 |
| Black Elk teaches the rosary |
This story was told in great detail in Dee Brown’s 1970 book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. That account has reached many people in the last fifty years. It was a best seller for over a year and has never been out of print since then, selling well over four million copies. The story was also told by George Bird Grinnell in his 1915 book The Fighting Cheyenne which he researched when there were still living survivors to interview.
There have also been versions in film and on TV. Most notably the 1970 film Soldier Blue starring Candace Bergen centered the events at Sand Creek, but it did poorly with critics and audiences. They found it too violent, which in retrospect is an odd criticism of a movie about a massacre. It is especially odd given the critical and box office success of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch just a year before. But nobody thought The Wild Bunch was anti-American, a criticism that was leveled repeatedly at Soldier Blue. Many insisted that the film was actually about the 1968 massacre of roughly 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians at Mỹ Lai on the South China Sea coast south of Danang by US soldiers of the Americal Division. News of that massacre hadn’t broken until the fall of 1969.
So what more is there to be said? Barring new discoveries in the archives, oral history, or ledger-book art, why write about this? For me it is an attempt to see these events through another prism. Even the most sympathetic accounts of Indigenous resistance have an ugly tendency to treat US conquest as somehow inevitable. They see settler violence as a regrettable side of this “inevitability.”
Dee Brown, for example, ends Bury My Heart with a quote from Black Elk Speaks. That book, by white poet John Neihardt, was his 1932 account of the memoir of Lakota medicine man Heȟáka Sápa. It famously fails to note that Nicholas Black Elk had been a Catholic catechist for thirty years at the time Neihardt interviewed him. But Brown’s final chapter describe the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, and Black Elk saw the bodies frozen in the snow afterward.
The quote:
 |
| A soft-focus photo by Curtis |
This elegiac language is part of the myth of “the Vanishing Indian.” I have no idea what part of this was said by Black Elk and what part of this was made up by Neihardt. I just know that it is a trope reinforced by countless bad poems and paintings and by the still popular photos of Edward S. Curtis. I know that Natives haven’t “vanished.” The commercial media is mostly ignoring the ongoing news of Wetʼsuwetʼen land defenders resisting gas pipeline construction at Unist’ot’en. In fact, a search of The New York Times website indicates that their last story about Wetʼsuwetʼen was published in 1998! But closing one’s eyes doesn’t make the story go away.
I want to make a first pass at seeing the story of the Sand Creek Massacre through the prism of racial capitalism instead of isolating it as a part of “the Indian wars.” I want to center it and show how it is connected to other neglected history as well as being a negation of US triumphalism.
So what is “racial capitalism”? In their introduction to this year’s Histories of Racial Capitalism, editors Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy clarify what it is not:
Racial capitalism is not one of capitalism’s varieties. It does not stand alongside merchant, industrial, and financial as a permutation, phase, or stage in the history of capitalism writ large.
 |
| Land Protectors at Unist'ot'en [Brandi Morin and Al Jazeera |
Understanding this ongoing truth (see Standing Rock and Unist’ot’en. see Sandra Bland and Philando Castile) to be essential to capitalism, rather than an unfortunate persistence of obsolete racial beliefs, casts an entirely different different light on so many things. But enough introduction; let me try to shine this light on the massacre at Sand Creek.
In the first half of the 19th century, US capitalism wasn’t terribly interested in the western half of North America, except for overland travel to the west coast. Surveys said there wasn’t enough rainfall for agriculture. But the California gold rush had dramatically increased traffic across Native lands, so the US government called for a multilateral conference with Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara representatives in eastern Nebraska to ensure the safety of migrants through the Platte River Valley. The tribes guaranteed safe passage in return for $50,000 a year for fifty years (approximately $1.8 million in 2021 dollars) and a guarantee that the US would respect their territories and protect them from US citizens. My map (below) shows the treaty-assured boundaries of the Cheyenne nation, which is our subject here. Note that it includes Denver (founded 1858) and Colorado Springs (founded 1859). Those dates should give a clear idea how long the government in Washington protected Cheyenne sovereignty againstintrusion by its people.
