SOURCE: “Frederic Remington's Anglo-Saxon Indian” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 22-27.

[In the following essay, Randall discusses painter Frederic Remington's ambivalent view toward the western Indian in his novel John Ermine of the Yellowstone.]

Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, in which he “tried to fashion a narrative of the conquest of the American West as the victims experienced it,”¹ suggests in his introduction that his white American audience, who are accustomed to looking westward, read this book facing eastward. This good advice is perfectly consonant with our modern fashion of regarding our history not as a consensus, but as a series of confrontations in which the “good guys” often lose. In this instance they were those natural ecologists, the Indians. An example of an author who took their side is a minor but interesting writer who not only painted and drew the Indians but also wrote about them, and in his later work at least tried to overcome—with only partial success—the inbred notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority endemic in the 1890's to give a sympathetic portrait of the people who lost the plains. He is the well-known artist and illustrator Frederic Remington.

Theodore Roosevelt the statesman, Owen Wister of The Virginian fame, and Frederic Remington created the image of the American Wild West for the American public in the 1890's, an image which still rides on in innumerable cowboy movies and TV Westerns. They did so in a conscious effort to reunite the nation and bind up its wounds caused by the four years of the American Civil War,² an effort that reached its climax in the chauvinistic nationalism of the three-month Spanish-American War of 1898. All three knew each other, and Remington and Wister especially were friends, since Remington illustrated many of Wister's essays and tales. But by the time Wister published his best-seller, The Virginian in 1902 the friendship broke up because of their differing attitudes toward the West, Wister being sentimental and Remington much more hardboiled.³

By way of explanation, Wister's novel ended with the Virginian, now a Western cowboy, marrying the New England schoolmarm, Molly Wood of Bennington, Vermont, and settling down to raise cattle and make a fortune from a coal mine.⁴ It is a symbolic marriage of East and West, meant to preserve the best of both cultures. This appallingly sentimental attitude is exactly what the American public of 1902 wanted, and is what they still apparently want. Later in the same year, Remington published his only novel, John Ermine of the Yellowstone, a clear rebuttal of The Virginian.⁵ It is this book which I would like to discuss.

Briefly, the fable is this: A young icy-blue-eyed blond Anglo-Saxon boy is kidnapped by Indians and grows up as a Crow, an Absaroke. At the age of nine he is taken in by a white hunchbacked hermit named Crooked-Bear who has fled civilization for the usual Byronic reasons. Crooked-Bear teaches Ermine the ways of the white man so that he can use his knowledge to help the Crow people stave off the tide of white invaders who he knows will eventually triumph. When Ermine reaches late teenage, Crooked-Bear sends him to be a scout for the U. S. Cavalry, to learn their ways from within. Of course, he becomes an excellent scout—the best scouts are invariably Indians. All goes well until he makes the mistake of falling in love with Katherine Searles, the daughter of a major. Then he has his first experience with Eastern snobbery and the caste system. As G. Edward White says, he cannot understand why Kate will kiss him in the forest and reject him in the drawing room. When Kate's high-born Eastern suitor, Lieutenant Butler, indignantly demands that Ermine turn over a photograph of the girl which he has found on a trail a year earlier or else answer for the consequences, Ermine shoots him in the arm. Then like Huck, he lights out. Cheated of love, of honor, even of manhood, he flees the camp, knowing he is now to be a hunted outlaw. Eventually returning to camp under cover of night to kill Butler and thus avenge his own honor, he is shot down by the Indian who had been mortally offended when Ermine ordered him to retire after Katherine had been frightened when the Indian had merely wanted to shake hands with her. Remington was proving Owen Wister wrong in predicting the West would marry the East, saying instead, that the East is instrumental in killing the Wild West, which is pretty much what happened historically.

Remington was only a minor artist in writing fiction. He is definitely not at his best when he describes the Eastern gentry, but he writes believable dialogue for his Western soldiers and Indians. His Eastern characters sound as stilted as Fenimore Cooper's Inez and Captain Middleton in The Prairie. There is the influence of Bret Harte's pseudo-intimacy, especially in the first chapter about the discovery of nine-year-old “Gold Nugget” (“White Weasel” to the Indians) by the whites in Virginia City. In general, Remington tries to translate Indian customs and attitudes into white man's terms so as to preserve the flavor of Indian thought: “After the dried-meat moon his father had brought home many new ponies from the camps for the Cut-Arms [Cheyennes] toward the Morning” and “month of the cold moon” (28) meaning December.

