Our Hearts Fell to the Ground - Springer978-1-137-07646-5/1.pdf · Our Hearts Fell to the Ground Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost Edited with an Introduction by Colin

THE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISTORY AND CULTURE

Our Hearts Fell to the Ground

Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost

Edited with an Introduction by

Colin G. Calloway Dartmouth College

Palgrave Macmillan

For Marcia who came to Wyoming,/or Graeme who liked thefast wind, and for Megan, who slept in her crib beside me while I thought about this book.

For Bedford Books President and Publisher: Charles H. Christensen General Manager and Associate Publisher: Joan E. Feinberg Associate History Editor: Richard Keaveny Managing Editor: Elizabeth M. Schaaf Production Editor: Heidi L. Hood ProductionAssistant: Christina Smith Copyeditor: Jane M. Zanichkowsky Indexer: Steve Csipke Text Design: C1aire Seng-Niemoeller Cover Design: Hannus Design Associates Cover Art: William Cary (1840--1922) The Fire Canoe, Fort Berthold, ca. 1870 (0136.1834). Oil on canvas. From the Collection of Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-83531 Copyright © 1996 by BEDFORD BOOKS of St Martin's Press

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996978-0-312-16050-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, record­ing, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica.

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For information, write: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Editorial Offices: Bedford Books of St Martin's Press, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116

ISBN 978-1-349-61348-9 ISBN 978-1-137-07646-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-07646-5

Acknowledgments

Arapooish, "Speech on Crow Country." From The Adventures of Captain Bonneville U.S.A. in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West, by Washington Irving, edited by Edgeley W. Todd. New edition copyright © 1961, 1986 by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Bear Head, "Account of the Massacre on the Marias." From Blackfeet and Buffalo: Memories of Life Among the Indians, by James Willard Schulz (Apikuni). Copyright © 1962 by the University of Oklahoma Press.

J erome Big Eagle, "ASioux Story ofthe War, ca. 1894." From Collections ofthe Minnesota Historical Society 6 (1894), pp. 382-400. Reprinted and edited in Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts ofthe Minnesota Indian War of 1862, edited by Gary Clayton Anderson and AIan R Woolworth. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988, pp. 23-27, 55-56, 237.

"Kiowa Legend." From American Indian Mythology, by Alice Marriot and Caro! K Rach!in, pp. 169-70. Copyright © 1968 by Alice Marriot and Caro! KRachlin. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Acknowledgments and copyrights are continued at the back ofthe book on pages 216-17, which constitute an extension of the copyright page. It is a violation of the law to reproduce these selections by any means whatsoever without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Foreword

The Bedford Series in History and Culture is designed so that readers can study the past as historians do.

The historian's first task is finding the evidence. Documents, letters, memoirs, interviews, pictures, movies, novels, or poems can provide facts and clues. Then the historian questions and compares the sources. There is more to do than in a courtroom, for hearsay evidence is welcome, and the historian is usually looking for answers beyond act and motive. Different views of an event may be as important as a single verdict. How a story is told may yield as much information as what it says.

Along the way the historian seeks help from other historians and perhaps from specialists in other disciplines. Finally, it is time to write, to decide on an interpretation and how to arrange the evidence for readers.

Each book in this series contains an important historical document or group of documents, each document a witness from the past and open to interpretation in different ways. The documents are combined with some element ofhistorical narrative - an introduction or a biographical essay, for example - that provides students with an analysis of the primary source material and important background information about the world in which it was produced.

Each book in the series focuses on a specific topic within a specific historical period. Each provides a basis for lively thoughtand discussion about several aspects of the topic and the historian's role. Each is short enough (and inexpensive enough) to be a reasonable one-week assign­ment in a college course. Whether as classroom or personal reading, each book in the series provides firsthand experience of the challenge - and tun - of discovering, recreating, and interpreting the past.

iii

N atalie Zemon Davis Ernest R. May

Preface

This book is designed both as a sequel to The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices /rom Early America (Bedford Books, 1994) and to stand on its own as a case study of Native American views of the changing world of the nineteenth century. The volume follows chronologically from my earlier book The World Turned Upside Down and The Cherokee Removal: A Briel History with Documents, edited by Michael Green and Theda Perdue (Bedford Books, 1995). As in The World Turned Upside Down, the selections in this volume do not tell the whole story. Rather, the episodes and statements are intended to illustrate larger trends and serve as springboards for fuBer discussion of key issues in American Indian history.

