Indian Wars 437more important—to enable the gov-
ernment to negotiate separately with
each tribe. It was the classic strategy of
divide and conquer.
Although it made a mockery of
diplomacy to treat Indian tribes as
though they were European powers,
the United States maintained that each
tribe was a sovereign nation, to be
dealt with as an equal in solemn
treaties. Both sides knew that this was
not the case. When Indians agreed to
meet in council, they were tacitly
admitting defeat. They seldom drove
hard bargains or broke off negotia-
tions. Moreover, tribal chiefs had only
limited power; young braves frequently
refused to respect agreements made by
their elders.Indian Wars
The government showed little interest in honoring
agreements with Indians. No sooner had the Kansas-
Nebraska bill become law than the Kansas, Omaha,
Pawnee, and Yankton Sioux tribes began to feel
pressure for further concessions of territory. A gold
rush into Colorado in 1859 sent thousands of
greedy prospectors across the plains to drive the
Cheyenne and Arapaho from land guaranteed them
in 1851. By 1860 most of Kansas and Nebraska had
been cleared. Other trouble developed in the Sioux
country. Thus it happened that in 1862, after federal
troops had been pulled out of the West for service
against the Confederacy, most of the Plains Indians
rose up against the whites. For five years intermit-
tent but bloody clashes kept the entire area in a state
of alarm.
This was guerrilla warfare, with all its horror and
treachery. In 1864 a party of Colorado militia under
the command of Colonel J. M. Chivington fell on an
unsuspecting Cheyenne community at Sand Creek
and killed several hundred Indians. A white observer
described the scene: “They were scalped, their brains
knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open
women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the
head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated
their bodies in every sense of the word.” General
Nelson A. Miles called this “Chivington massacre”
the “foulest and most unjustifiable crime in the annals
of America.”
In turn the Indians slaughtered dozens of isolated
white families, ambushed small parties, and fought
many successful skirmishes against troops and militia.
They achieved their most notable triumph in December
1866, when the Oglala Sioux, under their great chiefIn Charles Russell’s Trail of the Iron Horse(1910) the steel rails stretch nearly to the sun, while
wispy brushstrokes depict the Indians almost as ghosts.
possessions and increase the size of their tepees, for
horses could drag heavy loads heaped on A-shaped
frames (called travoisby the French), whereas earlier
Indians had only dogs to depend on as pack animals.
The frames of the travois, when disassembled, served
as poles for tepees. The Indians also adopted modern
weapons: the cavalry sword, which they particularly
admired, and the rifle. Both added to their effective-
ness as hunters and fighters. However, like the
whites’ liquor and diseases, horses and guns caused
problems. The buffalo herds began to diminish, and
warfare became bloodier and more frequent.
After the start of the gold rush the need to link the
East with California meant that the tribes were pushed
aside. Deliberately the government in Washington pre-
pared the way. In 1851 Thomas Fitzpatrick—an expe-
rienced mountain man, a founder of the Rocky
Mountain Fur Company, scout for the first large group
of settlers to Oregon in 1841 and for American sol-
diers in California during the Mexican War, and now
an Indian agent—summoned a great “council” of the
tribes. About 10,000 Indians, representing nearly all
the plains tribes, gathered that September at Horse
Creek, thirty-seven miles east of Fort Laramie, in what
is now Wyoming.
The Indians respected Fitzpatrick, who had
recently married a woman who was half-Indian. In
the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 he persuaded each
tribe to accept definite limits to its hunting grounds.
For example, the Sioux nations were to stay north of
the Platte River, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho were
to confine themselves to the Colorado foothills. In
return the Indians were promised gifts and annual
payments. This policy, known as “concentration,” was
designed to cut down on intertribal warfare and—far