The Wild Frontier (35 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
In 1860, settlers in Humboldt County attacked Indian villages in retaliation for cattle and other property stolen in raids. The
San Francisco Bulletin
reported that “bands of white men, armed with hatchets … fell on the women and children, and deliberately slaughtered them, one and all.” A witness counted 26 such bodies in one camp.
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Not many months later, at the beginning of winter, the
Bulletin
ran a story about some settlers who had moved down from the mountains to protect their stock from the snow. When some returned to their houses to inspect them, they found “that the Indians had destroyed all that they had left.” They tracked down the band that committed the damage and killed 39 Digger Indians.
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The same week, the settlers in Upper Mattole also attacked the Diggers, slaying 7.
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When Indians robbed the Larabee house and killed the cook, Ann Quinn, settlers killed 2 of the Indians.
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And in 1862, Yahi Indians captured 3 white children and murdered 2 of them. One was found with 17 arrows in him, his throat slit, and scalped.
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Settlers in California were very unhappy about the inability of the army to stop claimed Indian misconduct. An editorial in the
Yreka Semi-Weekly Union
in 1864 took up the issue:
There is “A rottenness in Denmark” somewhere, in the management of our Indian affairs, and the citizens are now forming I
NDEPENDENT
companies to follow the Indians into their mountain fastnesses and annihilate them.
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Near the Cottonwood River in 1865, 2 white men went to an Indian camp to abduct a 10-year-old girl. The mother and a crippled boy resisted. One of the men cut the throat of the boy, then stabbed him repeatedly until he died. The girl and her mother escaped. A few days later, the frustrated men returned and burned the camp.
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Some Indians concocted an extortion scheme called the Chinese Tax Collectors. Eight Indians visited Fairfield Bar on the Feather River in 1865 and requested that the Chinese owners produce their poll tax receipts. When they did, they were told the receipts were no good, and the Indians demanded cash. The Chinese had none, so the Indians beat them and stole all the valuables.
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Apparently in an attempt to make amends to some extent, both the California and federal governments belatedly enacted a claims statute in 1928 permitting Indians to sue the federal government for damages as a result of loss of land and resources. Thirty years later, the federal government gave land titles to all California Indians who asked for them, a program that remained in effect until the 1970s.
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There were many Indians killed by atrocities in California. In the 12-year period from 1849 to 1861, there were 2,017 California Indian deaths due to settler atrocities (see Appendix C); surely there were more never reported in that lawless time and place.
The great number of atrocities in California would seem to have resulted from a conflict between the characters of the criminal elements among the prospectors and miners and the poor and unwarlike Indians. These atrocities by whites represent the extreme point of atrocities throughout the war.
A
ROUND
1850, settlers chained the father of Modoc Scarface Charley to the back of a wagon and dragged him until he died.
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In 1851, the Oatman family along the Gila River was attacked by some Indians, perhaps Yavapais, perhaps Apache. Everyone in the family was killed except 12-year-old Olive and her younger sister Mary, who were sold into slavery to the Mohaves. Olive was rescued 5 years later by a Yuma Indian. The Mohaves had tattooed her and Mary (who later starved to death) about the chin to discourage them from trying to escape. Olive was a sensation and went on a lecture tour across the country.
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These were not the only Indians who practiced tattooing their prisoners. Fanny Kelly said she “narrowly escaped tatooing [at the hands of the Sioux] by pretending to faint away every time the implements for the marring operation were applied.”
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A female captive in the Mississippi Valley refused to return to the settler community when ransomed by her father because her face had been disfigured by Indian tattooing and because she thought she was pregnant by a man who had taken her for his wife and who treated her well.
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An ox owned by a Mormon was shot with an arrow and killed in 1854 by High Forehead, a Sioux boy. He and 2 other boys ate it. They claimed the animal had been abandoned and was lame. The Mormon complained to the soldiers at Fort Laramie about what had happened. The matter was reported to Lieutenant J. L. Grattan. Grattan, who had perhaps been drinking (some say it was his French-Canadian interpreter, Lucien Auguste, who had been drinking and who mistranslated),
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went to the Sioux camp with 30 men and 2 cannon and demanded either 25 dollars for the ox or the 3 Sioux boys. Grattan had no authority to make any such demand. There was an argument. Grattan barked an order, and the cannon fired on the Indians, killing Chief Bear That Scatters and several Sioux. The Indians beat and hacked the soldiers to death. Only one of the 30 escaped, but he died upon his return to Fort Laramie.
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This was the first time in the history of the army that a military unit had been completely wiped out. The event came to be known as Grattan’s Massacre, or the Mormon Cow War. The country demanded action.
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The next summer, Colonel William Harney and 1,300 soldiers marched out of Fort Leavenworth “to even the score.” They came to the camp of the Sioux band of Chief Little Thunder, which had nothing to do with the cow incident, opened fire with cannon, killed 86 Indians, and took 70 women and children prisoner. Meanwhile, 5 of the warriors of Bear That Scatters sought to avenge his death by killing 3 settlers. They gave themselves up and were taken to Fort Leavenworth singing their death chants, but President Franklin Pierce pardoned them.
