[In this excerpt, Danziger describes the struggles of Native Americans in the face of post-Civil War white migrations westward that forced Indian accommodation to reservation life.]

Long ago the Arapahoes had a fine country of their own. The white man came to see them, and the Indians gave him buffalo meat and a horse to ride on, and they told him the country was big enough for the white man and the Arapahoes, too.

After a while the white men found gold in our country. They took the gold and pushed the Indian from his home. I thought Washington would make it all right. I am an old man now. I have been waiting many years for Washington to give us our rights.

—Little Raven, Arapaho [Vanderwerth, Indian Oratory (p. 144)]

If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows. Now we are poor but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die we die defending our rights.

—Sitting Bull, Sioux [Armstrong, I Have Spoken (p. 112)]

I know that my race must change. We can not hold our own with the white men as we are. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. … Whenever the white man treats the Indians as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall all be alike—brothers of one father and one mother, with one sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all.

—Chief Joseph, Nez Percé [Moquin and Van Doren, Great Documents (p. 251)]

Unbridled greed, exploitation of natural resources, enormous business profits, bloody racial conflict, cultural repression, and despair characterized the three decades following the Civil War when the American West was transformed. U.S. citizens and their families surged like a tidal wave across the Great Plains and beyond, homesteading farms, exterminating millions of buffalo and replacing them with herds of white-faced cattle, digging gold and silver from the mountainsides, and binding the Mississippi Valley to the West Coast with iron rails. These momentous events overwhelmed some aboriginal peoples. “When the buffalo went away,” remarked the aged Crow, Chief Plenty-Coups, “the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again.”¹ Other leaders, such as Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph, fought on, either militarily or using accommodation strategies. Their story is the subject of this essay, which also examines how federal Indian policymakers tried to improve conditions among displaced Native peoples. Sadly, by the 1890s the reservation scene suggested the unfulfilled hopes of both aboriginal leaders and altruistic “Friends of the Indian.”

Post-Civil War America alarmed Native peoples of the trans-Mississippi West, many of whom maintained their nomadic and seminomadic hunter-gatherer life-styles. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated in 1870 that of the 383,712 Indians, 234,740 still freely roamed the western territories and states. Most nomads lived in Alaska (70,000), Arizona (27,700), Nevada (16,220), Montana (19,330), Dakota Territory (26,320), and in present-day Oklahoma (34,400).² What threatened their world was the rapid influx of pioneers with eyes fixed on aboriginal lands suitable for farming, ranching, lumbering, mining, town sites, and railroad rights-of-way. Settlers expected federal Indian Office agents and U.S. Army troops to support their countrymen by cajoling or forcing Native inhabitants off most of the land. At this point the often cordial relations between Indians and newcomers, referred to by Little Raven, turned sour and then bloody as many Indian families and their leaders tenaciously fought to save their homelands.

When confronted with “Indian trouble,” federal policymakers usually believed that they had no choice but to remove Native impediments to the nation's expansion. Congress's initial strategy was to dispatch peace commissioners, including Civil War hero William T. Sherman, in hopes of concentrating nomadic tribes in either present-day South Dakota or Oklahoma, away from the major overland trails and railroad routes. Kiowa, Comanche, Kiowa-Apache, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux leaders negotiated a series of treaties in the mid-1860s that promised to restore peace and pledged the Natives to make way for white settlers. Neither side, however, listened carefully and respectfully to the views of the other, nor were the Indians convinced about the need to alter their traditional ways of life.³ At the Medicine Lodge Treaty Council in October 1867, for example, Comanche Chief Ten Bears asserted:

You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and to make us Medicine lodges [schools and churches]. I do not want them.

I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them, I lived happily.⁴

With many Indians holding this kind of attitude, sporadic fighting thus persisted across the Plains and beyond the Rockies.

Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Cochise, Chief Joseph—their names resounded down through the decades and became symbols of Indian determination to control their hunting grounds and retain established ways of life. Their struggle with U.S. military forces during the late nineteenth century comprises one of the best-known chapters in American history.

Triggered by white encroachment on Indian lands, cultural differences, and the federal government's determination to use force if necessary to concentrate the tribes on small reservations, the Indian wars lasted well into the 1870s. U.S. soldiers, conditioned by formal warfare on eastern Civil War battlefields, had difficulty coping with the semiarid western terrain and the martial skills of elusive, unorthodox fighters who often had no permanent villages to attack or crops to destroy. To elude the blue coats, hostiles sometimes found sanctuary and sustenance among peaceful fellow tribesmen living on reservations under the jurisdiction of civilian Indian agents. Yet time was on the Army's side as railroads crisscrossed the West, more and more settlers appropriated Indian resources, and buffalo—the Plains Indians' staff of life—were slaughtered by the millions. Individualistic Native societies also had difficulty uniting as tribes or forming intertribal alliances against the white invaders with their superior numbers, Indian scouts, railroads, telegraph lines, and mass-produced tools of war.⁵

Until the collapse of armed resistance, the Natives, who had much at stake, fought back stubbornly and often brilliantly, considering the odds. On the southern Plains, for example, reservation life galled the Kiowas, Comanches, Southern Cheyennes, and Southern Arapahoes. Farming failed to feed the warriors' families, Washington sent inadequate supplementary rations, whiskey hucksters sowed discontent, and whites nibbled at the edges of Native lands and slaughtered the buffalo for their hides, leaving the carcasses to rot. These circumstances provoked aboriginal peoples, who hungered for the old ways and were willing to fight rather than endure more reservation life. Kiowa Chief Satanta spoke for many when he said that “I love the land and the buffalo and will not part with it. … I have heard that you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains. I don’t want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die.”⁶ Partly out of desperation, the tribes sent hunting/raiding parties into Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska. Led by Satanta and other recalcitrant warrior-buffalo hunters, the southern Plains tribes fought against Washington's concentration policy for nearly a decade. The largest outbreak of hostilities was the Red River War of 1874-75. The Indians, finally overpowered, surrendered their weapons and horses and saw their leaders shipped off to prison in Florida.⁷ Peace returned to the Plains south of the Platte River but at great cost to the aboriginal inhabitants.