Originally, this book was intended to present Indian perspectives from throughout the trans-Mississippi West and from first contacts with Spaniards in the Southwest in the 1540s to 1900. The sheer volume of materials demanded a more limited focus. Personal interest, the richness of the visual and documentary materials from the Great Plains, and the rapidity and dramatic nature of the changes that occurred there in the nineteenth century prompted this choice. Peter Nabokov's Native Amer­ican Testimony: A Chronicle olIndian-White Relations /rom Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992 (Viking, 1991) provides an excellentcollection of Indian statements from a broader area and over a longer time span; this book concentrates on one group of peoples during a particularly crucial era of their history. Numerous anthologies and coffee table books offer native statements on aspects of the old ways of life in a timeless past; this book concentrates on how Indian people perceived and experienced massive changes in their ways of life in the wake of contact with people of European origin or ancestry.

All the people in these pages had their own names for themselves. (Sometimes, the names by which they are best known stern from an enemy's characterization.) Nevertheless, I have retained the most widely known names for the various tribes rather than bombard students with a barrage of unfamiliar terms. Likewise, I recognize the limitations - and

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vi PREFACE

to some people the offensive nature - of terms such as Indian, Native American, and white, but have employed them in situations where some collective noun is necessary and none is entirely satisfactory.

I am grateful to Charles Christen sen and the history staff at Bedford Books for their support and assistance on this project. Associate editor Richard Keaveny embraced the project with his usual enthusiasm, effi­ciency, and good humor; history intern Kate O'Sullivan provided able assistance; Heidi Hood steered the manuscript into publication; and J ane Zanichkowsky did a nice job of copyediting. I am also indebted to Gary Clayton Anderson, Peter Iverson, James P. Ronda, Michael L. Tate, and Robert M. Utley for their valuable and generous comments on the manuscript.

Colin G. Calloway

Contents

Foreword iii

Preface v

list of Illustrations xiii

Introduction: How the West Was Lost 1

The Indian Peoples of the Plains 2

The Conquest of the Plains 8

The ReselVations and the Era of Forced Acculturation 14

Native Responses and the Search for Hope 19

Voices and Visions 21

1. Lone Dog's Winter Count 31

2. Horses, Guns, and Smallpox 37

How the Blackfeet Got Horses, Guns, and Smallpox 41

Saukamappee, Memories 0/ War and Smallpox, 1787-1788 43

Howling Wolf: Trading Guns for Horses 47

"I Bring Death": The Kiowas Meet Sma11pox 50

Kiowa Legend 51

3. A Pawnee Vision of the Future 56

Sharitarish, "We Are Not Starving Yet," 1822 57

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viii CONTENTS

4. The Life and Death of Four Bears

Four Bears's Buffalo Robe 64

Four Bears KiUs a Cheyenne Chief 66

The Death Speech of Four Bears 66

Four Bears, Speech to the Arikaras and Mandans, July 30, 1837 68

5. Counting Coups and Fighting for Smvival

Account ofThree Coyotes's Expedition 72

Four Dancers, Three Coyotes Leads a Skirmish 73

Fighting for Crow Country 76

Arapooish, Speech on Crow Country 77

Two Leggings's Quest for Power 78

Two Leggings, The Dream and Reality 01 a Raid 79

A Woman's View ofWar 84

Pretty Shield, "Like Talking to Winter-Winds" 85

''The Only Way Open to Us" 85

Plenty Coups, On Alliance with the United States 86

61

71

6. The Agony and Anger of the Eastern Sioux 89

Big Eagle's Account of the Great Sioux Uprising 90

J erome Big Eagle, A Sioux Story 01 the War, ca. 1894 91

The Complaints of Strike the Ree, Medicine Cow, and Passing Hail 96

Strike the Ree, Medicine Cow, and Passing Hail, Speeches to the Special Joint Committee on the Condition olthe Indian Tribes, 1865 97

