The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Read online

  Like most military men, Grant favored the transfer of Indian affairs to the War Department, for he believed that army officers were less prone to the corruption and ineptitude typical of civilian bureaucrats at the Department of the Interior. Grant did not surrender this conviction when he took up residence in the White House; rather, he reserved the overwhelming number of Indian agency appointments for military officers, giving only a few such positions to Quaker missionaries. Sherman and especially Sheridan were even more adamant than the president about transfer; Sheridan testified before Congress that the use of army personnel in these roles would save untold sums of money while also protecting native peoples from the vicious designs of the unscrupulous Indian ring.66

  The generals and their backers, however, faced stiff opposition from the Department of the Interior. Among the most outspoken of their opponents was Nathaniel Taylor, the commissioner of Indian affairs and also the chairman of the Peace Commission, an eight-member body established by Congress in July 1867 to treat with native peoples in the hopes of averting additional bloodshed on the Plains. Writing for the commission in January 1868, Taylor enumerated eleven key reasons why the Interior Department should retain control of Indian affairs, including the inability of the War Department to handle such vast administrative responsibilities and the inherent dangers to civil liberty posed by the maintenance of a large standing army. The crux of Taylor’s opposition, however, was the glaring contradiction between promoting peace with native peoples while simultaneously investing the War Department with total authority over them.67

  Advocates of transfer were undeterred by these arguments or the fact that they had failed to achieve their goal of military oversight of Indian affairs on several previous occasions in the postbellum period. One such failed attempt in 1867 had even been spearheaded in the Senate by John Sherman of Ohio, the general’s younger brother, but to no avail. And yet by decade’s end the ground seemed to have shifted in favor of the War Department, in large part because of renewed native-white hostilities on the southern Plains in the summer and fall of 1868. That violence led to Sheridan’s winter campaign and also caused some members of the Peace Commission to reconsider the wisdom of extending the olive branch to recalcitrant Indian bands.

  Thus supporters of transfer pushed the issue vigorously as an amendment to the army appropriations bill before the House of Representatives in the early months of 1870. Surely, they thought, with Grant in office its passage was guaranteed. The partisan Army and Navy Journal, so often disappointed in the outcome of previous debates on the issue, expressed optimism in late February that victory was finally at hand, and that with the transfer Indian affairs would at last be overseen by “a set of officers not only respected for their integrity and professional honor, but necessarily subjected to responsibility and accountability, such as the civil service never can furnish.”68

  Such hopefulness proved unfounded. The conflagration over the Piegan affair consumed the proposed legislation as congressmen opposed to the transfer used the scandal to cudgel the military’s supporters. Few were more enthusiastic in this regard than Indiana’s Daniel Voorhees, “the tall sycamore of the Wabash,” who, after hearing the contents of Vincent Colyer’s letter, rose before the chamber and declared in regard to Baker’s strike, “It cannot be justified here or before the country; it cannot be justified before the civilization of the age, or in the sight of God or man. … I shall not vote for one dollar of an appropriation that upholds such a system of warfare as the indiscriminate massacre of all ages and both sexes, the innocent as well as the guilty.”69

  In the face of such passionate opposition, even the bill’s sponsor, John Logan of Illinois, disavowed the transfer amendment. The New York Times explained that “after [Logan] had read the account of the Piegan massacre his blood ran cold in his veins, and he wanted to ask the Committee to strike out that section [regarding transfer] and let the Indian Bureau remain where it is, and the Committee had agreed to that.”70 On 26 March, one month to the day after it had written with such hope about War Department control of Indian affairs, the Army and Navy Journal bemoaned the timing of the news from Montana and its calamitous effect, saying of the transfer proposal that “it seems to have been stricken out by general consent, and it had no friends to say a word for it.”71