The most interesting tension in John Ermine is that between Remington's contempt for the Indians because they are not white and his sympathy for what had happened to them because of what the whites had become—technological and commercial. (Fortunately, the latter attitude wins out.) But he still believed in inherent Anglo-Saxon superiority. Consequently he concentrates on White Weasel's Nordic ancestry and virtues while at the same time implicitly praising the Indians for their ability to survive in a precarious environment; in other words, the Indians were being more Anglo-Saxon than the Anglo-Saxons themselves, in their strength of will, courage, persistence, and ability to bear pain. His thinking is logically contradictory, but the net result is a sympathetic portrayal of the Indian by an erstwhile racist.⁷

How does Remington show his sympathy for the Indians? He sees them as living in an equilibrium with nature that can only be called ecological. They have a sense of their organic relation to the scheme of things entirely unknown to the white man and they show this by recognizing the unity of all life and the interrelation of all things with each other. To protect themselves from their enemies they take advantage of the terrain instead of altering it. They know when they hear a horse whinny while traveling at night that its owner must be Indian since white men never let their horses loose at night. Accordingly they let their own horses feed slowly, not attempting to guide them, so that their tracks will be mistaken for loose horses grazing.

They differ especially from the whites in their notions of manners, self-defense, and the art of war: “They did not shake hands—only ‘hat-wearers’ [whites] did that. Why should an Indian warrior lose the use of his right hand for even an instant? His hand was only for his wife and children and his knife” (41). Here is an example of Ermine's style of fighting in a Crow expedition against the Sioux: “My heart grew big, father; everything before my eyes swam red, and I do not remember much except that I rode behind a big Dakotah Sioux and shot him in the back. He fell from his horse to the ground and tried to gain his feet, but I rode the pack-pony over him, knocking him down so that he lay still. I turned round and shot him again before he died, and then I took his hair. He had a beautiful head-dress of feathers, which I took, but I left his gun, for it was heavy and a poor one. I chased his pony, the fine war-horse which is out in the stable” (pp. 70-71). The Indian concept of war involves killing the enemy by all means available; there is no notion of the fair play which the whites preached but did not practice. (The whites, like the Indians, took scalps.⁸) Lieutenant Butler, a well-connected Easterner and West Pointer, describes with grudging admiration the Indians' method of fighting, and inadvertently reveals their more humane qualities, saying that if they were not encumbered with their women, herds, and villages, and if they could count on a consistent supply of ammunition and buffalo, there would be a great many more army widows.

Remington admires endurance in the face of hardship. In his view, the whites suffer by comparison with the Indians in their inability to withstand suffering: “These white men cannot endure pain as we do; they bleat like a deer under the knife. Do you remember the one we built the fire on three summers ago over by the Big Muddy when Eashdies split his head with a battle-axe to stop his noise?” (p. 15). The Indian treatment of women is also different from and, by Remington's implication, superior to that of the white genteel world. When Crooked-Bear is asked why he doesn't have a squaw to do his cooking for him, he answers: “‘No woman would stay long up here, brothers; she would soon run away.’ Fire-Bear said nothing, for he did not understand. He himself would follow and beat the woman and make her come back, but he did not say so” (p. 44).