7. Massacres N orth and South

Account of Sand Creek 102

102

CONTENTS ix

Little Bear, The Sand Creek Massacre, 1864 104

The Massacre on the Marias (1870) 105

Bear Head, Account olthe Massacre'on the Marias 108

8. Talking to the Peace Commissioners: The Treaty of Medicine Lodge, 1867 111

''When We Settle Down We Grow Pale and Die." 113

Satanta, Speech at the Treaty 01 Medicine Lodge 114

"I Want to Live and Die as 1 Was Brought Up." 115

Ten Bears, Speech at the Treaty 01 Medicine Lodge 116

''Teach Us the Road to Travel." 116

Satank, Speech at the Treaty 01 Medicine Lodge 117

9. The Slaughter of the Buffalo 121

First Hide Hunters 125

Luther Standing Bear, "The Plains Were Covered with Dead Bison. " 125

The End of the Buffalo Road 126

earl Sweezy, On Taking "the New Road" 127

''War Between the Buffalo and the White Men" 128

Old Lady Horse, The Last Buffalo Herd 129

''They Stared at the Plains, as though Dreaming." 130

Pretty ShieId, When the Buffalo Went Away 130

10. The Battle on the Greasy Grass, 1876 133

Sioux Signs and Arikara Premonitions 135

Red Star, Reading the Sioux Signs 136

Repelling Reno 137

x CONTENTS

W ooden Leg, A Cheyenne Account 01 the Battle 137

Red Horse: Pictorial Record of the Battle 140

"The Soldiers Were All Rubbed Out." 144

Iron Hawk, Kilting Custer's Men 144

"The Women and Children Cried." 146

Mrs. Spotted Horn BuH, A View Irom the Viltage 146

11. The End of Freedom 150

''We Are Melting Like Snow on the Hillside." 153

Red Cloud, Speech to the Secretary 01 the Interior, 1870 154

An Old Woman's Dream 155

Buffalo Bird W oman, Recalting the Old Days 156

"I Just Listened, Said Nothing, and Did Nothing." 156

W ooden Leg, Serving as judge 157

Leaming to Like Wohaw 159

Carl Sweezy, Learning the White Man's Ways 160

12. Attending the White Man's Schools 168

Early Days at Carlisle 171

Luther Standing Bear, Lzfe at Boarding School, 1879 172

Wohawin Two Worlds 178

13. The Life and Death of Sitting Bull

Scenes from a Warrior's Life 183

Sitting Bull's Surrender Song 187

"It Is Your Own Doing That 1 Am Here." Sitting BuH, Report to the Senate Committee, 1883

"Lieut. Bullhead Fired into Sitting Bull."

Lone Man, The Death 01 Sitting Bult, 1890 191

187

189

191

182

CONTENTS xi

14. Killing the Dream 196

The Messiah's Letter 197

W ovoka, Message to the Cheyennes and the Arapahos, ca. 1890 198

"Something Terrible Happened." 199

Black Elk, Massacre at Wounded Knee, 1890 200

Epilogue 205

APPENDICES

Chronology of How the West Was Lost 209

Questions for Consideration 211

Selected Bibliography 213

Index 218

Illustrations

1. The Indian Peoples of the Great Plains in the Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century, Showing NeighboringTribes Mentioned in the Text (map) 4

2. A Great Battle 10-11

3. Lone Dog's Buffalo Robe 32

4. The Diffusion of Horses and Guns onto the Great Plains (map) 39

5. Trading Guns for Horses 48

6. The Smallpox Winter 50

7. Four Bears, as Painted by Karl Bodmer in 1834 63

8. Four Bears's Buffalo Robe 65

9. Four Bears's Drawing Depicting His Killing of a Cheyenne Chief 67

10. Crow Indians Pursue Sioux in a Running Battle 83

11. Hide Painting ofthe Massacre on the Marias (ca. 1930) 107

12. Council with Army Officers 113 13. Buffalo Hunting in the Old Days by Howling W olt 124

14. Seizing a Soldier' s Gun at the Battle of the Little Big Horn 139

15. The Indian Village in the Valley of the Little Big Horn 141 16. Soldiers Charging the Indian Village 141

17. Repulsing the Attack, as Indicated by the Cavalry Being Forced Back over Their Own Hoofprints 142

18. The Sioux Fighting Custer's Command 142 19. The Dead Soldiers and Indians 143

20. The Indians Leaving the Battlefield as They Hear that Relief Columns of Infantry Are Approaching 143

xiii

xiv ILLUSTRATIONS

21. Plains Indian Reservations, ca. 1889 (map) 151

22. Kiowa Husbands and Wives Going to a Dance 152

23. D.S. Indian Agent and Chief of Police Take a Child to School 170

24. W ohaw' s Self-Portrait 180

25. Sitting Bull's Drawings of Scenes from His Life as a Warrior (1870) 184-185

26. Sitting Bull 188

27. The Ghost Dance 197