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# 2025-03-12 - Grant's Uncivil War by Peter Cozzens | |
I live in Grants Pass, Oregon, which is named after President Grant. | |
This Smithsonian Magazine article caught my eye, and i think it tells | |
an important story. After the end of this article are links to other | |
posts about local history. | |
* * * | |
Illustration of President Grant | |
Ulysses S. Grant Launched an Illegal War Against the Plains Indians, | |
Then Lied About It | |
The president promised peace with Indians--and covertly hatched the | |
plot that provoked one of the bloodiest conflicts in the West | |
Peter Cozzens; | |
Illustrations by Tim O'Brien | |
Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat | |
November 2016 | |
Grant called "wars of extermination" "demoralizing and wicked" in | |
1873. | |
In July 1874, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led a thousand-man | |
expedition into the Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota. He was | |
under orders to scout a suitable site for a military post, a mission | |
personally approved by President Ulysses S. Grant, but he also | |
brought along two prospectors, outfitted at his expense. Although | |
largely unexplored by whites, the Black Hills were long rumored to be | |
rich in gold, and Custer's prospectors discovered what he reported as | |
"paying quantities" of the precious metal. A correspondent for the | |
Chicago Inter Ocean who accompanied the expedition was less | |
restrained in his dispatch: "From the grass roots down it was | |
'pay dirt.'" Taking him at his word, the nation's press whipped up a | |
frenzy over a "new El Dorado" in the American West. | |
The United States was going into the second year of a crippling | |
economic depression, and the nation desperately needed a financial | |
lift. Within a year of Custer's discovery, more than a thousand | |
miners had streamed into the Black Hills. Soon Western newspapers and | |
Western congressmen were demanding that Grant annex the land. | |
There was one problem: The Black Hills belonged to the Lakota | |
Indians, the most potent Indian power on the Great Plains. They had | |
taken the territory from the Kiowas and the Crows, and they had | |
signed a treaty with the United States guaranteeing their rights to | |
the region. The Lakotas most esteemed the Paha Sapa (literally, | |
"hills that are black") not for their mystic aura, as is commonly | |
assumed, but for their material bounty. The hills were their meat | |
locker, a game reserve to be tapped in times of hunger. | |
The outcry for annexation brought Grant to a crossroads. He had taken | |
office in 1869 on a pledge to keep the West free of war. "Our | |
dealings with the Indians properly lay us open to charges of cruelty | |
and swindling," he had said, and he had staked his administration to | |
a Peace Policy intended to assimilate Plains nations into white | |
civilization. Now, Grant was forced to choose between the electorate | |
and the Indians. | |
He had no legal reason for seizing the Black Hills, so he invented | |
one, convening a secret White House cabal to plan a war against the | |
Lakotas. Four documents, held at the Library of Congress and the | |
United States Military Academy Library, leave no doubt: The Grant | |
administration launched an illegal war and then lied to Congress and | |
the American people about it. The episode hasn't been examined | |
outside the specialty literature on the Plains wars. | |
During four decades of intermittent warfare on the Plains, this was | |
the only instance in which the government deliberately provoked a | |
conflict of this magnitude, and it ultimately led to the Army's | |
shocking defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876--and to litigation that | |
remains unsettled to this day. Few observers suspected the plot at | |
the time, and it was soon forgotten. | |
For most of the 20th century, historians dismissed the Grant | |
administration as a haven for corrupt hacks, even as the integrity of | |
the man himself remained unquestioned. More recent Grant biographers | |
have worked hard to rehabilitate his presidency, and they have | |
generally extolled his treatment of Indians. But they have either | |
misinterpreted the beginnings of the Lakota war or ignored them | |
altogether, making it appear that Grant was blameless in the greatest | |
single Indian war waged in the West. | |
