The Wild Frontier Read online

  English governor William Tryon urged the British ministry to “loose the savages against the miserable Rebels in order to impose a reign of terror on the frontiers.”21 It was done. There were depredations by Indians against settlers that had far-ranging effects. Scars were left by the Revolution which led to atrocious conduct by the settlers.

  ONLY 4 DAYS after the Revolution ended, George Washington wrote to James Duane outlining a policy of purchasing land occupied by Indians instead of seizing it:

  I am clear in my opinion, that policy and oeconomy [sic] point very strongly to the expediency of being on good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force of arms out of the Country; which as we have already experienced is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest which will return as soon as the pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left there; when the gradual extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire; both being beasts of prey tho’ they differ in shape. In a word there is nothing to be obtained by an Indian War but the Soil they live on and this can be had by purchase at less expense, and without that bloodshed, and those distresses which helpless Women and Children are made partakers of in all kinds of disputes with them.22

  Secretary of War Henry Knox also opposed taking by force the lands acquired from England that were occupied by Indians.23 He also believed that the view of many contending it impracticable to civilize the Indians was “probably more convenient than just.”24 Even at this early date and so soon after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, a high government official was concerned about justice for the Indians. However, that same year, Knox took Washington’s idea of buying land occupied by Indians several steps further. He foresaw that if the settlers would approach the Indian land and drive the game away, making the land less valuable to the Indians, they would be willing to sell cheaply, and they would be reduced to a very small number.25

  Washington’s attitude toward the Indians changed dramatically, however, after the embarrassing victory of the Miamis and their allies in 1790 over General Josiah Harmar’s army, which Washington had sent to the Northwest Territory to pacify the Indians. Washington no longer talked about peacefully occupying the West. He now decided that the Indians must be punished severely in order to defend the frontier and national honor. He sent General Arthur St. Clair to fight the Miami allies, but St. Clair was even more roundly beaten by the Indians in 1791.26

  After the Miami allies were finally defeated by General Anthony Wayne in 1794, however, the government “adopted a relatively conciliatory policy in its dealings with the natives. Government officials could afford to be benign” because control over the Northwest Territory had been established and settlers’ hunger for land in that area had been satisfied temporarily.27 Washington then followed the policy formulated by Secretary of War Henry Knox, which recognized the Indians’ claim to the land they occupied and denied that the government was entitled to that land by the right of conquest. He shared Knox’s view that the government’s authority over land occupied by the Indians consisted only of the exclusive right to negotiate with Indians for its purchase. Washington also started the practice of meeting with delegations of tribal leaders.28

  BEFORE HE became president, Thomas Jefferson supported military actions against Indians. As president, he was the first to advocate removal of the tribes to the West as a solution to the conflict between Indians and settlers. He proposed locating settlers as near to tribal areas as possible, hoping to impede the Indians’ hunting-based culture. Jefferson also believed that if Indians could be protected from white civilization for a period of at least 50 years, that might be enough time for assimilation. He regarded the Indians as noble savages.29 But after he had left office, Jefferson changed his views about the Indians. He came to believe that “ferocious barbarities justified extermination.”30 The transformation was startling. It came about, of course, because of the atrocities.

  President James Madison reported in his first annual message to Congress in 1809 that “our Indian neighbors” had remained at peace.31 War with Britain was approaching again, however, and in 1811 Madison’s attention was drawn to the Indian murders and depredations on the northwest frontier.32 On June 18, 1812, Congress declared war on Britain. Several tribes fought with the British, so Madison announced that “the hand of friendship, extended in vain, was now withdrawn.”33 In 1815, after the war was over, Madison was “happy” to report that tranquility had been restored in the northwest and that “our Indian neighbors” were back in the government’s good graces.34

  But the War of 1812 “had permanently altered Indian-white relations in North America.” Furthermore, according to Dippie, “by siding with the British, the ungrateful Indians had forfeited any claim to sympathy. The country owed them nothing; its sense of fair play was now their sole protection.”35 Novelist Washington Irving wrote in 1814 that there was a hardening of “popular feeling” toward the Indian. He urged restraint, a view not held by many settlers at that time.36

  President James Monroe declared in his first inaugural address in 1817 that “with the Indian tribes it is our duty to cultivate friendly relations and to act with kindness and liberality in all our transactions. Equally proper is it to persevere in our efforts to extend to them the advantages of civilization.” The concept of “cultivating friendly relations” with Indians seems to have disappeared by 1818, however, when President Monroe wanted to take “complete and undisputed control” over them. But 3 years later, he was talking about “real benefactors” and “Great Father” ideas.

