Fast Horse Outta Town: Trollheart Explores the Legend of the American West

[Trollheart]

How the West Was Lost: Those Who Tried and Failed to Save It

I certainly don't have to explain to any of you, I'm sure, how badly treated the Red Man was by ourselves as the settlers moved West, and how their lands were taken, promises to them broken like bottles made out of papier mache, how they were cheated, lied to, confused, derided, murdered and raped, and all but made extinct as a race, all in the name of white expansionism. As a white man myself, though I wasn't born for another century and even then was many thousands of miles from the scene of such savagery and betrayal, I nevertheless consider myself to bear a small part of the shame this sin stains, or should stain, every one of my race, and so I don't point the finger and say "they did it" while smugly looking down from on high, but try, in so far as I can, to use the collective "we" and accept my part of the blame.

As a nation historically oppressed by others, and as one torn apart by differences both political and religious, I should be able to say I know what it's like to be on the receiving end, but the truth is I don't. I'm the equivalent of a man living, during the time of the West, in say Canada or New York, well removed from the carnage and the massacres, in no danger. While my people (Catholics) were being killed and driven out of Northern Ireland by the Protestants, I was safely in the Republic, where the population was overwhelmingly Catholic, and so never faced any kind of oppression for my religion, never mind that I don't even believe. On the streets of Londonderry or Belfast or Armagh, pleading not being a practicing Catholic was no excuse and offered no escape; to Protestants (well, to the loyalist paramilitaries and their supporters) if you were baptised as a Catholic, or "Papist", then that was what you were.

Naturally, this worked in reverse too. A Protestant caught in a Republican area, or picked up by the IRA, would not get out of it by saying he (or she) was non-religious. To each side the other was the enemy, and it didn't matter if you were a mother of five or a old man, a schoolchild or a priest; there were only two sides, and if you weren't with them, you were against them. Not to mention that if you somehow did escape your fate by declaring against your own side, or purporting to be outside of the conflict, the chances you would be seen as a traitor by your own side and punished by them were not inconceivable. Again, on both sides, you were either with them, or us, or against them, or us. No middle ground.

But if anything positive can be said about the sectarian conflict between Catholic and Protestant that raged for over thirty years over the border (and it really can't), it can at least be admitted that there was a kind of brutal honesty there. Loyalist paramilitaries did not trick you into believing they were your friends, Republican punishment parties never pretended they would be all right with you living in their area. You were the enemy, you knew you were the enemy, they knew you were the enemy, and everyone knew where they stood. Or, quite possibly, knelt, with their hands on their head, waiting for the bullet that would end their life.

One of the greatest hypocrisies (and there are many) of the treatment of the Indians, as they were then called, in the American West is that the US Government and Army did not come right out from day one and say "we hate you, we have no use for you, there is no room for you in this new world we are going to force upon this land, and we are going to kill you all, or at worst, shove you all into ghettos." Had they done so, it would not in any way have lessened the horror of what happened, but at least the tribes would have known what to expect. When Hitler had the Jews herded into ghettos prior to being transported to the camps, it's a safe bet that none of them thought they would be allowed live. They knew where they stood. But with the Indians, it was so much more insidious and underhand.

Much of this, of course, came from political exigency. As settlers moved West and, to be blunt, wanted the lands that belonged to the Indian tribes - had been promised them by their government - the president and his cabinet had to renege on their promises, or part of them, pushing back the demarcation line which was supposed to encompass what were to be known as Indian Territory, until finally the borders of that land shrunk to a few reservations, while the white people trampled all over the Indians' sacred ancestral hunting grounds. As in all things, the white man came first. It had been so from the time when the first white man had stepped onto the land that was later to be known as America, and imposed his and his country's, and his race's values upon what he saw as "savages". White America wasn't really that bothered about imposing values on these savages, they just wanted their lands, and if they had to kill a few million of them, well they had no problem with that.

