Chapter III: The Cheyennes (2)

Thirty lodges of the Northern Cheyennes returned this year and joined their tribe, but many of them were still roaming among the Northern Sioux. In 1874 there were said to be over three thousand of these Northern Cheyennes and Arapahoes at the Red Cloud Agency. The Government refused any longer to permit them to stay there; and, after repeated protests, and expressions of unwillingness to move, they at last consented to go to the Indian Territory. But their removal was deferred, on account of the unsettled state of the Southern Cheyennes. Early in the spring troubles had broken out among them, in consequence of a raid of horse-thieves on their reservation. The chief, Little Robe, lost forty-three head of valuable ponies. These ponies were offered for sale in Dodge City, Kansas, where Little Robe's son, with a small band of young men, made an unsuccessful effort to reclaim them. Failing in this, the band, on their way back, stole the first stock they came to; were pursued by the Kansas farmers, the stock recaptured, and Little Robe's son badly wounded. This was sufficient to bring on a general war against white men in the whole region; and the history of the next few months was a history of murders and outrages by Cheyennes, Kiowas, Osages, and Comanches. Sixty lodges of the Cheyennes took refuge under the protection of the United States troops at the agency, and the old problem returned again, how to punish the guilty without harming the innocent. A vigorous military campaign was carried on under General Miles against the hostiles until, in the spring of 1875, the main body surrendered. Wretched, half starved, more than half naked, without lodges, ponies—a more pitiable sight was never seen than this band of Indians. It was inconceivable how they had so long held out; nothing but a well-nigh indomitable pride and inextinguishable hatred of the whites and sense of wrongs could have supported them. It was decided that thirty-three of the most desperate ones should be sent as prisoners to St. Augustine, Florida; but before the selection was completed a general stampede among the surrendered braves took place, resulting in the final escape of some four hundred. They held their ground from two P.M. until dark against three companies of cavalry and two Gatling guns, and, "under cover of an extremely dark and stormy night, escaped, leaving only three dead on the field." It is impossible not to admire such bravery as this. The Report of the Indian Bureau for 1875 says of the condition of affairs at this agency at this time: "The friendly Cheyennes have had their loyalty put to the severest test by comparing their own condition with that of the full-fed and warmly-housed captives of the War Department. Notwithstanding all privations, they have been unswerving in their friendship, and ever ready to assist the agent in maintaining order, and compelling the Northern Cheyennes who have visited the agency to submit to a count." In consequence of the hostilities, they were obliged to remain close to the agency in camp—a hardship that could hardly be endured, and resulted in serious suffering. Their rations were not enough to subsist them, and yet, being cut off from hunting, they were entirely dependent on them. And even these inadequate rations did not arrive when they were due. Their agent writes, in 1875: "On last year's flour contract not a single pound was received until the fourteenth day of First Month, 1875, when six months of cold weather and many privations had passed, notwithstanding the many protestations and urgent appeals from the agent."

The now thoroughly subjugated Cheyennes went to work with a will. In one short year they are reported as so anxious to cultivate the ground that, when they could not secure the use of a plough or hoe, they used "axes, sticks of wood, and their hands, in preparing the ground, planting and cultivating their garden spots."

The Northern Cheyennes are still on the Red Cloud Agency, and are reported as restless and troublesome.

In 1877 they were all removed to the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Agency, in Indian Territory. The Reports of the Department say that they asked to be taken there. The winter of 1866 and the summer of 1867 were seasons of great activity and interest at this agency. In the autumn they went off on a grand buffalo hunt, accompanied by a small detail of troops from Fort Reno. Early in the winter white horse-thieves began to make raids on their ponies, and stole so many that many of the Indians were obliged to depend on their friends' ponies to help them return home. Two hundred and sixty in all were stolen—carried, as usual, to Dodge City and sold. A few were recovered; but the loss to the Indians was estimated at two thousand nine hundred dollars. "Such losses are very discouraging to the Indians," writes their agent, and are "but a repetition of the old story that brought on the war of 1874."

In midsummer of this year the "Cheyenne and Arapahoe Transportation Company" was formed: forty wagons were sent out, with harness, by the Government; the Indians furnished the horses; and on the 19th of July the Indians set out in their new _rôle_ of "freighters" of their own supplies. They went to Wichita, Kansas—one hundred and sixty-five miles—in six days, with their ponies; loaded sixty-five thousand pounds of supplies into the wagons, and made the return trip in two weeks, all things being delivered in good condition.

This experiment was thoroughly tested; and its results are notable among the many unheeded refutations of the constantly repeated assertion that Indians will not work. The agent of the Cheyennes and the Arapahoes, testifying before a Senate Committee in 1879, says: "We have run a wagon train, driven by Indians, to Wichita, for three years and over, and have never had a drunken Indian yet."

"Do they waste their money, or bring it home?"

"They almost invariably spend it for saddles or clothing, or something of use to them that is not furnished by the Government. *** They have never stolen an ounce of sugar, coffee, or anything else: they have been careful not to injure or waste anything, and have delivered everything in good faith."

