The Earth is Weeping

The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

Peter Cozzens

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781786491510
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786491503
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Sunday Times' Best History Books of 2017
Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History
Winner of the 2017 Caroline Bancroft History Prize
Shortlisted for the Military History Magazine Book of the Year Award
NOMINATED FOR THE 2017 PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN 'Extraordinary... Cozzens has stripped the myth from these stories, but he is such a superb writer that what remains is exquisite' The Times In a sweeping narrative, Peter Cozzens tells the gripping story of the wars that destroyed native ways of life as the American nation continued its expansion onto tribal lands after the Civil War, setting off a conflict that would last nearly three decades. By using original research and first-hand sources from both sides, Cozzens illuminates the encroachment experienced by the tribes and the tribal conflicts over whether to fight or make peace, and explores the squalid lives of soldiers posted to the frontier and the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies. Bringing together a cast of fascinating characters, including Custer, Sherman, Grant and a host of other military and political figures, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Red Cloud, The Earth is Weeping is the fullest account to date of how the West was won... and lost.

THE EARTH
IS WEEPING

PROLOGUE

OUR CHILDREN SOMETIMES BEHAVE BADLY

PATRONS OF P. T. BARNUM’S American Museum in April 1863 were in for a treat. For twenty-five cents, they could gaze upon eleven Plains Indian chiefs just arrived in New York City from a visit to the “Great Father” President Abraham Lincoln. These were not the “random beggars or drunken red men from Eastern reservations” that Barnum normally presented to the public, The New York Times assured readers. They were Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches— “roamers of the remotest valleys of the Rocky Mountains.” Barnum promised three dramatic performances daily, but the engagement was strictly limited. “Come now, or you’re too late,” trumpeted the great showman. “They are longing for their green fields and wild forest homes, and must be seen now or not at all.”¹

Barnum teased New Yorkers with extravagant previews. He rode through the streets of Manhattan with the Indians in an oversized carriage preceded by a marching band. The great showman and the chiefs made stops at schools, where children performed calisthenics and sang songs for them. Newspapers responded with amused derision, but the Indians captivated the public. Crowds flocked to the four-tier theater of Barnum’s Broadway Street gallery to see staged “pow-wows.” The Indians said little, but their painted faces, long braids, buckskin scalp shirts, and scalp-trimmed leggings delighted show goers. At the final curtain call on April 18, Chief Lean Bear of the Southern Cheyennes bade New Yorkers farewell on behalf of the delegation.²

Chief Lean Bear was a member of the Council of Forty-Four, the governing body of the Cheyenne people. Council chiefs were peacemakers, enjoined by tribal custom never to permit passion to displace reason and to always act on behalf of the tribe’s best interests, which in 1863 most elder Cheyenne chiefs construed as friendly relations with the mushrooming white population in the Territory of Colorado that crowded their already diminished hunting lands. But official Washington was troubled. Confederate agents were rumored to be circulating among the Plains Indians, trying to incite them to war. To counter the threat (which was in fact baseless) and smooth over differences with the tribes, the Indian Bureau had arranged for Lean Bear and ten other chiefs to visit the Great Father. The Indian agent Samuel G. Colley and their white interpreter accompanied them.

On the morning of March 26, 1863, two weeks before the opening of their New York extravaganza, the Indians, their agent, and their interpreter had filed into the East Room of the White House through a murmuring throng of cabinet secretaries, foreign diplomats, and distinguished curiosity seekers. “Maintaining that dignity or stolidity characteristic of the stoics of the woods,” a Washington journalist told his readers, “they quietly seated themselves on the carpet in a semicircle, and with an air of recognition to the destiny of greatness to be gazed at, seemed quite satisfied with the brilliancy of their own adornings and colorings.”³

After a fifteen-minute wait, President Lincoln strode into the room and asked the chiefs if they had anything to say. Lean Bear arose. As the crowd of dignitaries pressed closer, Lean Bear momentarily lost his composure. The chief stammered that he had much to say but was so nervous that he needed a chair. Two chairs were brought, and Lincoln sat down opposite the chief. Cradling his long-stem pipe, Lean Bear spoke, hesitantly at first, but with a growing eloquence. He told Lincoln that his invitation had traveled a long way to reach them and the chiefs had traveled far to hear his counsel. He had no pockets in which to hide the Great Father’s words but would treasure them in his heart and faithfully carry them back to his people.

