Ouray and chiefs, from Utah Copyright 1997 State Historical Society of Wisconsin

During the years of the Civil War, the federal government, in order to fight the battle for the Union, withdrew many of its troops from western garrisons. That withdrawal of troops encouraged many of the long suffering Indian tribes to seek revenge for their grievances against whites. By 1865 white-Indian skirmishes had spread throughout the Great Plains and throughout the Southwest. In order to pacify the West, Congress established in 1867 a Peace Commission to convince the various tribes to give up their lands and to relocate on what would come to be called "reservations."
The Peace Commission of 1867 suggested two major reservation land areas. One, in what today is present-day Oklahoma, then was unsettled territory; the other, in the Black Hills of the Dakotas. A number of treaties were signed between the representatives of the federal government and representatives of the various Indian tribes, and signed into law finally by then president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. In spite of Grant's adoption of what he trumpeted as "peace policy" in 1869, warfare continued as the United States found it increasingly difficult to keep the Native Americans on the reservations and to keep the whites off Indian lands.

One of the earliest victims of this "peace policy" was not a human being but an animal. But as victim, the animal itself would victimize human beings. That animal, of course, was the buffalo. At the end of the Civil War, the buffalo population of the Old West was somewhere between 12 and 15 million animals. That was the case in 1865. By 1883 the species was nearly extinct, perhaps numbering in the 1-3,000 range, after only a few years of unbridled hunting and killing by whites--whites who killed buffalo for the meat, whites who killed buffalo for the hides, whites who in increasing numbers slaughtered buffalo often from moving trains for the sport. The fencing in of grazing lands by those farmers who moved to the Great Plains also cut off the range of the buffalo, which was used to roaming and grazing at will. More than any other single pressure, this destruction of the buffalo forced the various Indian tribes to submit. That is, starvation took care of a job that the Army itself quite often could not complete.

Indian-White clashes:

There were a number of bloody clashes. I want to call several to your attention as examples of the manner in which we treated the original inhabitants of this country.

1) Red River War: At Civil War's end in 1865, there were approximately 300,000 Native Americans living in the West. Some of these Indians, particularly the Comanche, had been for over two-hundred years, successfully fighting off invasions--invasions by the Spanish, French, the English, and finally, the Americans. Many observers of the Comanche considered them the finest mounted warriors in the entire world. Their horsemanship gave them superiority as hunters and as fighters and enabled them to migrate vast distances when depleted hunting grounds no longer contained game. And so the Comanche became one of the early targets of the federal government and the Army. A series of clashes took place. The final confrontation took place in the winter of 1874-75 in Texas. A battle known, at least from the white side of the issue, as the Red River War. In this war, the federal government did not defeat the Comanche as much as strip the Comanche of the main means of fighting: that is, the horses. The Army, rather than directly fight the Comanche, roamed throughout Texas systematically slaughtering herds of wild horses the Comanches depended upon for both their hunting and fighting. Harassed by the Army, deprived of their means of transportation, the demoralized Comanches, by the middle of 1875, began to appear at the federal agencies on the reservations seeking government rations that, meager as they were, represented the only alternative to starvation.

2) Far West: Roughly the same time, 1877, one of the major tribes was the Nez Percé Indians. There was a valley in the state of Washington [Territory] known as the Walla Walla Valley--rich agricultural land. In 1876, 1877, white settlers tried to pour into the Walla Walla Valley. The Nez Percé Indians led by a remarkable man known to us as Chief Joseph, refused and tried to fend off white invasion. A tragic episode occurred. The federal government sent the troops in to force the Nez Percé off their lands and to accept new territorial boundaries. Chief Joseph gathered together a band of two hundred warriors and some four hundred women and children, began a long trek to escape the white settlers across the lands into Canada. Over a period of about four months, winding back and forth but ever going northward trying to reach the Canadian border, Chief Joseph led his people in escaping the federal government and the Army. The band traveled more than a thousand miles. Finally in late 1877, just a few miles from the Canadian border, the troops captured Chief Joseph and his warriors, the old people, the women, the children, and sent them off to Indian territory.