Meanwhile, in the Southwest, reservation life together with further land losses drove many Apaches to take to the warpath rather than surrender their freedom and homeland. “This is the country of the Chiricahua Apaches,” Chief Cochise once asserted. He continued:

This is the country where the Chiricahua Apaches belong. The mountains and the valleys, the days and the nights belong to the Chiricahua Apaches. It was so from the memory of the oldest man, and that memory comes from the oldest man ahead of him. There was none but the Indian here and the land was filled with food. The Indians could make a living for themselves. The men with steel came and tried to take it from us and we defeated them. Now the Americans—and none is more treacherous than the Americans, and none more arrogant. The Americans think they are better than other men. They make their own laws and say those laws must be obeyed. Why?⁸

Led by Cochise, Victorio, Nana, and Geronimo, the Apaches fought intermittently until the mid-1880s, but their fate was similar to that of the southern Plains tribes: military power forever broken and leaders imprisoned.⁹ The Apaches thus resigned themselves to reservation life as had their Navajo and Pueblo neighbors.

The story repeated itself with some variations in the Pacific Northwest and on the northern Plains, where reservation conditions, slipshod federal management, and charismatic Native leaders encouraged some groups to resist militarily. On the California-Oregon border, for instance, the Modocs refused to share a reservation with the Klamaths, and under Captain Jack the Modocs kept escaping back to their former home at Tule Lake. Following a brief war in 1872, Washington removed the tribe to the Quapaw Agency in Oklahoma. The Modocs' exile lasted until 1909.¹⁰ In another example, the refusal of some Nez Percés to settle on the Lapwai reservation and their subsequent 1,300-mile flight toward Canada is well chronicled. Following Chief Joseph's surrender in 1877, his people were also held as prisoners of war in Oklahoma.¹¹ Joseph's famous surrender speech (to General Nelson A. Miles in Montana's Bear Paw Mountains) and subsequent remarks to American audiences and policymakers reflected the Indians' frustration as wards of the government.

I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country, now overrun by white men. … Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. … You might as well expect the rivers to run backwards as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.¹²

Many Sioux and northern Cheyennes also resisted being penned up on reservations that were poorly managed, ill suited to agriculture, and constantly encroached upon by land-hungry whites. Under the leadership of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and others, they fought for their freedom and their hunting grounds. First the white man promised “that the buffalo country should be left to us forever,” Sitting Bull claimed. “Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: ‘First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland.’”¹³ Not until 1877 did peace return to the northern Plains, and with the Indian barrier breached, white settlers quickly spread across the grasslands.¹⁴

The Indian wars, sparked by Washington's determination to concentrate all Native peoples on restricted reservations, were full of significance. They opened vast natural resources to non-Natives, although the cost was high. Between 1866 and 1891 regular U.S. troops fought 1,065 “actions” with Indians, and the War Department kept an average of 16,000 officers and men on active duty.¹⁵ Concerns about the frontier Indian danger had been an integral part of the nation's story since its founding a century earlier. Now the country faced an equally perplexing problem: what role should former warriors and their families play in American society? From their perspective, the Sioux, Nez Percés, Modocs, Apaches, and other tribes—militarily humbled and stripped of their livelihoods—must have wondered, too, about their future as Uncle Sam's wards. The answers came quickly. Once gathered onto reservations, America's Native peoples found themselves caught up in a new struggle for their children, for their identities, and for their souls.

Mark Twain astutely observed that “soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.”¹⁶ During the late 1870s, U.S. Indian policymakers set as their goal the cleansing and Americanization of “savage” reservation residents in preparation for their integration into mainstream society. Advocates of “civilizing” the Indians obviously believe that aboriginal peoples were capable of learning the English language and of adopting an alternative, superior mode of life if they were brought under the influence of honest and capable Indian agents, Christian missionaries, farmers, and teachers. To “allow them to drag along year after year … in their old superstitions, laziness, and filth … would be a lasting disgrace to our government,” wrote Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price, but to transform the Indians into self-sufficient and productive citizens would be “a crown of glory to any nation.”¹⁷

Assimilation of Native Americans into the dominant society required specific strategies in the judgment of Washington officials and humanitarian reformers. These included the promotion of Indian self-sufficiency through farming and stock raising, the formal education of their young, the allotment of Indian land in severalty, and the conferring of U.S. citizenship on Indians who had abandoned traditional ways.¹⁸ How to deal with America's aboriginal people, President Rutherford B. Hayes confided to his diary, “is a problem which for nearly three centuries has remained almost unsolved. … Let all our dealings with the Red man be characterized by justice and good faith, and let there be the most liberal provision for his physical wants, for education in its widest sense, and for religious instruction and training. To do this will cost money, but like all money well expended it is wise economy.”¹⁹ With the western Indians peaceful and concentrated on secluded and often infertile reservations, the time had come to test fully these techniques

