Great Plains (27 page)

Americans were not completely negligent about trying to provide the Indians with protection against smallpox; both the Lewis and Clark and the Stephen Long expeditions brought supplies of vaccine for that purpose. Unfortunately, in both cases, the supplies got wet and were ruined. And, of course, whether or not the Indians would have agreed to be vaccinated is yet another question. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs finally did send some vaccine upriver well after the epidemic of 1837 had done its damage. See De Voto,
Across the Wide Missouri,
p. 294.

 

Halsey's letter to his superiors is in Chardon, p. 394.

The appetite of white collectors for Indian skulls is one of the grisly sidelights of Great Plains history. Prince Maximilian describes his disappointment when an Indian killed by Blackfeet near Fort McKenzie had his head clubbed to smithereens by vengeful women and children before Maximilian could “obtain his skull” (p. 275). Audubon went to some effort, as described in his
Journals,
to get the skull from a three-years-dead Indian buried in a tree (Vol. II, pp. 72–73). Larpenteur talks about an Indian named The Shining Man whose skull was sent downriver “in a sack with many others” to fill a “requisition for Indian skulls” made by physicians in St. Louis (p. 344). Collectors who enjoyed this hobby turn up often in Great Plains literature.

The fact that the old Fort Union cemetery was dug up by highway contractors I learned from Ranger Orville Loomer and others. He said that guys were driving around with skulls on their dashboards, and little kids were painting themselves with packets of vermillion found in the graves.

Chapter 3

 

The epidemic of suicides on the Wind River Reservation which Lydell White Plume told me about later made national news:

 

ARAPAHO TEEN FOUND HANGED

RIVERTON, WYO.
—T
HE BODY OF AN
18-year-old Arapaho Indian has been found in an abandoned house on Wind River Indian Reservation, where nine young men killed themselves last year.

—“The Nation” column, New York
Daily News,
March 20, 1986

 

I can no longer find the source which stated that Sitting Bull's cabin ended up in the Chicago city dump. I read this in a pamphlet of “Did-you-know” facts about North Dakota in a drugstore in Killdeer, N.D., but when I went back to look for it two years later it was no longer on the newsstand and the druggist did not remember it.

 

Many of the facts of Sitting Bull's life come from either
Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux,
by Stanley Vestal (Norman, Okla., 1957), or
New Sources of Indian History 1850–1891,
also by Vestal (Norman, Okla., 1934). The second book is better than the first, because the second is simply a collection of primary source documents, with no attempt made to spin them into a yarn.

Another important source on Sitting Bull is the mistitled
My Friend the Indian,
by Major James McLaughlin (Seattle, 1970). McLaughlin's antipathy for Sitting Bull runs throughout the book. He calls Sitting Bull “crafty, avaricious, mendacious, and ambitious … [with] all the faults of an Indian and none of the nobler attributes…” (p. 48).

The fact that Sitting Bull sold his autographs for a dollar each is mentioned in an exhibit in the Klein Museum in Mobridge, South Dakota.

 

Vestal says that Sitting Bull was born on the south side of the Grand River, “at a place called Many-Caches because of the many old storage pits there, a few miles below the present town of Bullhead, South Dakota.” McLaughlin says Sitting Bull was born “within twenty miles of the scene of his death.” Other sources place his birthplace farther away.

 

Many of Sitting Bull's wounds and battles are also chronicled in
Sitting Bull: An Epic of the Plains,
by Alexander B. Adams (New York, 1973).

 

Information on the Ghost Dance comes from sources already named, and also from
The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West,
edited by Howard R. Lamar;
Wind on the Buffalo Grass: The Indians' Own Account of the Battle of the Little Big Horn River & the Death of their life on the Plains,
edited by Leslie Tillett (New York, 1976); and
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions,
by John Fire Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes (New York, 1976).

The fact that one of the Sioux delegates said he saw the whole world in Wovoka's hat is in
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions,
p. 227.

 

Few white people of the time seem to have understood exactly what the Ghost Dance was; Agent McLaughlin thought the dance originated with the Aztecs and had to do with the return of Montezuma (
My Friend the Indian,
p. 49).

