Satanta, a Kiowa chief, was one of the participants in the Medicine Lodge Treaty who argued that Native Americans didn't want the kinds of houses or reservations the government officials were proposing. But if peace failed, the bill stipulated that the secretary of war would take up to 4,000 civilian volunteers to remove the Indians by force, writes historian Kerry Oman. A peace treaty seemed like a much less costly alternative, especially if the tribes agreed to live on reservations. Sherman’s concern about nomadic Indians was echoed in Congress, where members claimed it cost upwards of $1 million a week to fund the militias defending frontier populations. In the months preceding the peace commission, Sherman wrote, “If fifty Indians are allowed to remain between the Arkansas and the Platte we will have to guard every stage station, ever train, and all railroad working parties… fifty hostile Indians will checkmate three thousand soldiers.” Sherman) reflected Congress’s uncertainty in whether to proceed with diplomacy or military force. The four civilians and three military men (including Civil War General William T. Although the bill to form a peace commission quickly gained approval in both houses of Congress in July 1867, the politicians appointed a combination of civilians and military personnel to lead the treaty process. Indians have to be confined to make way for railroads and American expansion.”īut how to achieve this result wasn’t at all clear by the time of the Medicine Lodge Peace Commission. “ people of good intentions, but it’s clear where the U.S. sends a peace commission out there, it’s a recognition that its military policy against the tribes isn’t working,” says Colin Calloway, professor of history at Dartmouth and author of Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History. New people are coming in and essentially squatting on tribal land, and the cost of war for them is incredibly high."įor the Americans, ending the wars and moving towards a policy of “civilizing” Native Americans were equally important reasons to initiate the gathering. "They want some assurances of what's in the future for them. "They want food rations, they want the arms and ammunition, they want the things being offered to them," Anderson says. government, and hoping to end the costly wars. Given the antagonism between the groups, why would Native Americans bother attending such a gathering? For Eric Anderson, a professor of indigenous studies at Haskell Indian Nations University, it’s all about trying to take advantage of the gifts offered by the U.S. Germain in Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada. settlements as well, but a series of contemporary government investigations into those incidents blamed “unrestrained settlers, miners, and army personnel as the chief instigators of Indian hostility,” writes historian Jill St. In 1863, military expeditions attacked a Yanktonai encampment at Whitestone Hill, killing at least 300 men, women and children in 1864, cavalrymen attacked a group of Cheyenne and Arapaho in Sand Creek, Colorado, killing more than 150 women and children and mutilating their bodies and just a few months earlier in 1867, Major General Winfield Hancock burned down the Cheyenne-Oglala village of Pawnee Fork in Kansas. As more and more settlers moved westward in hopes of starting anew, and workers assembled the transcontinental railroad, conflicts between Native Americans and the United States erupted in pockets of violence. Two weeks later, members of the Southern Cheyenne joined them as well.Ī mere two years had passed since the end of the Civil War, and Americans were still reeling from the bloodshed and social upheaval. The government delegates were met by more than 5,000 representatives of the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho and Kiowa-Apache nations. Situated deep into the tribes’ hunting grounds, the meeting spot would host one of the Plains’ Indians most devastating treaties-in large part because it wouldn’t be long before the treaty was broken. military and the Indian tribes of the Great Plains, to the sacred site of Medicine Lodge Creek. Their purpose? To escort a cohort of seven men, appointed by Congress to put an end to the bloodshed between the U.S. It was an astonishing spectacle: 165 wagons, 600 men, and 1,200 horses and mules, all stretched across the plains of the Kansas territory in October 1867.
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