What happened in between? Gold was discovered in 1858 by disappointed prospectors returning from California. Roughly 100,000 people rushed into Cheyenne country in about a year.
In The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, (August 2021) Mae Ngai discusses gold discoveries in terms of capital accumulation. Arguing against the investment banker and historian Jean-Jacques Van Helten she writes that these gold discoveries were not lucky developments in a world that depended on gold as currency and needed expanded money supply to support growth. Instead she says gold discoveries actually stimulated that growth.
But in his 2019 Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers and the Transcontinental Railroad, Manu Karuka actually goes a little farther. Instead of seeing the US military as protecting migration and economic development initiated by thousands of impatient white entrepreneurs on the ground, Karuka says that their mines and farms and sawmills were heavily subsidized by the Army and were themselves a form of warfare.
Again, let’s return to the particulars. The US invasion of Cheyenne land - in violation of the 1851 treaty - led to accelerating conflict between Cheyennes and Americans. In the fall of 1860 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs came to eastern Colorado to meet with Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs and demand that they cede 92% of the land guaranteed them by that 1851 treaty. Most Cheyennes refused and continued to move freely through their territory, but the US government insisted that this new 1861 treaty was valid and therefore the very existence of Cheyennes outside the new boundaries was evidence of their hostility and criminality.
In April 1864, for example, 20 Colorado Volunteers encountered about 15 Cheyenne hunters and demanded that they throw down their weapons. When the Cheyennes refused, the soldiers opened fire. In the fight that followed, two soldiers were killed and three Cheyennes were wounded, allowing the Volunteers to make the case that a state of war existed with the Cheyenne.
In May, Lieutenant George Eayre set out with 84 men and two cannons with orders from Colonel John Chivington to “kill Cheyennes whenever and wherever found.” (My emphasis.) They were discovered by hunters from a camp of Cheyennes who had agreed to the new treaty. Fearing an attack by soldiers mistaking them for hostiles, chief Lean Bear rode out with papers he received from President Abraham Lincoln identifying him as peaceful and wearing a medal from his recent trip to Washington, DC. Lt. Eayre instructed his troops to fire. They shot him off his horse, then rode closer and shot him again on the ground. Eayre then ordered the artillery to fire on Lean Bear’s camp. The Cheyennes in the camp came out and returned fire until chief Black Kettle instructed them not to fight with the soldiers. The murder of Lean Bear convinced many Cheyennes that there could be no peace with people who acted as though they had no morals.
There were still those who wanted peace, though. That summer the governor instructed them to demonstrate their friendship by moving to the vicinity of Fort Lyon. That is exactly what Black Kettle did, along with a village of maybe 200 people, mostly too young or too old to be combatants.
Col. Chivington and the Colorado Volunteers spent most of the fall hunting for combatants, who were now led by a military society called the Hotamétaneo’o, or Dog Men. Unsuccessful, and with his troops’ 100-day enlistments about to expire, Chivington decided that if he couldn’t engage and defeat hostiles he could certainly murder friendlies instead. And that is what happened the morning of November 29, 1864.
I am not going to describe the nature of the atrocities committed by the soldiers or of the trophies they brought back to Denver. I will say that they greatly exaggerated the number of people they killed. Some of the people in the camp escaped to the east during the first minutes of the attack. Others survived in rifle pits above the camp and escaped later. The news they brought to the other Cheyenne bands was so horrifying that they now declared war on the Americans… nine months after the Americans declared war on them.
The word also reached the Lakota who were still reeling from the news that the US had hanged 39 of their Dakota relatives in Minnesota for defending their lands and massacred a village of Dakota and Nakota refugees in what is now North Dakota. Then, too, many Lakotas had removed themselves from their treaty-designated territory after a Sičháŋǧu chief named Matȟó Wayúhi was murdered by soldiers in a dispute over an emigrants stray calf. They followed the game animals to the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, but the discovery of gold in Montana meant new settler traffic through that area, too, followed by the construction of new forts. The Lakota now allied themselves with the Cheyennes and Arapaho to fight the US Army.
