Crazy Mule’S Maps Of The Upper Missouri, 1877-1880 (original) (raw)

The Early Years of the Delaware Indian Experience in Kansas Territory1 830-1845

Journal of the West, 2002

WHITE Horse (Woipi-hum), a prominent Cheyenne Dog Soldier, was renowned for his abilities as a fighter. He left behind his great military deeds in his pictographic drawings. One specific drawing depicted WTiite Horse in combat with two Delaware Indians. White Horse wore the tradifional trappings of a Plains Indian warrior. He was attired in a buckskin shirt and a hair-pipe breastplate, with his face painted for war. The drawing illustrated White Horse riding on a fleet pony, carrying a painted war shield, and counfing coup on the Delaware by striking them across their backs with his bow. White Horse drew the Delaware wearing white man's clothing. One wore a loose-fitüng gray shirt, and green cloth trousers over his boots; the other was drawn wearing a gingham shirt. Both held rifles and pistols. White Horse portrayed one Eastem Indian riding a horse equipped with a "civilian-style horned saddle"; the other heavily armed Delaware was sitting on a mule.' The drawing emphasized Dog Soldier prowess and courage, but it also suggested the unique interactions between Indian people on the Great Plains during the middle of the 19th century. The drawing of White Horse

The Great Plains Tribes Section C -Displacement (Continued)