While the Nez Perce conflict was going on, in the Southwest (New Mexico and Arizona) another set of tribes, collectively known to the white man as the Apache, were trying to fend off white invasion--invasion of miners, invasion of agricultural settlers, invasion of cattle growers. Various clashes had taken place in the late 1860s into the 1870s. Various peace agreements had been signed between Apache leaders and the federal government. Those peace agreements systematically were broken either by the Apache on their side or by the federal government on its side. Finally in 1884, a major leader of the Apache, a man named Geronimo, a fierce warrior, agreed with federal representatives to lead his people on to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona. A year later, after a year of starvation on the reservation, Geronimo led his people off the reservation, fleeing into the hills of northern Mexico. In March of 1886, after three days of negotiations and talk, Geronimo agreed to return once again to the reservation. During these conversations, widely covered by newspaper reporters, Geronimo blamed the federal officials for all the disagreements that had arisen. Speaking very bluntly, he told the U.S. General this: "Whenever I meet you, I talk good to you. And you to me. And peace is soon established. But when you go to the reservation, you put agents and interpreters over us who do bad things." By "bad things," Geronimo meant corrupt practices, the provision of spoiled food, moth eaten and disease-ridden blankets, foul liquor, humiliating existence, continuous threats of imprisonment.

The Battle of Little Big Horn (1876)

3) "Battle of Little Big Horn": The Sioux Indians were the Indian tribes that lived in much of the Dakotas and the Black Hill areas of the Dakotas. And those Indians had originally agreed to go on the reservations established under that earlier peace commission. They might have remained on those reservations peacefully, had not a major silver discovery taken place in the Black Hills. Miners were invading the Black Hills looking for both gold and silver in the early 1870s. Angered by this miners' invasion, the Sioux left the reservation, gathered together in Montana territory under the dual leadership of two great warrior generals: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

In 1876, the federal government decided to send a major military expedition against Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and forced the Sioux back on to the reservation. There was a principle detachment of the seventh cavalry, under the leadership of Colonel George A. Custer. Custer is the man, you will recall, who uttered those immortal lines in American history: "Hell, there ain't any Indians over them hills!" Custer was sent in June of 1886 to the area around the Little Big Horn River, an area of rolling hills and small valleys. Custer led his troops against a large band numbering more than 2,000 Sioux Indians led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Those Indians were encamped along the shores of the Little Big Horn River, among trees, which, to this day, still border banks of the river. Custer's scouts--his chief scouts, two Crow Indians--had gone out in advance, and had come back and told Custer of a massive gathering together of Indian warriors just a few miles beyond the ridges. Custer distrusted all Indians and certainly distrusted his Crow scouts, and so he led his troops into battle on June 26, 1876.

Custer and all of his men died in that attack, that attack which was popularized and romanticized by the white press as "Custer's Last Stand." (There was only one survivor of that great battle, Custer's horse, which now stands stuffed in the museum in the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas). The stunning victory at the Little Big Horn River was the high watermark of Indian success. From that period on, Indian warfare trickled to a standstill. By 1881, even Sitting Bull, who had escaped to Canada, was on the verge of starvation and was forced to surrender.

During the 1880s the Sioux Indians developed a new religion which came to be known as the "Ghost Dance," a religion that promised a return of Indian lands and end to white oppression. A growing number of Sioux began practicing rituals of the Ghost Dance. In 1889 those who believed in the new religion fled the reservation in hopes of defeating, for the last time, the white man. The last major, outright Indian-white confrontation came in 1890 at the so- called "Battle of Wounded Knee"--"so-called" because, rather than a battle, it was a massacre. The Sioux Indians who were trying to escape found themselves surrounded on a snowy winter's morning--surrounded during the night in the hills above their encampment by curiously, ironically enough, a division of Custer's old Seventh Cavalry, who had mounted Gatling guns in the hills above the embankment below. And at dawn's early light, without warning, the federal troops began firing indiscriminately into the Indians' camp below. At this so-called Battle of Wounded Knee, 300 Sioux were either killed or eventually died of exposure. Among those 300 were 130 women, old men, and small children. Some contemporaries saw this as the triumph of brave soldiers over treacherous warriors, while others saw it as the slaughter of helpless Indians by an army seeking revenge for Little Big Horn. At any rate, the Sioux, the Apache, the Comanche, and others, were the final victims of America's great move westward into the period that we call the Old West.

Conclusion:
The "American West" was in reality not very long-lived. As the 19th century wore on, the increased pace of industrialization in America radically changed the nation's economy, politics, and society. While Americans had once headed west looking for gold in streams and mines, politicians and "captains of industry" soon began to look for gold in factories, and some in corrupt business and political practices. The story of these new "gold mines" is an incredibly fascinating aspect of American history; so important, in fact, that we'll take it up in the next lecture: The Gilded Age and the Politics of Corruption.