Throughout his military career, Grant was known as an aggressive | |
commander, but not a warmonger. In his Personal Memoirs, he damned | |
the Mexican War, in which he had fought, as "one of the most unjust | |
ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation," and he excoriated | |
the Polk administration's machinations leading to hostilities: "We | |
were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should | |
commence it." And yet in dealing with the Lakotas, he acted just as | |
treacherously. | |
* * * | |
The treaty between the Lakotas and the United States had been signed | |
at Fort Laramie in 1868, the year before Grant took office. "From | |
this day forward," the document began, "all war between the parties | |
to this agreement shall forever cease." | |
Under the Fort Laramie Treaty, the United States designated all of | |
present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the | |
Black Hills, as the Great Sioux Reservation, for the Lakotas' | |
"absolute and undisturbed use and occupation." The treaty also | |
reserved much of present-day northeastern Wyoming and southeastern | |
Montana as Unceded Indian Territory, off-limits to whites without the | |
Lakotas' consent. To entice Lakotas onto the reservation and into | |
farming, the United States promised to give them a pound of meat and | |
a pound of flour a day for four years. Whether those who wished to | |
live off the hunt rather than on the dole could actually reside in | |
the Unceded Territory, the treaty did not say. All Lakota land, | |
however, was to be inviolate. | |
The Great Sioux Reservation by Guilbert Gates | |
Most Lakotas settled on the reservation, but a few thousand | |
traditionalists rejected the treaty and made their home in the | |
Unceded Territory. Their guiding spirits were the revered war chief | |
and holy man Sitting Bull and the celebrated war leader Crazy Horse. | |
These "non-treaty" Lakotas had no quarrel with the wasichus (whites) | |
so long as they stayed out of the Lakota country. This the wasichus | |
largely did, until 1874. | |
Custer's official mission that summer, finding a site for a new Army | |
post, was permitted under the treaty. Searching for gold was not. | |
As the pressure rose on Grant to annex the Black Hills, his first | |
resort was rough diplomacy. In May 1875, a delegation of Lakota | |
chiefs came to the White House to protest shortages of government | |
rations and the predations of a corrupt Indian agent. Grant seized | |
the opportunity. First, he said, the government's treaty obligation | |
to issue rations had run out and could be revoked; rations continued | |
only because of Washington's kind feelings toward the Lakotas. | |
Second, he, the Great Father, was powerless to prevent miners from | |
overrunning the Black Hills (which was true enough, given limited | |
Army resources). The Lakotas must either cede the Paha Sapa or lose | |
their rations. | |
When the chiefs left the White House they were "all at sea," their | |
interpreter recalled. For three weeks, they had alternated between | |
discordant encounters with hectoring bureaucrats and bleak hotel-room | |
caucuses among themselves. At last, they broke off the talks and, the | |
New York Herald reported, returned to the reservation "disgusted and | |
not conciliated." | |
Lakota chief Red Cloud | |
> The Lakota chief Red Cloud (seated, second from left, in 1877) | |
> signed the treaty establishing the Great Sioux Reservation. | |
> (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs) | |
Meanwhile, miners poured into the Black Hills. The task of running | |
them out fell to Brig. Gen. George Crook, the new commander of the | |
Military Department of the Platte, whose sympathies clearly rested | |
with the miners. Crook evicted many of them that July, in accordance | |
with standing policy, but before they pulled up stakes he suggested | |
they record their claims in order to secure them for when the country | |
opened up. | |
Throughout these proceedings, Crook thought the Lakotas had been | |
remarkably forbearing. "How do the bands that sometimes roam off from | |
the agencies on the Plains behave now?" a reporter asked him in early | |
August. | |
Black Hills | |
> The Great Spirit gave us this country as a home," Crazy Horse said | |
> after the war that began over the Black Hills. "You had yours." | |
> (Bryan Schutmaat) | |
