An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

EIGHT

"INDIAN COUNTRY"

Buffa lo were dark rich clouds moving upon the rolling hills

and plains of America. And then the 'flashing steel came

upon bone and -flesh.

-Simon J. Ortiz, fr om Sand Creek

The US Army on the eve of the Civil War was divided into seven
departments-a structure designed by John C. Calhoun during the
Monroe administration. By 186 0, six of the seven departments,
comprising 183 companies, were stationed west of the Mississippi,
a colonial army fighting the Indigenous occupants of the land. In
much of the western lands, the army was the primary US govern­
ment institution; the military roots to institutional development
run deep.
President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861, two
months after the South had seceded from the union. In April, the
Confederate States of America (CSA) seized the army base at Fort
Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina. Of more than a thousand
US Army officers, 286 left to serve the CSA, half of them being West
Point graduates, most of them Indian fighters, including Robert E.
Lee. Three of the seven army department commanders took leader­
ship of the Confederate Army. Based on demographics alone, the
South had little chance of winning, so it is all the more remarkable
that it persisted against the Union for more than four years. The
186 0 population of the United States was nearly thirty-two mil­
lion, with twenty-three million in the twenty-two northern states,
and about nine million in the eleven southern states. More than a
third of the nine million Southerners were enslaved people of Af­
rican heritage. Within the CSA, 76 percent of settlers owned no

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