Naming “Extermination or Civilization”
I can’t remember which of the dozens of Sioux War books I was reading at the time, but there dawned this nagging question about why Grant decided to go to war against the Sioux. I had been coming to really respect the General President, sympathise with all the scandals that came his way, most of which were not his fault. I was convinced that he meant it when he said (several times) “let us have peace”. But then he called his army chums to Washington and they organised an invasion of what were really Sioux lands.
Sitting Bull and the roaming Sioux were far away from US Government interference, among the Yellowstone River tributaries in the Big Horn country. They were not in the Black Hills or the Great Sioux Reservation. They were in what the 1868 Laramie Treaty called “Unceded Indian Territory”, the huge tracts of land to the west of the Reservation which had not been ceded by the Sioux to the United States, and were available for them exclusively. The army promised to abandon the military posts there.
Several historians place the decision to go to war in a sort of secret meeting in Washington on the morning of Wednesday 3 November 1875. Grant called General Phil Sheridan to this meeting, and had to get a message to him out on the west coast where he was enjoying his honeymoon. So you can deduce that Grant had already decided to call in the army when he called on Sheridan. That was about a month before the secret meeting. Had something happened about a month before the secret meeting that would trigger Grant into making the decision to go to war against the Sioux? That led to looking at what Grant was up to, and then into the Allison Commission’s activities, and then back at the visit of Red Cloud and Spotted Tail to Washington. To keep track of it all I started transcribing and summarising episodes. Before I knew what I was doing, I was working on a book.
My previous book was all about 1876 around the globe: “In 1876: Bananas & Custer”. This looked like it would be a deep dive into US history in 1875, so the working title of this collection of notes was “1875”. The impression I had got was that the Ultimatum to the Sioux was created at the secret meeting, and was an integral part of the decision to go to war. And so the title changed to “1875: Ultimatum to the Sioux”.
When it became clear that the roaming Sioux were not on the warpath in 1875 (apart from a few battles with encroaching settlers at Fort Pease in deepest Montana), I looked further and further back to see what was the trigger. The violent threads of Reconstruction took up much of Grant’s time, and if he was the decision maker, as it looks like he was, then these events would have helped shape his mind. The further back I went, the more Grant’s answer to the Indian Question was peace and civilization. There were constant calls for extermination, usually from those on the frontier nearer the Indians themselves. It came down to Grant and the US Government’s choice to either exterminate these awkward Indians, or pay to civilise them.
Before and during this time of Grant’s Peace Policy, extermination was on the agenda, time and time again. Here are just a few of the extracts from the book when extermination made it to the discussion.
Wednesday 14 June 1865 With the tail ends of the Confederate forces still surrendering, part of the United States army’s attention turns towards the Indians. Major General John Pope says, “By sending troops enough the Indians can of course be exterminated, but surely such cruelty cannot be contemplated by the Government. The question is now squarely before us. Either the extermination of the Indian tribes or a humane policy which shall save them from so cruel a fate, and at the same time secure from danger white emigrants.” (1)
Friday 28 December 1866 General Sherman writes to General Grant in the aftermath of the Fetterman Fight. “I do not yet understand how the massacre of Colonel Fetterman’s party could have been so complete. We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men women, and children. Nothing less will reach the root of this case.” (2)
