The Indians were forced to move south of the mines, but they stayed in the foothills. A traveler on the Santa FeBent's Fort trail observed, "The Arkansas from Bent's Fort up to the mountains is one vast Indian campthe Comanches, Kioways, and Arapahoes are all banded together and unless the government does something to protect the emigrants, many will never reach this place."
That same winter another miner wrote home, "The Indians have sent us word that we must leave the country." Two months later a warrior band told some miners that they would need all their logs for forts in the spring to protect themselves from Indian attacks. They identified the hostiles as Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes.
In spite of this continued unrest among the tribes, there was no serious trouble for a time. Along the trail some of the Indians did stop wagon trains to beg from the drivers or to levy a toll on a train wanting to cross Indian lands.
Near Council Grove a typical sight was reported: "Near us a band of about 400 Kaw [Kansas] Indians… they are a miserable, lowlived set who live by thieving."
Horace Greeley, near the head of the Republican River, encountered a large band of Indians who stopped the train and demanded a toll. "Arapahoes… not hostile to us but intent on begging or stealing, and stopping the wagons peremptorily until their demands are complied with." Greeley, like other whites, would not admit that the Indians had any right to collect tolls from intruders on their lands.
The friction between the trains and the tribes increased year by year as the Colorado mining camps continued to grow and regular express runs, stage coach lines, and freight trains joined in the traffic. Here was a potential trouble spot with a short fuse, needing very little to produce an outbreak.
Buffalo cows graze with their calves. Although buffalo grow for six or seven years, they are considered adults in their fourth. (U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries & Wildlife, photo by E. P. Haddon)
An average adult bull weighs sixteen hundred pounds and stands six feet tall. Buffalo grow dark brown, almost black, hair on the foreparts; the shorter hair on the hindquarters changes color with the seasons. (U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries & Wildlife, photo by Wesley D. Parker)
19. Buffalo Country Troubles, 1860-65
In 1860 the national government was so involved in the slavery question and the presidential election that it could pay little heed to the trouble spots developing along the fringes of the buffalo country, where delays in negotiating and ratifying treaties and irregularities in treaty payments caused much unrest among the tribes. The problems were greatly aggravated by the arrogance of the settlers who invaded the Indian reservations, ignoring or deliberately defying specific treaty provisions.
The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 drained the western military posts of the better officers and troop units. They were replaced by less able officers commanding poorly trained and equipped men. These officers often were from the east or midwest and knew very little about dealing with Indians.
Many of the men in the new boom towns and mining camps were another source of trouble. They were out west to avoid war service, or they had left the east one jump ahead of the sheriff. Local volunteer units were composed largely of these two classes, who sometimes deliberately tried to stir up Indian troubles to justify their continued presence on the frontier.
When a number of these causes were at work in one locality, serious trouble soon developed, and in some instances broke out into open conflict between red men and white. The first of these was the Sioux War.
The Minnesota border had a difficult Indian problem as the result of the rapid settlement following establishment of the Minnesota Territory in 1849. At that time more than 90 percent of the territory was held by various tribes of IndiansSioux, Winnebago, Fox, Sauk, Menominee. All the white settlers were concentrated around Fort Snelling at St. Anthony's Falls, which marked the head of steamboat navigation on the Mississippi. Settlers moved in rapidly to occupy the new territory. The Indian commissioner sought new land for them by securing a new treaty, which would permit him to move the Indians out of the lower Minnesota Valley and the lands just to the west.
Once the Sioux had signed the treaty, they were defrauded of their treaty payments by the officials, who paid the money, not to the individual Indians, but to any traders who claimed the Indians owed them for goods bought on credit. The resulting scandals and investigations so delayed further payments that white settlers occupied much of the land before the payments for it were made. The Sioux finally broke loose with a large war party and in August 1862 wiped out 700 whites whom the Sioux sincerely believed were stealing Indian lands.
Troops marched out at once against the warriors. After two months of bloody fighting, the Indians were subdued and the army had 1,500 Sioux prisoners, mostly women and children. General John Pope, commander of the forces in Minnesota, backed by the local population, wanted to execute at least 100 of the captive men, but in the end had to be satisfied with hanging only thirty-four of them before President Lincoln intervened.
The next spring, 1863, General Henry Hastings Sibley marched out with 3,000 men to clear all the Sioux out of their homes, where they had lived for more than 200 years. This was accomplished in two months after two large battles and several small fights. The Sioux leader, Little Chief, was killed and cut up for souvenirs by the soldiers. They took his scalp, skull, and wrist bones.
Several thousand seminomadic Sioux were affected in this mass expulsion. They were driven from their wild-rice swamps and fishing lakes, and were forced to turn more to buffalo hunting to supplement the crops they began to grow along the Missouri. This sudden large increase in hunters in the Sioux buffalo country forced the tribe to expand westward, at the expense of the Crows. The Powder River Basin, which included most of the land between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains, became the Sioux's prized hunting ground. When the whites tried to put a road through and protect it with military posts, the Sioux responded with a full-scale war.
On the central plains the southern Cheyennes and the southern Arapahoes also came under heavy pressure from white intruders on their lands in the 1850's. The treaty they had signed at Fort Laramie defined the boundaries of their land and promised them large annual payments from the government, but the Senate never bothered to ratify the treaty. The tribes could not understand the Indian Bureau's failure to keep the promises made in writing at Fort Laramie.
The massive stampede to the Colorado mines in 1858 and 1859 pushed the tribes toward open resistance. Their plight was described in the Indian agent's report for 1859:
I estimate the number of whites traversing the plains across the central belt to have exceeded sixty thousand during the present season. The trains of vehicles and cattle are frequent and valuable in proportion. Post lines and private expresses are in constant motion. The explorations of this season have established the existence of precious metals in absolutely infinite abundance and convenience of position. A concourse of whites is, therefore, constantly swelling an incapability of control or restraint by the government.