The regrettable impingement of the white man on Indian territory receives a great deal of attention. Remington frequently reminds us that the whites have “lines of tents, wagons without end, but no women” (p. 102). The massed columns of soldiers are incredible to the Indians. In connection with their warfare, the phrase “ten thousand men die” runs like a leitmotif throughout the book, meaning that the whites are so numerous that they can afford to lose that number without counting the cost: “Raptly he listened to the long accounts of the many marvels back in the States, and his little Sioux scalp took a new significance as he tried hard to comprehend ten thousand men dying in a single battle of the Great White Man's war [the Civil War]. Ten thousand dead men was severe strain on his credulity when Crooked-Bear imposed it upon him” (p. 76). This is probably a reference to Cold Harbor⁹ in the Peninsular Campaign, when Grant marched his men against massed Confederate artillery, a battle that was considered extremely bloody, even by the whites in the bloody Civil War. Late in the book Remington writes again from an Indian point of view: “It was the awful stolidity of never ending time which appalled Ermine as he calculated his strategy—no single desperate endeavor would avail; to kill all those men behind him would do the Sioux no good whatever. In single battles the white men were accustomed to leave more men than that, on the field. … A mile away on his right he saw a friendly scout rise over a bluff … that was the difference between the solid masses of dust-blown white men behind him and the Indian people; that sight gave him a proportion. If all these white men were dead, it would make no difference; if that Indian on the far-off hill was dead, he could never be replaced” (pp. 113-114). We are back with the ecological theme again. The whites are genocidal. Again and again there are references to the inevitable destruction of the West by the East in the oncoming white tide: First come the gold-hunters in a rising white tide, mindless of their government's treaties with the Indians or the reprisals by the Indians themselves; then the white soldiers came to their aid and fused with the gold-hunters so that it was one continual war against the Indians. “Long columns of ‘pony soldiers’ and still longer lines of canvas-topped wagons trailed snakelike over the buffalo range” (p. 83). Wave after wave they come, until the Sioux are pressed back into the country of the Crow, who in turn are pressed back into mountain valleys and other inaccessible places. Crooked-Bear who, like Leatherstocking, had previously fled from the advance of white civilization, thinks: “Had he completed his work, had he fulfilled his life, was he only to sit here with his pale, dead thoughts, while each day saw the fresh bones of free and splendid animals bleach on the hillsides that he might continue?” (p. 85). (Probably a reference to thousands of bison the white men have slaughtered.) The white men, when they pass just once through a place, leave a trail which even a herd of buffalo could not produce: “Keeping his sharp eyes circling, Ermine mused along. Yes, he remembered what Crooked-Bear had said: ‘The white men never go back; they do not have to hunt buffalo in order to live; they are paid by the year, and one, two, even a lifetime of years make no difference to them. They would build log towns and scare away the buffalo. The Indians could not make a cartridge or gun,’ and other things which he had heard came into his mind” (p. 113).

But the climax of triumphant white vindictiveness and obliteration of the old West comes in the mopping-up operations after Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn (mentioned on p. 83), in which the white soldiers indulge in a policy of overkill: they kill the innocent for the guilty.¹⁰ John Ermine is part of this, although Remington carefully keeps him clear of any involvement with the real atrocities: killing of women and children and shooting of ponies upon which the Indians depend for their livelihood. This time, showing his ambivalence, the author seems to side with the whites: “Ermine in his turn conceived a new respect for white soldiers. (If their heels were heavy, so were their arms when it came to the final hug.) While it was not apparent to him just how they were going to whip the Sioux and Cheyenne, it was very evident that the Indians could not whip the soldiers; and this was demonstrated directly when Colonel Miles, with his hardy infantry, charged over Sitting Bull's camp, and while outnumbered three to his one, scattered and drove the proud tribesmen and looted their tepees. Not satisfied with this, the grim soldier crawled over the snow all winter with his buffalo-coated men, defying the blizzards, kicking the sleeping warriors out of their blankets, killing and chasing them into the cold starvation of the hills. So persistent and relentless were the soldiers that they fought through the captured camps when the cold was so great that the men had to stop in the midst of battle to light fires, to warm their fingers, which were no longer able to work the breech-locks. Young soldiers cried in the ranks as they perished in the frigid atmosphere; but notwithstanding, they never stopped. (The enemy could find no deep defile in the lonely mountains where they would be safe among the rocks, the steady line charged over them, pouring bullets and shell.) Ermine followed their fortunes and came to understand the dying of ‘the ten thousand men.’” These people went into battle with the intention of dying if they were not victorious. They never consulted their heels, no matter what the extremity. By the time of the green grass the warriors of the northern plains had either sought their agencies or fled to Canada. Through it all Ermine had marched and shot and frozen with the rest. He formed attachments for his comrades—that enthusiastic affection which men bring from the camp and battle-field, signed by suffering and sealed with blood” (pp. 135-136).