There were two theaters to the war against the Plains Indians. One was along the Platte River in Kansas and the Red River on the border between Oklahoma and Texas. In both theaters there was a division between the Pawnees, Crows, Shoshonis, and Arikaras, who served as scouts for the U.S. Army, and their traditional enemies the Lakotas, Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches who fought against the Army. The senior leadership of the army, including William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan, George Armstrong Custer, and Nelson A. Miles, were all veterans of the Civil War. However, the Army after 1870 consisted mainly of German and Irish immigrants. In December 1868, General Sheridan ordered all Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches to come to Fort Cobb, Oklahoma. The Comanche leader Tosawi, the Cheyenne leader Black Kettle, and the Arapaho leader Yellow Bear all complied with the order, but the Kiowas did not. Sheridan sent Lieutenant Colonel Custer after them. He confronted them at their winter camp on Rainy Mountain Creek. The Kiowa chief Satanta and Lone Wolf with an escort of warriors came out to talk with Custer. Instead of negotiating, Custer arrested Satanta, Lone Wolf, and the escort party. In the spring of 1869, the Comanches and Kiowas were sent to Fort Sill, and the Cheyennes and Arapahos were sent to a reservation around Camp Supply. The Indian agent at Fort Sill, Lawrie Tatum, forced them to become farmers. 2,000 Kiowas and 2,500 Comanches were settled on the reservation. During the autumn Black Kettle moved his people to the Washita River. When in November he heard rumors that soldiers were coming his way, Black Kettle, Little Robe, and two Arapaho leaders traveled to Fort Cobb, which was the headquarters for their near agency south of the Arkansas River. When in November the soldiers approached his village, Black Kettle went out to meet them at the Washita Ford. However, the soldiers including Custer’s 7th Cavalry launched an attack. Black Kettle and his wife were killed in the attack. In May 1870, Eli S. Parker, a Seneca Indian whom President Ulysses S. Grant appointed as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, invited Red Cloud and 15 Oglalas to come to Washington, DC. The chiefs met with President Grant, and Red Cloud told the President that the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty gave them the right to trade at Fort Laramie and have an agency on the Platte River. The next morning Secretary of Interior read to them the terms of the treaty that made no mention of Fort Laramie or the Platte River and instead stated that the Sioux agency would be established “at some place on the Missouri.” Red Cloud claimed that this was the first time he had heard about this condition and that he had been lied to. The war against the Comanches and Kiowas continued into the autumn as Miles and Ranald Mackenzie accompanied advanced onto the Llano Estacado, a high plateau in the Texas Panhandle. In September 1874, five columns of American soldiers converged on Palo Duro Canyon. As winter came, the Comanches and Kiowas surrendered, except for one band of Quahadhi Comanches under Quannah Parker, who held out until the spring of 1875. Eventually Parker surrendered and led the Kwahadi to the reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Later in life he became a wealthy cattle rancher, and he was appointed by the federal government as the principal chief of the entire Comanche nation. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had refused to sign the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, which established a Lakota reservation. The arrival of gold hunters provoked them into open warfare. In the summer of 1875 Sitting Bull joined the Cheyenne in a Sun Dance, which resulted in an alliance of the two tribes. When the government ordered all Lakotas to go to the reservation established for them, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse ignored the order. Shortly after Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and their Teton people settled on their reservation in northwestern Nebraska, rumors began to spread about the discovery of Gold in the Black Hills. In 1874 George Armstrong Custer, who had participated in the slaughter of Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyennes on the Washita in 1868, was sent into the Black Hills to report on the situation. In December 1875, Commissioner of Indian Affairs ordered all off reservation Indians Sioux and Cheyenne to report to their agencies. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse replied that they wouldn’t come until the spring. A mixed band of Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Sioux left the Red Cloud agency to go to the Powder River country. On February 7, 1876, the War Department authorized General Sheridan to commence operations against “hostile” Sioux. In May George Crook and a force of more than a thousand left Fort Fetterman for Fort Reno, where he was to rendezvous with at least 200 Crow and Shoshone allies. In July Custer departed Fort Abraham Lincoln with a party of mostly Arikara scouts. The chiefs decided to move to the valley of the Little Big Horn River to the west. On June 15 Custer’s forces on the Rosebud crossed the ridge between the Rosebud and the Little Big Horn. Custer divided his forces and sent Major Marcus Reno to the south to attack the Hunkpapa camp. The Indians were able to turn back Reno’s attack. This enabled the Indians to make a frontal attack on Custer’s column in which Custer and his entire force were wiped out. By the spring of 1877 most of the Lakotas, including Crazy Horse, had surrendered. But Sitting Bull led a small band into Canada. The Canadian government did not consider his people to be Canadian Indians. Finally, in 1881, Sitting Bull crossed the border and was arrested as a military prisoner. By 1883 he was released from prison and transferred to the Hunkpapa Agency at Standing Rock. When he learned that the Lakota might be sent to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma, Crazy Horse left the reservation. He was captured and placed in the guard house at Fort Robinson, where in a struggle with one of the guards, he was killed in September 1877. Crazy Horse spend nine years after his surrender on the Lakota reservation. In 1890 a millenarian cult known as the Ghost Dance spread from a Paiute messiah. Informants said that Crazy Horse was preparing to leave the reservation, and Nelson Miles, sent an order to arrest him. Crazy Horse surrendered to the Indian police without a fight, but as they exited the tent, a fight erupted and Crazy Horse was killed. In December hundreds of Lakota Sioux left the Standing Rock reservation for a Ghost Dance. They were intercepted by troops of the 7th Cavalry under Major Samuel Whiteside, who took them at a cavalry camp on the Wounded Knee Creek. In an effort to disarm them, a fight broke out in which nearly 300 Lakota men, women, and killed were killed in what became known as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Today, the Lakota Sioux live in five reservations in western South Dakota: the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala, the Rosebud and Lower Brulé reservations of the Brulé, the Cheyenne River Reservation of several other Lakota bands, and the Standing Rock Reservation of the Hunkpapa and other bands. Under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 tribe is entitled to elect their own leaders, but many traditionalist Oglalas did not support the new form of government. The issue came to a head in the early 1970s, when younger members joined the American Indian Movement (AIM). This led to an armed stand-off between the FBI, federal marshals, and AIM in the hamlet of Wounded Knee in which one marshal was wounded and two Indians were killed.

PIERRE-JEAN DE SMET'S REMARKABLE MAP OF THE MISSOURI RIVER VALLEY, 1839: WHAT DID HE SEE IN IOWA?

Journal of the Iowa Archaeological Society, 2008

In 1839, Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet, made a rough but mesmerizing map of the Council Bluffs, Iowa area, showing the locations of Indian settlements, trading houses, and other features such as tombs and a shipwreck. Although his work was crude, many of the features on his map can be identified in the real world. This paper briefly discusses De Smet's time in Iowa and some of the events he witnessed and the people he knew, such as Sauganash, the illustrious Potawatomi chief also known as Billy Caldwell. The possible locations of the mapped features in Iowa are discussed, using topographic, historic, and archaeological information.

Too Né's World: The Arikara Map and Native American Cartography

We Proceeded On, 2018

A map drawn in 1805 by an Arikara diplomat sent by the Lewis and Clark Expedition to meet with President Jefferson provides a window into indigenous North American cartographic traditions and the use of Native American maps by the Corps of Discovery during their westward journey in 1804-1805.