"Well," Crook said, "they are quiet." | |
"Do you perceive any immediate danger of an Indian war?" the reporter | |
persisted. | |
"Not just now," Crook answered. | |
Grant gave negotiation one more try. He appointed a commission to | |
hold a grand council on the Great Sioux Reservation and buy mining | |
rights to the Black Hills. | |
The only member of the commission who knew the Lakotas was Brig. Gen. | |
Alfred H. Terry, the urbane and kindly commander of the Department of | |
Dakota. Why not, he suggested, encourage the Lakotas to raise crops | |
and livestock in the Black Hills? No one listened. | |
The grand council convened that September but quickly foundered. | |
Crazy Horse refused to come. So did Sitting Bull; when the commission | |
sent a messenger to talk to him, he picked up a pinch of dirt and | |
said, "I do not want to sell or lease any land to the government--not | |
even as much as this." Subchiefs and warriors from the non-treaty | |
Lakota villages did attend the council, but to intimidate any | |
reservation chief who might yield. Gate-crashing whites--some | |
well-meaning and others of questionable intent--advised the | |
reservation chiefs that the Black Hills were worth tens of millions | |
of dollars more than the commission was prepared to offer. Those | |
chiefs then said they would sell--if the government paid enough to | |
sustain their people for seven generations to come. | |
The commission sent word back to Washington that its "ample and | |
liberal" offer had been met with "derisive laughter from the Indians | |
as inadequate." The Lakotas could not be brought to terms "except by | |
the mild exercise, at least, of force in the beginning." | |
By October 1875, Grant was plotting a new course to break the | |
impasse. Early that month, the War Department ordered Lt. Gen. Philip | |
Sheridan, the ranking officer in the West, to come to Washington. The | |
order bypassed the Army's commanding general and Sheridan's immediate | |
superior, William T. Sherman. The order itself doesn't survive, but | |
Sheridan's response, addressed to the adjutant general in Washington | |
and included in Sherman's papers at the Library of Congress, notes | |
that he had been summoned to "see the secretary [of war] and the | |
president on the subject of the Black Hills." This telegram is the | |
first of the four documents that lay out the conspiracy. | |
On October 8, Sheridan cut short his honeymoon in San Francisco to | |
make his way east. | |
Custer Stereograph | |
> Custer, pictured in 1874, had believed that his foray into the | |
> Black Hills would "open a rich vein of wealth," his brother-in-law | |
> wrote. | |
> (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution) | |
The Black Hills (Bryan Schutmaat) | |
The Badlands (Bryan Schutmaat) | |
> Of the 60 million acres promised to the Lakotas in 1868--including | |
> the Badlands--they've lost more than 55 million. | |
> (Bryan Schutmaat) | |
* * * | |
Sensing trouble on the Plains, a group of New York pastors met with | |
Grant on November 1 and exhorted him not to abandon his Peace Policy | |
in order to satisfy a specie-starved public. That "would be a blow to | |
the cause of Christianity throughout the world." | |
"With great promptness and precision," the New York Herald reported, | |
the president assured the clergymen that he would never abandon the | |
Peace Policy and "that it was his hope that during his administration | |
it would become so firmly established as to be the necessary policy | |
of his successors." Smelling a rat, the Herald correspondent added, | |
"In that he might possibly be mistaken." | |
Grant was, in fact, dissembling. Just two days later, on November 3, | |
he convened a few like-minded generals and civilian officials to | |
formulate a war plan and write the necessary public script. On that | |
day, the Peace Policy breathed its last. | |
Grant had taken nearly a month in choosing his collaborators. He knew | |
he could count on his secretary of war, William Belknap. And earlier | |
that fall, when he had to replace his secretary of the interior after | |
a corruption scandal, Grant broke with the custom of consulting the | |
cabinet on secretarial choices and privately offered the job to | |
Zachariah Chandler, a former senator from Michigan and a hard-liner | |
in Western affairs. Also invited were a pliable assistant interior | |
secretary named Benjamin R. Cowen and the commissioner of Indian | |