The pages of the history of the American west - but mostly, not the silver screens of movie theatres, for obvious reasons - are filled with massacre after massacre of Indian tribes, and not just the men. The US Cavalry seems in general to have made little to no distinction between warriors or braves, and their women and children. All were cut down with the same lack of human compassion or regard, families slaughtered in bloodbaths the likes of which we would not see again till World War I, and which had been recently witnessed through the dripping, scarlet eye of the Civil War. Nobody cried over these innocents, at least, nobody that counted. Often there was nobody left of the tribe to mourn them, as they were all wiped out together. And these were no orderly military campaigns either; at best, Indians could muster rifles, but usually defended themselves (assuming they got the chance to; many of these were sneak attacks, which would have been loudly proclaimed as underhand and cowardly in the US Senate had they been carried out by the Indians) with axes, bows and arrows and spears. The US Army had artillery, rifles and the precursor of the dread of the trenches, the machine gun, in the Gatling gun, which could kill many men at a distance like some chattering goblin of destruction.

There was no comparison, and no chance for the Indians, even assuming they knew what was coming and could prepare for it. Fire, too, was used by the white man, as the Indians almost to a man lived in hide-covered tepees or wigwams, hungrily devoured by flames in an instant, and like the thatched cottages and shacks callously burned by the Normans and others down through history, one man with a single torch could realistically destroy an entire settlement, camp or village in moments. Once the panicked denizens rushed out, seeking safety, weapon fire would cut them down, or else brave cavalrymen would ride in and slice them to pieces, taking, it should be noted, scalps often as trophies, emulating the practice of some of the more warlike tribes.

Sadly, but a single example of such a massacre, but so rooted in not even misunderstanding, but a sense of entitlement, arrogance and pure good-old-fashioned violence in response to a reasonable request was the account below that I feel it incumbent upon me to relate it. To place it in context, it came as the result of a horse-race was disputed by the Navajo tribe, who believed - and it seems correctly - that they were cheated. Approaching the fort to air their grievances, one man was shot and then all hell broke loose. The below report is by Captain Nicholas Hodt of the US Army.

"The Navahos, squaws, and children ran in all directions and were shot and bayoneted. I succeeded in forming about twenty men .... I then marched out to the east side of the post; there I saw a soldier murdering two little children and a woman. I hallooed immediately to the soldier to stop. He looked up, but did not obey my order. I ran up as quick as I could, but could not get there soon enough to prevent him from killing the two innocent children and wounding severely the squaw. I ordered his belts to be taken off and taken prisoner to the post .... Meanwhile the colonel had given orders to the officer of the day to have the artillery [mountain howitzers] brought out to open upon the Indians. The sergeant in charge of the mountain howitzers pretended not to understand the order given, for he considered it as an unlawful order; but being cursed by the officer of the day, and threatened, he had to execute the order or else get himself in trouble. The Indians scattered all over the valley below the post, attacked the post herd, wounded the Mexican herder, but did not succeed in getting any stock; also attacked the expressman some ten miles from the post, took his horse and mail-bag and wounded him in the arm. After the massacre there were no more Indians to be seen about the post with the exception of a few squaws, favorites of the officers. The commanding officer endeavored to make peace again with the Navahos by sending some of the favorite squaws to talk with the chiefs; but the only satisfaction the squaws received was a good flogging."

Now consider that the above massacre - you can't really call it anything else - was sparked by one of the men asking for reparations, for justice, not to be cheated, and when the gate of the fort was rudely slammed in his face, trying to force entry. He was immediately shot. I mean, it's somewhat overkill, isn't it? And then it led to a total slaughter as what I suppose cops today in America might call an "unlawful gathering" were treated with the full, terrible and repressive hand of the law of the West, American law, white law. I suppose that could as easily have been a bunch of black people today.

Of course, there are worse, some famous, some not, many hushed up, excused and in some cases even gloried in, but the one above does serve to show just how little the white soldiers and their commanding officers thought of these people who mistakenly believed they were dealing with friends, kindred spirits, reasonable men. While in my History of America journal I can and do go on at length about the various tribes, their customs, deeds, achievements, daily lives, this is all before we white men set foot on the continent, and since then, the story of the American Indian, or the Native American, whichever you prefer, has been slowly and then with increasing speed charging down a hill like a stampede of wild buffalo, heading for extinction. In a very real way, the appearance of the white man in America can be likened to the unwelcome intrusion of Satan into the Garden of Eden. Of course, Indians would not make that comparison as they're not Christian, which just shows how most allegories don't hold up very well to close examination. But it's certainly true to say that the second half of the nineteenth century sounded the death knell of the freedom of the Red Man, the end of his ownership or guardianship of the plains, the severe dwindling of the buffalo and the first chapter of his own personal version of Paradise Lost.

