The lack of government control in the mining camps and the reckless breed of men there were felt at once by the Indians. No effort was made to keep the whites from further encroachment on Indian lands, or to punish the men who shot an occasional Indian, but before the breaking point was reached, the Indian Bureau held a meeting with the tribes at Bent's Fort in 1861 and induced the southern Cheyennes and the southern Arapahoes to give up claim to most of their hunting grounds in Colorado and western Kansas. They accepted a small reservation in the southeastern Colorado sand hills.
After three years of comparative quiet, the border was stirred up by a rather small complaint that through bungling became a serious incident. A settler reported to the officer at Camp Sanborn that some Indians had stolen cattle from him and his neighbor. As he guided a lieutenant and forty men toward the spot, they met about seventy Indians traveling with a small herd of horses, but no cattle. The settler then asked the officer to take some of the horses, which the settler claimed belonged to him, although he had not reported any stolen. The Indians would not submit to the settler's demands and beat off the troops, with small losses on each side.
In retaliation for this Indian resistance, troops attacked a Cheyenne village 135 miles to the north, and not implicated in the trouble. The peaceful village was caught by surprise and lost sixty, mostly women and children, in the attack. The troops then destroyed the tipis. This incident angered the Indians over a wide area. The Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, and Comanches put on their war paint and made the western plains a dangerous place for whites. They ran off stock, wiped out stage stations, and for a time cut off Colorado from the east. The troops were helpless against the raiders, being unable either to prevent or avenge attack. One frontier officer stated the problem:
It is conceived that scattered bands of mounted hunters, with the speed of a horse and the watchfulness of a wolf or an antelope, whose faculties are sharpened by their necessities; who, when they get short of provisions, separate and look for something to eat, and find it in the water, in the ground, or on the surface; whose bill of fare ranges from grass-seed, nuts, roots, grasshoppers, lizards, and rattlesnakes, up to deer, antelope, elk, bear, and buffalo, and who have a continent to roam over, will be neither surprised, caught, conquered, over-awed, or reduced to famine by a rumbling, bugle-blowing, drum-beating town passing through their country on wheels at the speed of a loaded wagon.
If the Indians are in the path and do not wish to be seen, they cross a ridge, and the town moves on, ignorant of whether there are fifty Indians within a mile or no Indians within fifty miles. If the Indians wish to see, they return to the crest of the ridge, crawl up to the edge, pull up a bunch of grass by the roots, and look through or under it at the procession.
This fruitless chasing of the Indian raiders inspired Governor John Evans of Colorado Territory to send word to all the Indians that they had to come in and settle at Fort Lyons or their families would be exterminated. Several important Cheyenne chiefs went to Denver to talk with the governor, but he would not make peace with them. General S. R. Curtis, in command of the Department of Kansas, had sent out word: "I want no peace until the Indians suffer more…. It is better to chastise before giving anything but a little tobacco to talk over. No peace must be made without my directions."
This harsh attitude on the part of the general and the governor encouraged Colonel John Chivington of the Colorado volunteers to march out with 1,100 men and make a surprise attack on the peaceful Cheyenne village of Chief Black Kettle, who had set up camp for his people at Sand Creek, near Fort Lyons, as he had been ordered to do. Chivington attacked the unsuspecting village at dawn on a snowy winter morning.
Later a government commission, in the report of its official investigation, included this commentary: "Fleeing women holding up their hands and praying for mercy were brutally shot down; infants were killed and scalped in derision; men were tortured and mutilated in a manner that would put to shame the savage ingenuity of interior Africa." From a village of 700, over 500 were massacred and the camp was destroyed.
This senseless slaughter of the peaceful Cheyennes proved costly to the people of Colorado and to the whole border. An experienced army officer remarked later, "But for that horrible butchery it is a fair presumption that all the subsequent wars with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes and their kindred might possibly have been averted."
Instead, the Plains Indians from the Canadian border to the Red River went out on a war of revenge that 8,000 troops could not quell, and took the lives of several hundred whites, mostly in small groups at widely spaced spots over the region.
Public indignation over the Sand Creek massacre forced the army to end the war with a treaty. Although the southern Cheyennes escaped further attacks by the troops for a time, they had to give up all their lands north of the Arkansas and move south. This left the heart of the buffalo country, from the Arkansas to the Platte and west to the Rockies, free of any Indian claims and opened the way for new settlers and the railroads.
The initial attack on a Cheyenne village had stirred up the tribes to the south. Some of the Cheyennes joined with the Comanches and Kiowas to form a formidable force of about 3,000 fighting men, with their camps in the Texas Panhandle along the Canadian River. Here Kit Carson with troops from New Mexico fought them in a desperate battle at Adobe Walls the same week Colonel Chivington was massacring the Cheyennes at Sand Creek.
Adobe Walls was the ruins of a trading post built on the Canadian River by William Bent in the 1830's to supplement his post on the Arkansas. He wanted the Comanche trade but did not want them coming to his Arkansas post, where they might get into fights with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes to the north. After the Comanches joined with those tribes in a peace treaty in 1840, they could come to the Arkansas post to trade, and the post on the Canadian was abandoned. After twenty-five years it had fallen into ruin, but about five or six feet of the thick abode walls were still standing, offering a strong defensive position for Carson and his troops.
Carson had 300 men and two howitzers to hold off 3,000 Indians, and even with the protection of the walls he had to fight desperately to stave off disaster. Finally toward night the Indians withdrew and Carson retreated to the west.
This was an indecisive fight, with Carson getting a little the worst of it. He was unable to advance against the Indian camp, while the Indians were unwilling to pay the price in lives that an all-out assault on the little force would have entailed. This fight did show that the Indians on the southern plains were able to collect a formidable force when they thought their existence or their hunting grounds were in serious danger.
20. Cattle and Railroads in the Buffalo Country
In the 1860's the buffalo found that their pastures on the Great Plains were being invaded by a newcomer, also a grass eater: Texas longhorns were coming up the trail each year in a seemingly endless procession.
Among the chaparral and mesquite thickets of southern Texas the longhorns could survive and multiply where buffalo would starve or die of thirst. This large desert range was extended rapidly as more settlers moved into Texas and the Indians were pushed back. Then the good range land near the settlements was cleared of buffalo, and the longhorns took over that pasture too, until their range covered about half of Texas. During the Civil War the herds increased rapidly in a practically wild state as most of the cowhands went off to war and there were not enough left to round up the cattle. When peace finally came, there were perhaps 3 million or more cattle waiting for the roundups, too many for the Texas market. Herds were driven north along the trail in hopes of reaching a market somewhere. For several years, each spring saw a steady stream of cattle on the way to northern markets.