The agent reports not a single case of drunkenness during the year. The manual labor and boarding-school has one hundred and thirteen scholars in it, "all it can accommodate." The children earned four hundred dollars in the year by work of one sort and another, and have "expended the money as judiciously as would white children of their ages." They bought calico, cotton cloth, shoes, hats, several head of cattle, and one horse. They also "bought many delicacies for their friends in camp who were sick and in need."

"One Cheyenne woman tanned robes, traded them for twenty-five two-year-old heifers, and gave them to her daughter in the school. *** The boys have one hundred and twenty acres of corn under cultivation, ten acres of potatoes, broom-corn, sugar-cane, peanuts, melons, and a good variety of vegetables. They are entitled to one-half the crop for cultivating it."

This is a marvellous report of the change wrought in a people in only two years' time. It proves that the misdemeanors, the hostilities of 1874 and 1875, had been largely forced on them by circumstances.

The winter of 1877 and summer of 1878 were terrible seasons for the Cheyennes. Their fall hunt had proved unsuccessful. Indians from other reservations had hunted the ground over before them, and driven the buffalo off; and the Cheyennes made their way home again in straggling parties, destitute and hungry. Their agent reports that the result of this hunt has clearly proved that "in the future the Indian must rely on tilling the ground as the principal means of support; and if this conviction can be firmly established, the greatest obstacle to advancement in agriculture will be overcome. With the buffalo gone, and their pony herds being constantly decimated by the inroads of horse-thieves, they must soon adopt, in all its varieties, the way of the white man. *** The usual amount of horse-stealing has prevailed, and the few cases of successful pursuit have only increased the boldness of the thieves and the number of the thefts. Until some other system of law is introduced we cannot hope for a cessation of this grievance."

The ration allowed to these Indians is reported as being "reduced and insufficient," and the small sums they have been able to earn by selling buffalo-hides are said to have been "of material assistance" to them in "supplementing" this ration. But in this year there have been sold only $657 worth of skins by the Cheyennes and Arapahoes together. In 1876 they sold $17,600 worth. Here is a falling off enough to cause very great suffering in a little community of five thousand people. But this was only the beginning of their troubles. The summer proved one of unusual heat. Extreme heat, chills and fever, and "a reduced and insufficient ration," all combined, resulted in an amount of sickness heart-rending to read of. "It is no exaggerated estimate," says the agent, "to place the number of sick people on the reservation at two thousand. Many deaths occurred which might have been obviated had there been a proper supply of anti-malarial remedies at hand. *** Hundreds applying for treatment have been refused medicine."

The Northern Cheyennes grew more and more restless and unhappy. "In council and elsewhere they profess an intense desire to be sent North, where they say they will settle down as the others have done," says the report; adding, with an obtuseness which is inexplicable, that "no difference has been made in the treatment of the Indians," but that the "compliance" of these Northern Cheyennes has been "of an entirely different nature from that of the other Indians," and that it may be "necessary in the future to compel what so far we have been unable to effect by kindness and appeal to their better natures."

If it is "an appeal to men's better natures" to remove them by force from a healthful Northern climate, which they love and thrive in, to a malarial Southern one, where they are struck down by chills and fever—refuse them medicine which can combat chills and fever, and finally starve them—then, indeed, might be said to have been most forcible appeals made to the "better natures" of these Northern Cheyennes. What might have been predicted followed.

Early in the autumn, after this terrible summer, a band of some three hundred of these Northern Cheyennes took the desperate step of running off and attempting to make their way back to Dakota. They were pursued, fought desperately, but were finally overpowered, and surrendered. They surrendered, however, only on the condition that they should be taken to Dakota. They were unanimous in declaring that they would rather die than go back to the Indian Territory. This was nothing more, in fact, than saying that they would rather die by bullets than of chills and fever and starvation.

These Indians were taken to Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Here they were confined as prisoners of war, and held subject to the orders of the Department of the Interior. The department was informed of the Indians' determination never to be taken back alive to Indian Territory. The army officers in charge reiterated these statements, and implored the department to permit them to remain at the North; but it was of no avail. Orders came—explicit, repeated, finally stern—insisting on the return of these Indians to their agency. The commanding officer at Fort Robinson has been censured severely for the course he pursued in his effort to carry out those orders. It is difficult to see what else he could have done, except to have resigned his post. He could not take three hundred Indians by sheer brute force and carry them hundreds of miles, especially when they were so desperate that they had broken up the iron stoves in their quarters, and wrought and twisted them into weapons with which to resist. He thought perhaps he could starve them into submission. He stopped the issue of food; he also stopped the issue of fuel to them. It was midwinter; the mercury froze in that month at Fort Robinson. At the end of two days he asked the Indians to let their women and children come out that he might feed them. Not a woman would come out. On the night of the fourth day—or, according to some accounts, the sixth—these starving, freezing Indians broke prison, overpowered the guards, and fled, carrying their women and children with them. They held the pursuing troops at bay for several days; finally made a last stand in a deep ravine, and were shot down—men, women, and children together. Out of the whole band there were left alive some fifty women and children and seven men, who, having been confined in another part of the fort, had not had the good fortune to share in this outbreak and meet their death in the ravine. These, with their wives and children, were sent to Fort Leavenworth, to be put in prison; the men to be tried for murders committed in their skirmishes in Kansas on their way to the north. Red Cloud, a Sioux chief, came to Fort Robinson immediately after this massacre, and entreated to be allowed to take the Cheyenne widows and orphans into his tribe to be cared for. The Government, therefore, kindly permitted twenty-two Cheyenne widows and thirty-two Cheyenne children—many of them orphans—to be received into the band of the Ogallalla Sioux.