Saturday 26 January 1867 The Doolittle Report is published. After the Sand Creek massacre in November 1864, and just before the end of the Civil War, Kit Carson says, “Humanity shudders at the picture of the extermination of thousands of human beings until every means is tried and found useless for their redemption.” (3)
Friday 1 February 1867 General Grant writes to Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, with Sherman’s outrage over the supply of arms and ammunition to Indian enemies. These papers “show the urgent necessity for an immediate transfer of the Indian bureau to the War Department and the abolition of the civil Indian agents and licensed traders. I do not see that any course is left open to us but to withdraw our troops to carry on formidable hostilities against the Indians until all the Indians or all the whites on the great plains … are exterminated.” (4)
Friday 12 April 1867 General Hancock delivers his warning to the gathered local chiefs. “I have a great many soldiers, more than all the tribes put together. It is true you might kill some soldiers, and surprise some small detachments. But soldiers come here to be killed - that is what they are for; we have plenty more, and as soon as one is killed, we have another in his place. If you take a passenger train, and kill women and children, you will be exterminated. Let the guilty then beware. Stick to your treaties and let the white man travel unmolested.” (5)
Saturday 13 July 1867 In the continuing investigations after the Fetterman Fight, Commissioner Taylor says. “The causes of the war are easily traced to the Sand Creek Massacre in December 1864. We have reached a point in our national history when, it seems to me, there are but two alternatives left us as to what shall be the future of the Indian, namely swift extermination by the sword, and famine, or preservation by gradual concentration on territorial reserves and civilization.” (6)
Tuesday 16 July 1867 Missouri Senator John Brooks Henderson says that “in this war of extermination twenty-five of our own men will fall for every man, woman or child of the Sioux. Suppose we exterminate them all, what does it amount to? Is it any honor to the people of the United States? What amount of credit do we gain by it? Is there any glory in a war of that sort? None whatsoever… Are not murders being committed in Texas? Certainly. Murders in North Carolina? Yes. Even in the fine old State of Massachusetts and in the very intelligent and great Empire State, New York, we find murders committed. Because a Sioux Indian commits a murder, because he steals a horse, are you to wage war against an entire tribe? It will only inflict dishonor upon ourselves and accumulate our public debt. If nothing else but extermination will do, we cannot permit the Indian to stand in the way of civilization, and his termination must come.” (7)
Friday 30 August 1867 The Indian successes of Red Cloud and the Sioux give impetus to bell-ringing editorials. “A war of extermination against the Indians would be better for all, than the merciless and continuous butcheries that have been going on. Weak sentimentalists may object to this as barbarous, but those who are acquainted with the Indian character, and know how utterly worthless he is, will endorse it as right and proper.” (8)
Saturday 2 November 1867 “What shall we do with the Indians?” asks the Army & Navy Journal. “But peace involves one of two things - either the extermination of the Indian or his subjection to law and habits of industry. Extermination is a word easily said; but to put it into execution will cost untold millions of money and a life for a life. Let it be remembered that the Indians number nearly 300,000, and it has cost $70,000 per head to kill those we have put out of the way. The civilization of the Indian is the easiest and cheapest, as well as the only honorable way of securing peace. We only need to treat Indians like men, treat them as we do ourselves, putting on them the same responsibilities, letting them sue and be sued, and taxing them as fast as they settle down and have anything to tax. The times are ripe for this movement.”