By 1890 the Office of Indian Affairs supervised fifty-eight agencies scattered from New York to California. Washington charged each federal agent, who was responsible for one or more reservations, with destroying tribal customs and beliefs, replacing them with mainstream American life-styles and values, and encouraging Indian integration into the dominant society. At that point reservations (dubbed “virtual open-air prisons” by historian Donald J. Berthrong) would no longer be necessary. Agents' specific responsibilities included: administering agency as well as tribal moneys and property; controlling the chiefs; fostering farming by the men and instructing the women in household skills; safeguarding the health of the inhabitants; aggressively restricting Indian dress, language, and other “vicious habits”; advancing Christianity; and educating children. The agency staff (usually a clerk, farmer, medical doctor, blacksmith, and one or more teachers) also played key roles in this Americanization process.²⁰

Two of the agents' biggest challenges were educating Indian youth and maintaining law and order. Considered “as bright and teachable as average white children of the same ages,” Native youngsters were the key to Washington's “civilization” program. Congress therefore took back control of Indian education from Christian missionaries and between 1877 and 1900 created its own educational system and increased the level of annual funding from $20,000 to $1,364,368.²¹ More than 20,000 Indians attended an elaborate federal school system by the close of the century. English was the language of instruction, and teachers emphasized the vocational application of knowledge. As with adults, this meant farming plus a knowledge of common trades for the boys and domestic arts for the females. Native self-sufficiency and Americanization remained the government's objectives.²²

To make sure that reservation economic development and cultural change took place in an orderly environment, Congress in 1878 authorized experimental police units to fill the power vacuum created by the withdrawal of military troops from the West and the weakened authority of tribal chiefs. The system proved so successful that within three years it operated on forty-nine reservations and included 84 commissioned officers and 786 noncommissioned officers and privates.²³ To the Indian Office, a disciplined and well-trained police force also served as a “perpetual educator” for fellow Natives who would walk the white man's road. “Indian police became more than law enforcers,” Berthrong noted; “they slaughtered issue beefs, returned truants to boarding schools, carried messages for agents, took tribal censuses, and built roads and agency buildings.”²⁴ The courts of Indian offenses, established by the Interior Department in the early 1880s, formed another weapon in the federal government's acculturation arsenal. Soon, ninety-three Native judges staffed courts at twenty-eight agencies. They heard cases against Indians charged with theft, destruction of property, drunkenness, and trafficking in intoxicating liquors. The courts also enforced Indian Office rules that forbade various practices of medicine men, polygamy, and the sun, scalp, and war dances.²⁵

Tribal sovereignty came under attack in the late 1800s as did traditional Indian customs, languages, and political structures. After 1871 the U.S. Congress legislated policies and programs, with or without Indian consultation. No longer would the government negotiate treaties with Native political groups. Tribal sovereignty, implied by earlier treaties, seemed inappropriate for the 1870s. Indians had become wards of the government. Congress also enacted the Major Crimes Act in 1885, which made Indians who committed certain infractions on reservations subject to federal government jurisdiction rather than tribal authority. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the act's constitutionality in United States v. Kagama.²⁶ In another case the Court determined that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give U.S. citizenship to Native persons born on reservations.²⁷

As vulnerable subject peoples hemmed in on reservations, Indians ironically suffered at times at the hands of the very persons charged with protecting them. Historian Francis Paul Prucha concluded that the “Indian service, upon which rested much of the responsibility for solving the ‘Indian problem’ of the post-Civil War decades, was itself a large part of the problem.”²⁸ Opportunities for fraud corrupted many federal agents who were paid meager salaries yet annually handled large amounts of Indian money, annuity goods, and farm equipment “in isolated areas away from civilized restraints and comforts.” Agents also supervised the leasing of reservation lands and negotiated contracts for agency improvements. Sioux Chief Red Cloud once asked an audience in New York City, “I wish to know why Commissioners are sent out to us who do nothing but rob us and get the riches of this world away from us! I was brought up among the traders, and those who came out there in the early times treated me well and I had a good time with them. … But, by and by, the Great Father sent out a different kind of men; men who cheated and drank whiskey; men who were so bad that the Great Father could not keep them at home and so sent them out there. … I want to have men sent out to my people whom we know and can trust.”²⁹

Reform proposals were many but the results modest. Three times the House of Representatives approved transfer of the Indian Office from the Interior Department, where the spoils system governed appointments, to the War Department, but the bills got no further. Ulysses S. Grant's administration tried to improve Indian Office field operations by using inspectors and replacing political patronage appointees with more honest and competent agents nominated by religious denominations. The latter experiment failed miserably. Not enough qualified Christian men wished to become Indian agents, patronage pressures emanating from Congress and the White House undermined the process, and interdenominational competition degenerated into “flagrant bigotry,” according to Prucha. Also ineffective was the Board of Indian Commissioners, a group of Christian philanthropists appointed to advise the government on Native affairs and serve as a watchdog over the Indian service. Hayes's secretary of the interior, Carl Schurz, reformed Indian Office operations and purged it of many dishonest officials, but the service did not fully eradicate the political spoils system until the next century.³⁰

The reservation environment, as overseen by federal Indian agents, elicited mixed responses from Natives of the prairies, plains, mountains, and deserts of the West. Their eastern cousins, introduced to reservations earlier in the century, felt much the same way. Historian Arrell M. Gibson claimed that for many American Indians the reservation “matched, and in some cases exceeded, the somber ‘Trail of Tears’ for needless, agonizing want, unthinkable suffering, and personal and group decline to the brink of destruction.”³¹

Reservation factionalism sprang from these mixed responses. Indian agents of the period quickly and conveniently categorized bands or tribal factions as “progressive” or “traditional,” yet historian David Rich Lewis cautions that communities contained many interest groups that were sometimes in flux because of the variety of issues they faced. Furthermore, individuals, as Lewis discovered in his study of northern Ute leader William Wash, “frequently transcend the bounds of static factional categories.”³² Nevertheless, a few of the popular options available to reservation individuals and groups after the Civil War should be discussed, albeit with caution.