While there are huge names in Native American lore, giants who stand like titans astride the history of the West, so compelling and memorable that they cannot be stricken from the record or buried with the dead, men who fought against the might of the white man's army - and in some cases, at least temporarily, won - these people will be dealt with where they deserve to be, in the annals of those who contributed to the history of the West. They can't be relegated to a section on Indians, these names that call to us down through almost two hundred years and remind us of our sins. Red Cloud. Tecumseh. Crazy Horse. Geronimo. And of course, Sitting Bull. These men's resistance to the white ethnic cleansing ring loudly through the lore of the West, and should make us shrink from their courage and their determination to preserve their people, even if this proved to be a hopeless task.

No. Here, in this section, I want to look at some of the lesser-known names, those who have been forgotten by or erased from history. The ones who stood up and said no, the ones who gave their lives to save their fellows and their families, the ones who refused to move off their land, granted to them by their gods and the spirits of their ancestors. There are many, many stories of heroism and bravery, rugged determination and stubborn resistance buried in the bones of the mountains and the soil of the earth, drowned in the rivers and looking down from the hot skies, and while we can't bring them back, they should not be allowed to be forgotten.

[Trollheart]

Part I: Spirits in the Material World: Ghostdancing on the Precipice of History

"If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indians."
--WAMDITANKA (Big EAGLE) of the SANTEE SIOUX

Little Crow* (Ta-oya-te-duta)

A chief of the Mdewkantons, a branch of the Santee Sioux, itself part of the great Sioux Nation from which Indian legends like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse would emerge, Little Crow was not a happy man. He it was who had signed two treaties on behalf of his people, giving away almost ninety percent of their land along the Minnesota River in return for which his people continued to be cheated by the white man, refusing to pay up. The Mdewkantons had been reduced to basically living on a sort of almost welfare set up by the white agency traders who now all but controlled the land. These men stiffed them on every count, and made them feel interlopers in their own country. Big Eagle* once noted "Many of the whites always seemed to say by their manner when they saw an Indian, 'I am better than you,'" and it was indeed typical of the way white men (and possibly, probably in fact, women) looked down on the Indians as beneath them.

In fairness to this proud warrior chief, he had done everything asked - or demanded - of him by the white man. He had dressed as they deemed fit, converted to Christianity and become an Episcopalian, built a house and begun to farm, but still it wasn't enough. Still the Great Father (President Buchanan) continued to trick and cheat him and treat him as if he were a small child. The Civil War was taking a huge toll on America, and when Little Crow and his people went to collect their annuities at the Upper Agency on Yellow Medicine River they were told their payment had not yet arrived, and possibly might not, as the coffers of Congress were somewhat bare from having had to fight the war. Little Crow asked the trader chief, agent Thomas Galbraith why they could not have some of the provisions already in the warehouse? Their money was due; could he not supply them on credit? In response Galbraith had soldiers guard the warehouses.

Incensed, and starving, Little Crow sent his own men, outnumbering the whites five to one, to take what they needed, and Galbraith, at the insistence of and persuasion by the captain, who did not want a bloodbath on his hands over some flour, to which the Indians were in any case entitled, refused to fire upon them. Little Crow persisted though until Galbraith promised to also supply the chief's people at Lower Agency, further down the river, where his own camp was. Whether in retaliation for being, as he saw it, humiliated while the Indians emptied his warehouse and made a mockery of his efforts to protect the merchandise, the agent kept Little Crow waiting for days, and when it became clear he had no intention of supplying the Mdewkantons, Little Crow issued this warning: "We have waited a long time. The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry they help themselves."