The inconsistencies in Remington's view are clearly seen in his characterization of Ermine, who is now an Indian, now a white. When Crooked-Bear first gives him a firearm, he acts like a white: “When he comprehended that he really did own a gun, he passed into an unutterable peace, akin to nothing but a mother and her new-born child” (p. 56). Killing (owning a gun) is equated with childbirth and is considered creative, a fact which speaks volumes about the satisfactions of violence in his day and ours. Whites are identified with guns (cf. p. 57), although the Indians have them too. Remington is saying that for the white men, the gun is a way of life, as it is not for the Indians, who merely use them to secure a livelihood. This of course eventually leads to the destruction of the environment, Indian as well as ecological.

When “White Weasel” arrives at the soldiers' camp, however, he acts like an Indian, and thus begins the theme of white belittlement of John Ermine for his Indian nature. The incident of the officers' trimming of the tenderfoot at a poker game while planning to lose his saddle, clothes, and gun back to him at a subsequent poker game is scotched by John Ermine's counter-stratagem. He waters an officer's horse by feeding him water and salt corn, and then races his own pony against him and wins. But what starts as an American Western practical joke on the officers' part turns out to have been carried too far; as Remington says, “It would not sound well when told on Tongue River [the place of winter cantonment]” (p. 173). When told that they had intended to return his things to him all along, Ermine replies by revealing his counter-strategem, and the author comments, “Major Searles and his fellows were unlike many jokers; they slowly readjusted after the shock and laughed with the others” (p. 173). But ugly emotions are close to the surface; Ermine's trick could have killed the officer's horse, as he freely admits, and in the West men have been killed for less. Part of the danger lies in the fact that the deception could be interpreted as an Indian trick (although it isn't necessarily), and the ugly spectre of racism raises its head. John Ermine's equivocal status has already raised tensions in the white men's minds.

When he meets Katherine Searle he runs up against her flirtatiousness and desire to stay in fashion. (She can't be more than eighteen, since she has just finished school, while John Ermine is around twenty-one or two.) Remington calls her “the arch one” (p. 183) and refers to her uptilted nose, which is supposed to be fetching. She flirts with Butler, who calls John Ermine her “sage-brush admirer” (Ibid.). She calls Ermine her “King Charles cavalier” (p. 184) and “my knight of the yellow hair” (p. 202). Of course she plays the two off against each other, even though she likes Butler and eventually intends to marry him; apparently she has never read Jane Eyre; such behavior as Jane's wasn't fashionable in the 1870's. Much of her interest in Ermine derives from his protecting her from Sharp-Nose, the Indian who wants to shake hands with her. (Ermine's insult to Sharp-Nose later leads to his own death.) There is a question of whether or not Ermine may not be reduced through love to racial prejudice when he refuses to let the Indian shake hands with Katherine; in this scene he seems to be acting white. First he calls Sharp-Nose in Absaroke “brother,” then he threatens to “come” to him, then he calls on a chieftain to make him go back and calls him “boy” and “fool.” This sounds like a racial slur: “Good gracious! I had done nothing; did he want to kill me?” “No, he wanted to shake hands with you; he is a fool” (p. 166). This is definitely the tone of the nineteenth-century white man dealing with one of the lesser breeds without the law.

Later, Kate worries about the young Indian's being angry at Ermine, holds out a false promise, and as evidence that he is her chivalric knight of the plains, she gives him her glove (p. 187). Kate capriciously says she must have a wolf; to her surprise Ermine takes her seriously and captures one for her. The officers take the wolf and run the Western equivalent of an English hunt to hounds (pp. 200-201): Remington is parodying popular genteel romance. There is an obvious double irony here: The West outsmarts the Eastern (English) hunt to hounds (the wolf, being a true Westerner, escapes) but the East has triumphed over the West in Kate's victory over the now smitten John Ermine. During the course of the hunt, Kate is thrown from her horse, who breaks his leg in a gopher hole, and she faints. In this stock predicament of romance, Ermine rescues her, revives her with water, and kisses her repeatedly. As Remington says: “She sensed kindly caresses and warm kisses which delighted her (p. 211). Next day he proposes to her after she displays her foot and acts coy. Kate says her mother would never consent to marriage (she is right about this), and threatens to call a servant. “‘No, no, I cannot marry you. Why, what should we do if I did? We should have to live in the mule corral.’ ‘No, come to the mountains with me. I will make you a good camp.’ She almost laughed aloud at this” (p. 223). She says her father would not let her marry him, and adds, “Don't you think you Western men cover the ground a little too fast?” (p. 224). She denies she kissed him (in reality she remembers), and it is a case of Western honesty versus Eastern prudery. “Fear had departed Ermine's eyes and all graciousness from hers” (p. 224). He tells her the photo he has found which he thinks has come from Sak-a-war-tee [God] is of her. She says she would marry only for love, and tells him she doesn't love him and has given him no reason to think so (she is not strictly accurate or honest about this). He is reduced to talking “wild gutterals” to himself in the Indian language.