Some aboriginal leaders and their followers, believing that further military resistance was foolish, abandoned hope of ever restoring traditional life-styles and pragmatically tried to make the best of reservation life. They took up farming, sent their children to school, attended church services, adopted “citizen's dress,” cooperated with the local Indian agent, and generally tried to walk the white man's road. The rural isolation of most reservations limited work opportunities, but by the turn of the century the U.S. Census Bureau calculated that 60 percent of Native American males able to hold jobs were “gainfully employed.” Nearly 90 percent of the women, on the other hand, remained at home.³³

For those willing to adjust to the white man's expectations, reservations offered chances for economic self-sufficiency. Most were in farming. Historian Donald L. Parman argues that prior to allotment restrictions in the 1880s and the decline of Indian agriculture (discussed below), “many Indians were making the adjustments necessary for successful agriculture. … On thirty-three unallotted reservations, eighteen increased the acreage under cultivation over 10 percent annually and thirteen raised production levels over 10 percent.” Although nearly three-fourths of the Indian men worked as farmers or farmhands in 1910, other opportunities existed within reservation boundaries. Some contracted to carry supplies for the agency or, as noted above, worked as Indian police and judges.³⁴

Others found off-reservation jobs. Most notable were Native performers who toured with the Wild West shows. Buffalo Bill hired between seventy-five and one hundred Indians during the 1880s, for example. They thrilled audiences in the United States and Europe and in return saw new sights, savored the appreciative crowds, and earned a livelihood. Less dramatic were the traveling medicine shows and their Native employees. Aboriginal dances and crafts attracted large crowds who were then sold a variety of quack medicines. In the late nineteenth century, thirty troupes of the Kickapoo Medicine Company, each employing ten or more Indians, traveled American roads. Indian scouts (often Apaches, Pawnees, Osages, and Delawares) employed by the U.S. Army also traveled for a living. Less glamorous was the hard work performed off-reservation by western Indians who hired out to local ranchers, for instance, and by Chippewa Indians of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota who worked in white towns, lumber camps, sawmills, and mines, and for railroad companies.³⁵

Among the Natives who stayed closer to home, the old ways of life still beckoned, and many disregarded Indian Office prohibitions to keep such customs alive: courtship practices and polygamy, clan ceremonies, and sacred rituals such as the sun dance. Reservation residents also used two mind-altering drugs, alcohol and peyote, which Washington had forbidden.³⁶ These Natives massively resisted Washington's Americanization program. Parents withheld their children from government schools and their cooperation from officials who would change other aspects of the old ways. In some cases, the government seemed to ask the impossible. Farming, for example, ran counter to hunter-warrior traditions; furthermore, reservation lands often were semiarid or, in the north, had too short a growing season. When favorable agricultural conditions prevailed, the poverty-stricken Indians frequently lacked the equipment, livestock, and seeds to farm profitably. Constant white encroachment on Native lands also hurt the chances for economic self-sufficiency. Perhaps the most subversive force was the Indians' distrust, based on bitter experience, of the supposedly superior American way of life.³⁷ In 1875 an aged Navajo chief explained why he would not send his people's children to the agency school: “I do not believe in the white man or his ways. … The white man makes our young men drunk. He steals away our daughters. He takes away their hearts with sweet drinks and clothes. He is a wolf.”³⁸

Reservation living conditions in the late 1800s also prompted widespread despair and drunkenness and a leadership crisis. “Our men had fought hard against our enemies, holding them back from our beautiful country by their bravery,” lamented Pretty-Shield, a Crow medicine woman. “But now, with everything else going wrong, we began to be whipped by weak foolishness. Our men, our leaders, began to drink the white man's whisky, letting it do their thinking. … Our wise-ones became fools. … But what else was there for us to do? … Our old men used to be different; even our children were different when the buffalo were here.”³⁹ In 1881, when Sitting Bull ended his Canadian exile and surrendered to the commander at Fort Buford in Dakota Territory, he spoke with disdain about reservation life and Indian accommodationists, stating that “I do not wish to be shut up in a corral. It is bad for young men to be fed by an agent. It makes them lazy and drunken. All agency Indians I have seen were worthless. They are neither red warriors nor white farmers. They are neither wolf nor dog. But my followers are weary of cold and hunger. They wish to see their brothers and their old home, therefore I bow my head.”⁴⁰

Amid such resignation and despair on the reservations, Indian messiahs emerged offering some hope. Most influential was the Paiute Wovoka, who preached the Ghost Dance religion. It assured Indians that if they practiced the ritual Ghost Dance and behaved properly, their white antagonists would disappear and the old days would return—including the buffalo. Ghost Dancers would also be reunited with their ancestors. Washington's resolve to overcome such religious resistance to reservation acculturation plans climaxed with the notorious clash between federal troops and Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890.⁴¹ But more subtle, and far more devastating in the long run to Uncle Sam's wards, were federal Indian policy changes in the 1880s.

