The Dying Grass, page 146
From the East to the West it had now been done, and the admission of Oklahoma was our crowning ritual; together we had accomplished the long miracle of Indian subjection—all of us:
Crook in his tilted slouch hat, with his wrinkled coat pulled right up around his whiskers,
living light and striking hard, leaving his rides, raids and massacres to be followed up by columns, forts, towns and everything else that can be carried within the narrow white arches of Army wagons
and Custer, who once said: If I were an Indian, I often think that I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation . . .
then Gibbon, Miles and even poor Sturgis,
their Indian scouts like well-trained setters ranging and beating the ground,
not to mention our boys in blue,
dropping down on their knees to aim their Spencer carbines
then their Sharpses, and Springfields
(for the Philippines they shouldered great Krags, whose roar approached that of Shore Crossing’s buffalo gun)
so that buffalo could be magicked into mules, sulkies, vanners, expressers, bussers, drafts, thoroughbreds and even French coach horses
while we transformed Indians into souvenirs:
M. E. TAYLOR,
DEALER IN
Hides. Pelts. Furs. Tallow.
Ginseng and Indian Relics,
Furs a speciality in season.
Some of our American dreams were white with black blotches like Holstein cows; but we also established on our new landscapes the brownish-orange white-islanded coats of Guernsey dairy cows,
and then cities,
always craving more and more,
so that just as we slice away strips and stripes from a rawhide, so we trimmed down the reservations,
correcting treaties until each ranging Indian nation was as long gone as a melodeon
(moonlight on our sleeping America, Indian ghosts silently leaving her forever)
—preparing the way, uplifting the trumpets
—here comes the general!—
so that now, in Panama, Hawaii, Grenada or Iraq, our grand old American dream may again unroll itself in a still more perfect array, exactly as a column of march straightens itself out upon leaving its old bivouac.
FURTHER HISTORY OF AMERICA’S INDIANS
(1902)
Indian warfare is horrid; but Indian massacres, outrages and brutality, and Indian rule, which is war, is a thousand times worse.
O. O. HOWARD, Brigadier General, U.S. Army (1881)
Notwithstanding all that has been said about the progress the Government is making in civilizing the Indians, explains a veteran employee at the Indian Office, the full blooded Indian of to-day is right where he was one hundred years ago . . . Our experience has been that the Indian never rises above the intellectual and mental status of a child of fourteen years.
FURTHER HISTORY OF PRESIDENT RUTHERFORD B. HAYES
(1878–CA. 1885)
It is true that a dollar a day is not enough to support a man and five children, if the man insists on smoking and drinking beer . . . Man cannot live by bread, it is true, but the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, sermon (1877)
Spade-bearded and gracious (Lemonade Lucy peering curiously in), he twice met Chief Joseph and listened kindly to his complaints, but of course little could be done for the poor fellow. Foggy-minded sentimentalists such as Lieutenant Wood have sometimes presumed to criticize our reservation system, under which, I do admit, certain unscrupulous Agents have enriched themselves at our Indians’ expense.— All right, a few redskins might have starved to death. However, as President Hayes was starting to realize, the Indians were no worse off than any number of other little people. Now that America had become so beautiful and automatic, our negroes, coal miners and railroad men, the German proletariat, the pallid young women in the textile mills, the Chinamen, were all under the sway of reservations. If only we could establish a reservation for buffalo!— Or for citizens!— After he left office, Hayes wrote in his diary: This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. But Lemonade Lucy was calling him; she required assistance with one of her earrings; so he contented himself with adding: How is this?, then closed the book.
FURTHER HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(1911)
. . . whenever I travelled, particularly on horseback, I used to continue, in imagination, peopling the hills, ridges, groves, forests, and ravines with soldiers, and laying off everything, for purposes of offence and defence, into military positions for cavalry, artillery, and infantry.
BRIGADIER GENERAL OLIVER OTIS HOWARD, U.S.A., 1881
And pre-eminent usage, reports the Encyclopaedia Britannica, has now made its citizens “Americans,” in distinction from the other inhabitants of North and South America.
FURTHER HISTORY OF CAMAS
(1877–2010)
Labor is the straight trail that leads to pleasant places full of wheat and corn and potatoes instead of Kowse, Kamas and bitter root; where the cow, the sheep and hen take the place of the buffalo, the deer and the curlew; and melons and fruit that of weeds and thorns.
GOVERNOR CALEB LYON, to Chief Lawyer of the Nez Perce (1864)
Even after their lands were allotted, the Nez Perce still travelled to dig camas every June and July, but there was less and less of it
(as the People would say, it is becoming smooth),
the Bostons plowing and grazing on all the camas meadows,
and so through scarcity our Indians were all the better guided to reason.
FURTHER HISTORY OF THE BUFFALO
(1878–84)
As nearly as I can estimate, there were in 1865 about nine and one-half million of buffaloes on the plains between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains; all are now gone, killed for their meat, their skins, and their bones. This seems like desecration, cruelty, and murder, yet they have been replaced by twice as many cattle. At that date there were about 165,000 Pawnees, Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, who depended on these buffaloes for their yearly food. They, too, have gone, but they have been replaced by twice or thrice as many white men and women, who have made the earth to blossom as the rose, and who can be counted, taxed, and governed by the laws of nature and civilization. This change has been salutary and will go on to the end.
GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN, to Buffalo Bill (ca. 1887; in a letter proudly hung on the wall of Bill’s “Welcome Wigwam” in Nebraska)
It was in the country around Judith Basin that the Crow woman first perceived what was happening: Not even the flowers masked the stink of decaying flesh: Our hearts were like stones, she said. And yet no one believed, even then, that the white man could kill all the buffalo.
Likewise, no one now believes that once upon a time a Comanche could hamstring a buffalo at full gallop.
Long have they pass’d, faces and trenches and fields, into a white banner with red and blue lettering hung over the street between Shooters Sports Bar and the revolving sign which glares: REMEMBER OUR TROOPS NEAR AND FAR, shining all through the night before the Lewiston Roundup; and come morning there’ll be a beautiful blonde flagwaver, who might even smile at you on your way out of town; you’ll be coming down from the gas station past Nez Perce Drive, not far from Nez Perce Grade; my heart is good, O yes; long have they pass’d into Idaho’s yellow rangeland.
Long have they pass’d, those centuries when old women made rope out of Indian hemp. Long have they pass’d, the buffalo.
On his deathbed, Buffalo Bill boasted of having done for more than forty thousand buffalo all by his lonesome. His favorite gun was a .48 calibre breech-loading Springfield named Lucretia Borgia.
The buffalo-skin overcoat was almost the universal winter costume of street car drivers, teamsters, and cabbies, who had to brave the sub-zero weather without the protection now afforded to motormen and chauffeurs . . . The relative cheapness of these coats put them within the means of the great multitude doing outside work and was the cause of the buffaloes’ passing.
Once upon a time, the Crows paid eight buffalo robes for a knee-length red coat trimmed with silver and gold. I wonder why they can’t afford those red coats nowadays?
When Columbus arrived, there might have been as many as a hundred and twenty-five million buffalo within the confines of what is now the United States. It took awhile to chip away at those. Pennsylvania’s last herd avoided extermination until 1799. Reader, wouldn’t you have supposed that we could have finished the job before? Well, we didn’t. Come to think of it, I remember a pioneer mother in long skirts, a shawl around her head, pushing a wheelbarrow full of buffalo chips, her grimy little blonde daughter at her side. She might have had a use for the buffalo. But buffalo herds are the commissaries of our wild Indians. If you want to corral those savages onto some nice little reservation, it’s best to starve them.
At first, Custer’s widow admits, the bleaching bones of thousands of buffaloes were rather a melancholy sight to me, but I soon became as much accustomed to the ghastly sockets of an upturned skull as to the field-mouse which ran in and out either orifice with food for her nest of little ones . . . All evidences of death are sad to a woman.
The bones were gathered up by enterprising white men and sold for fertilizer. As for the manure, there were Montana homesteaders still burning it in their stoves as late as 1900.
Kill an old bull for a shield, a fine young cow for a tipi wall or a bed robe. Long have they pass’d.
If you’ve ever wondered why we couldn’t have improved the breed until they were almost as good as beef, I have two definitive answers. First of all, Buffalo Bill’s disciples assure us that it is death for the domestic cow—due to the hump on the calf—to breed with the buffalo bull. Secondly, Mr. Buffalo Jones, who tried the experiment on a ranch out by Dodge City, did manage it without fatal results, but the cattalo turned out a singularly unsightly beast, without the majesty of the buffalo, the swift balance of the longhorn, nor the smooth compactness of beef stock. But Jones planned to improve the strain. Let’s leave those two Buffaloes to quibble, while history blazes on, rendering our domains ever more American.
The Union Pacific Railroad had begun to push west from Omaha upon the termination of our Secession War. In four years it accomplished its collateral result: the Plains buffalo had been subdivided into northern and southern herds, the former more numerous. Two lines of track through Kansas easily disposed of the southern herd. O yes; American sunshine drove away those dark shaggy clouds. Now for the northern residuum:
In our centennial year, when Custer fell and the People passed their last summer in Wallowa, the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Bismarck. Here came the first long train, as pretty as an Apache squaw riding on a fast horse, with her night-dark braids whirling behind her! Before Thanksgiving, Bismarck held a noteworthy fête, showing off Chief Joseph, Yellow Bull and other Nez Perce captives at the Sheridan House Hotel. They were very up to date there; they even had a chromo portrait of President Hayes on the wall. A mirthful American lady kissed Joseph on the lips! (Springtime, fumbling in a bluish-grey cornhusk bag decorated with diagonal stripes of dull reddish-brown, found no more yarrow for the baby’s fever.) Then off went those savages to the Indian Territory; long have they pass’d. On other trains came our buffalo hunters. The price of buffalo hides had fallen, so they had to kill more buffalo to make up the difference. Then there was the unfinished business with Sitting Bull (not to mention that renegade White Bird).