The Great Plains Tribes Section B -Displacement

The introduction of the horse by the Spaniards and of guns by the French in the fur trade created a rivalry between Great Plains tribes over hunting territories resulting in the displacement of some tribes by other tribes. These rivalries continued with the displacement caused by the American expansion onto the Great Plains in which some tribes, such as the Shoshone, Pawnees, and Crows, sided with the Americans against their historical tribal enemies. In 1851 the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Sioux, Crows, and other Great Plains tribes came to Fort Laramie on the North Platte River in Wyoming today and agreed to allow Americans to build roads and military posts in their territory. Red Cloud of the Ogallala Dakota signed a treaty of Fort Laramie allowing for White people to travel across Dakota territory on their way to California, where gold had been discovered. The Dakota were promised that they would receive in return presents for the next 55 years. But White settlers infringed upon the Dakota reservation lands, annuity payments were late or never received, and the Indian agents and traders were often corrupt. When in 1858 gold was discovered at Pike’s Peak, thousands of White miners began to come into this region. In 1859 they built a village named Denver City on the Plains at the base of the Rocky Mountains in present-day Colorado. Lands on the Platte River Valley that had been assigned to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapahos by the Fort Laramie Treaty began to fill up with settlers. In February 1861 U.S. officials invited the chiefs of the Cheyennes and Arapahos to Fort Wise on the Arkansas River to discuss a new treaty. The Cheyennes and Arapahos understood that under the treaty they would retain their land rights and freedom of movement to hunt buffalo, but they would live within a triangular territory bounded by the Sand Creek and the Arkansas River. The Santee Sioux were originally woodlands Indians, who were confined to a narrow strip along the Minnesota River as the result of two treaties under which the surrendered nine-tenths of their original homeland. In May 1863, 770 Santees were put on a steamboat to be relocated to a reservation at Crow Creek on the Missouri River in the Dakota Territory. Governor Evans of the Colorado Territory created the 3rd Colorado Cavalry Regiment under Colonel John Chivington to protect Denver and the Platte River Road. Chivington was a Methodist pastor, but despite his religious background, Chivington was anti-Indian. Colorado Volunteers based in Denver attacked some Cheyennes on the South Platte River even though they had no authority to operate in Kansas. In November 1864, Chivington’s Colorado regiments attacked the Cheyenne and Arapaho camps on the bend of Sand Creek. Gold was discovered in Montana during the Civil War. After the war, the Oregon and California Trail crossed the hunting grounds of the western Lakotas. In August 1866, Colonel Henry B. Carrington sent his men to build a fort on the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud moved to the headwaters of the Tongue River in easy striking distance of Fort Phil Kearny. In late December Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos warriors camped north of Fort Phil Kearny, and they and sent several young warriors, including Crazy Horse, as decoys. The decoys attacked a party of woodcutters, and Captain William J. Fetterman led a party of cavalry and infantry to rescue them. The decoys led them into the trap set by the Indians. In the spring of 1866 several Southern Cheyennes went south for the summer to hunt buffalo along the Smoky Hill. A peace commission convened a council in early October at Medicine Lodge Creek. There were more than 4,000 Indians, mostly Kiowa, Comanches, and Arapaho with few Cheyennes. The Medicine Lodge Treaty stated that the Indians had the right to hunt on any lands south of the Arkansas River “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers to justify the chase.” Over the winter of 1867-68 the Cheyennes and Arapahos received no arms or annuities while Congress debated the treaty in Washington. A second Fort Laramie treaty in May 1868, was signed only by the Mountain Crow chiefs. Under it they relinquished all their lands and accepted a permanent reservation from the 107th meridian west to about the Yellowstone Park and north and west to the Yellowstone River and the Wyoming line to the south. The posts on the Bozeman Road were abandoned in the summer of 1868, and as soon as the troops left that Lakotas burned them down. Red Cloud came to Fort Laramie in 1868 with a hundred other chiefs, some of whom signed the treaty. Red Cloud initially refused to sign the treaty. He finally agreed, but he cautioned that it might be difficult to control all the young warriors. When Ulysses S. Grant became president in 1869, his Commissioner of Indian Affairs, a Seneca Indian named Ely S. Parker, invited Red Cloud and other chiefs to Washington, where the learned that the 1868 treaty stated a an agency for the Teton Sioux would be established at a place on the Missouri River, not at Fort Laramie.