affairs, Edward P. Smith (who, like Belknap, would eventually leave | |
office after a corruption scandal of his own). | |
Opposition to Grant's plan might have come from his highest-ranking | |
military officer, Sherman. He was one of the men who had signed the | |
Fort Laramie Treaty on behalf of the United States. He advocated | |
using force against Indians when warranted, but he had once written | |
Grant of his anger at "whites looking for gold [who] kill Indians | |
just as they would kill bears and pay no regard for treaties." And | |
though Grant and Sherman had become close friends when they led the | |
Union to victory, they had grown apart over politics since the Civil | |
War. After Belknap usurped the general's command prerogatives with no | |
objection from Grant, Sherman had moved his headquarters from | |
Washington to St. Louis in a fit of pique. He was not invited into | |
the cabal, though two of his subordinates--Sheridan and Crook--were. | |
That Grant held a meeting on November 3 was public knowledge, but the | |
outcome was not. "It is understood the Indian question was a | |
prominent subject of attention," the Washington National Republican | |
reported, "though so far as learned there was no definite decision | |
made upon any subject relative to the policy of the Administration in | |
its management of the Indian tribes." | |
Crook, however, shared the secret with his trusted aide-de-camp Capt. | |
John G. Bourke, and it is thanks to Bourke's Herculean note-taking, | |
embodied in a 124-volume diary held at the West Point library, that | |
we can discover the secret today. Buried in one of those volumes is | |
this entry, the second of the four incriminating documents: "General | |
Crook said that at the council General Grant had decided that the | |
Northern Sioux [i.e, the Lakotas] should go upon their reservation or | |
be whipped." | |
U.S. Generals | |
> Generals Wesley Merritt, Philip Sheridan, George Crook, James | |
> William Forsyth, and George Armstrong Custer examine a document. | |
> (Crook and Sheridan) | |
The conspirators believed that Sitting Bull and the non-treaty | |
Lakotas had intimidated the reservation chiefs out of selling the | |
mining rights to the Black Hills. Crush the non-treaty bands, they | |
reasoned, and the reservation chiefs would yield. | |
Despite overwhelming popular support for seizing the Black Hills, | |
Grant could expect heated opposition from Eastern politicians and the | |
press to an unprovoked war. He needed something to shift the fault to | |
the Lakotas. | |
He and his collaborators came up with a two-phase plan. First the | |
Army would deliver the ultimatum to which Bourke referred: Repair to | |
the reservation or be whipped. The Army would no longer enforce the | |
edict affirming Lakota ownership of the Black Hills. This is revealed | |
in the third document, also at the Library of Congress, a | |
confidential order Sheridan wrote to Terry on November 9, 1875: | |
> At a meeting which occurred in Washington on the 3d of November | |
> ... the President decided that while the orders heretofore issued | |
> forbidding the occupation of the Black Hills country by miners | |
> should not be rescinded, still no fixed resistance by the military | |
> should be made to the miners going in... | |
> | |
> Will you therefore cause the troops in your Department to assume | |
> such attitude as will meet the views of the President in this | |
> respect. | |
If the Lakotas retaliated against incoming miners, so much the | |
better. Hostilities would help legitimize the second phase of the | |
operation: The non-treaty Lakotas were to be given an impossibly | |
short deadline to report to the reservation; the Indian Bureau was to | |
manufacture complaints against them, and Sheridan was to make ready | |
for his favorite form of warfare, a winter campaign against | |
unsuspecting Indian villages. | |
The Army's commander had no inkling of the intrigue until November | |
13, when Sherman asked Sheridan why he hadn't yet filed his annual | |
report. Sheridan's reply, also at the Library of Congress, rounds out | |
the conspiracy: "After my return from the Pacific Coast," Sheridan | |
wrote insouciantly, "I was obliged to go east to see...about the | |
Black Hills, and my report has thus been delayed." Rather than | |
elaborate on the war plan, Sheridan simply enclosed a copy of his | |
