Removing Native Americans ‘side effect’ of Indian Wars
William Tecumseh Sherman, commanding general of the U.S. Army, explained the “Indian Wars” this way to graduates of a military academy in Michigan in 1879:
“Though peace has ever been the controlling genius of our laws and institutions, we are forced to admit that what ministers to the happiness of one class or race often works to the misery of another,” he said.
“Wars do not usually result from just causes, but from pretexts,” Sherman added. Because “ambition, selfishness folly, madness … become blind and bloodthirsty, and are not to be appeased save by havoc.”
In his latest book, “The Last Campaign,” H.W. Brands provides a lively account of the post-Civil War conflict over the territory that became the United States. Brands is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of two dozen books, including biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D.Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
Given the land hunger, vastly superior numbers and firepower of the invaders, Brands reminds us, the outcome of the Indian Wars was never in doubt, even to Native Americans who resisted orders to leave their ancestral homes. Although he presents a nuanced analysis of the attitudes of Sherman and other generals toward the conflict, Brands, echoing virtually all of his fellow historians, condemns the treatment of Indigenous people by white settlers and the U.S. government.
“The Last Campaign” is at its best when Brands draws on vivid accounts by soldiers, settlers, chiefs and warriors (many of them written many years later and translated and edited by non-Indigenous people).
When he returned to camp and discovered that his mother, young wife and three small children had been murdered by marauding Mexicans, Geronimo said he turned away, stood by the river, did not pray, talked to no one, and no one talked to him. Although others had lost in the massacre, “none had lost as I had, for I had lost all.”
Within a few days, Geronimo found his purpose: He vowed vengeance against those who had wronged him – and his people.
TrooperJohn Bourne was stationed in Camp Grant, 50 miles north of Tucson, when he fought the Apaches. He remembered the heat, dust and centipedes, scorpions and tarantulas. Above all, he recalled a dull routine broken occasionally by reconnaissance missions and visits to a cemetery, which furnished even “the most callouswith nightmares for a month.”
On the plains, Brands writes, white ranchers allowed immense herds of cattle free range. Indians “could be forgiven, at least at first, for seeing little difference” between hunting cattle andhunting buffalo. Moreover, “much of the struggle on the plains” resulted from whites’ efforts to remove buffalo tofree up grass for cattle.
“The demise or displacement of the Indians … was a side effect.”
Toward the end of the book, Brands makes a brief, and in my judgment, misguided attempt to mitigate the impact of demise and displacement. Efforts to “remake Indians in the image of whites wasn’t a total failure,” he writes. Some individuals “found their niches.” In Oklahoma, Cherokees rebuilt “the same kind of progressive, prosperous society they hadcreated in Georgia.”
Perhaps. But, along with the slavery of African Americans, removal, relocation and reservation polices remain America’s “original sin.”