Lean Bear addressed Lincoln as an equal. The president, he said, lived in splendor with a finer lodge, yet he, Lean Bear, was like the president, a great chief at home. The Great Father must counsel his white children to abstain from acts of violence so that both Indians and whites might travel safely across the plains. Lean Bear deplored the white man’s war then raging in the East and prayed for its end. He closed with a reminder to Lincoln that as chiefs of their peoples he and the other Indian leaders must return home, and Lean Bear asked the president to expedite their departure.⁴

Then Lincoln spoke. He began with good-humored but marked condescension, telling the chiefs of wonders beyond their imagination, of “pale-faced people” in the room who had come from distant countries, of the earth being a “great, round ball teeming with whites.” He called for a globe and had a professor show them the ocean and the continents, the many countries populated with whites, and finally the broad swath of beige representing the Great Plains of the United States.

The geography lesson over, Lincoln turned somber. “You have asked for my advice . . . I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race excepting living as they do, by the cultivation of the earth. It is the object of this government,” continued Lincoln, “to be on terms of peace with you and with all our red brethren . . . and if our children should sometimes behave badly and violate treaties, it is against our wish. You know,” he added, “it is not always possible for any father to have his children do precisely as he wishes them to do.” Lincoln said an officer called the commissioner of Indian affairs would see to their early return west. The chiefs were given bronzed-copper peace medals and papers signed by Lincoln attesting to their friendship with the government, after which Lean Bear thanked the president and the council concluded.⁵

The chiefs’ stay in Washington did not end with the White House meeting, however. As if the journey east had not sufficed to demonstrate the power of the white people, for ten days the commissioner of Indian affairs insisted on shuffling the delegation from one government building and army fortification to another. Then Agent Colley accepted P. T. Barnum’s invitation to New York. By the time the Indians boarded a train for Denver on April 30, 1863, they had been in the white cities nearly a month.⁶

President Lincoln’s peace pledge rang hollow in the Territory of Colorado, where Governor John Evans’s idea of interracial amity was to confine the Cheyennes on a small and arid reservation. Although they had signed a treaty three years earlier agreeing to accept reservation life, Lean Bear and the other peace chiefs were powerless to compel their people to relinquish their freedom. Cheyenne hunting parties ranged over eastern Colorado and the unsettled western Kansas plains as they had always done. They harmed no whites; indeed, the Cheyennes considered themselves at peace with their white neighbors, but Coloradans nonetheless found their presence intolerable. Governor Evans and the military district commander, Colonel John Chivington, who had political ambitions of his own in Colorado, took dubious reports of cattle theft by hungry Cheyennes as an excuse to declare war on the tribe. In early April 1864, Chivington ordered cavalry to fan out into western Kansas and to kill Cheyennes “whenever and wherever found.”

Lean Bear and his fellow peace chief Black Kettle had passed the winter and early spring quietly near Fort Larned, Kansas, where they traded buffalo robes. Now tribal runners brought word of the imminent danger. Recalling their hunting parties, Lean Bear and Black Kettle started their people northward to find protection in numbers among Cheyenne bands gathering on the Smoky Hill River. But the army found them first.

On the night of May 15, 1864, Lean Bear and Black Kettle camped on a muddy, cottonwood-fringed stream three miles short of the Smoky Hill. At dawn, hunting parties fanned out onto the open plain in search of buffalo. Before long, they were back, pounding their ponies to the lodge of the camp crier. They had spotted four columns of mounted soldiers on the horizon, and the troops had cannon. As the crier awakened the village, Lean Bear rode forward with a small escort to meet the soldiers. His medal from President Lincoln rested on his breast in plain view, and in his hand he carried the peace papers from Washington. From atop a low rise, Lean Bear saw the troopers at the same time they saw him. Their commander ordered his eighty-four men and two mountain howitzers into a battle line. Behind Lean Bear, four hundred warriors from the village assembled warily.⁷

Lean Bear rode forward, and a sergeant cantered toward him. All must have seemed well to the chief. After all, he and the Great Father had pledged mutual peace. Dignitaries from around the globe had greeted him at the White House. Army officers in the forts around Washington had been gracious and respectful. The people of New York City had honored him. He had his medal and peace papers to prove that he was the white man’s friend. But the Great Plains was a world unto itself.

Lean Bear was just thirty feet from the soldiers when they opened fire. The chief was dead before he hit the ground. After the smoke cleared, several troops broke ranks and pumped more bullets into his corpse. As Lincoln had cautioned Lean Bear, his children sometimes behaved badly.⁸

A newspaperman once asked George Crook, one of the preeminent generals in the West, how he felt about his job. It was a hard thing, he replied, to be forced to do battle with Indians who more often than not were in the right. “I do not wonder, and you will not either, that when Indians see their wives and children starving and their last source of supplies cut off, they go to war. And then we are sent out there to kill them. It is an outrage. All tribes tell the same story. They are surrounded on all sides, the game is destroyed or driven away, they are left to starve, and there remains but one thing for them to do—fight while they can. Our treatment of the Indian is an outrage.”⁹

That a general would offer such a candid and forceful public defense of the Indians seems implausible because it contradicts an enduring myth: that the regular army was the implacable foe of the Indian.