orders to Terry, suggesting to Sherman they "had best be kept | |
confidential." | |
Sherman exploded. How could he be expected to command, he wrote to | |
his brother, Senator John Sherman, "unless orders come through me, | |
which they do not, but go straight to the party concerned?" He vowed | |
never to return to the capital unless ordered. | |
Sitting Bull | |
> Sitting Bull said white people broke every promise they made but | |
> one: "They promised to take our land, and they took it." | |
> (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs) | |
* * * | |
To manufacture complaints against the Lakotas, the Grant | |
administration turned to an Indian Bureau inspector named Erwin C. | |
Watkins, who had just come back from a routine tour of the Montana | |
and Dakota Indian agencies. Watkins' official duties were | |
administrative, such as auditing Indian agents' accounts. But in | |
reporting on his tour, he went well beyond the scope of his authority | |
to describe the behavior of the non-treaty Lakotas, though it is | |
unlikely he ever saw one. | |
The Watkins report singled them out as "wild and hostile bands of | |
Sioux Indians" who "richly merit punishment for their incessant | |
warfare, and their numerous murders of settlers and their families, | |
or white men wherever found unarmed." Most offensive, they "laugh at | |
the futile efforts that have thus far been made to subjugate them | |
[and] scorn the idea of white civilization." Without ever mentioning | |
the Fort Laramie Treaty, the report concluded that the government | |
should send a thousand soldiers in to the Unceded Territory and | |
thrash the "untamable" Lakotas into subjection. | |
Watkins had long worked in Zachariah Chandler's Michigan political | |
machine, and he had served under Sheridan and Crook in the Civil War. | |
His report, dated November 9, encapsulated Sheridan's and Crook's | |
views. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that the conspirators | |
had ordered Watkins to fabricate his report, or even wrote it | |
themselves. | |
While leaking the Watkins report--it made headlines in a handful of | |
papers--the conspirators obscured their war preparations. At Crook's | |
headquarters in Wyoming Territory, rations and ammunition were being | |
stockpiled, pack trains prepared, troops marshaled in from outlying | |
forts. Something clearly was afoot, but Crook and his staff declined | |
to discuss it with the local press. | |
The Chicago Inter Ocean correspondent who had stoked the gold frenzy, | |
William E. Curtis, actually came close to exposing the plot. After | |
sounding out his Army contacts, Curtis told his readers just five | |
days after the White House meeting, "The roving tribes and those who | |
are known as wild Indians will probably be given over entirely to the | |
military until they are subdued." The precise identity of his source | |
is unknown, but when Curtis took the matter up with the high command, | |
a senior officer dismissed talk of war as "an idle fancy of a | |
diseased brain." Curtis didn't press the matter, and an Inter Ocean | |
correspondent in the field concluded that war was unlikely for the | |
simple reason that Lakota Indian agents told him, truthfully, that | |
the Indians had no wish to fight. | |
On December 3, Chandler set in motion the first phase of the scheme. | |
He directed the Indian Bureau to inform Sitting Bull and the other | |
non-treaty chiefs that they had until January 31, 1876, to report to | |
the reservation; otherwise they would be considered "hostile," and | |
the Army would march against them. "The matter will in all | |
probability be regarded as a good joke by the Indians," Sheridan | |
wrote to Sherman, who had lost interest in what his subordinate was | |
up to. | |
By then the Lakotas were snowbound in villages scattered throughout | |
the Unceded Territory. Their attitude hadn't changed; they had no | |
truck with the wasichus so long as they stayed off Lakota land, which | |
their chiefs had no intention of surrendering. Their response to | |
Chandler's ultimatum was unthreatening and, from an Indian | |
perspective, quite practical: They appreciated the invitation to talk | |
but were settled in for the winter; when spring arrived and their | |
ponies grew strong, they would attend a council to discuss their | |
future. | |
Indian agents dutifully conveyed the message to Washington--where | |