Sitting Bull was not the leader of the Ghost Dance; he may even have been a bit skeptical about it. He proposed to McLaughlin that they journey to the agencies of the West and look for the Messiah together. (McLaughlin did not go for the idea.) On the other hand, the dancers were guests in Sitting Bull's camp, and he could not allow McLaughlin to make him evict them. McLaughlin wrote that he visited Sitting Bull and said, “Look here, Sitting Bull … I want to know what you mean by your present conduct and utter disregard of department orders. Your preaching and practicing of this absurd Messiah doctrine,” etc. etc.—an approach which did not give Sitting Bull much of an out.

 

Upon the rumor that Sitting Bull was about to leave, McLaughlin moved to arrest him partly in fear that he would join with other Indians hiding in the Badlands from the recent buildup of troops at the Sioux reservations. McLaughlin and others believed that Sitting Bull might lead these fugitives in a new Indian war.

Chapter 4

 

The compilation of statements about Indians is taken mostly from the writings of these contemporary white observers:

Travels in the Interior North America in the Years 1832 to 1834,
by Alexander Philipp Maximilian,
prinz von
Wied-Neuwied. (It was he who said Indians swam differently: “We crossed the river near the part where a great number of young Indians were bathing … Their mode of swimming was not like that of the Europeans, but perfectly resembled that of the Brazilians,” p. 265);

Life in the Far West,
by George Frederick Ruxton (New York, 1849);

The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants,
by Richard Irving Dodge (New York, 1877);

My Life on the Frontier,
by Granville Stuart (Cleveland, 1925);

Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains in the Years 1819, 1820,
by Edwin James;

Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri,
by Charles Larpenteur;

The Oregon Trail,
by Francis Parkman (New York, 1978).

The dislike of Indians for meat butchered cross-grain is in
The Indian Tipi: Its History, Construction, and Use,
by Reginald and Gladys Laubin (Norman, Okla., 1957), p. 80. Wild meat is drier than farm-raised; butchering across the grain tends to spill juice.

 

The Indians' use of their bodies as alarm clocks is in
Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull,
by Stanley Vestal (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), p. 55: “Indian warriors could determine in advance their hour of rising by regulating the amount of water drunk before going to bed.”

 

The exchange rate of tipi poles for horses appears differently in different sources. R. and G. Laubin, in
The Indian Tipi
(p. 9), say that among the Kiowa Apache five tipi poles equalled one horse.

Other exchange rates are taken from Wied-Neuwied, pp. 244, 251, 340; Kurz's
Journal,
pp. 148, 182; Denig, p. 158; Dodge, p. 362; Stuart, Vol. I, p. 127; “The Buffalo in Trade and Commerce,” by Merrill G. Burlingame, in
North Dakota Historical Quarterly,
Vol. III, no. 4 (July 1929), p. 273.

The exchange of a horse for eight or ten peyote beans among the Oto Indians is mentioned in James, Vol. III, p. 58; he calls them “intoxicating beans.” The dollar value of prime beaver pelts appears in Smith,
John Jacob Astor,
p. 224. The yearly salary of a trapper is in ibid., p. 212. The claim that out West the nickel was the smallest coin is in Kurz's
Journal,
p. 129. Many museums display Indian artifacts decorated with American coins; the Museum of the American Indian in New York has a feather headdress with two eyes made of flattened silver dollars to enable the wearer to see bullets in flight. The story about the Indians (they were Sioux) who dumped the gold and ran off with the buckskin sacks is in Stuart, Vol. I, pp. 252–53.

 

The wanderings of the Sioux which brought them eventually to the Great Plains are detailed by George Hyde in
Red Cloud's Folk
(Norman, Okla., 1937), Chap. 1. Information about the Crow Indians comes from Denig, Chap. V. The Blackfeet are discussed in De Voto,
Across the Wide Missouri.
I read about the Atsinas in
The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West,
among other sources. The three kinds of Cree are mentioned in Howard, p. 43.