The end of the Civil War the following spring freed the Army to engage the tribes. Nevertheless, by 1868 the US government was asking for peace. Battles along the Platte River in Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming did not turn out the way the generals or the War Department expected. In the opening days of the war, a party of Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne attacked the Platte River bridge near what is now Casper, Wyoming. They failed to destroy the bridge but they did defeat columns of soldiers coming from both directions, killing them and taking their supplies. The drawing to the right, by a Cheyenne named Feathered Bear shows him - armed only with bow and arrows - riding down a dismounted cavalryman armed with carbine and pistol.
Later that summer the Army ordered three converging columns of troops - roughly 2700 in all - under Brigadier General Patrick Connor into the area around the Powder River. Connor’s genocidal orders to his officers were "You will not receive overtures of peace or submission from Indians, but will attack and kill every male Indian over twelve years of age.” In 2006, the US Army, hoping to learn lessons from the Indian wars that it could apply to fighting “unconventional forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, commissioned a study by the Combat Studies Institute that was published as the Atlas of the Sioux Wars. I’ll let the CSI describe Connor’s expedition into the Powder River country:
Meanwhile, Cole had marched just north of the Black Hills and headed up the Belle Fourche River where he linked up with Walker’s column on 18 August. Initially, the two columns continued to push deep into Indian lands until they grew dangerously low on supplies and decided to move toward the Tongue River and link up with Connor. On 1 September, a large Cheyenne war party attacked the columns altering Cole’s decision to move toward the Tongue River. Instead, they headed down the Powder River hoping to replenish their supplies with the abundant game known to be in the Yellowstone River valley. The night of 2 September inflicted early winter storms on the columns. More than 200 of Cole’s horses and mules, already weakened by hunger, died from exposure and exhaustion. Again, Cole changed his direction of march and decided to return to Fort Laramie for provisions. On the morning of 5 September, Cole and Walker unknowingly stumbled into the vicinity of a large village near the mouth of the Little Powder River. The village was an unprecedented gathering of Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Southern Cheyenne. More than 1,000 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors swarmed out of the village to attack the columns. The battle raged for 3 hours before the still undiscovered village moved safely out of the way, and the Indians broke off the fight. Then again on 8 September, the exhausted and starving troops unwittingly threatened the village. The Indian rearguard easily delayed the soldiers and the village escaped a second time.
Over the course of the next 12 days, the columns continued to plod along. Each day dozens of horses and mules died of starvation. The Indians hovered around the columns like vultures and, had it not been for the detachment’s artillery, probably would have been more troublesome to the troops. On 20 September, Cole and Walker’s troops straggled into Fort Connor. Connor’s equally exhausted troops joined them on 24 September. The expedition had failed to subdue the tribes and, instead, had emboldened the Sioux to continue their determined resistance to any white incursion into Powder River country.
Please note that even after the passage of 140 years (and the service in subsequent US wars of countless Native troops) the authors are still using phrases like “hovered around the columns like vultures” and “white incursion.” The drawing above is by Brave Bear. He shows himself closing in on a mounted artilleryman. He is wearing an Army coat with brass buttons and armed with a pistol and a lance. His clothing and the presence of the mounted artilleryman convinced the authors of the collection Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History of Coups and Combat that these were events of September 1. That was the day Captain E.S. Rowland and seven men chased some Cheyennes who surprised the Army’s horse guard and stole 20 horses. The only one who escaped the Cheyenne counter-attack was Capt. Rowland himself. This drawing and the one above are both from that collection.