No epoch in American history, in fact, is more deeply steeped in myth than the era of the Indian Wars of the American West. For 125 years, much of both popular and academic history, film, and fiction has depicted the period as an absolute struggle between good and evil, reversing the roles of heroes and villains as necessary to accommodate a changing national conscience.

In the first eighty years following the tragedy at Wounded Knee, which marked the end of Indian resistance, the nation romanticized Indian fighters and white settlers and vilified or trivialized the Indians who resisted them. The army appeared as the shining knights of an enlightened government dedicated to conquering the wilderness and to “civilizing” the West and its Native American inhabitants.

In 1970, the story reversed itself, and the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme. Americans were developing an acute sense of the countless wrongs done the Indians. Dee Brown’s elegantly written and passionately wrought Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and, later that same year, the film Little Big Man shaped a new saga that articulated the nation’s feelings of guilt. In the public mind, the government and the army of the latter decades of the nineteenth century became seen as willful exterminators of the Native peoples of the West. (In fact, the government’s response to what was commonly called the “Indian problem” was inconsistent, and although massacres occurred and treaties were broken, the federal government never contemplated genocide. That the Indian way of life must be eradicated if the Indian were to survive, however, was taken for granted.)

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee still deeply influences the way Americans perceive the Indian Wars and has remained the standard popular work on the era. It is at once ironic and unique that so crucial a period of our history remains largely defined by a work that made no attempt at historical balance. Dee Brown gave as the stated purpose of his book the presentation of “the conquest of the American West as the victims experienced it,” hence the book’s subtitle, An Indian History of the American West. Brown’s definition of victims was severely circumscribed. Several tribes, most notably the Shoshones, Crows, and Pawnees, cast their fate with the whites. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee dismissed these tribes as “mercenaries” with no attempt to understand them or explain their motives. These Indians, like the army and the government, became cardboard cutouts, mere foils for the “victims” in the story.

Such a one-sided approach to the study of history ultimately serves no good purpose; it is impossible to judge honestly the true injustice done the Indians, or the army’s real role in those tragic times, without a thorough and nuanced understanding of the white perspective as well as that of the Indians. What I have sought to do in this book, then, is bring historical balance to the story of the Indian Wars. I hesitate to use the word “restore” when speaking of balance, because it is the pendulum swings that have defined society’s understanding of the subject since the closing of the military frontier in 1891.

Of inestimable benefit to my work has been the wealth of Indian primary sources that have become available since the publication of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. They have enabled me to tell the story equally through the words of Indian and white participants and, through a deeper understanding of all parties to the conflict, better address the many myths, misconceptions, and falsehoods surrounding the Indian Wars.

A myth as enduring as that of an army inherently antagonistic toward the Indians is that of united Indian resistance to white encroachment. No tribe famous for fighting the government was ever united for war or peace. Intense factionalism ruled, each tribe having its war and peace factions that struggled for dominance and clashed, sometimes violently, with one another. One of the most committed advocates of peaceful accommodation with the whites paid for his convictions with his life; a disgruntled member of the tribe’s war faction poisoned him.

Unanimity existed only among tribes that accepted the white invasion. Influential chiefs such as Washakie of the Shoshones saw the government as guarantors of his people’s survival against more powerful tribal enemies. The Shoshones, Crows, and Pawnees all proved invaluable army allies in war, following the adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Not only did the Indians fail to unite in opposing the westward expansion of “civilization,” but they also continued to make war on one another. There was no sense of “Indianness” until it was too late, and then it came but dimly through a millennial faith that brought only bloodshed, horror, and broken hopes.

Intertribal conflict was in part the consequence of a fact that has never been appreciated but that will become apparent as this book unfolds: that the wars between Indians and the government for the northern plains, the seat of the bloodiest and longest struggles, represented a displacement of one immigrant people by another, rather than the destruction of a deeply rooted way of life. A decade after Lean Bear’s murder, an army officer asked a Cheyenne chief why his tribe preyed on their Crow neighbors. He respo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Chronology
• The Earth is Weeping
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustration Credits
• Picture Section
• A Note About the Author
• Also by Peter Cozzens
• Copyright