Showing complete contempt for the hungry Indians, the traders were immovable and one of them even went so far as to suggest they could eat grass, or their own shit. Not surprisingly, this ended the council and Little Crow departed in anger. Revenge for this grave and callous insult would soon be visited upon this man, when later he would lie dead on the ground with his own mouth stuffed with grass. I suppose he was lucky that was all it would be stuffed with! Even so, Little Crow knew he was bound by the treaties he had signed not to make war upon the white man, and while that white man seemed to care about as much for the truth as the eagle cared about the rabbit, Native Americans had their honour, and their word was their bond. He found events moving faster than he had anticipated though, and carrying him along on a wave of resentment and hostility as he learned that some of his men had killed white men and women in a futile game of who's-the-bravest, and his council advised him that it would be best to strike first, as history showed that when one of his number was killed by an Indian, the white man did not make any distinctions between Indians, and all were seen as guilty. To make things worse, women were among the casualties, and this would only inflame the white men more.

Still Little Crow pushed for calm, and peace, even though he knew his men were right: the white man would exact a terrible toll for this day's work, and he would spare nobody. But when the hated word "coward" was shouted out, Little Crow faced his people sternly: "Ta-oya-te-duta is not a coward, and he is not a fool! When did he run away from his enemies? When did he leave his braves behind him on the warpath and turn back to his tepee? When he ran away from your enemies, he walked behind on your trail with his face to the Ojibways and covered your backs as a she-bear covers her cubs! Is Ta-oya-te-duta without scalps? Look at his war feathers! Behold the scalp locks of your enemies hanging there on his lodgepoles! Do you call him a coward? Ta--oya-te-duta is not a coward, and he is not a fool. Braves, you are like little children; you know not what you are doing.

"You are full of the white man's devil water. You are like dogs in the Hot Moon when they run mad and snap at their own shadows. We are only little herds of buffalo left scattered; the great herds that once covered the prairies are no more. See!--the white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one--two--ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one--two--ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.

"Yes; they fight among themselves--away off. Do you hear the thunder of their big guns? No; it would take you two moons to run down to where they are fighting, and all the way your path would be among white soldiers as thick as tamaracks in the swamps of the Ojibways. Yes; they fight among themselves, but if you strike at them they will all turn on you and devour you and your women and little children just as the locusts in their time fall on the trees and devour all the leaves in one day.

"You are fools. You cannot see the face of your chief; your eyes are full of smoke. You cannot hear his voice; your ears are full of roaring waters. Braves, you are little children--you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon of January.

"Ta-oya-te-duta is not a coward; he will die with you."

And so Little Crow was committed. He had already lost face in the eyes of his people by signing the treaties and giving away the land of the Mdewkantons, and had elected another to speak for them in his place. If he did not fight, despite his reservations (sorry) he would bear up the charge of being a coward, and perhaps a traitor too. Yet he foresaw dark times for his people if they did attack. There was however no choice at this point, and so, while some of the Mdewkantons went to the trading post in the morning to warn those they had come to regard as friends, and save their lives, most were slaughtered and so began a war between Little Crow's people and the oppressors who had tricked them out of their land. As the survivors fled back to the fort they met a company of soldiers who ignored the warnings of the priest, Reverend Hinman, who advised them to turn back, and they were ambushed and half their number killed.

Flushed with their success, Little Crow's people marched on Fort Ridgeley itself, their numbers swelling as other chiefs, tired of their mistreatment and of watching their people starve, joined the attack. Discipline, however, proved a problem, as most of the warriors just went where they liked and did what they wanted, some heading off to a nearby village, and the proper assault on the fort was delayed to the next day. It was quite quickly seen that taking a US Army fort was next to impossible: the Indians' favourite tactic of shooting fire-arrows into the building in order to burn it down would not work, as the fort was constructed of stone, and though they shot at and through the windows, there was no real way to know if their shots hit the targets, while the men in the fort could see the attackers clearly, and were of course better armed.

With reinforcements, a second attack the next morning was more successful, as the warriors used camouflage to creep close enough to the fort to set the thatched roofs of the stables on fire, causing great confusion. But again they were driven back, and with such losses that Little Crow worried they would not be able to mount a third assault. In addition to this, word had come of over 1,400 reinforcements on the way from St. Paul, fresh fighting men who would bolster the defence of the garrison and vastly outnumber the decimated Santee. Wounded, Little Crow lay in his tent while Manako, another war chief, led an attack against the village which the warriors had tried to take the previous day. Again they were repulsed, though they did kill over a hundred men and retired with twice as many prisoners in women and children. By now the US reinforcements had arrived, and the Santees found it expedient to withdraw to the mountains, where Little Crow, recovered from his wounds, tried to enlist other war chiefs to his cause.