This is as good a time as any to reflect on who ordered Brig. Gen. Connor to launch this ill-fated expedition. Major General Grenville Dodge was eight months away from resigning his commission to become Chief Engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad. The construction of the Transcontinental Railroad is one of those episodes that - unlike the murder of Chief Lean Bear or the failure of the Powder River Expedition - always finds its way into textbooks of US History. That construction is part of the triumphalist narrative of the expansion of the United States, treating it as a given and using the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” meaning it was already written before it even happened. It understates (erases?) the fact that despite truly massive subsidies, the railroad remained unprofitable 25 year after its construction. It ignores the fact that it could not have been built without costly Army support. The War Department argued that it was a security necessity, allowing rapid movement of troops and supplies, but that’s a bit of a circular argument. The railroad allowed troops to quickly support other troops who were only under attack because they were supporting railroad construction through treaty-reserved territory.
Manu Karuka discusses all this in Empire’s Tracks. In his introduction he notes that westward expansion is better understood as continental imperialism than as nationhood. He reminds us that in 1867 Lieutenant General William Tecumseh Sherman named defending railroad construction the Army’s principal task (over defending democracy by opposing the KKK in the former Confederate states) and enthusiastically described how the railroad could support the genocide of the Native peoples. He reminds us that most railroad engineers were trained at West Point. (Major General Dodge was not a West Pointer. He received his engineering degree at Norwich University, a military academy in Vermont, and worked as a railroad surveyor for ten years before becoming an Army officer when the Civil War broke out.) Karuka also points out that the military budget in those years served as another, hidden, subsidy to the railroads.
What about those finances? Another episode that finds its way into high school texts - although usually without explanation - is the Credit Mobilier scandal, which embarrassed President Grant as he was running for his second term in 1872. The Union Pacific Railroad was built between 1865 and 1869, precisely the years of the “Indian War” we have been discussing. I will get ahead of myself by saying the US did not win this war, so the railroad was being built across territory it did not hold and, therefore there were precious few Americans along the route needing to be served. That means there was no prospect of profit for operating it, something that was well understood by potential investors, who stayed away from what they considered unsound securities. It is also worth remembering that the furthest westward expansion of the US railroad system was in Council Bluffs, Iowa and that there was no rail bridge across the Missouri River! So when the Union Pacific completed its tracks to Promontory Summit, Utah and linked up with the Central Pacific Railroad, cars from the east still had to cross the river by ferry. Also the Central Pacific only ran from Sacramento, so it was only months later that trains from Omaha reached Oakland. Even the checkerboard of alternate sections of land that the government gave to the railroads to sell (Indigenous land that the government had only a notional title to, and still did not control) wasn’t enough to guarantee profitability.
Where then would profits come from if the railroad was years away from having adequate numbers of customers? Why from the construction itself! Congress hadn’t put any sophisticated auditing procedures in place. The executives of the Union Pacific created a second company, Crédit Mobilier of America, to do the construction. Crédit Mobilier submitted grossly inflated bills to Union Pacific who were the same people. Then the Union Pacific execs - with straight faces - simply passed those costs on to Congress. The actual cost of building 1000 miles of railroad was about $50 million, but Union Pacific billed $94 million. Most of that extra $44 million went directly into the pocket of the leading shareholders. Of course the members of Congress weren’t completely blind and stupid. Several million had to be paid to them in bribes, supplemented by drastically-discounted Union Pacific stock.
How is this related to the Sand Creek massacre and the subsequent war? Well, conventional understanding of capitalism says that profits come from surplus value, the difference between what the labor market says is the value of a worker’s day and the value of what that worker produces in a day. But here we see that profits are coming from stealing Indigenous land to be sold by the railroad. Here we see that profits are coming from the budget of the War Department. Here we see that profits are coming from looting the US Treasury.
By 1868 the Army had failed to defeat the Lakota, Arapaho and Cheyenne but it really needed to get them to stop fighting so that the trains could run. The concessions were mainly to the Lakota. Although the territory secured to them in the new Treaty of Fort Laramie was somewhat smaller than in 1851, this time the US promised no forts in their territory and permanent use of hunting grounds that - under the old treaty - belonged to the Crow, Mandan, Assiniboine, and Blackfoot tribes. Moreover, the Army actually abandoned the contested forts on the Bozeman Trail, surrendering the territory to the Lakota.
