The Americans by Daniel J. Boorstin

Author:Daniel J. Boorstin [Boorstin, Daniel J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75647-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

The Americans did not listen.

Yet the Indians could not be ignored, for they threatened life and land in many parts of the West. As late as 1869, the United States Commissioner of Agriculture warned that the “fifty thousand hostile Indians” ranging the territory between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains showed “a stolidity of character and an inaccessibility to civilizing influences … remarkable even in this strange race of men.” He exaggerated neither their number nor their hostility. Against them the United States Government had established over no forts manned by about 20,000 troops in that upper Missouri country alone. But demobilization after the Civil War had left too few men in the army to police the South and the Indians at the same time. In the whole West in 1870 there were probably about two hundred thousand Indians; the Indian threat was not yet a mere legend.

New residents on the vast plains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana petitioned Congress for help. They complained that not enough troops were defending their land, that the forts were too weak, and too far apart. In the federal offensive of 1876, Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were finally defeated, but this turning point came only after the annihilation of Custer and his 264 men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Cattlemen and other settlers continued to argue against establishment of Indian reservations, which, they said, served as government-protected fortresses into which the hostile Sioux could retire to gather strength for new raids. In 1880 half the state of South Dakota was still considered Indian land.

Before the Civil War, the western lands had become pawns in the North-South conflict over slavery. Many on each side hoped that the Indians would be a permanent dam against westward expansion by the other. The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs had reported in 1836 that “with this uninhabitable region on the west of the Indian Territory, they cannot be surrounded by white population. They are on the outside of us, and in a place which will remain on the outside.” During the debate in 1837 over an Indian territory bill, Southerners proposed to block Northern expansion by giving the Indians all the land north of Missouri and west of the Missouri River up to the Rockies. Comparable Northern plans to settle the Indians in the southwest seemed to have a similar objective. Attempts to organize Nebraska were blocked by claims that treaty guarantees had reserved the country exclusively for Indians.

So long as the Indians remained strong enough to make trouble—for at least a century after the nation was born—American citizens found it in their own interest to keep Indian bounds and Indian claims vague. To confirm Indian possession of a clearly defined territory would only strengthen Indian belief in their right to perpetual possession of that territory. More often than not, Indian ownership of a particular tract was explicitly recognized only after the Indians had sold it to the white men. Indian willingness to sell was generally treated as the best, and often the only, proof of Indian ownership.

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