Edward Smith, the commissioner of Indian affairs, buried it. Sticking | |
to the official line secretly scripted in November, he declared that | |
the Lakotas were "defiant and hostile"--so much so that he saw no | |
point in waiting until January 31 to permit the Army to take action | |
against them. Interior Secretary Chandler, his superior, duly | |
endorsed the fiction. "Sitting Bull still refuses to comply with the | |
directions of the commissioners," he told Belknap, and he released | |
authority for the non-treaty Lakotas to the war secretary, for | |
whatever action the Army deemed appropriate. | |
Sheridan had a green light. On February 8, he ordered Terry and Crook | |
to begin their campaign. | |
The winter operations were a bust. Terry was snowbound. Crook | |
mistakenly attacked a village of peaceable Cheyennes, which only | |
alienated them and alerted the non-treaty Lakotas. Worse, the Army's | |
stumbling performance hardly persuaded the reservation chiefs that | |
they needed to cede the Black Hills. | |
That spring, thousands of reservation Indians migrated to the Unceded | |
Territory, both to hunt buffalo and to join their non-treaty brethren | |
in fighting for their liberty, if necessary. The Army launched an | |
offensive, with columns under Crook, Terry and Col. John Gibbon | |
converging on the Lakota country. The Indians eluded Gibbon. Crook | |
was bloodied at the Battle of the Rosebud on June 17 and withdrew to | |
lick his wounds. Eight days later, some of Terry's men--the 7th | |
Cavalry, under Custer--set upon the Lakotas and their Cheyenne allies | |
at the Little Bighorn and paid the ultimate price for Grant's perfidy. | |
* * * | |
Then came the cover-up. For eight months, Congress had paid little | |
heed to events in the Lakota country. Only after the Little Big Horn | |
debacle did Congress question the war's origins and the government's | |
objectives. | |
The conspirators had prepared for congressional scrutiny. The new | |
secretary of war, J. Donald Cameron, took just three days to submit a | |
lengthy explanation, together with Watkins' report and 58 pages of | |
official correspondence on the subject. Absent was Sheridan's | |
incriminating order to Terry from November 9, 1875. | |
Military operations, Cameron assured Congress, targeted not the | |
Lakota nation, only "certain hostile parts"--in other words, those | |
who lived in the Unceded Territory. And the Black Hills, Cameron | |
attested, were a red herring: "The accidental discovery of gold on | |
the western border of the Sioux reservation and the intrusion of our | |
people thereon, have not caused this war, and have only complicated | |
it by the uncertainty of numbers to be encountered." If Cameron were | |
to be believed, the war lust of young Lakotas had brought on the | |
conflict. | |
Certainly many congressmen recognized Cameron's chicanery for what it | |
was. But with the nation's press clamoring for retribution after the | |
Little Bighorn, they dared not dispute the administration's line. | |
Congress gave the Army carte blanche to conduct unremitting war. By | |
May 1877, the Lakotas had been utterly defeated. | |
Nearly everyone seemed content to blame them for the conflict. A | |
singular dissenting voice was George W. Manypenny, a reform-minded | |
former Indian Bureau commissioner. He surmised that "the Sioux War of | |
1876, the crime of the centennial year, [was] inaugurated" at the | |
White House in November 1875. But he was dismissed as an Indian | |
apologist, and no one took his allegations seriously. | |
In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the Lakotas were entitled to | |
damages for the taking of their land. The sum, uncollected and | |
accruing interest, now exceeds $1 billion. The Lakotas would rather | |
have the Black Hills. | |
Wagon Train Stereograph (William H. Illingworth) | |
Rock Formation Stereograph (William H. Illingworth) | |
Custer State Park (Bryan Schutmaat) | |
Sage Creek Road (Bryan Schutmaat) | |
Pine Ridge Reservation (Bryan Schutmaat) | |
From: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ulysses-grant-launched-illegal-war… | |
* * * | |
# Other Local History | |
Colonization of the Rogue Valley by Petey Pinecone | |
History of the Rogue River National Forest by Jeffrey Lalande | |
The Returner by John Medicine Horse Kelly | |
tags: article,history,native-american,oregon | |
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