain Indian tribes now at war with the United States," which, in the view of the Nation, was a "practical measure for the security of travel through the territories and for the selection of a new area sufficient to contain all the unsettled tribes east of the Rocky Mountains." Senator Sherman had informed his brother of the prospect of this law, and the General had replied: "The fact is, this contact of the two races has caused universal hostility, and the Indians operate in small, scattered bands, avoiding the posts and well-guarded trains and hitting little parties who are off their guard. I have a much heavier force on the plains, but they are so large that it is impossible to guard at all points, and the clamor for protection everywhere has prevented our being able to collect a large force to go into the country where we believe the Indians have hid their families; viz. up on the Yellowstone and down on the Red River." Sherman believed more in fighting than in treating at this time, yet he went on the commission erected by the act of July 20, 1867. By this law four civilians, including the Indian Commissioner, and three generals of the army, were appointed to collect and deal with the hostile tribes, with three chief objects in view: to remove the existing causes of complaint, to secure the safety of the various continental railways and the overland routes, and to work out some means for promoting Indian civilization without impeding the advance of the United States. To this last end they were to hunt for permanent homes for the tribes, which were to be off the lines of all the railways then chartered,—the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Atlantic and Pacific.

The Peace Commission, thus organized, sat for fifteen months. When it rose at last, it had opened the way for the railways, so far as treaties could avail. It had persuaded many tribes to accept new and more remote reserves, but in its debates and negotiations the breach between military and civil control had widened, so that the Commission was at the end divided against itself.