  Nevertheless, the transfer movement survived throughout the 1870s, being raised periodically by military supporters in Congress but failing on each occasion and dying out altogether before the end of the decade. By that time even some of its most ardent proponents, like the representative and future president James A. Garfield of Ohio, conceded that sweeping reforms in the Indian Bureau had made the switch unnecessary. But as Garfield had also acknowledged several years earlier on the House floor, victory on the transfer issue was within his grasp in the spring of 1870, but “while we were expecting it to become a law, the Piegan massacre occurred which shocked the sensibilities of the whole nation … and it of course failed to become a law.”72

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the contretemps over the transfer issue was merely the opening act in a larger drama concerning the Marias massacre. And if the actors in the first scene were politicians and bureaucrats, succeeding them on the national stage were humanitarians and reformers, many of them battle-tested veterans of the abolitionist cause. To the extreme vexation of Sheridan and Sherman, they were cast once again as the fools.

  It stood to reason that, with the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, some antislavery activists would turn their attention to the plight of native peoples.73 After all, the mistreatment of Indians had long been an abolitionist concern, dating at least to the anguished debates over Indian removal during the 1820s and 1830s. Indeed, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, a young William Lloyd Garrison inveighed against Old Hickory’s forced deportation of the Cherokees and the Creeks, among others, likening their ejection from the South to the proposed schemes for African colonization.74 The gaunt-faced Garrison accordingly linked the suffering of native peoples and the enslaved in the nameplate of his newspaper, the Liberator, which depicted Indian treaties crushed underfoot by slave auctioneers.75

  Perhaps the leading figure from the abolitionist movement to take up the Indian cause was Lydia Maria Child.76 Born in Massachusetts in 1802 and probably best remembered for her Thanksgiving song “Over the River and through the Wood,” the prim and serious Child played such crucial roles in various nineteenth-century reform efforts, from antislavery to women’s suffrage, that Garrison christened her “the first woman in the republic.” While some of her earliest published work in the 1820s dealt with the injustices heaped upon native peoples by white Americans, for most of the antebellum period Child dedicated her energies to the eradication of human bondage, even serving as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard from 1841 to 1843.77

  When Child, by then in her sixties, returned to the Indian question in the aftermath of the Civil War, she did so in typically provocative fashion. Her April 1868 essay “An Appeal for the Indians,” written in response to the report of the Peace Commission published earlier that year, outlined a gradual plan for native acculturation that, in time, would allow Indians to fully assimilate into mainstream American society. But Child devoted most of her commentary to a blistering indictment of federal Indian policy, placing the preponderance of blame for the Indian Wars on the shoulders of the U.S. government and its white citizens, who she argued were the true barbarians.78

  Whatever its strident tone, “An Appeal for the Indians” was positively temperate by comparison with Child’s full-scale literary assault on the military establishment in the wake of the Piegan massacre. Published in the Standard in May 1870, “The Indians” read more like a sermon than a piece of journalism, invoking the infamous British slaughter of some thirty-eight Scottish Highlanders at Glencoe in 1692, which—like Baker’s attack on the Marias—caused the deaths of women and children from exposure after they were turned out of their homes.
Insisting that unvarnished racism had animated the butchery in Montana, Child wrote, “Shame on General Sheridan for perpetrating such outrages on a people because they were poor, and weak, and despised! Shame on General Sherman for sanctioning it! They have tarnished their laurels and disgraced the epaulets they wear.”79

  Child’s was hardly the lone humanitarian voice on the matter. At an 18 May 1870 meeting of the U.S. Indian Commission (which, despite the name, was a private group established in 1868 by the New York philanthropist Peter Cooper), a letter from the prominent Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips was read to the audience. In his letter Phillips insisted that “[e]very American ought to blush at this nation’s treatment of the Indians” and that “[t]he hands of Sheridan are foul with Indian blood, shed by assassins who acted under his orders and received his approval.” Not to be outdone, William Lloyd Garrison, Phillips’s fellow abolitionist and sometime adversary, sent his own note, maintaining that if the humanitarian response “be loud, the language explicit, the action uncompromising … these [protests] will not be in vain.”80