An attempt was made by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in his Report for 1879, to show by tables and figures that these Indians were not starving at the time of their flight from Indian Territory. The attempt only redounded to his own disgrace; it being proved, by the testimony given by a former clerk of the Indian Bureau before the Senate committee appointed to investigate the case of the Northern Cheyennes, that the commissioner had been guilty of absolute dishonesty in his estimates, and that the quantity of beef actually issued to the Cheyenne Agency was hundreds of pounds less than he had reported it, and that the Indians were actually, as they had claimed, "starving."

The testimony given before this committee by some of the Cheyenne prisoners themselves is heart-rending. One must have a callous heart who can read it unmoved.

When asked by Senator Morgan, "Did you ever really suffer from hunger?" one of the chiefs replied, "We were _always_ hungry; we _never_ had enough. When they that were sick once in awhile felt as though they could eat something, we had nothing to give them."

"Did you not go out on the plains sometimes and hunt buffalo, with the consent of the agent?"

"We went out on a buffalo-hunt, and nearly starved while out; we could not find any buffalo hardly; we could hardly get back with our ponies; we had to kill a good many of our ponies to eat, to save ourselves from starving."

"How many children got sick and died?"

"Between the fall of 1877 and 1878 we lost fifty children. A great many of our finest young men died, as well as many women."

"Old Crow," a chief who served faithfully as Indian scout and ally under General Crook for years, said: "I did not feel like doing anything for awhile, because I had no heart. I did not want to be in this country. I was all the time wanting to get back to the better country where I was born, and where my children are buried, and where my mother and sister yet live. So I have laid in my lodge most of the time with nothing to think about but that, and the affair up north at Fort Robinson, and my relatives and friends who were killed there. But now I feel as though, if I had a wagon and a horse or two, and some land, I would try to work. If I had something, so that I could do something, I might not think so much about these other things. As it is now, I feel as though I would just as soon be asleep with the rest."

The wife of one of the chiefs confined at Fort Leavenworth testified before the committee as follows: "The main thing I complained of was that we didn't get enough to eat; my children nearly starved to death; then sickness came, and there was nothing good for them to eat; for a long time the most they had to eat was corn-meal and salt. Three or four children died every day for awhile, and that frightened us."

(This testimony was taken at Fort Reno, in Indian Territory.)

When asked if there were anything she would like to say to the committee, the poor woman replied: "I wish you would do what you can to get my husband released. I am very poor here, and do not know what is to become of me. If he were released he would come down here, and we would live together quietly, and do no harm to anybody, and make no trouble. But I should never get over my desire to get back north; I should always want to get back where my children were born, and died, and were buried. That country is better than this in every respect. *** There is plenty of good, cool water there—pure water—while here the water is not good. It is not hot there, nor so sickly. Are you going where my husband is? Can you tell when he is likely to be released?"

The Senators were obliged to reply to her that they were not going where her husband was, and they could not tell when he would be released.

In view of the accounts of the sickness and suffering of these Indians in 1877 and 1878, the reports made in 1879 of the industry and progress at the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Agency are almost incredible. The school children have, by their earnings, bought one hundred head of cattle; 451,000 pounds of freight have been transported by the Indians during the year; they have also worked at making brick, chopping wood, making hay, hauling wood, and splitting and hauling rails; and have earned thereby $7,121.25. Two of the girls of the school have been promoted to the position of assistant teachers; and the United States mail contractor between this agency and Fort Elliott, in Texas—a distance of one hundred and sixty-five miles—has operated almost exclusively with full-blooded Indians: "there has been no report of breach of trust on the part of any Indians connected with this trust, and the contractor expresses his entire approval of their conduct."

It is stated also that there was not sufficient clothing to furnish each Indian with a warm suit of clothing, "as promised by the treaty," and that, "by reference to official correspondence, the fact is established that the Cheyennes and Arapahoes are judged as having no legal rights to any lands, having forfeited their treaty reservation by a failure to settle thereon," and their "present reservation not having been, as yet, confirmed by Congress. Inasmuch as the Indians fully understood, and were assured that this reservation was given to them in lieu of their treaty reservation, and have commenced farming in the belief that there was no uncertainty about the matter, it is but common justice that definite action be had at an early day, securing to them what is their right."

It would seem that there could be found nowhere in the melancholy record of the experiences of our Indians a more glaring instance of confused multiplication of injustices than this. The Cheyennes were pursued and slain for venturing to leave this very reservation, which, it appears, is not their reservation at all, and they have no legal right to it. Are there any words to fitly characterize such treatment as this from a great, powerful, rich nation, to a handful of helpless people?