That was, of course, not the end of the story. Negotiations for the new treaty were completed in early November of 1868. On November 27 the US 7th Cavalry, commanded by George Armstrong Custer attacked a Cheyenne village on the Washita River in what is now western Oklahoma. Yes, it was the village of Black Kettle, the same Black Kettle whose village had been destroyed in the Sand Creek Massacre. Yes, he had moved his people there in order to stay away from all the fighting to the north. No, he did not survive this time; he and his wife were both shot in the back by the troopers while trying to escape. One parallel with Sand Creek is that Major General Philip Sheridan had ordered a winter campaign to find and destroy hostile villages while they were less mobile. Failing to do so, Custer found and destroyed a friendly village. An important difference is that Custer left almost as quickly as he arrived. In his report he claimed that he counted 103 dead Cheyennes. In fact he did not stay long enough to count. He sent a party under Major Joel Elliot down the the stream to pursue some fleeing villagers, but did not stay to find out what happened to Elliot and his men. In fact, they encountered a mixed party of Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Arapahos from other villages who were rushing to support Black Kettle. Elliot’s troopers were overwhelmed and killed. Of the 21 deaths sustained by the 7th Cavalry that day, 20 were Elliot and the men with him.
There is another important difference between the massacre at Sand Creek and the massacre at the Washita River. The Congressional investigation into the former condemned it without qualification. The joint committee reported:
As to Colonel Chivington, your committee can hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct. Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity; holding the important position of commander of a military district, and therefore having the honor of the government to that extent in his keeping, he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty. Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, he took advantage of their in-apprehension and defenceless condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.
Whatever influence this may have had upon Colonel Chivington, the truth is that he surprised and murdered, in cold blood, the unsuspecting men, women, and children on Sand creek, who had every reason to believe they were under the protection of the United States authorities, and then returned to Denver and boasted of the brave deed he and the men under his command had performed.
There was no such general condemnation of Custer, despite some criticism in parts of the eastern press. It had apparently only taken four years - from November 29, 1864 to November 27, 1868 - for an attack on a peaceful village (the exact same peaceful village) to be normalized. In her essay “Race, Innovation, and Financial Growth: the Example of Foreclosure” K-Sue Park wrote about the legalization of foreclosure against Natives prefiguring the legalization of foreclosure against white people. She concludes:
The power of racial violence to normalize violence is likely to foster ongoing creativity, generating new techniques of trespassing upon human life and dignity in ways that may seem at first beyond contemplation but, under the beacon of profit and through a racially marked separate entrance will seep into the very fabric of the everyday.
The subsequent history of the territory we are discussing bears this observation out in every way. Immediately after the 1868 treaty businessmen in Cheyenne, Wyoming began spreading rumors of gold discoveries to the north on the theory that similar rumors had sparked Army takeovers in Colorado and in Montana. In 1874 the Army sent Custer on an expedition into the Black Hills in complete violation of the treaty. When he announced the discovery of gold there, President Grant demanded that the Lakota sell the land. And then, in the summer of 1876, Lt. Gen. Sheridan was ordering yet another three-pronged assault into the Powder River country against the Lakota and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies, this time a larger one. Brigadier General Alfred Terry was to march with 925 men from the east, near Bismarck in what is now North Dakota. Brigadier General George Crook was to march from the south in the Wyoming Territory with roughly 1000 men. And Colonel John Gibbon was to march with 450 men from the west, near Bozeman in the Montana Territory.
Crook was defeated at Rosebud Creek by the Lakota and their allies, led by Crazy Horse. Lt. Colonel Custer, scouting ahead of Brig. Gen Terry’s command, attacked the main allied camp at Little Bighorn Creek and his entire command was wiped out. But by the winter of 1876-1877 Terry was driving the allies in to a reservation. The only exceptions were the bands led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and they came in later. President Grant said at the time that the seizure of lands without a new treaty was illegal and in 1980 the Supreme Court agreed.