But due to the lack of discipline exercised by his men in the indiscriminate slaying of not only soldiers and traders but blameless civilian settlers, and more to the point, his failure to take the fort, he had few takers. Nobody wanted to join the losing side. Nevertheless, what had been put in motion could not now be stopped, and Little Crow knew he had two choices: hide and wait for the Army to find and kill him and his people, or go out fighting and taking as many of them with them as they could. He decided to go on the offensive, and take on the army led by Colonel Henry Hasting Sibley, an ex-trader who was now a cavalry officer. Indiscipline again reared its ugly head though, as many of his warriors, particularly those who had seen how difficult trying to take Fort Ridgeley had been, wanted to go for softer targets, attacking the villages and settlements where there were few if any soldiers. Little Crow, believing the Santees' beef was only with the army, refused to allow this and his force split into two along the lines of those who remained with him to attack the soldiers (the lesser of the two) and those who decided to go their own way and take down the civilians. From that point, the Santees' attempts were doomed to failure.

Big Eagle had more success, and killed many soldiers, but it was all mostly as a rearguard action and the Santee disappeared into the forests, unable to make any real gains. Sibley tried to force Little Crow into a parley, demanding he return the prisoners he had taken, but the Santee were worried about the edict of extermination that had gone out from Governor Ramsey, and though Little Crow left a note to explain why the Santees had made war on Sibley's men, he refused to bring back the prisoners, distrustful of the man. Many of his contemporaries were for suing for peace though, believing the return of the prisoners would be the end of it. Another Indian, who held the same views as Little Crow, voiced his opinion thusly:

"I am for continuing the war, and am opposed to the delivery of the prisoners. I have no confidence that the whites will stand by any agreement they make if we give them up. Ever since we treated with them, their agents and traders have robbed and cheated us. Some of our people have been shot, some hung; others placed upon floating ice and drowned; and many have been starved in their prisons. It was not the intention of the nation to kill any of the whites until after the four men returned from Acton and told what they had done. When they did this, all the young men became excited, and commenced the massacre. The older ones would have prevented it if they could, but since the treaties they have lost all their influence. We may regret what has happened, but the matter has gone too far to be remedied. We have got to die. Let us, then, kill as many of the whites as possible, and let the prisoners die with us."

And every word he said was true. But as ever down through history, such matters are often settled by treachery, and so this one too. Washaba, one of the other chiefs, sent a secret message to Sibley, anxious to end the war and obtain forgiveness for his people. He arranged to meet the colonel and hand over the prisoners. After a final assault had again failed, Little Crow withdrew and Sibley marched into the Santees camp, aided by Wabasha and took back the prisoners. He then made every remaining Santee his prisoner, and began a kangaroo court which ended in death sentences for many, though these were held off while President Lincoln was requested to ratify and authorise the sentences, which he refused to do. Ramsey and General Pope, Sibley's immediate superior, to whom he had passed the responsibility of pronouncing deaths on what was said to be over three hundred Indians, were angered by the President's delay, and swore to take revenge themselves with or without his permission. Lynch mobs also attacked the prisoners as they were marched to a new prison camp.

In the end, Lincoln's explicit orders saved the lives of most of the Santees, as he declared that only thirty-odd of the warriors should be executed, those who could be proven to have been guilty of murder. The rest were to be imprisoned. Among them was Big Eagle, and the son-in-law of Wabasha, who had betrayed the tribe, was hanged, though he had not taken part in any violence, and had tried to stop the war. Little Crow tried to rally reinforcements from the other tribes, showing them what the white men had done, but they were not interested, believing their best option was to move out of the way. Little Crow crossed over the border into Canada, to seek the help of the British there, but had no luck, and when he decided to go back to Minnesota and take horses from the white men in recompense for the land he had signed away, and never been paid for, he was shot and killed by bounty hunters.

*  Little Crow, Big Eagle: you have to wonder if there was a Medium Raven or an Enormous Buzzard knocking around in that tribe, don't you?