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Atrocities by the Sioux began to occur with greater frequency. In the Black Hills of the Dakotas, Sioux caught a trapper of mixed blood, Hercules Levasseuer, in 1855. They cut off his hands, then cut out his tongue. Three years earlier, 30 prospectors had gone there. Eight turned back after seeing Indians; the rest disappeared. A gold miner, Ezra Kind, scratched a last message on a rock indicating that all the others of his party of 7 had been killed by Indians. They got all the gold they could
carry, and, Lazarus reported, “I have lost my gun and nothing to eat and Indians hunting me.”
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In Washington Territory the same year, the Yakima chief Kamiakin properly did not trust Governor Isaac Stevens and therefore would not sign a treaty proposed by Stevens. Instead, he made alliances preparing for war. “Even thus allied, he thought it best to bide his time, organize, and plan before confronting superior white forces. As often happened when Indians contemplated war, hot-headed young warriors acted independently and rashly.” Qualchin, who was Kamiakin’s nephew, led 5 warriors who attacked and killed 6 prospectors. A. J. Bolen, the Indian agent, was sent to investigate, and he was also killed. The army sent a force, and Kamiakin’s 500 warriors ambushed it, killing 5. Indians raided a settlement near Seattle, killing 9 more.
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Also that year, Colonel James Kelley led a unit of militia in Washington Territory, where Walla Walla chief Peo-Peo-Mox-Mox had just burned a fort. The colonel and the chief held a parley, and the chief sent a messenger back to the village purportedly to communicate the terms of Kelley’s offer to the Indians. Kelley held Peo-Peo-Mox-Mox and 6 other chiefs as voluntary hostages. The chief’s message no doubt was to attack the army, because Kelley’s force was soon under attack by many Indians. Kelley ordered the chiefs tied up. Peo-Peo-Mox-Mox resisted, there was a struggle, the chief drew a dagger, and he was hit on the head by a gun barrel. After a 4-day battle, the Indians withdrew, and the Oregon volunteers showed the settlers the chief’s ears and scalp. Kamiakin’s other allies, the Umatillas and Cayuses, were enraged. They raided settlements, killing 31.
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The Rouge River War occurred in Oregon in 1855 at about the same time as the Yakima War in Washington. Captain Andrew Jackson Smith, the commander of Fort Lane, had tried to keep peace between the settlers and the Indians. At times he would even interpose his troops between them. In October, because of the threat posed by the settlers, he moved the Indian men to the fort. The women and children were to follow. Before they could, volunteers murdered 23 Indian old men, women, and children.
The next day, the Indians killed 27 settlers. General John E. Wool, the head of the Department of the Pacific, and commander of both Washington and Oregon, observed, “It has become a contest of extermination by both whites and Indians.” Wool, like many other army officers, was not anti-Indian. “Wool openly sympathized with the Indians. He directed his field officers not to fight Indians unless forced to do so, and at all other times to persuade the tribes to become peaceful.”
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That same year Nelson Lee”
*
and 20 others were attacked by Comanches as they were taking mules and horses to California to sell Four, including Lee, survived, but were captured by the Indians. The next morning, Lee’s feet were unbound and he was conducted through the Indian camp so he could see what had happened to those who had not made it. They had been cut and hacked. Some had their arms and hands chopped off. Others had their tongues drawn out and sharp sticks thrust through them. All had been scalped. When the Comanche village was reached, the survivors were tied naked to posts with their hands and feet stretched between them. A long line of perhaps 200 warriors approached them in single file carrying knives, tomahawks, and arrows.
As the procession passed a pair of these captives, 2 warriors broke from the line, seized them by the hair, scalped them, then resumed their places in line, and went on. The piece of scalp taken was about the size of a silver dollar and did not necessarily kill them, but blood ran freely over their faces and into their beards. The second time the line came past, the warriors cut the same 2 prisoners with their arrows. The Indians returned an uncounted number of times, until the 2 were hacked and covered with blood. After a couple of hours, the warriors started singing their war song, approached the 2 slowly, then drew hatchets and crashed them into the skulls of the prisoners. The bodies were thrown on the ground. Dogs came and lapped the blood from the wounds.
After a time, Lee tried to escape, but was caught and taken to the tent of Chief Spotted Leopard, where he was tied to stakes on his back. For 2 weeks he was kept tied down. The chief drew his knife across the tendon just below his knee. The chief frequently bent his leg back and forth, breaking the wound open. The purpose of this procedure was to cripple Lee so that he could not escape when he was finally allowed to move about. Later, while on the way back to the Comanche camp, he heard war whoops and shrieks of agony that grew fainter and fainter, then stopped. When he got into camp he saw parts of an army uniform. Lee never forgot what happened next:
Moving on beyond the camp into a grove, a spectacle presented itself that froze my blood. A white man had been subjected to the torture. A sharp stick had been thrust through his heel cords, by which he was suspended from a limb, with his head downward, as a butcher suspends a carcass. He, also, had been sacrificed with the accursed flints, his ears cut off and tongue drawn out. A slight convulsive shrug of the
shoulders indicated that life was not wholly extinct. I gazed upon him in silence and terror and was relieved when they led me away.
