by Scott Sosebee
*This will be Part One of a two-part series on the last major Indian Campaign on Texas soil
Popular culture, particularly those contained in novels and films, have made it a habit of offering a romanticized and often inaccurate picture of the late nineteenth-century U.S. frontier, and perhaps nothing has been more whitewashed than the conflict between Native Americans and White interlopers in the American West. Quite often, the fights between the two groups are framed as one group raiding into the other’s areas—with Native Americans often filling the “villain” role—or as some sort of inevitable conflict between two cultures that could not co-exist. The true past was frequently not so cut-and-dried; the reality was more often murky, or one in which the “good guys” were not who we have been led to believe they were. The fact is that that relations between people from the aggressive and expansionist United States (and Europeans before there was a United States) who moved onto lands occupied by various indigenous tribes were more akin to an armed invasion characterized by duplicitous diplomacy than we would, quite frankly, like to believe. The actual record of U.S./Tribal relations is one of numerous broken treaties, armed conflict, and the eventual whole subjugation and then confinement of Native peoples to reservations, another institution whose record of abuse is legion.
One of those dishonorable legacies was the final large-scale campaign against Plains cultural peoples in what became known as The Red River War, a series of engagements by the U.S. Army to remove Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne people from Texas and the southern plains and force them onto reservations in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The result of this campaign—in Texas, at least—was the final stand of the Plains tribes in the state and all but ended a way of life for these Native peoples as they had to forge a new way as wards of the U.S. government restricted to lands that constituted just a fraction of the plains that they once roamed, hunted, and in many ways controlled. It was the closing of one chapter in Texas history and the opening of another.
The Red River War was just one theater of a larger battle with Plains tribes that came about as a result of the United States government’s failure to enforce or follow its own structures contained within the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge. In the years immediately after the Civil War, the United States government began to negotiate a series of agreements with Plains Native groups in an attempt to secure passage through tribal lands that led into the west. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge was a treaty signed with southern plains Tribes. The Native representatives agreed to enter reservations in the western part of the Indian Territory in exchange for annual food rations, financial annuities, and a protection of Indian lands and way-of-life on the reservations. They would also be provided with guns and ammunition for hunting, as well as housing and services. In exchange, the Natives promised to end raids on White land holdings, and also confine their hunting of bison to lands “south of the Arkansas River.” Ten chiefs signed the treaty and most tribal members from the Comanche and Southern Cheyenne—along with some Kiowa—agreed to move to the reservation.
It dd not take long for the treaty to fail. Buffalo hunters ignored the provisions and encroached on Native lands, slaughtering the animals by the hundreds of thousands, taking only their skins and tongues while leaving their carcasses to rot on the plains. The U.S. government also failed to provide the provisions and promises of the treaty, which left the reservation lands in poverty and despair. The U.S. Army also failed to stop outlaws from stealing Indian stock, and did not stop whiskey dealers from entering tribal lands, which was a promise of the Treaty. The situation deteriorated even more as the years passed.
Native leaders appealed to U.S. representatives. U.S. Indian policy had undergone a significant shift in 1869 when President Ulysses S. Grant initiated the Quaker Peace Policy. The policy called for members of the Society of Friends—Quakers—to fill the role of administrators of Native reservations. Quakers had long advocated for the humane treatment of Native peoples and hoped that they could somehow create an environment of at least accommodation between Whites and Natives by serving as a mediator of sorts between the two groups. President Grant saw the potential for less conflict on the Plains and thus approved the policy.
The Quaker administrators, though good intentioned, were ill-equipped to carry out the provisions. They were ineffective in guarding entry of Native lands by outlaws and hunters and they received very little cooperation from the Office of Indian Affairs or the United States Army in stopping violations. The Army particularly had no inclination or even intention of stopping hunters from taking bison on Indian lands, and they also failed to enforce other promised stipulations of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge. Corruption from Indian agents outside the Quaker circle also harmed relations. Unscrupulous traders, contracted to provide food to the reservations, instead sold the best meat and produce to White towns, and transported often rancid products to the reservations. Thus, by the spring of 1874, conditions on the western Oklahoma reservations were reaching a boiling point; Native leaders, discontent with the broken promises made in the Treaty, began to hear complaints from their people and were near armed reaction to the injustices. A movement among the Comanche would prove to be a spark of war in that year.
*Next Week, the Red River War of 1874 begins with two leaders of the Quahadi Band of Comanches, Isa-Tai and Quanah.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee the Executive Director of the Association and can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.