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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.
* * *
(IMG) 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.
(IMG) 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."
(IMG) 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.
(IMG) 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.
(IMG) 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)
(IMG) The Black Hills (Bryan Schutmaat)
(IMG) 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."
(IMG) 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.
(IMG) 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.
(IMG) Wagon Train Stereograph (William H. Illingworth)
(IMG) Rock Formation Stereograph (William H. Illingworth)
(IMG) Custer State Park (Bryan Schutmaat)
(IMG) Sage Creek Road (Bryan Schutmaat)
(IMG) Pine Ridge Reservation (Bryan Schutmaat)
(HTM) From: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ulysses-grant-launched-illegal-war-plains-indians-180960787/
* * *
# Other Local History
(DIR) Colonization of the Rogue Valley by Petey Pinecone
(DIR) History of the Rogue River National Forest by Jeffrey Lalande
(DIR) The Returner by John Medicine Horse Kelly
tags: article,history,native-american,oregon
# Tags
(DIR) article
(DIR) history
(DIR) native-american
(DIR) oregon