Throughout the painful annals of the river tribes during the past century there was no more attractive feature of their relations with the whites than the means of transportation by which the paleface came to their country. The keelboat and the steamboat are a part of their life history. The steamboat in particular came to be what the buffalo had been—their principal resource for the necessities of life. It was a difficult rôle that it had to fill. To the Indian it was friend and foe, truth and falsehood, honor and shame, alike. It brought the early traders with their welcome merchandise, and alas! with their liquor and the smallpox. It brought the Commissioners to make treaties, and the annuities which those treaties guaranteed. It brought the Indian agent and the evils that followed in his train, and finally it brought the sword. When the Indian at last gave up the fight he and the steamboat abandoned the river together, and both are now strangers where once they made the entire valley teem with life.
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE ARMY ON THE MISSOURI.
The rôle which the army was called upon to fill in the history of our Indian affairs was a most unpleasant one. It began while the proud spirit of the tribes was as yet unbroken, but had been aroused by ever-increasing aggression to the point of active resistance. It then became necessary to subdue them by force to absolute subordination to the government, and to remove them from their larger hunting grounds to small reservations. This thankless task devolved upon the army. It was not merely a thankless task, but a most arduous and formidable one. Compared with service in the Indian campaigns, that in the South during the Civil War was a holiday pastime. What tragedy in all our national wars can compare with the battle of the Little Big Horn? What record of retreat and pursuit is there like that of the Nez Percé campaign of 1877? Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow had no terrors for the individual soldier like those of the winter campaign of Crook in the Powder River country in March, 1876, when it was so cold that the men were not permitted to go to sleep at night for fear they would never wake up.
THE WEIGHT OF A DREAD POWER.
In the course of twenty years after 1855 military posts sprang up all over the West. There was scarcely an Indian trail in that entire region that did not witness the passage of government troops. From one haunt to another his relentless pursuers tracked the desperate Indian. Ambushes and massacres were met with crushing defeats in battle, but the general drift of the conflict was uniformly one way. The Indian was learning the weight of that dread power which had so far tolerated his independence, but was now to extinguish it forever. The struggle lasted in its main features about sixteen years, or from 1862 to 1877; but its extreme limits were the Grattan Massacre of August 19, 1854, and the battle of Wounded Knee, December 29, 1890.
For some years the Indians who were parties to the treaty of Laramie observed its conditions fairly well; but in 1854 an unfortunate affair occurred which temporarily interrupted the general peace. Some fifteen hundred Indians of three different Sioux bands were encamped in the Platte Valley, about six miles below Fort Laramie, in August of that year. One of the Indians drove off and killed a stray cow belonging to an emigrant train. The owner complained of the theft to the officer in command at Laramie, and Lieutenant Grattan, with about twenty men, was sent to bring in the thief. He probably did not show very much tact in performing his delicate task, and made the mistake of attempting to take the culprit by force in the presence of nearly ten times his number of Indians. The result was the massacre of his entire party. The Indians then went to the American Fur Company warehouse, where their annuity goods were in waiting, broke open the building, and carried off the annuities.
BATTLE OF ASH HOLLOW.
Thereupon the government ordered General Harney to take the field with a military force, establish convenient bases of supplies, protect the frontier and the emigrant routes, and to deal a heavy blow upon the offending Indians. On September 3, 1855, General Harney attacked a large force of Indians who had taken part in the Grattan massacre, completely routed them, killed and captured upward of two hundred, and destroyed nearly all their property. This affair took place across the Platte River from Ash Hollow, a noted situation on the emigrant trail, from which the battle has taken its name.
General Harney next moved his force to the Missouri River, where the old trading post of Fort Pierre had been lately acquired by the government, and there held councils with various tribes, which again resulted in general pacification. In the following year the important military post of Fort Randall was built, and Fort Pierre was abandoned because of its undesirable situation. General Harney discharged his task in a manner highly creditable to himself and satisfactory both to the Indians and the government; and seven years were to elapse before any further difficulty of a serious character should occur.