  For their part, the embattled generals pushed back strenuously against their detractors. In a lengthy public missive to Sherman, Sheridan tried to explain away the deaths of Piegan noncombatants with a Civil War analogy: “Did we cease to throw shells into Vicksburg or Atlanta because women or children were there?” And yet by the end of the note Little Phil seemed resigned to his fate, explaining that with the onrushing tide of white settlers, Indians—for the safety of both parties—had to move to reservations and remain there, by force of arms if necessary.81 Sherman, meanwhile, took his critics head-on, in a letter to the same meeting of the U.S. Indian Commission where the messages from Phillips and Garrison had been read. While praising the good intentions of those gathered in New York, the wizened general patiently explained that “the Indian question is a practical one, and not one of mere feeling,” and that if the humanitarians truly wished to appreciate the complexities of the situation, he would be happy to meet them “where the Indians are,” in Kansas, Wyoming, or Dakota Territory.82

  In the end, though, in the battle for public opinion it was the frail and bespectacled agitator who prevailed over the grim-visaged warrior. The unyielding “remonstrances” urged by Garrison took their toll during the spring and summer of 1870; they led eventually to a defeat far more painful than the orphaning of the transfer amendment for Sherman and his military brethren. The final version of the House army appropriations bill signed into law on 15 July 1870 forbade officers from holding positions in the civil service, thus ending the practice of installing soldiers as Indian agents.83 Not only did this prohibition accelerate the military’s lessening influence over native affairs, but it also deprived the army of much-needed patronage jobs, which now went exclusively to Christian missionaries. Thus began a new era of sweeping Indian reform, one grounded in religious education and moral suasion, an approach first proposed in 1864 by none other than Alfred Sully.

  Ironically, the new legislation cost Sully and William Pease—both labeled as whistle-blowers—their jobs in Montana, and having incurred the hatred of their superior officers they saw their military careers stall abruptly. Lieutenant Pease, whose report of the massacre ignited the scandal in the East, soon found himself barred by Colonel de Trobriand from making social calls to Fort Shaw, and threatened with forced ejection if he returned to the post on anything other than official business.84 In December, Pease rejoined his infantry regiment, but would not receive a promotion to captain for thirteen years, the rank at which he retired in 1887. Sully, whom Sherman accused to Sheridan of “doing an unofficerlike and wrong act” by transmitting Pease’s account to Washington, may have suffered even more, for he bounced from one assignment to the next and grew more bitter with each new posting, before dying in Washington Territory in April 1879, at the age of fifty-seven.85

  Fittingly, perhaps, it was Eugene Baker who fell the hardest. Despite Sheridan’s unwavering support throughout the spring and summer of 1870, Piegan Baker, as the major came to be known, was unable to recapture even a glint of the promise he had shown during the Civil War. Though he remained a beloved figure among white Montanans, his bonhomie could not mask an ineluctable slide into alcoholism. In fact, his drinking nearly cost the lives of dozens of men under his command when, during a Sioux ambush in eastern Montana in the summer of 1872, Baker was so drunk that he was “inclined to treat the whole alarm as a groundless fright.” Only the quick thinking of his subordinates averted disaster.86 Thereafter Baker drifted about the northern Plains on various assignments, interrupted by frequent sick leaves (characterized on one occasion as a “disorder of [the] spleen and liver, splenic pain and jaundice”—sure signs of alcoholism) and at least one court-martial. By the time he died “of chronic gastritis,” in December 1884 at Fort Walla Walla, he had exhausted the patience of the army: the government contributed $150 for his casket but refused to pay the cost of transporting his body for burial on the unceremonious return voyage from the Pacific Northwest to upstate New York.87

  De-tan-a-ma-ka

  On a sunny afternoon in June 1926, Horace Clarke, then seventy-seven, eased into a chair at his home in East Glacier Park to recount the story of his life.88 His interviewer that day was Martha Plassmann, an old friend from an established Montana family who, having outlived two husbands, had devoted her later years to socialist causes and especially to historical writing. Since Clarke was among the most knowledgeable authorities on the state’s colorful frontier past, Plassmann had eagerly traveled the 140 miles from her home in Great Falls in order to chat with him, and they spent several hours talking in Clarke’s comfortable, book-lined study.

