Indian Peace Commission

The treaties that resulted were designed to move the tribes to reservations, to "civilize" and assimilate these native peoples, and transition their societies from a nomadic to an agricultural existence.

This, in addition to corruption throughout the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the continued migration of the railroad and white settlers westward, led to a general restlessness and eventually armed conflict.[5]: Ch.

1 [6] Following the Sand Creek Massacre on November 29, 1864, where troops under John Chivington killed and mutilated more than a hundred friendly Cheyenne and Arapaho, half or more women and children, hostilities intensified.

After two years of inquiry, Doolittle's 500-page report condemned the actions of Chivington and blamed tribal hostilities on the "aggressions of lawless white men".[7][8]: 35–6 [9][5]: Ch.

William T. Sherman personally wrote to the Secretary of War and assured him that "if fifty Indians are allowed to remain between the Arkansas and Platte" they would "checkmate three thousand soldiers" and that action had to be taken.

Their work was organized around three main goals in an effort to solve the "Indian question":[4][8]: 37 [a][2]: 108 Owing to the high cost of waging war in the West,[b] Congress concluded after much debate that peace was preferable to extermination, and empowered a seven-man commission of four civilians and three military officers to negotiate with the tribes on behalf of the government, work to confine them to reservations, and if unsuccessful, raise a volunteer army of 4,000 men to move them by force.

[8]: 40 [10]: 193  Following two days of resistance to the proposition of leaving their land,[d] treaties were signed on October 21, that moved the tribes to reservations in Oklahoma, promised a "token amount" of annual subsidies from the government, and contained various provisions designed to transition the tribes to a "foreign world of sedentary farming", for which the commissioners bestowed upon them goods and gifts worth tens of thousands of dollars.

[8]: 40 On October 27, 500 warriors of the Cheyenne, who had been camped some 40 miles (64 km) away, arrived, and agreed to a treaty of similar provisions, creating and moving them to a reservation between the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers south of Kansas.

[8]: 40 [10]: 209 The commission departed immediately for North Platte and Fort Laramie in the hopes of negotiating with Red Cloud, who was leading an open revolt.

[8]: 41  Before leaving in failure, they received communication from Red Cloud with assurances that once the army left the forts on the Bozeman Trail near the Powder River, in the heart of Sioux land, the ongoing war he was waging could be ended.

These included the ratification of the treaties of the prior year, and the creation of districts where the tribes could turn to agriculture, "barbarous dialects" could be "blotted out and the English language substituted," and government subsidies eventually withdrawn entirely.

Here they envisaged that in a span of 25 years, the buffalo on which many tribes depended would be gone, the nomadic natives would be assimilated, tribal identity eliminated and replaced with "one homogeneous mass", and the commission could avert "another generation of savages".

Ulysses S. Grant wrote to Sherman to prepare to abandon military posts on Sioux land, and acquiesce, for the first time in history, to Red Cloud's demands as a hostile native leader in the field.

[19]: 464  In 1864 thousands of Navajo had been forcibly relocated there in a 300 mi (480 km) march, following the scorched earth tactics of Kit Carson and James Henry Carleton, which had pushed many to the brink of starvation.

[8]: 45 [25] On June 18, 1868, the group of 8,000, accompanied by some 2,000 sheep and 1,000 horses set off at a pace of 12 miles (19 km) per day on their Long Walk Home to their ancestral lands.

[26] At Fort Bridger in modern Wyoming, Augur met with the Shoshone and Bannock, and although they were at peace with the government at the time, negotiated a treaty signed on July 3, 1868, in order to "arrange matters that there may never hereafter be a cause of war between them".

Yet with Henderson busy with the ongoing impeachment proceedings for Andrew Johnson, the remaining seven commissioners set to filing their final report, published on October 9, 1868.

[8]: 46 [j] They recommended the government provide the promised supplies to the tribes who had relocated to reservations, and treat each treaty as being in full effect, regardless of whether they had been officially ratified by the Senate.

[4][8]: 37  According to Eric Anderson, of Haskell Indian Nations University, the first of the commission's treaties at Medicine Lodge "marked a shift away from genocide to policies that we would today term 'ethnocide'".

"[13]: 281 The treaties variously provided for grants of individually owned tracts of land for those who "desire to commence farming", up to $175 worth of "seeds and implements" per family over four years, and stipulations for the provision of farmers and other skilled workers from the government.

[36]: 2521  However, such clauses failed to be enforced until 2009, when a young Sioux woman won the first and only "bad men" court case, earning a $600,000 award for damages in relation with a sexual assault.

"[24]: 261  As James Gump quotes historian John Gray, the Fort Laramie treaty was itself full of "gross contradictions" and, in his opinion, "it is inconceivable that any Indian was truthfully informed of all its provisions.

"[15]: 81  Continuing to quote anthropologist Raymond DeMallie, Perhaps the single most frustrating aspect of the entire history of treaty making was the inability of the two sides to communicate with one another meaningfully.

[10]: 261, 3 [page needed] There was also an incongruity in the fact that the government approached treaty making as a representative democracy, while the tribes made decisions through consensus, and although the chiefs had been appointed as signatories, they did not control those who were not a party to the negotiations themselves.

"[9] At the time it disbanded, the commission was widely seen as a failure, as violence had already returned to the Southern Plains, following the collapse of the agreements made at Medicine Lodge.

[44][45]: 23  For those that were fulfilled, the government did so only after debate and delay, as was the case with Fort Laramie and the Sioux, where William S. Harney of his own accord, purchased and provided supplies for the tribes to last through the winter, and was then made to answer to Congress for his "unauthorized expenditures.

"[8]: 47 Some among the tribes returned to conducting raids on both whites and other natives, faced with hungry families in the absence of pledged government rations, at the same time that the tribal economies were being dismantled.

"[8]: 48 [l] In 1871, the House of Representatives attached a rider to the Indian Appropriations Act, ending the practice of treaty making with tribes, and designating native people individually as legal wards of the federal government.

[36]: 2522 [49] Congressional efforts to reduce the size of Medicine Lodge reservations eventually resulted in the case of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, wherein the Supreme Court ruled in 1903 that "Congress had the right to break or rewrite treaties between the United States and Native American tribes however the lawmakers saw fit.

"[9] According to Prucha: [A]t the end of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, special commissions, new laws, and Supreme Court decisions made clear that treaty provisions, once considered sacred, need no longer be adhered to ...