The girl-out-of-reach is an old theme in nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon literature. One thinks of Tennyson's Maude and Estelle and Pip in Great Expectations. John Ermine has stolen kisses several times from Kate when she was half-conscious in the river-bottom; it is reminiscent of McTeague's famous scene with Trina in the dental chair, which had appeared only three years earlier. It is a symbolic seduction. Although Kate may not have remembered the kisses, it seems probable that she does remember them and is doing what other women have done from time to time—pretends they were against her will.

At any rate, the result is tragic for John Ermine. Major Searles denies him the house and wants Kate to announce her engagement to Mr. Butler immediately. Captain Lewis remains friendly but instantly assumes marriage is out of the question. John Ermine wonders if “wanting to marry Katherine Searles might be some crime against the white man's law” (p. 234)—it is, or at least is against his prejudices—so he carries a rifle for protection. Captain Lewis says they pity him. He indignantly protests, saying the white man speaks with a forked tongue: “You have two hearts: one is red and the other is blue; and you feel with the one that best suits you at the time” (p. 236). “You did not think I was a dog when I kept you all from freezing last winter; but here among the huts and the women I am a dog” (p. 236). Lieutenant Butler appears and demands that Ermine hand over Kate's photograph: “Mr. Butler, you will only get that photograph from off my dead body. You have Miss Searles; is that not enough?” “I will then take it by force from you!” A tremendous bang roared around the room” (p. 238). Ermine has shot Butler's six-shooter out of his hand, hitting his arm, and then disappeared, Indian style (pp. 240-241). In a peculiar mixture of chivalric honor and Indian pride, Ermine chooses death to dishonor; he will not let himself be court-martialed. He has been robbed of his self-respect, made an outlaw, spurned by women; no wonder he feels like an Ishmael: “The brotherhood of the white kind, which had promised him so much, had ended by stealing the heart and mind of the poor mountain boy, and now it wanted his body to work its cold will on; but it could have that only dead” (p. 243). The whites have destroyed him; they don't recognize his Nordic heritage, which is the same as the Indians': “Now he was fleeing for his life because he had done two of the most natural things a man can do [love a woman, kill a man who threatens him—he hopes he has killed Butler instead of only wounding him]. Again Remington switches around and identifies Ermine as a wronged white: “The mountain boy had brought little to the soldier camp but the qualities of mind which distinguished his remote ancestors of the north of Europe, who came out of the dark forests clad in skins, and bearing the first and final law of man, a naked sword on a knotted arm” (p. 244).

This is the tragic-mulatto theme, although Ermine is technically not a half-breed. But the tragic-mulatto theme is tragic only to those who refuse to accept miscegenation—and miscegenation is a long accomplished fact in American life. To others it is merely pathetic. Just as paranoid fear of sexual aggression by black males has contributed to poisoning black-white relations in this country, so does paranoid fear of John Ermine as a “wild man,” i.e., an Indian who dares to sue for the hand of the pretty young girl from the East, turn the whole white community out on a chase to hunt him down and lynch him. Unlike the wolf, to whose hunt this one is parallel, this Westerner does not escape.

In his final apostrophe to the white man, Ermine wishes he had acted more Indian and less white. He says that if he had followed his Indian heart, he could have stolen Katherine from under the noses of the white soldiers, or kidnapped her from a hunting party, rawhided her to her horse, and disappeared without trace, “but when she looked at me, my blood turned to water” (p. 245). Remington even tries to turn him into a Christ figure: “God, God, have you deserted me?” (p. 246).