These changes resulted in part from the advocacy of the Women's National Indian Association of Philadelphia, the National Indian Defense Association, the Indian Rights Association, and other reform organizations established in the late nineteenth century and known collectively as “Friends of the Indian.” Building on the reform traditions of Christianity and the antebellum era, these groups shared a belief that past federal Indian programs had failed miserably. Beginning in 1883 their representatives convened annually, along with professional educators and government officials, at Lake Mohonk, New York, to discuss Indian affairs and promote reform efforts.⁴² The Indian was clearly not being prepared for American citizenship by his reservation—“that hot-bed of barbarism,” as Commissioner of Indian Affairs John H. Oberly called it, “in which many noxious social and political weeds grow rankly.”⁴³ Instead, Natives, demoralized by dependence on the government dole, remained communal in their thinking and followed too many of the old ways. To save the aborigines, the reservation system must be dismantled. The Indian Rights Association urged Congress to provide the “three foundation stones” that Natives must have to become industrious and self-sufficient members of American society: education, a protected individual title to land, and U.S. citizenship.⁴⁴

Native education greatly needed reform. In 1880, Congress appropriated a mere $75,000 to support aboriginal schools, and the Indian Office reported that only fifteen of its sixty-six agencies could adequately educated their children.⁴⁵ Reformers saw the greatest obstacle to their goals in the overpowering influence of the children's families to whom the youngsters returned each day and relapsed “into their former moral and mental stupor.”⁴⁶ During the 1880s and 1890s, Friends of the Indian encouraged the building of more boarding schools on reservations as a partial solution to these problems. Here, the children learned academic subjects as well as “industrial training.” For the boys, this included instruction in farming, stock raising, and gardening, plus such trades as carpentry, masonry, and blacksmithing. Girls learned competencies appropriate to their domains: the kitchen and dining room, dormitory, laundry room, and sewing room. The on-reservation boarding facility, like the day school, was still subject to strong reservation influences, particularly the pervasive Indian languages and the proximity of the children's parents.⁴⁷

To improve education, that is, to detribalize the children and prepare them for integration into American life, Friends of the Indian involved students with two off-reservation institutions. In 1879, Richard Henry Pratt started a boarding school on an experimental basis in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The school drew its first eighty-four students, a mixture of boys and girls, from the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Agencies in Dakota Territory.⁴⁸ By the mid-1890s, Carlisle enrolled 769 pupils whose education was similar to that offered by reservation residential schools except that students were under tighter discipline and totally cut off form home influences for years at a time. English was the only language of instruction.⁴⁹ So successful was the Carlisle experiment in the eyes of white reformers that the Indian Office created eighteen similar institutions by 1895. The number of Indians enrolled in nonreservation boarding schools that year was 4,673.⁵⁰

Beginning in 1890, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan advocated a second off-reservation educational experience. He observed how effective public schools were at “Americanizing our foreign population” and hoped that these institutions might do the same for Native children. Thus, he began contracting with selected school districts.⁵¹ Within five years 487 children attended public schools in California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Michigan. By 1895 the Indian Office educational network had thus grown to include 19 off-reservation boarding schools, 75 reservation boarding schools, 110 reservation day schools, and 62 institutions (operated by churches or secular groups) with whom the government contracted. That year Congress appropriated $2,060,695 for Indian education. In the 1890s, Washington also required that all Indian children attend school and placed Indian Office educational personnel under Civil Service Act provisions.⁵²

It is hard to generalize about Indian response to these educational reforms. Certainly many learned English and some of the ways of American society, including job skills. However, the lack of employment opportunity on their home reservations, to which most Indian students returned, meant that a large percentage “simply returned to camp life,” as Berthrong has noted. Luther Standing Bear, a Sioux who attended Carlisle, took a different view of these relapses:

According to the white man, the Indian, choosing to return to his tribal manners and dress, “goes back to the blanket.” True, but “going back to the blanket” is the factor that has saved him from, or at least stayed, his final destruction. Had the Indian been as completely subdued in spirit as he was in body he would have perished within the century of his subjection. But it is the unquenchable spirit that has saved him—his clinging to Indian ways, Indian thought, and tradition, that has kept him and is keeping him today. The white man's ways were not his ways and many of the things that he has tried to adopt have proven disastrous and to his utter shame. … many an Indian has accomplished his own personal salvation by “going back to the blanket.”⁵³

No comprehensive studies exist about the lives of boarding school graduates, yet scholars agree that young Indian men and women who returned to their home reservations often ended up working for the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs in menial capacities. Instead of converting their families and friends to Christian civilization, which the off-reservation boarding school system expected to happen, large numbers of graduates reverted to their community's lifeways.⁵⁴

Besides education, reformers saw a second means for assimilating Indians into national life in the granting of land in severalty, that is, individual possession rather than tribal ownership. Throughout the 1880s, Friends of the Indian thus advocated an allotment program to break up reservation land holdings into individual family tracts. Indian farmers would learn how to compete in a market economy alongside their white neighbors. Allotment would also weaken tribal ties. Severalty was not a new program; the Indian Office had applied it to selected tribes with mixed results.⁵⁵ Massachusetts Senator Henry L. Dawes, chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and a leading light at the Lake Mohonk conferences, led the lobbying effort for a general Indian allotment act. Not only reformers but also the railroads, white settlers, and other entrepreneurs favored severalty legislation because over sixty million acres of surplus reservation lands would be for sale following allotment.⁵⁶

Success came in 1887. The Dawes Act provided 160-acre allotments to reservation families plus all the “rights, privileges, and immunities” of other U.S. citizens. Following a quarter-century trust period, Washington would issue fee-simple titles to the new owners.⁵⁷ According to historian Frederick E. Hoxie, the Dawes Act “was the first piece of legislation intended for the general regulation of Indian affairs to be passed in half a century, and it remained the keystone of federal action until 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act replaced it. … [S]upporters of the Dawes Act hailed it as the ‘Indians’ Magna Carta.’”⁵⁸ This sense of satisfaction seemed justified. Communal reservations, so long an impediment to the acculturation process, were soon dismantled by allotment, which reformer Merrill E. Gates described as “a mighty pulverizing engine for breaking up the tribal mass.”⁵⁹