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Three Englishwomen were brought into the camp where Lee was held. They told him the men in their wagon train had been massacred, the children carried away, “and crying babies killed by cutting a hole under their chins and hanging them ‘on the point of a broken limb.’” They said they had been repeatedly raped.
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Lee was sold twice during his captivity. Big Wolf sold him to Chief Spotted Leopard, who in turn sold him to Chief Rolling Thunder. Rolling Thunder liked him and asked if he would like to marry. Lee said yes, believing it would help his chances of escape. He was then given 6 daughters of the tribe from which to chose. He chose Sleek Otter, who proved to be a faithful and affectionate wife. His marriage did indeed improve his status in the tribe. “I was no longer made the center post at their war dances.”
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One day, Rolling Thunder informed him that the 2 of them would go on a 3-day journey, alone. At the end of the first day, they entered the village of a small tribe. The chief got drunk. The next morning Lee was very thirsty, but there was no water. Finally they found a little muddy water, and Lee was given the horn to scoop it up, but he could only get 3 parts mud to one part water. Rolling Thunder saw the problem, got off his horse, threw his rifle on the ground, and lay down to drink the muddy water. His hatchet was on his saddle. Lee grabbed the hatchet, leaped toward the chief, and buried the hatchet a full hand’s breadth in his brain. For 56 days he wandered lost in the wilderness, undergoing many hardships until a trader found him.
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Only 3 years after the Mormon Cow War, Mormons were again involved in atrocities. Utah had asked to be admitted to the Union as a state several times. Congress refused each time because some Mormons practiced polygamy. President James Buchanan appointed a new territorial governor in the place of Mormon governor Brigham Young. Buchanan sent federal troops to enforce the appointment. In 1857, a group of Indians and Utah citizens gathered to confront these troops. They attacked a party of 140 and murdered most of them.
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*
The Choctaw settled in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. They supported the Americans in the Revolution and the War of 1812.
9
†
The Seminoles lived in Florida. The name means “one who has camped out from the regular towns.” The reason for this is that the Seminoles broke off from other tribes (primarily Creeks) and moved south in the 1700s.
10
†
The Creeks were in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, and Oklahoma. Their villages were organized into Red towns and White towns. The warriors lived in the former and the peacemakers in the latter.
11
§
The Chickasaw were in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Oklahoma. They supported the British in the French and Indian War, halted all French traffic on the Mississippi for a time, and successfully resisted the attack of French armies 3 times. Some warriors fought on both sides in the Revolutionary War.
12
¶
The Cherokee lived in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. They poisoned water to catch fish and used blowguns to kill small game. Tribal organization included a White Chief who helped make decisions about farming, lawmaking, and disputes, a Red Chief who advised about warfare, and a War Woman who went on war parties but did not fight and decided which prisoners would live and which would die.
13
*
During the French and Indian War, the Fox tribe fought against the French. The French and Chippewa drove them to new homelands. They and the Sac and others defeated the Illinois in 1769. They formed a temporary alliance with the Sioux to attack the Chippewa, but were defeated.
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*
Through much of their history, Comanche raided whites and other tribes to steal horses. They had a long history of fighting the Texas Rangers and the army. The Native American Church was chartered by the Comanche in 1918; one of its practices involves the sacramental use of peyote. By the 1930s, about half the Indians in the country were members.
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*
Kiowa migrated frequently. Their first known home was in western Montana. Lewis and Clark found them in Nebraska in 1805. The Kiowa raided other tribes such as the Caddos, Navajos, Utes, Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Osages.
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*
Savage was from Illinois. He quit school at 14, lived for several years among the Sac and Fox and other Indians, then went to California, where he lived mostly among Indians and was like a chief. He spoke 5 Indian languages, plus German, French, Spanish, and English.
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*
This is the same J. J. Warner, an Indian agent, who in 1856 told the Santa Isabel Indians that he intended to take all unbranded animals in their possession away from them, asserting that those animals were his property! The lieutenant commanding the local army post, William A. Winder, told the chief of the Santa Isabels that if any attempt should be made by Warner to take the animals, they should bring them to the lieutenant for safekeeping. Winder reported to his commander, Major W. W. Mackall, that “this is one of the many cases of injustice practiced upon these Indians, and by the very men whose duty it is to protect them.”
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John Bigler, stating that in their 4 counties within a very few months, Indians had murdered at least 130 whites.
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*
Nelson Lee was born in New York City, fought in the Black Hawk War and the Mexican War, was in the U.S. Navy, the Texas Navy, and was a Texas Ranger.
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