But I want to stay with K-Sue Park’s observation about the normalization of capitalist violence. The country around the Powder River was seized from the tribes by military violence and the buffalo herds for which it was known were killed, too. Eastern and European businessmen headquartered in Cheyenne immediately began to fill it with cattle herds. Their profits were initially enhanced by the facts that it was the Army , not them, that had born the costs of defeating the Indians and that they were running their herds on public land that they never paid for. When their profits fell, due to drought, overgrazing, and a very bad winter, they blamed the arrival of newcomers: homesteaders who paid for land and fenced it, reducing the amount of free public land; small ranchers who weren’t members of their social class, and sheep ranchers whose flocks competed with the cattle for grass. They chose to say that all these newcomers were “rustlers” and mounted successful public opinion campaigns to make that argument with their friends in the local and national press.
And they hired an army of assassins from Texas, who they called stock detectives, to murder their adversaries. They even gave them a list of who to kill, which was discovered by people on that hit list. The result was the Johnson County War which has been the subject of so much pulp literature (including Owen Wister’s The Virginian) and film drivel (including tMichael Cimino’s famously catastrophic Heaven’s Gate.) One thing that stays with me is the extent to which even those versions that are critical of the Cheyenne capitalists continue to believe their propaganda about cattle rustlers. But the other thing is the way massacres of Natives could lead to massacres of white business adversaries.
I want to make the same observation about the increasing violence by capitalists against their own employees. In the 1860’s the Cheyennes were being murdered and expropriated from their lands and homes by miners. By the 1890’s those miners were themselves being murdered and deported from the state by the companies that owned the mines. In 1914 out-of-state “detectives” were mustered into the Colorado National Guard and given uniforms so that they could machine-gun a camp of striking miners in Ludlow.
And the railroads? The instrument of the military to quickly move troops to kill Indians across a country that was only the US on its own maps? In 1894 when the railroad workers struck over repeated pay cuts the US Army mobilized 12,000 troops under Brig. Gen. Nelson Miles to break the strike. Manu Karuka writes that all capitalism is violence and war for private profit. Among those profiting privately in the case of the 1894 strike was US Attorney General Richard Olney who wrote the brief justifying the use of the Army. His government salary was a then-hefty $8000 a year. But throughout his service he continued accepting $10,000 a year from the railroads.
I want to include two postscripts. One is about how racial capitalism can use one group against another, how Black soldiers could be mobilized against Natives and Natives could be convinced to enslave African Americans. It’s about how even today Black people can uncritically idealize those Buffalo Soldiers who participated in the colonial wars in the West, in the Philippines and in Mexico. It’s about how even today Native tribes can exclude their own Black tribal members on the basis of race and then argue that it is their right of self-determination to do so.
And its about the currently popular Western, The Harder They Fall. One of the protagonists in that movie is the Black trapper Jim Beckworth. In real life, Beckworth died in 1867, ten years before any one of the members of the Rufus Buck Gang was even born. In real life Jim Beckworth was the scout who led Colonel John Chivington’s army of murderers to Chief Black Kettle’s camp on Sand Creek on November 29,1864. The Cheyenne later asked him why he did it. He told them he had to, that the white people would have killed him if he hadn’t. No Cheyenne ever accepted that explanation.
My second postscript is about erasure. Two-thirds of the crew laying track east for the Central Pacific - all the way up the Sierras to 7000 feet from Sacramento and all the way back down into the desert - were Cantonese speakers from the Pearl River region of China. The day the golden spike was driven it was Chinese construction workers who brought up the last rails. The famous photo of that event erased their existence from public historic memory. Thirteen years later Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act barring any Chinese from emigrating to the United States. The photo below shows a Central Pacific work crew on that very day.
No comments:
Post a Comment