American Heritage History of the Indian Wars by M. Utley Robert E. Washburn Wilcomb

Author:M. Utley, Robert,E. Washburn, Wilcomb [Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Native American
ISBN: 9781612309026
Publisher: New Word City
Published: 2015-08-26T20:00:00+00:00

No one else in 1851 knew the West or its Indians better than Tom Fitzpatrick. Perhaps the greatest of the mountain men, companion of Jed Smith, Kit Carson, and Jim Bridger, he had trapped most of the beaver streams of the plains and Rockies, piloted the first Oregon-bound immigrants as far as the Snake River, and served as guide for John C. Frémont and other military explorers. A master of wilderness skills, Fitzpatrick was also a literate man, possessed of an uncommon intellect and a depth of character not often associated with the boisterous trapping fraternity. He looked upon Indians sympathetically but not sentimentally and accorded them the wary respect of a man who had survived almost three decades in the Indian country. In return, they viewed him as a fair and honorable man and a worthy adversary. They had two names for him: “Broken Hand,” because a bursting rifle had carried away three fingers; and “White Hair,” because of premature graying induced by a harrowing experience eluding a pursuing band of Gros Ventres.

In October 1846, returning from guiding General Stephen Watts Kearny’s army of conquest to New Mexico, Fitzpatrick learned that he had been appointed United States Indian Agent for the Upper Platte and Arkansas Agency. In a rare act of statesmanship, the government had selected a thoroughly qualified man for the post of Indian agent. By 1851, Fitzpatrick had served conscientiously and wisely for five years as the first emissary of the United States to the tribes of the High Plains. Fourteen years later, the Arapaho chief, Little Raven, would remember him as “the one fair agent” the government had sent to his people.

In September 1851, at the government’s invitation, 10,000 tribesmen of Fitzpatrick’s agency raised their tepees in a grassy valley near Fort Laramie. Fitzpatrick’s chief, Superintendent David D. Mitchell, hoped to negotiate a treaty that would restrain the Indians from molesting immigrants on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. Actually, his main concern was the intertribal warfare that imperiled white travelers simply by keeping the plains country in constant turmoil. Father De Smet, also on hand, worried about this problem too; he foresaw the diminishing buffalo herds causing intensified fighting, until the Indians “become themselves extinct over the last buffalo steak.” Mitchell’s solution was to persuade each tribe to agree to a particular defined territory and then remain within it.

Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Crows, Gros Ventres, Assiniboins, Arikaras, and Shoshones had come for the big council. The Pawnees, bitter enemies of the Sioux, refused. So did the Kiowas and Comanches, who told Broken Hand that they had “too many horses and mules to risk . . . among such notorious horse thieves as the Sioux and Crows.” The Shoshones, accompanied by their old friend Jim Bridger, approached warily with muskets primed even though assured that the 270 soldiers standing by would keep their enemies in check.

The apprehension was justified, for a Sioux warrior with an old score to settle rushed out to gun down a Shoshone chief. An interpreter intervened and narrowly averted a collision.

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