Understandably, Indians were less sanguine about the prospects of allotment. In the past, a paternalistic federal government rarely sought Native input into policy decisions, which usually led to more Indian land loss and removals. Delaware Chief Charles Journeycake shared this perspective with the Indian Defense Association in 1886: “We have been broken up and moved six times. We have been despoiled of our property. We thought when we moved across the Missouri River and had paid for our homes in Kansas we were safe. But in a few years the white man wanted our country. We had good farms. Built comfortable houses and big barns. We had schools for our children and churches, where we listened to the same gospel the white man listens to. The white man came into our country from Missouri. And drove our cattle and horses away.” As for the prospects of allotment farming following the Dawes Act, Shoshone Chief Washakie made this pronouncement to Indian Office officials: “God damn a potato!”⁶⁰

From the Indian perspective, the paternalistic allotment program “hung like a millstone” around their necks. The aboriginal land base had shrunk from 139 million acres to 34,287,336 acres by 1934, when Washington abandoned the program. Native communities lost not only “surplus” lands but also many individual allotments. Farmers lacked proper training and access to credit because they could not use their allotments as collateral. In 1888, Congress appropriated only $30,000 for Indian farm machinery, livestock, seeds, and other agricultural assistance. Fledgling Native farmers, under these circumstances, often leased or sold their lands rather than compete with non-Indian neighbors. Some land sales occurred without Native approval. The amount of Indian farm-land in the eleven major states where reservation land had been allotted declined from 3.1 to 2.4 million acres between 1910 and 1930. As they became an increasingly landless minority, aboriginal peoples' dependence on the federal government was perpetuated rather than eliminated.⁶¹

Nevertheless, Friends of the Indian persisted after 1887 in opening “surplus” Native land to non-Native settlers. “The greatest danger hanging over the Indian race,” Schurz had warned in 1881, “arises from the fact that, with their large and valuable territorial possessions which are lying waste, they stand in the way of what is commonly called ‘the development of the country.’ ”⁶² During the 1890s, Congress abolished tribal governments in the Indian Territory, forced allotment upon the Natives there, thus opening the area to white settlement, and paved the way for Oklahoma statehood.⁶³

To the north the Great Sioux reservation was reduced radically in 1889, triggering a tragic reaction. Here, as well as elsewhere in the West, thousands of Indians were prompted by the reservation ordeal, and even more by land loss, to join the messianic Ghost Dance movement. Once the Indians were a happy people, recalled the Paiute prophet Wovoka; then the white man came. “He dug up the bones of our mother, the earth. He tore her bosom with steel. He built big trails and put iron horses on them. He fought you and beat you, and put you in barren places where a horned toad would die. He said you must stay there; you must not go hunt in the mountains.”⁶⁴ Chief Red Cloud revealed something of the Sioux's despair and why they reached out to the Ghost Dance for salvation:

We had no newspapers, and no one to speak for us. We had no redress. Our rations were again reduced. You who eat three times each day, and see your children well and happy around you, can’t understand what starving Indians feel. We were faint with hunger and maddened by despair. We held our dying children, and felt their little bodies tremble as their souls went out and left only a dead weight in our hands. … There was no hope on earth, and God seemed to have forgotten us. Some one had again been talking of the Son of God, and said He had come. The people did not know; they did not care. They snatched at the hope. They screamed like crazy men to Him for mercy. They caught at the promises they heard He had made.

The white men were frightened and called for soldiers. Indian provocation and resistance once again led to confrontation and bloodshed—this time at Wounded Knee, with the deaths of over two hundred Sioux men, women, and children.⁶⁵

To summarize the post-Civil War era: as eastern Indians coped peacefully with reservation life, the western tribes battled fiercely to safeguard their homelands and traditional ways. Chiefs such as Sitting Bull, Joseph, and Geronimo became legends, but the consequences of 1,065 military engagements with U.S. troops meant that defeated Native nations would be confined to reservations, where altruistic Friends of the Indian tried to “civilize” and assimilate Indian wards through a battery of programs, including farming instruction, formal education of the young, and the allotment of aboriginal holdings. Some Natives accepted these initiatives, believing they had no choice but to walk the white man's road. Others continued to resist, militarily and in other more subtle but equally determined ways, as the Ghost Dancers showed in 1890.

At the turn of the century, America's 267,905 Indians, not including Native groups living in Alaska, had made their initial adjustment to life on widely scattered reservations. In 1899 the Indian Office had vital statistics for 187,319 of its wards and claimed that 13 percent resided in permanent homes, 28 percent spoke English for everyday purposes, and 23 percent could read. Schools enrolled 23,615 students.⁶⁶

Aboriginal peoples were not thriving, but at least Indian adaptability and fortitude enabled them to survive the transition and establish permanent homes on restricted land bases. Native peoples had forged a new set of relationships with whites on and off the reservations by 1900. No longer free-wheeling nomads who controlled vast resources, the Indians led lives that revolved around island communities.

Non-Indian Americans who surrounded the reservations assumed that their neighbors would soon vanish into the dominant society; so, too, did Washington policymakers. A century later we realize how wrong they were. Native Americans, employing resistance and accommodation strategies and with help from generations of new leaders, have regained much numerical, cultural, and political strength.⁶⁷ Geronimo and Sitting Bull would be pleased.