  SOME SETTLERS viewed Indians as wild animals. After the settler murderers of 9 Indians in Indiana were apprehended in 1824, their defense was that it was “no worse to kill an Indian than to kill a wild animal.”37 Similarly, Helen Hunt Jackson in A Century of Dishonor told how around 1878 in Dakota County, Winnebago Henry Harris, who was employed to cut wood, was shot through the heart. Harris had had several disputes with a white man named D. Balinska, and Balinska had threatened Harris’s life a few months before. Investigators found footprints in the snow leading from Balinska’s home to the place from where the shot was fired. The rifle ball which killed Harris was the same weight as one found in Balinska’s shot pouch. The grand jury was unwilling to indict for the apparent reason “that it was only an Indian that was killed.”38

  Missionaries of course believed the Indians could be saved. They held that view “in relative isolation,” however, until about 1850, when others began to feel that way too.39 There was interest growing in the government in helping the Indian as well. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun reported to House Speaker Henry Clay in 1818 that “helplessness has succeeded independence” among the western Indians, and “the time seems to have arrived when our policy towards them should undergo an important change…. Our views of their interest, and not their own, ought to govern them.”40 This analysis favorable to the Indians was widely accepted. Calhoun created the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the War Department in 1824. He sent military expeditions west for several purposes, 2 of which were to contain Indians within treaty lands and to prevent settlers taking such lands. (Later he saw the Indians as an obstacle to settler westward expansion.)41

  DURING THE 1820s the idea became common that the Indians were dying out and when they did, there would no longer be an Indian problem. In 1820 Massachusetts orator Edward Everett predicted that if the red man could change from savagery to civilization on his own, that was good, but if he could not, he should be left to the operation of his character and habits, and when he was gone a civilized man would take his place.42 Secretary of State Henry Clay in an 1825 cabinet meeting said that Indians were by nature incapable of civilization, were essentially inferior to the Anglo-Saxon, and were destined to extinction probably within 50 years.43

  President Monroe in his 1818 annual address argued that to civilize the Indians

  and even to prevent their extin
ction [it] was indispensible that their independence as communities should cease, and that the control of the United States over them should be complete and undisputed.44

  Monroe later added that to use force to do this would be “revolting to humanity and entirely unjustifiable.”45

  THE RESERVATION system required Indians to remove to west of the Mississippi. But Wilcomb E. Washburn sounded a dark note about settler attitudes toward Indians in his book The Indian in America:

  Whatever else the reservation system may represent it does mark an acceptance of the Indians’ right to live and to retain land and resources for their support. While such a concession may not seem exceptional, on balance it ran against a persistent current of thought—not solely in America—that cared little whether aborigines disappeared from the face of the earth.46

  Andrew Jackson wrote to William Henry Harrison in 1811 accusing Indians of being deceitful, unrelenting barbarians and adding that “the blood of our murdered countrymen must be revenged. The banditti ought to be swept from the face of the earth.”47 Jackson also likened Indians to wolves.48

  However, in his first inaugural address in 1829, President Jackson promised,

  It will be my sincere and constant desire to observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give them that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people.

  This is a breathtaking apparent change in attitude from wanting to sweep the Indians from the face of the earth in 1811 to desiring to treat them justly and liberally only two decades later.

  But by this time, most settlers no longer thought that the Indian could improve. A religious writer noted in 1830 that although missionaries never doubted the Indians’ capacity for improvement, “the great mass of the community” did not share that view.

  By the 1840s, it was obvious there was an impending crisis in Indian affairs because continued settler expansion impaired Indian isolation in the West. There were many different views concerning how to solve this worsening situation,49 but at least there was some thinking about the Indians and their problems.

  ROBERT G. Hays in A Race at Bay noted the change in attitudes toward Indians brought about by the Civil War. “Inevitably, attention to the Indian problem diminished as the nation moved closer to civil war.”50 The earlier general interest in improving the lot of the Indians waned. Horace Greeley went to the West Coast by train in 1859 and sent back dispatches as he proceeded:

  I have learned to appreciate better … than hitherto … the dislike, aversion, contempt, wherewith Indians are usually regarded by their white neighbors, and have been since the days of the Puritans. [One] needs but little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigine to convince any one that the poetic Indian—the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow—is only visible to the poet’s eye.51

  In 1860 a California paper reported, “The Indians are in a starving condition; they kill stock to live. The whites cannot afford horses and cattle for their sustenance, and will not. Ergo, unless Government provides for the Indians, the settlers must exterminate them.”52

  The Santee Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862 caused settler goodwill, according to Marshall, to “run out.”

