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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2017
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“The Earth is Weeping” by Peter Cozzens is a fascinating and evenhanded history of the Indian Wars that marred the American West from 1862 to 1891.
The Plains Indian Wars still haunt the West
By MATT WINTERS
EO Media Group
W riter’s
N otebook
L
ike hungry little mountain bluebirds
on the first day of grasshopper sea-
son, we were jumping with joyous
energy as our teacher soothed us into our
seats. It was a day to cherish: Our “gradu-
ation” from third grade, marking a success-
ful end to primary school for our brave band
of 9-year-olds. No matter what else hap-
pened, we were told to bank this achieve-
ment, remembering it as we walked the long
path ahead.
There ought to be grade-school reunions.
It would be such an honor to travel back to
Wyoming Indian Elementary School at the
fast-approaching half-century mark of that
bright spring day to embrace and laugh with
my classmates of 1967. What tall tales we
would trade about our adventures in the
world! I hope fate has been good to us all
— even to their big brothers who teased me
as a stick-thin, pasty-faced kid with ear-flap
hats. I would have teased me, too.
Where we’re born and the lives we lead
result from endless cross-rippling deci-
sions and interactions. Since parts of my
family began arriving in the West in 1847,
our connections with tribal people per-
haps run deeper than average. But my early
life on the Wind River Indian Reservation
all comes down to one man, Great-great-
grandpa Ed Alton. He left the U.S. Army
Infantry to set up a horse ranch and saloon
on the reservation’s boundary in 1878, his
red brick house a 10-minute bike ride from
my boyhood home.
Alton served as first sergeant in Capt.
Arthur MacArthur’s Company, 36th Infan-
try Regiment, from 1866 to 1869. His spurs
are a paperweight in my office. I’ve often
wondered what that experience was like
and whether he played any interesting or
violent part in the Plains Indian Wars. That
curiosity prompted reading historian Peter
Cozzens’ illuminating 2016 “The Earth is
Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars
for the American West.”
Mom sternly discouraged us from play-
ing “Cowboys and Indians.” We could be
a sheriff’s posse and train robbers, but she
emphatically believed it was in bad taste to
even pretend to re-fight old conflicts with
our Shoshoni and Northern Arapaho neigh-
bors. We had good reason to tread softly.
Our family history has many intersec-
tions with America’s Indian wars, includ-
ing John Winter’s military service in 1675-
76, defending Massachusetts Bay Colony
during an uprising by Narragansett Indi-
ans and allies. In 1758, at the height of the
French and Indian War, another ancestor
was killed by Indians in western Virginia,
his widow and children held captive until
1764. The 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in
eastern Colorado was partly stoked by the
murder of my cousin Nathan Ward Hungate
and his wife and young daughters, perhaps
by a wrathful war party of Cheyennes and
Northern Arapahos.
Crushing the Indians
They had plenty of reasons to be angry.
“The object of the whites was to crush
the Indians down to nothing. I will not take
the [treaty] paper with me. It is all lies,”
Oglala Chief Red Cloud said in Washing-
ton, D.C. in 1869 near the end of negotia-
tions with President Ulysses Grant.
“Believing the Great Father had cheated
them yet again, that night in their hotel sev-
eral of the Oglalas and Brulés contemplated
suicide,” Cozzens wrote.
Red Cloud eventually cajoled most of
his tribe, along with many Northern Chey-
ennes and Northern Arapahos, to settle near
MATT WINTERS COLLECTION
Even though he was embroiled in the Indian Wars, Chief Red Cloud was something
of a peacemaker and a cultural icon — enough so that his name and image were
used for Alaska salmon canned for an Ohio grocery store in about 1900.
1867 MacArthur was in Wyoming Territory.
His company was policing unruly frontier
mining towns, patrolling the railroad and
offering protection to emigrants heading
down the Oregon Trail.”
This was depicted in AMC’s melodra-
matic TV series “Hell on Wheels,” but for
actual facts I’ll have to someday see if the
National Archives contains MacArthur’s
dispatches.
Overall 36th Infantry commander Col.
John Gibbon remained in that role long
after railroad completion. He showed up a
little too late to help or die with Custer at
the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, and
botched an attack on Chief Joseph’s fleeing
Nez Perce in 1877.
Gibbon and plenty of others in the Army
empathized with the Indians, recogniz-
ing that they were resisting technologically
advanced invaders in whatever ways they
could. Others were poisonously racist. Gen.