Notes

1. Frank Linderman, Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows (1932; reprint ed., New York, 1972), 248.

2. “Census of 1870,” in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed in the United States (Except Alaska) at the Eleventh Census: 1890, 25 vols. (Washington, DC, 1894), 7:21-22. Other Indians were peacefully settled on reservations or at Indian agencies in the eastern states or the western states of Arkansas, California, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, and Texas.

3. Thomas W. Dunlay, “Fire and Sword: Ambiguity and the Plains War,” in Philip Weeks, ed., The American Indian Experience: A Profile, 1524 to the Present (Arlington Heights, IL, 1988), 137-39; William T. Hagan, “United States Indian Policies, 1860-1900,” in William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians. 15 vols., vol. 4, History of Indian-White Relations, ed. Wilcomb E. Washburn (Washington, DC, 1988), 52-53. Hagan notes that the peace commissioners were much more successful in moving to Oklahoma the prairie tribes of eastern Nebraska and Kansas. These included the Sauk and Fox, Potawatomis, Osages, Iowas, Pawnees, and the Poncas.

4. Quoted in W. C. Vanderwerth, ed., Indian Oratory: Famous Speeches by Noted Indian Chieftains (Norman, OK, 1971), 161.

5. Robert M. Utley, “Indian-United States Military Situation, 1848-1891,” in Washburn, Handbook, 170-73; Hagan, “United States Indian Policies,” 55; idem, “How the West Was Lost,” in Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Indians in American History: An Introduction (Arlington Heights, IL, 1988), 181-84; Dunlay, “Fire and Sword,” 140-51; Philip Weeks, Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States, 1820-1890 (Arlington Heights, IL, 1990), 160-91.

6. Quoted in Virginia Irving Armstrong, comp., I Have Spoken: American History through the Voices of the Indians (Chicago, 1971), 86.

7. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, 1873 (Washington, DC, National Cash Register Microfiche Edition, 1969), 200 (hereafter cited as ARCIA); ARCIA, 1874, 10-11; Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols. (Lincoln, NE, 1984), 1:535-36; Arrell M. Gibson, The American Indian: Prehistory to the Present (Lexington, MA, 1980), 408-12; Weeks, Farewell, 160-69.

8. Quoted in Armstrong, I Have Spoken, 87-88.

9. Prucha, Great Father, 1:539; Hagan, “How the West Was Lost,” 187-89; Gibson, American Indian, 418-22; Utley, “Indian-United States Military Situation,” 178-80.

10. ARCIA, 1871, 297-309; ARCIA, 1873, 12-14; Gibson, American Indian, 351, 417-19.

11. Prucha, Great Father, 1:541-42, 574-77; Gibson, American Indian, 419.

12. Quoted in Armstrong, I Have Spoken, 116.

13. Quoted in T. C. McLuhan, ed., Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence (New York, 1971), 90.

14. ARCIA, 1873, 5-6; ARCIA, 1874, 6-8; ARCIA, 1875, 6-9; ARCIA, 1876, xiv-xv; Utley, “Indian-United States Military Situation,” 174-76.

15. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Report on Indians Taxed, 7:637, 643.

16. Quoted in James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Conquest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 1985), 329.

17. “Annual Report,” October 24, 1881, in Wilcomb E. Washburn, ed., The American Indian and the United States: A Documentary History, 4 vols. (New York, 1973), 1:300.

18. Carl Schurz, “Present Aspects of the Indian Problem,” in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880-1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 14; “Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs J. Q. Smith,” October 30, 1876, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:217; “Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price,” October 24, 1881, ibid., 300-301; Gibson, American Indian, 428; Prucha, Great Father, 1:593-94; Weeks, Farewell, 217-18.

19. T. Harry Williams, ed., Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881 (New York, 1964), 148.

20. “Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward P. Smith,” November 1, 1875, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:210-11; Gibson, American Indian, 429-31; Prucha, Great Father, 2:645; Donald J. Berthrong, “Nineteenth-Century United States Government Agencies,” in Washburn, Handbook, 261-63; idem. “The Bitter Years: Western Indian Reservation Life,” in Weeks, American Indian Experience, 155; ARCIA, 1890, cxxix.

21. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Report on Indians Taxed, 7:74; David Wallace Adams, “From Bullets to Boarding Schools: The Educational Assault on the American Indian Identity,” in Weeks, American Indian Experience, 220-21; Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT, 1982), 112; “Report of Commissioner E. A. Hayt,” November 1, 1879, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:249. For a discussion of Christian mission schools among the Indians see Prucha, Great Father, 1:141, 146-48, 597, and 2:693-94, 707-11.

22. Hagan, “United States Indian Policies, 1860-1900,” 58-59; Prucha, Great Father, 2:689, 692-93; Gibson, American Indian, 431-32; Adams, “Bullets to Boarding Schools,” 220-21.

23. ARCIA, 1873, 4-5; “Report of Hiram Price,” October 10, 1882, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:336-37; “Report of Price,” 1881, in ibid., 1:307.

24. “Report of Price,” 1881, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:307; Report on Indians Taxed, 7:76; Berthrong, “Bitter Years,” 158.

25. “Report of Hiram Price,” October 10, 1883, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:348-49; “Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs T. J. Morgan,” September 5, 1890, in ibid., 1:470-71. The sun dance, writes historian Arrell Gibson, was “the most important Teton Sioux ritual. … It was a time for giving thanks, for renewing national solidarity, and for gaining personal strength and status,” Gibson, American Indian, 70.

26. Gibson, American Indian, 439-40; Walter L. Williams, “American Imperialism and the Indians,” in Hoxie, Indians in American History, 235-37; U.S. Statutes at Large, 33:385; United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375 (1886).

27. Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884).

