Buffalo and Plains Life: Case Study in Policy, Power, and Environment

The Importance of the Buffalo to Lakota, Pawnee, other Plains Tribes
meat
hides for clothing, shoes, blankets
sinew for thread and bowstrings
tools from bones
implements from horns
dried dung for fuel

Military Policy in "Wars of the West"
One army officer advised, "Kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone."
General Philip H. Sheridan: "Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance. The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to settle the vexed Indian question than the regular army has done in the last 30 years."

Results:

1872-1875: Nine million buffalo killed.
By the 1880s only a few hundred remained of the estimated 13 million buffalo that had existed in 1850
One railroad conductor recalled that "one could have journeyed more than 100 miles along the railroad right-of-way without stepping off carcasses of slaughtered bison."

Demand for buffalo robes, hides also transforms Plains societies:

Blackfeet hunt for profit, plug in to trading system with profits, but also losses
Pawnees and others must hunt further from their villages
Increased conflict among Plains peoples
Clashes over scarce buffalo
Hunters/warriors left their own settlements vulnerable to raids by others
Upset the subsistence system: increased dependence

1867 Peace Treaties with Plains and Southwest Peoples: new policy for reservations, Office of Indian Affairs
Relocation and reservations: removal from the "path of white settlement"
Linked with a planned approach to "encourage" assimilation and transformation "to walk the white man's road"
Those Native Americans who refused to locate within reservation boundaries would be under military control.

As in the past, transfer of land went through the legal process of treaty making. But treaty making was subject to bribery, "gray areas" of interpretation, uncertainties and deliberate breaking of agreements when new circumstances arose.

Disruption of policies

1873, prospectors began in 1873 to dig gold in the Black Hills, part of the Sioux reservation in Dakota

Government: unable to hold back the prospectors

sacred burial and hunting grounds, Sioux do not want to give it up

Govt: decides to open the Black Hills to gold seekers at their own risk, then, when war breaks out, forced the cession of lands.

see transparency

2 million acres in the heart of the territory had not been assigned to any tribe, and white homesteaders wanted the fertile land in this area.

"Boomer" movement: stirred by RR running across the Indian Territory during the 1880s, worked to open this area to white settlement

1889: government gives in and placed the Oklahoma District under the Homestead Act. April 22, 1899 homesteaders rush in and stake out the entire district within a few hours. Two tent cities-Guthrie with 15,000 people and Oklahoma City with 10,000--were in full operation by nightfall.

Cheyennes and Sand Creek 1864
Sioux and others at Little Big Horn, 1876
Chief Joseph And Nez Perces, 1877
Apache in Arizona: Guerilla warfare under Cochise and Geronimo until 1886

Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (1881)

private property: Dawes Severalty Act, 1887

severalty: division of reservation lands into individually owned parcels

private ownership not part of Indian culture

allotments had failed in the past

President authorized to

divide tribal lands

160 acres to each family head

smaller parcels to individuals

held in trust by govt for 25 years

receipients would become US citizens

remaining reservation lands sold off, proceeds in Indian education fund

By 1930s, reduced indian land by 65%