  Clarke—whom Plassmann described for her readers as “a small man with keen black eyes and hair,” with a dark complexion “indicative of his Indian blood” and features resembling those of the Japanese—was in a fine mood on this occasion, springing to his feet to emphasize key points in his story and revealing admirable sharpness of mind for a man approaching eighty.89 Plassmann must have struggled to keep up, as Clarke veered from one subject to the next and sprinkled his ramblings with provocative observations. For instance, he explained that the Blackfeet were the “cleanest” of all native peoples but confessed that he harbored deep skepticism of the typical mixed-blood (though one himself), who he felt relied too heavily on government handouts. He told Plassmann the meaning, if not the provenance, of his Indian name, De-tan-a-ma-ka, which translated as “the Man Who Stands Alone with His Gun.” And he mentioned that an official in the Department of War had once asked his sister Helen to write a history of the state, but she had demurred, explaining that if “she confined herself to actual facts they would not be digestible.”90

  During the interview, however, Clarke was more reticent about the two central incidents in his life: his father’s murder and the military campaign that followed. (Plassmann, on the other hand, stressed precisely this pair of events in the cover letter to her publisher pitching the resulting article.)91 Still, Clarke did not sidestep the topics altogether. Sandwiched between his description of a real estate deal and memories of a visit to Canada was a strange and haunting story about a trip he had made to Seattle years before. While en route via steamboat, Clarke became incapacitated by seasickness. He refused medical attention, but his condition worsened after he disembarked, so that he began to hallucinate as he walked the city’s crowded streets. In this delusional state he imagined a meeting with a Piegan named Fog Eater, whose jaw had been shot away during the Marias Massacre. As Clarke told Plassmann, the grinning Indian said to him, “You fool. Go back home.” And so after his recovery, Clarke quickly returned to Montana.92

  Horace Clarke, ca. 1910s. Though nearly killed the night of his father’s murder, Horace Clarke survived to avenge him at the Marias in 1870, accompanied by his younger brother, Nathan. Horace lived into his eighties and served often as a mediator between the Piegans and federal officials. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.
/>   His unsettling encounter, dreamlike as it was, provides a neat allegory for his enduring relationship to the Baker Massacre. Clarke spent most of his adult life pushing memories of the slaughter to the very margins of his conscience, hoping to downplay or even forget the details of that terrible day. This approach worked well for nearly half a century, until the ghosts of January 1870 caught up with him and forced their way into his consciousness in the twilight of his life.

  JOE KIPP, BY contrast, would have been happy with shadowy visits from the occasional phantasm; instead, he lived forever in the harsh daylight of the massacre’s aftermath, battered by his own guilt and the Piegans’ scorn. Many Blackfeet held Kipp accountable for the deaths of their loved ones as well as for the inauguration of a desolate epoch for the Blackfeet, one marked by hunger, illness, and privation. Stunned that any foe would strike so viciously against the sick and frail in the dead of winter, Piegan chiefs abandoned all plans for retaliation within weeks of the slaughter and pressed for peace with the U.S. government through Jesuit intermediaries.93 The shift in the natives’ fortunes were so stark thereafter that on the tenth anniversary of Baker’s campaign, a Montana writer observed, “Ever since January 1870, the Blackfeet tribes … have been peaceable and quiet, and it has been safe to travel all over their country.”94 In other words, the carnage at the Big Bend had secured the white conquest of the northwestern Plains. And for the Piegans, Joe Kipp—more than anyone except Baker himself—became the reification of all blame for the massacre.

  Historical marker, Fort Shaw, 2007. Although the Marias Massacre belongs in any discussion of the worst atrocities committed by American military forces against native peoples, it is largely forgotten today. Note that it does not merit even a passing mention on this placard commemorating Fort Shaw, the staging ground for the expedition against the Piegans in 1870. Photograph by the author.