Thursday 28 May 1868 This year’s Indian Appropriation Bill is discussed in the House. Democrat James Cavanaugh from Minnesota is not a friend of the Indian. “I will say that I like an Indian better dead than living. I have never in my life seen a good Indian (and I have seen thousands) except when I have seen a dead Indian. I believe in the policy that exterminates the Indians, drives them outside the boundaries of civilization, because you cannot civilize them. Gentlemen may call this very harsh language, but perhaps they would not think so if they had had my experience in Minnesota and Colorado. In Minnesota the almost living babe has been torn from its mother’s womb; and I have see the child, with its young heart palpitating, nailed to the window-sill. I have seen women who were scalped, disfigured, outraged. In Denver, Colorado Territory, I have seen women and children brought in scalped to satisfy the devilish and barbarous propensities. The Indian will make a treaty in the fall, and in the spring he is again ‘upon the war-path’. The torch, the scalping-knife, plunder, and desolation follow wherever the Indian goes.” (9)
Wednesday 14 October 1868 General Sherman writes to General Sheridan, “As to extermination, it is for the Indians themselves to determine. We do not want to exterminate or even to fight them. At best it is an inglorious war, not apt to add much to our fame or personal comfort, and for our soldiers, to whom we owe our first thoughts, it is all danger and extreme labor, without one single compensating advantage… If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians it is but the result of what they have been warned again and again, and for which they seem fully prepared… I believe that this winter will afford us the opportunity, and that before the snow falls these Indians will seek some sort of peace, to be broken next year at their option; but we will not accept their peace, or cease our efforts till all the past acts are both punished and avenged.” (10)
Monday 23 November 1868 While Custer and his men are on their way to Washita, Commissioner Taylor sends in his annual report from the Interior offices in Washington. Taylor laments the decreasing population of Indians, now 300,000, from the introduction of white diseases and liquors, and the inter-Indian wars. “It is sad to think that they are decreasing from year to year, fading so rapidly away from the nations of the earth… It is inhuman and unchristian to destroy a whole race by such demoralization and disease as military government is sure to entail upon our tribes. If you wish to exterminate the race, pursue them with the ball and blade; if you please, massacre them wholesale, as we sometimes have done; or, to make it cheap, call them to a peaceful feast, and feed them on beef salted with wolf bane; but for humanity’s sake, save them from the lingering syphilitic poisons, so sure to be contracted about military posts”. (11)
Wednesday 26 January 1870 The New York Times says, “We have had two policies with the Indians: extermination or apathy. The President proposes to treat them as men. We must in some way atone for our crimes as a nation, for it will be written that we enslaved the African, persecuted the Chinaman, and massacred the Indian! Shall it be death or peace? The President says peace. The Indian question has been our nation’s shame, its burning, bitter shame. And in their weakness men cry for extermination. To speak such a word is not only a crime but a degradation. It means we are too weak to be honest and just - that we are cowards. When we say that we must destroy to live, it means that we can dare nothing for justice, that we are too sordid for a liberal, generous, magnanimous policy. We owe the Indian justice! Let us grant that, and permit him to work out his own political and social salvation.”
Saturday 11 June 1870 During the Indian visit to Washington, the New York Times says, “Is this the way the business of a great Government should be carried on, even though the parties treated with are ‘only’ Indians? Is it any wonder that the Indians do not adhere to treaties if they are carefully kept in the dark as to what those treaties really contain? We are quite aware that there is a class in the country which simply settles all such questions by saying, ‘any treatment is good enough for the Indians. They are vermin, and must be exterminated.’ We trust, however, that this savage theory is not accepted by the great body of the people. It may be the destiny of the red man to be ‘stamped out’, but while he does remain upon the earth it is scarcely worthy of us as a people to make him the victim of a superior cunning”.