The Cheyenne are the subject of several books, including
The Cheyenne Indians
(New Haven, 1923) and
The Fighting Cheyennes
(New York, 1915), by George Bird Grinnell, and
Cheyenne Memories,
by John Stands In Timber and Margot Liberty (Lincoln, Neb., 1972). They and the Arapahoes also turn up a lot in
Red Cloud's Folk,
and many other books. The Shoshone were mainly a tribe from the Rocky Mountains and beyond, although bands of Shoshone spent time on the plains; see “The Northern Shoshone,” by Robert H. Lowie, in
The Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History,
Vol. II, pt. II, 1909. For more on the Kiowa and Kiowa Apache, see
The Indians of Texas,
by W. W. Newcomb (Austin, Tex., 1961). Two good books about the Comanches are
The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains,
by Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, (Norman, Okla., 1952), and
Comanches: The Destruction of a People,
by T. R. Fehrenbach (New York, 1974).

The plains tribes also known as the Gros Ventre were the Arapaho; the Atsina, relatives of the Arapaho who were sometimes called the Gros Ventre of the Prairie; and the Hidatsa, also known as the Gros Ventre of the Missouri.

(For a better list of books about the plains Indians, see
The Plains Indians: A Critical Bibliography,
by E. Adamson Hoebel [University of Indiana Press, 1977].)

 

In this and the next several pages, almost every sentence comes from a different source. I won't list them all.

The Crows' claim never to have killed a white man except in self-defense appears in many sources—e.g.,
Absaraka, Home of the Crows,
by Margaret Irvin Carrington (Chicago, 1950), p. 7. The Crows may have got on better with white people than other Indians did because their love for stealing horses and trading horses made them incipient capitalists. For revenge, a Crow was more likely to steal a man's horses than to kill him (see Denig, pp. 150–51). The Crows' sexual habits drew much comment. Prince Maximilian said, “They exceed all other tribes in unnatural practices” (p. 175)—a reputation which did not seem to repel white trappers and traders.

 

The spiritual exercises of the Cheyenne appear in
Wooden Leg, a Warrior Who Fought Custer,
by Thomas B. Marquis (Lincoln, Neb., 1957).

 

The writer Washington Irving, after he became famous for his tales of Dutch New York, moved to Europe and lived there for seventeen years. In England he published perhaps his best-known work, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in a collection called
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
When he returned to his native land, he wanted to see more of it, and so arranged to accompany an Indian commissioner as secretary on a journey over the Oklahoma prairies in 1832. Later he wrote a book about this trip,
A Tour on the Prairies
(Norman, Okla., 1956), an elegant and vivid account of the southern plains in the days before settlement. It was he (among others) who observed how good-looking the Osages were (
A Tour on the Prairies,
p. 22).

Maria Tallchief was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, of an Osage Indian father and a mother who was Irish, Scottish, and Dutch. Her marriage to Balanchine is discussed in
Balanchine,
by Bernard Taper (New York, 1963), pp. 229 et seq.

 

Most of the unflattering descriptions of the Arikara come from Denig, Chap. II; the appellation the “Horrid Tribe” is in Dodge, p. 43.

 

The horror of Texan–Comanche relations is well documented in Fehrenbach.

The Story of Colt's Revolver: The Biography of Col. Samuel Colt,
by William B. Edwards (Harrisburg, Pa., 1953), discusses the contributions of Comanche warfare to the development of Colt's new invention. Hays's Big Fight, on the Pedernales River, in June 1844, was the battle where the Texas Rangers first whipped the Comanche. Captain Samuel H. Walker was the ranger who went to New York to consult with Colt on modifications to the revolver; Walker was later killed in the Mexican War by a Mexican with a lance. Colt's assembly-line manufacturing methods and his salesmanship spread his weapons worldwide. He visited the Russians and told them the Turks were buying revolvers, then visited the Turks and told them the Russians were. He sold to both sides in conflicts all over Europe and South America. He bought Crimean War–surplus muskets and sold them to traders, who sold them to the Sioux, who used them against cavalry armed with Colt's .44 Army model. His best friend was his horse, Shamrock.