The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

On August 6, 1867, the Commission organized at St. Louis and discussed plans for getting into touch with the tribes with whom it had to treat. "The first difficulty presenting itself was to secure an interview with the chiefs and leading warriors of these hostile tribes. They were roaming over an immense country, thousands of miles in extent, and much of it unknown even to hunters and trappers of the white race. Small war parties constantly emerging from this vast extent of unexplored country would suddenly strike the border settlements, killing the men and carrying off into captivity the women and children. Companies of workmen on the railroads, at points hundreds of miles from each other, would be attacked on the same day, perhaps in the same hour. Overland mail coaches could not be run without military escort, and railroad and mail stations unguarded by soldiery were in perpetual danger. All safe transit across the plains had ceased. To go without soldiers was hazardous in the extreme; to go with them forbade reasonable hope of securing peaceful interviews with the enemy." Fortunately the Peace Commission contained within itself the most useful of assistants. General Sherman and Commissioner Taylor sent out word to the Indians through the military posts and Indian agencies, notifying the tribes that the Commissioners desired to confer with them near Fort Laramie in September and Fort Larned in October.

The Fort Laramie conference bore no fruit during the summer of 1867. After inspecting conditions on the upper Missouri the Commissioners proceeded to Omaha in September and thence to North Platte station on the Union Pacific Railroad. Here they met Swift Bear of the Brulé Sioux and learned that the Sioux would not be ready to meet them until November. The Powder River War was still being fought by chiefs who could not be reached easily and whose delegations must be delayed. When the Commissioners returned to Fort Laramie in November, they found matters little better. Red Cloud, who was the recognized leader of the Oglala and Brulé Sioux and the hostile northern Cheyenne, refused even to see the envoys, and sent them word: "that his war against the whites was to save the valley of the Powder River, the only hunting ground left to his nation, from our intrusion. He assured us that whenever the military garrisons at Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C. F. Smith were withdrawn, the war on his part would cease." Regretfully, the Commissioners left Fort Laramie, having seen no savages except a few non-hostile Crows, and having summoned Red Cloud to meet them during the following summer, after asking "a truce or cessation of hostilities until the council could be held."

The southern plains tribes were met at Medicine Lodge Creek some eighty miles south of the Arkansas River. Before the Commissioners arrived here General Sherman was summoned to Washington, his place being taken by General C. C. Augur, whose name makes the eighth signature to the published report. For some time after the Commissioners arrived the Cheyenne, sullen and suspicious, remained in their camp forty miles away from Medicine Lodge. But the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache came to an agreement, while the others held off. On the 21st of October these ceded all their rights to occupy their great claims in the Southwest, the whole of the two panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and agreed to confine themselves to a new reserve in the southwestern part of Indian Territory, between the Red River and the Washita, on lands taken from the Choctaw and Chickasaw in 1866.

The Commissioners could not greatly blame the Arapaho and Cheyenne for their reluctance to treat. These had accepted in 1861 the triangular Sand Creek reserve in Colorado, where they had been massacred by Chivington in 1864. Whether rightly or not, they believed themselves betrayed, and the Indian Office sided with them. In 1865, after Sand Creek, they exchanged this tract for a new one in Kansas and Indian Territory, which was amended to nothingness when the Senate added to the treaty the words, "no part of the reservation shall be within the state of Kansas." They had left the former reserve; the new one had not been given them; yet for two years after 1865 they had generally kept the peace. Sherman travelled through this country in the autumn of 1866 and "met no trouble whatever," although he heard rumors of Indian wars. In 1867, General Hancock had destroyed one of their villages on the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas, without provocation, the Indians believed. After this there had been admitted war. The Indians had been on the war-path all the time, plundering the frontier and dodging the military parties, and were unable for some weeks to realize that the Peace Commissioners offered a change of policy. Yet finally these yielded to blandishment and overture, and signed, on October 28, a treaty at Medicine Lodge. The new reserve was a bit of barren land nearly destitute of wood and water, and containing many streams that were either brackish or dry during most of the year. It was in the Cherokee Outlet, between the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers.