When he returns to Crooked-Bear, John Ermine gives a running summary in which he complains of white perfidy and accuses Kate of being a tease: “When the girl looked at me, it lighted a fire in my heart, and then she blew the flame until I was burning up. She told me as well as any words can say, ‘Come on,’ and when I offered her my hand she blatted like a fawn and ran away. As if that were not enough, this Butler walked into the room and talked to me as though I were a dog and drew his gun” (pp. 264-265). White honor and Indian vengeance combine in him as he continues. Butler, he says, has taken from him everything he has been working for with the whites and reduced him to a human wolf, so he intends to go back and kill him. “You say I may lose my life; ho! what is a dead man? A dead man and a buffalo chip look just alike to these mountains, to this sky, and to me, Crooked-Bear” (p. 266). Scorning death, he knows that he will die but wants to take Butler with him: “I am going to make others drink with me this bitter drink, which will sweeten it for me” (p. 266). The white influence dies out of him and he becomes a Nordic-Indian primitive, an Ishmael: “every one was his enemy” (p. 269), Indian and white; it is the tragic mulatto theme: “he could trust no one” (p. 269). His last friend is Night, the covering concealing darkness. He returns to the post dressed as an Indian, rides a wood wagon into camp, and is shot by Sharp-Nose (“me kill him”), “the fool whom he would not allow to shake hands with Katherine Searles” (p. 271). (He is right: he has betrayed himself by not being Indian enough.)

Sharp-Nose kills him right under the window of Major Searles' sitting room (p. 270). Was he seeking Butler? A last glimpse of Katherine? Why didn't he keep a weather eye out for Sharp-Nose upon returning to the camp? Love, which had made him a bigot, makes him oblivious to all danger except the obvious one from Butler. Remington's plot creaks a little here; his being shot while intent on killing Butler seems a bit unlikely in view of his training as an Indian going into what he knows is dangerous territory. Also, the book is not quite free of the feeling that, in spite of his Indian training, all this should not happen to a man who is, after all, white.

After Ermine's death, Sharp-Nose is brought in to Katherine, who recognizes him when he says, “Maybe, now you shake hands.” “Yes, I will shake hands with you now, Sharp-Nose” and half to herself, as she eyed her malevolent friend, she muttered, “and he [Ermine] kept you [Sharp-Nose] to remember me by” (p. 271). Thus the book ends. Here Frederic Remington's misogyny comes out: a man is dead, and all she can think of is her vanity, the compliment to her. Or maybe she does not think of him as a man; maybe for her a dog is dead, for this is a story of fear of miscegenation, and most whites regarded the Indians as dogs. (Cf. Chapter 26 on “The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating” in Melville's The Confidence-Man.)

The last few paragraphs of John Ermine do a kind of about-face, getting away from the racial theme almost entirely. At the end, the Eastern gentry, Katherine, and the Western Indian, Sharp-Nose, shake hands over the demise of John Ermine, now a poor white trying to struggle up the social scale and not making it. It is a kind of international agreement to keep the riffraff down. Frederic Remington is ambivalent about racism and Anglo-Saxon superiority to the very end.

Notes

1. Bantam edition (N. Y., 1972), xii.

2. Cf. G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), passim.

3. Cf. Ben Merchant Vorphal, My Dear Wister—The Frederic Remington-Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto: American West Publishing Co., 1972), passim.

4. Cf. John Seelye's review of My Dear Wister, New Republic, Sept. 2, 1972, pp. 28-33. Also cf. White, p. 143.

5. Ibid.

6. Frederic Remington, John Ermine of the Yellowstone (The Gregg Press: Ridgewood, N.J., 1968), p. 27. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

7. Cf. John Ermine, pp. 22, 52.

8. Cf. Dee Brown: “The Europeans may or may not have introduced scalping to the New World, (25) but the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonists made the custom popular by offering bounties for the scalps of their respective enemies. The same practice was occasionally followed in the warfare on the plains in the 1865-1890 period. Ibid., pp. 56, 92.

9. Cf. 116: “One big man slapped Ermine of the back hard enough to make him cough, and said, ‘I'd rather take my chance at Cold Harbor than go poking round the hills alone as you do, my boy!’”

10. Cf. Brown, p. 283: “When the white men in the East heard of Long Hair's defeat, they called it a massacre and went crazy with anger. They wanted to punish all the Indians in the West. Because they could not punish Sitting Bull and the war chiefs, the Great Council in Washington decided to punish the Indians they could find—those who remained on the reservations and had taken no part in the fighting.”