SITTING BULL: As long as there are buffaloes, that is the way we will live.
REPORTER: But the time will come when there will be no more buffaloes.
SITTING BULL: Those are the words of an American.
Accordingly, we stationed our half-breeds, tame Indians and hide men just this side of the Medicine Line. Whenever the buffalo tried to cross, our proxies shot them and scared them back. It was there, some said, shut in by this line of prairie fire and guns, that the greatest slaughter of the northern herd took place. Had the Canadians pulled this trick on us, continues the lady just quoted, how we would have trumpeted our national fury! But I, William the Blind, wonder whether the Canadians thought that it was just as well? After all, sooner or later, their Indians must likewise be confined in reserves. Why not send a little hunger their way? And so in 1879, the Prime Minister up there in the British Possessions expressed something between resignation and equanimity when he concluded: The best authorities agree in representing five years as the maximum period for which the food wants of the Indians of the Plains may be to any reasonable degree supplied from the buffalo. One year later, the Northern Pacific arrived at Terry and Sully Springs, Montana, elevating the summer butchery of herds from a possibility to a convenience. In 1881, Sitting Bull’s Sioux in Canada were reduced to eating their dead ponies. Accordingly, most of them went back across the Medicine Line to surrender to their kind friends the Americans. That was the year the Kiowas postponed their Sun Dance from June until August, because only then could they find a single buffalo. In 1882, no buffalo came to the Kiowas, who accordingly cancelled their Sun Dance. Meanwhile, two hundred thousand buffalo hides departed from stations between Mandan and Miles City. The following year, forty thousand hides went out. That was when Standard Railroad Time settled throughout our United States. One year later, the hide men sent one carload, the last shipment ever made. And in that year I see Sitting Bull gazing wearily down at the tomahawk in his lap, a feather in his hair, his eyes sunken deep in, his face round and wrinkled, photograph copyrighted 1884 by Palmquist & Johnson.
From a newspaper, 2011:
OREGON CITY, Ore.— As long as American Indians have lived in the Pacific Northwest, they have looked to a jawless, eel-like fish for food.
Tribes once harvested the lamprey from rivers throughout the Columbia Basin, which stretches from the Oregon coast up into Canada. But with dozens of hydroelectric dams in the way, the fish has followed the path of the buffalo . . .
One of the fundamental facts of life is the dominance of man over the lower animals, and the further dominance of civilized man over his primitive brother dwelling in savagery . . . If we really believe that the civilization of the white man is superior to the savagery of the red, we must of necessity believe that this conquest was a desirable thing . . . Nor can we blink at the fact that this good could be realized only through the destruction of the life—whether human or animal—which flourished in the wilderness . . . The wild buffalo was no less antipathetic to the white man’s culture than were the dinosaurs and the cycads of the Jurassic Age . . .
MILO MILTON QUAIFE, Secretary of the Burton Historical Collection (1938)
Our whole conduct towards them [Indians] has been marked by a greed that knew no bounds, a rapacity that has never been staid, and a cruelty more ferocious than savages ever inflicted upon their enemies . . . If it be the purpose of the Government to continue this monstrous policy until the extinction of the race is accomplished, then it is wiser, cheaper and more humane to select and put into operation the agencies that will attain this end as quickly as possible . . . Let us finish the work, commenced so many years ago, by a sharp and decisive stroke. Send the Army out over the plains and into the fastnesses of the mountains, to strike down and destroy the Indians of every age and sex until not one of that unfortunate people shall be left to tell the melancholy story of their wrongs . . .
CONGRESSMAN J. SMITH YOUNG, 1878
After our rebellion,* when so many young men were at liberty to return to their homes, they found they were not satisfied with the farm, the store, or the work-shop of the villages, but wanted larger fields . . . It is probable that the Indians would have had control of these [Western] lands for a century but for the war. We must conclude, therefore, that wars are not always evils unmixed with some good.
ULYSSES S. GRANT, 1886
. . . and from the soul’s birth until it soars into Heavenly Spheres it has to seek for, and be clad in, an armor fitted for warfare, until it meets and overcomes the foes to its innocency, to its progress, and to its ultimate attainment.
BRIGADIER GENERAL OLIVER OTIS HOWARD, U.S.A., ca. 1895
CHRONOLOGY
GLOSSARIES
SOURCES
[AND A FEW NOTES]
A CHRONOLOGY OF THE SEVEN AGES OF WINELAND
V. THE AGE OF DYING GRASS
ca. 8,000 B.C.
End of the last Ice Age. Possible date of arrival of the Nimiipu (Nez Perce) in their pre-Contact homeland.
1492
Estimates of buffalo population in what is now the United States vary between 50 million and 125 million.
ca. 1770
Miner’s dip compass introduced in Sweden.
1786
Tuekalas (Old Chief Joseph) born.
1805–6
Lewis and Clark become the first known Euro-Americans to meet the Nimiipu, by whom they are kindly treated. Their homeland extends “more than 13.5 million acres.” See entry for the Walla Walla Treaty of 1855.