28. Prucha, Great Father, 1:582.

29. ARCIA, 1876, iii-iv; Gibson, American Indian, 430; Prucha, Great Father, 1:586-89; Red Cloud quoted in Armstrong, I Have Spoken, 93.

30. Paul Stuart, The Indian Office: Growth and Development of an American Institution, 1865-1900 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1979), 5, 13, 20; Weeks, Farewell, 156, 197-204; Prucha, Great Father, 1:523.

31. Gibson, American Indian, 443, 451-55. Gibson noted, too, that by 1890 “the Indian population of the United States had been reduced from an estimated original 1,500,000 to less than 250,000.”

32. David Rich Lewis, “Reservation Leadership and the Progressive-Traditional Dichotomy: William Wash and the Northern Utes, 1865-1928,” in Albert L. Hurtado and Peter Iverson, eds., Major Problems in American Indian History (Lexington, MA, 1994), 420-34.

33. Gibson, American Indian, 472; Weeks, Farewell, 231; Berthrong. “Bitter Years,” 167; C. Matthew Snipp, “Economic Conditions,” in Mary B. Davis, ed., Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia (New York, 1994). 176.

34. Donald L. Parman, Indians and the American West in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington, IN, 1994), 9-10; Snipp, “Economic Conditions,” 176.

35. Gibson, American Indian, 470-71; Edmund J. Danziger, Jr., The Chippewas of Lake Superior (Norman, OK, 1978), 94-97.

36. Weeks, Farewell, 231-32.

37. Gibson, American Indian, 466-69.

38. Quoted in Armstrong, I Have Spoken, 98.

39. Linderman, Pretty-Shield, 251.

40. Quoted in Armstrong, I Have Spoken, 126.

41. Ibid., 472-82; Utley, “Indian-United States Military Situation,” 183.

42. Robert W. Mardock, “Indian Rights Movement until 1887,” in Washburn, Handbook, 303-4; Hazel Whitman Hertzberg, “Indian Rights Movement, 1887-1973,” in ibid., 305-6; Gibson, American Indian, 457-59, 494.

43. “Report for December 3, 1888,” in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:421.

44. Prucha, Great Father, 2:656; “Statement of Objectives” (1885) in Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 43-44.

45. Table 10, ARCIA, 1895, 16; “Report of Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs E. M. Marble,” November 1, 1880, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:283.

46. “Report of Morgan,” 1890, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:445; “Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs J. D. C. Atkins,” September 28, 1886, in ibid., 1:396.

47. “Report of Price,” 1882, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:330-31; “Report of Morgan,” 1890, in ibid., 1:444-45.

48. “Report of Marble,” 1880, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:284.

49. ARCIA, 1895, 5; “Report of Morgan,” October 1, 1889, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:429-31; “Report of Price,” 1882, in ibid., 1:333-34.

50. ARCIA, 1895, 5.

51. “Report of Morgan,” 1890, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:445-46.

52. ARCIA, 1895, 3-16; Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Lincoln, NE, 1984), 65. The trend toward educating Indians in the public schools continued, and by 1930 over half the enrolled native students attended these institutions. Margaret Connell Szasz and Carmelita Ryan, “American Indian Education,” in Washburn, Handbook, 293.

53. Berthrong, “Bitter Years,” 161-64; quoted in McLuhan, Touch the Earth, 104.

54. Berthrong, “Bitter Years,” 162-64; Prucha, The Great Father, 2:699-700; Adams, “Bullets to Boarding Schools,” 236-37; Robert A. Trennert, “Educating Indian Girls and Women at Nonreservation Boarding Schools, 1878-1920,” in Hurtado and Iverson, Major Problems in American Indian History, 389-91.

55. “Report of Price,” 1882, in Washburn, Documentary History, 1:336; “Report of Hayt,” November 1, 1878, in ibid., 1:225-29. Objections to severalty during the 1880s are reviewed in the House Committee on Indian Affairs, “Minority Report on Land in Severalty Bill” (1880) in Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 122-28; and Hertzberg, “Indian Rights Movement,” 306.

56. Report on Indians Taxed, 7:67; Gibson, “Indian Land Transfers,” in Washburn, Handbook, 226-27.

57. U.S. Statutes at Large, 24:388-91. For a discussion of those tribes initially exempted from the Dawes Act see Gibson, American Indian, 497-98.

58. Hoxie, Final Promise, 70.

59. Merrill E. Gates, “Addresses at the Lake Mohonk Conferences,” in Prucha, Americanizing the American Indian, 337, 342.

60. Quoted in Armstrong, I Have Spoken, 127-28.

61. Weeks, Farewell, 221-22; Wilcomb E. Washburn, ed., The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887 (Philadelphia, 1975), 30-31; Leonard A. Carlson, “Allotment,” in Davis, Native America in the Twentieth Century, 29; Parman, Indians and the American West in the Twentieth Century, 3, 9-10.

62. Schurz, “Present Aspects of the Indian Problem,” in Prucha, Americanizing the American Indian, 25. For a detailed analysis of how the idealistic purpose of the Dawes Act was subverted see Janet A. McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian 1887-1934 (Bloomington, IN, 1991).

63. Gibson, American Indian, 502.

64. Quoted in Armstrong, I Have Spoken, 129.

65. Red Cloud quoted in Wayne Moquin and Charles Van Doren, eds., Great Documents in American Indian History (New York, 1973), 265-66. For a thorough account of Wounded Knee see Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven, CT, 1963).

66. Berthrong, “Nineteenth-Century Government Agencies,” 263.

67. Davis, Native America in the Twentieth Century, xi. …