Phil Sheridan, for instance, “hanged war-
riors randomly during an Indian uprising
in Oregon for the ‘salutary effect’ it would
have on fellow tribesmen.” The West’s
unbelievably large bison herds were slaugh-
tered for quick profits and to starve Indi-
ans onto reservations. Cozzens cites one
example of 4,373,730 bison hides shipped
east from Fort Dodge, Kansas, in just one
three-year period in the 1870s. The policy
worked. The Indians starved, living out a
nightmare of “apocalyptic dread. For the
Plains Indian, extermination of the buffalo
meant death — both physical and spiritual,”
Cozzens wrote.
Bad times are still here
MATT WINTERS COLLECTION
An appointment to first sergeant in 1866 led to three years “policing unruly frontier
mining towns, patrolling the railroad and offering protection to emigrants heading
down the Oregon Trail.”
Fort Laramie in the forlorn hope of a last-
ing peace. Other Oglalas and Lakotas, led
by Crazy Horse, had no interest in accom-
modation: “they intended to live the tradi-
tional nomadic life or perish in the attempt.”
Naive Eastern sympathy for the plight
of American Indians led some 19th cen-
tury cynics to refer to Indians as “Lo” —
a sarcastic play on the line “Lo! the Poor
Indian!” in Alexander Pope’s “An Essay
on Man.” However, despite his title’s hint
at a sob story, Cozzens’ book is a master-
work of objectivity and thorough research.
Award-winning author of 16 volumes on
the Civil War and its echoes in the West,
Cozzens uses unfamiliar original sources
to describe horrors and heroism on an enor-
mous scale — an American Iliad.
This was a storm of villainy and nobility
on all sides in the midst of no-mercy terror-
ism between and even within tribes. Whites
circled and lunged and blundered through
murderous Indian feuds and the tribes’ futile
attempts at civil defense against encroach-
ing settlers. Whites were by turns heartless
aggressors, blameless victims, profiteers,
and well-intentioned but often pathetically
ineffectual helpers.
“Grand plans descended into confusion
and cross purposes, alliances and loyal-
ties shifted momentarily, and soldiers and
warriors and their families spent most of
that quarter-century tired, hungry, discour-
aged, trying just to survive the next drought
or winter… No wonder their earth wept,”
reviewer William C. Davis wrote about this
landmark account of what another writer
calls “America’s actual longest and most
tragic war.”
Hell on wheels
Neither Alton nor his Capt. MacArthur
are mentioned in Cozzens’ book. MacAr-
thur, Medal of Honor-winning father of
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and the sergeant
he described as “Faithful, true and diligent,”
spent their three-year enlistment safeguard-
ing the transcontinental railroad project.
Starting at Fort Kearney, Nebraska Terri-
tory, “The regiment’s main duty would be
to protect the Union Pacific as the iron road
snaked westward,” according to historian
Geoffrey Perret. “As the railroad advanced,
so did the 36th Infantry. By the summer of
Essential reading for all Americans,
“The Earth is Weeping” is a sad book, but
one that inspires by revealing more of the
truth about what Indians endured — regard-
less of whether some had it coming. Its les-
sons are a rebuttal to all who blame “whiny
Indians” for opposing the Dakota Access
Pipeline.
In a brilliant story last month, The New
York Times Magazine told of how the
Standing Rock protest was inspired by a
tribal youth group’s anti-suicide efforts.
(See tinyurl.com/NYT-Lakota-Youth.) It
is loaded with echoes of the Indian Wars
and is just the latest validation of William
Faulkner’s most-famous quote, “The past is
never dead. It’s not even past.”
“Suicide is so common on the reserva-
tion that Lakota youth don’t bother to say
‘committed suicide’ or ‘attempted suicide.’
They just say ‘attempted’ or ‘completed,’”
reporter Saul Elbeain said. In the summer
of 2015, 30 kids from the Cheyenne River
Reservation attempted and eight completed.
Pine Ridge seems likely to become
another defeat for the Lakota, other Indi-
ans and their supporters. Winning against
an already-permitted corporate pipeline was
always going to be a long shot and became
a nearly impossible one on Election Day
2016. But good for them for trying.
As for my classmates in the Wyoming
Indian Primary School Class of 1967, I
wonder just how many are alive for my
dreamed-about reunion. Nearly a decade
ago I was told all the boys were dead. I pray
that isn’t true. But if it is, may their grand-
children live and endure and find paths back
to power and meaning.
Matt Winters is editor and publisher
of the Chinook Observer and Coast River
Business Journal. He lives in Ilwaco.