The Medicine Lodge treaties were the chief result of the summer's negotiations. The Peace Commission returned to Fort Laramie in the following spring to meet the reluctant northern tribes. The Sioux, the Crows, and the Arapaho and Cheyenne who were allied with them, made peace after the Commissioners had assented to the terms laid down by Red Cloud in 1867. They had convinced themselves that the occupation of the Powder River Valley was both illegal and unjust, and accordingly the garrisons had been drawn out of the new forts. Much to the anger of Montana was this yielding. "With characteristic pusillanimity," wrote one of the pioneers, years later, denouncing the act, "the government ordered all the forts abandoned and the road closed to travel." In the new Fort Laramie treaty of April 29, 1868, it was specifically agreed that the country east of the Big Horn Mountains was to be considered as unceded Indian territory; while the Sioux bound themselves to occupy as their permanent home the lands west of the Missouri, between the parallels of 43° and 46°, and east of the 104th meridian—an area coinciding to-day with the western end of South Dakota. Thus was begun the actual compression of the Sioux of the plains.

The treaties made by the Peace Commissioners were the most important, but were not the only treaties of 1867 and 1868, looking towards the relinquishment by the Indians of lands along the railroad's right of way. It had been found that rights of transit through the Indian Country, such as those secured at Laramie in 1851, were insufficient. The Indian must leave even the vicinity of the route of travel, for peace and his own good.

Most important of the other tribes shoved away from the route were the Ute, Shoshoni, and Bannock, whose country lay across the great trail just west of the Rockies. The Ute, having given their name to the territory of Utah, were to be found south of the trail, between it and the lower waters of the Colorado. Their western bands were earliest in negotiation and were settled on reserves, the most important being on the Uintah River in northeast Utah, after 1861. The Colorado Ute began to treat in 1863, but did not make definite cessions until 1868, when the southwestern third of Colorado was set apart for them. Active life in Colorado territory was at the start confined to the mountains in the vicinity of Denver City, while the Indians were pushed down the slopes of the range on both sides. But as the eastern Sand Creek reserve soon had to be abolished, so Colorado began to growl at the western Ute reserve and to complain that indolent savages were given better treatment than white citizens. The Shoshoni and Bannock ranged from Fort Hall to the north and were visited by General Augur at Fort Bridger in the summer of 1868. As the results of his gifts and diplomacy the former were pushed up to the Wind River reserve in Wyoming territory, while the latter were granted a home around Fort Hall.

The friction with the Indians was heaviest near the line of the old Indian frontier and tended to be lighter towards the west. It was natural enough that on the eastern edge of the plains, where the tribes had been colonized and where Indian population was most dense, the difficulties should be greatest. Indeed the only wars which were sufficiently important to count as resistance to the westward movement were those of the plains tribes and were fought east of the continental divide. The mountain and western wars were episodes, isolated from the main movements. Yet these great plains that now had to be abandoned had been set aside as a permanent home for the race in pursuance of Monroe's policy. In the report of the Peace Commissioners all agreed that the time had come to change it.

The influence of the humanitarians dominated the report of the Commissioners, which was signed in January, 1868. Wherever possible, the side of the Indian was taken. The Chivington massacre was an "indiscriminate slaughter," scarcely paralleled in the "records of the Indian barbarity"; General Hancock had ruthlessly destroyed the Cheyenne at Pawnee Fork, though himself in doubt as to the existence of a war: Fetterman had been killed because "the civil and military departments of our government cannot, or will not, understand each other." Apologies were made for Indian hostility, and the "revolting" history of the removal policy was described. It had been the result of this policy to promote barbarism rather than civilization. "But one thing then remains to be done with honor to the nation, and that is to select a district, or districts of country, as indicated by Congress, on which all the tribes east of the Rocky mountains may be gathered. For each district let a territorial government be established, with powers adapted to the ends designed. The governor should be a man of unquestioned integrity and purity of character; he should be paid such salary as to place him above temptation." He should be given adequate powers to keep the peace and enforce a policy of progressive civilization. The belief that under American conditions the Indian problem was insoluble was confirmed by this report of the Peace Commissioners, well informed and philanthropic as they were. After their condemnation of an existing removal policy, the only remedy which they could offer was another policy of concentration and removal.

The Commissioners recommended that the Indians should be colonized on two reserves, north and south of the railway lines respectively. The southern reserve was to be the old territory of the civilized tribes, known as Indian Territory, where the Commissioners thought a total of 86,000 could be settled within a few years. A northern district might be located north of Nebraska, within the area which they later allotted to the Sioux; 54,000 could be colonized here. Individual savages might be allowed to own land and be incorporated among the citizens of the Western states, but most of the tribes ought to be settled in the two Indian territories, while this removal policy should be the last.