  One tribe of the Dakota [the Santee Sioux] had proved to be not only treacherous but barbarous in the extreme. It would not be forgotten by the whites of the frontier. The Indians were no less served warning that when crossed, Government and its security forces would retaliate beyond reasonable limits, exiling or exterminating a great body of people, if that were deemed the expedient course.53

  Following the Sand Creek Massacre by the Colorado militia in 1864, however, some newspapers condemned the attack against the Indians. The Louisville Journal expressed the opinion that the Indians were “poor children of nature” and they deserved “pity from the philanthropic world.” The attack “should excite for those poor creatures the generous pity of the nation, and we are gratified that it is to be subjected to Congressional investigation.”54 On the other hand, the superintendent of the Denver mint worried that “every band of Indians of any size on the plains is united for the purpose of exterminating and driving all the white men from these mountains and plains.”55

  IN 1865 there were several comments in the Times about the post-Civil War period. It “openly called on the government to treat the Indians … more fairly.”56 Matters did not improve, so the Times suggested that it would be a happy thing for both Indians and settlers if the Indians would move to Mexico, where the bulk of their race was concentrated.57 The Times also reported that “many of the Western settlers are very anxious for a war of extermination against the Indians, and assert that outrages and atrocities will never cease until this is adopted and ended.”58

  In the 1860s, the Times again changed its attitude concerning Indians. Its principal interest became the protection of settlers on the frontier, and it was outspoken in condemning policies it believed were too lenient on warlike tribes.59 In later decades, although it could not condone Indian atrocities, it tended to blame the government for them, leaving the implication, at least, that the atrocities were justified.60

  John M. Coward concluded that “many post-Civil War newspapers and their readers were advocating a more complex view of Indians: They might still be ‘savage,’ but they could also be seen as innocent victims of their ‘degraded’ state.”61

  AFTER FETTERMAN’S Massacre in 1867, General Sherman urged that the army should act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to the extermination of men, women, and children. Congress didn’t agree and created a peace commission instead.62

  A committee of investigation was appointed which included four generals: Alfred Sully, Ely S. Parker, John Buford, and John B. Sanborn. The committee’s report in 1867 was sobering. Frontiersmen and army contractors had made false reports of alleged massacres by Indians, then called on the government to send troops to protect them.63 The Times supported the view that the settlers constantly provoked the Indians:

  It has justly been said in Congress by those who have investigated the matter, that the Western settlers are a constant source of irritation to the Indians, committing petty depredations upon them, driving them from their lands, and in a thousand little ways stirring up their ill-blood.64

  In 1868, after President Grant had been elected but before he took office, some members of the Sac and Fox tribes met with President Andrew Johnson to protest that a thieving Indian agent had them put in prison. Johnson remarked that “the agent of the Government should have been put in jail instead of the chiefs.”65

  By the following year, the Times observed that the “extermination remedy” was gradually dropping from the range of possibilities in deciding what to do with the Indian. Wryly it noted that a London newspaper nevertheless thought it was a proper thing to do.66 The Times further hoped that the Indian might receive fair play “now that the army officers have so strenuously taken his part.” The Indians’ worst foes were the settlers, the sutlers, the peddlers, the traders, and the frontiersmen who had defrauded them.67

  Finally, near the end of the year, the Times concluded that “the new view is not to exterminate, but to civilize the Indian.”68 To the extent that this was the majority attitude, progress was being made in settler attitudes.

  Ulysses S. Grant announced a new federal Indian policy when he assumed office in 1869. Quakers played such a dominant role in Grant’s Peace Policy that it was called the Quaker Policy by some. Grant is reported to have said that if his policy could make Quakers out of the Indians, it would help take the fight out of them.69

  Yet, during Grant’s second administration, there was a growing public reaction against numerous Indian aggressions, and the Peace Policy collapsed. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., summarized the situation in The White Man’s Indian. Many vocal westerners opposed the Peace Policy as just another example of “sickly sentimentalism” toward savage
Indians, while eastern humanitarians looked to new ways of converting the Indian to Christian civilization after the 1870s.70 For instance, about 1870, the Montana Post was fed up:

  It is high time the sickly sentimentalism about humane treatment and conciliatory measures should be consigned to novel writers, and if the Indians continue their barbarities, wipe them out.71

  But by 1871 the Times had become optimistic about the future of the Indian:

  If the Indian is to survive on this continent at all, it must be by elevating himself to the social, industrial, and political level of the white man. With time and opportunity, it is pretty obvious that he can do this.72

  When a group of chiefs came to New York in 1872, the Times observed that easterners might smile at such names as Red Cloud, Red Dog, Blue Horn, and Slow Bull, “but in the North-west their names recall a long series of bloody massacres, and they are mentioned with hatred and dread.”73

  THE POOR condition of the Indians in 1875 was the subject of another Times editorial decrying that the Indians were “practically friendless and helpless. On the frontier, between the settlers and the adventurers, closing in on them alike from the West and the East, and with the treatment they are sure to receive from the Government, the Indians might as well be between the upper and nether mill-stones.”74

  After several Indian uprisings earlier in 1875, the Times apparently came to feel that readers were becoming bored with Indian stories and cared little for either their present or future condition. All that changed with the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. That battle (Custer’s Last Stand) was an unprecedented shock to the settlers and spoiled the country’s centennial celebration.