Thursday 9 January 1873 Democrat Senator Allen Thurman of Ohio says, I am not one of those men who believe that these Indians ought to be exterminated right off or anything of the kind. I deny that we have treated them in the barbarous manner that has been spoken of so frequently and made the subject of oration again and again. I am willing to do what I can to rescue them from suffering and to promote their welfare. I am not willing, however, to take two hundred thousand savages who will not work at all and pander to their idleness and to their vices when you leave ten times that number of our own white race, and, if you see fit, too, of the black race in the United States to suffer without anything being said in reference to their suffering and their privations… I do not want to see any bloody extermination of these people. But I am not exactly prepared to pay three or four millions a year to keep the peace with two or three hundred thousand Indians. The number of Indians with whom there was any danger of war was comparatively small. Until those Indians are well whipped we shall never have peace with them That is the honest truth about it. If they let George Crook in Arizona have his way for three months he will do more to make peace down there, where there are the worst Indians on the continent, than all the peace commissioners you can send from now until the day of the general judgment. Although he is one of the best soldiers in the service of this Government, there is not a more humane man living than is George Crook. You can never have peace until you make those people fear the power of the Government… Was there anything so absurd on the face of this earth as to claim that two hundred thousand vagabond Indians own half this continent? No, sir; this earth was given by the Almighty for the inhabitants thereof, for their support; and if the Indians had ten times a good a title to it as they have, they have no right to exclude the people who need this soil out of which to raise their daily bread. No, sir; there is no law of religion that gives them any such right. They have no right to play dog in the manger and hold land sufficient to make forty States, on the ground that it is necessary for them as a hunting ground. Sir, you cannot expect that the white people will agree to any such thing. Talk about it as much as you please, they will not do it.” (12)
Wednesday 20 May 1874 The Republic Magazine has an article actually entitled “Indian Extermination or Civilization”. It leads with this quote, “if the Government will agree to pay three hundred dollars per scalp, the extermination of the Indian races may be completed, by contract, within five years.” Despite this beginning, the article is about the history and success of Grant’s Peace Policy so far. It is in favour of civilisation. (13)
Tuesday 25 May 1875 The New York Herald reviews the difficulties of the Indian question. “In our eager, hungry desire to possess new territories we have looked upon the rifle as the swiftest means of deciding all Indian controversies. So that it has become almost a law of the settlements of the West that the first duty of the settler is to exterminate the Indians. There could be no severer reflection upon our civilization than this.”
Wednesday 22 March 1876 The Grange Advance in Minnesota republishes some words from Little Crow, one time Sioux chief and leader of attacks against settlers. “Make us white men or leave us Indians. We cannot be dogs, to receive abuse and not resent it.” The newspaper says he means that “they should either be placed on the same footing with white men, subject to and protected by the laws; or should be declared enemies and warred with to extinction.”
Saturday 25 March 1876 And finally for this list, the Times Herald describing the Great Sioux War, “Things are getting warm up in the Big Horn country for Sitting Bull and his band of Sioux. Generals Crook and Custer have dug up the hatchet and gone into active business, their sole aim and purpose being the extermination of the Indians who have been raising the disturbances of late.”
Extermination or Civilization indeed!!
References:
(1) War of the Rebellion Official Records, Series I, Volume XLVIII, Part II (1896) Pg 879-882
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924077723025?urlappend=%3Bseq=881
(2) Report of the Secretary of War on the late massacre of US troops by Indians at Fort Phil Kearney (1867)
39th Congress, 2nd Session; Senate; Ex Doc No 15
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-01277_00_00-010-0015-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-01277_00_00-010-0015-0000.pdf
(3) The Doolittle Report - Condition of the Indian Tribes (1867)
39th Congress, 2nd Session; Senate; Report No 156
https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2746&context=indianserialset
(4) A Communication from General Grant on Indian Affairs (1867)
39th Congress, 2nd session; House of Representatives; Mis Doc No 40
https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/indianserialset/1750/
(5) Worcester Daily Spy, 25 April 1867
(6) Letter from the Secretary of the Interior touching the origin and progress of Indian hostilities on the frontier (1867)
40th Congress, 1st Session, House of Representatives; Ex Doc No 13 Pg 1-2, 5-6
https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8897&context=indianserialset
(7) The Congressional Globe, 40th Congress, 1st Session, page 667 etc
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32437011509920&seq=809
(8) Walla Walla Statesman, Washington Territory, 30 August 1867
(9) Congressional Globe 1868, 40th Congress; House; page 2638
https://www.congress.gov/congressional-globe/page-headings/40th-congress/n-a/60018
(10) New York Herald, 7 December 1868
(11) 1868 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Pg 1, 10-11
https://archive.org/details/usindianaffairs68usdorich/page/n9/mode/2up
(12) Congressional Globe, 42nd Congress, Session III Pg 430-435
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30902/m1/727/
(13) Indian Extermination or Civilization
The Republic Magazine: Devoted to The Dissemination of Political Information, Vol II No 5, Pg 308 (May 1874)
https://archive.org/details/sim_republic-a-monthly-magazine_1874-05_2_5/page/308/mode/2up
