The Indian Frontier 1846-1890

THE INDIAN FRONTIER 1846–1890

Revised Edition

ROBERT M. UTLEY

Histories of the American Frontier Series

Ray Allen Billington, General Editor

Howard R. Lamar, Coeditor

Martin Ridge, Coeditor

David J. Weber, Coeditor

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS

ALBUQUERQUE

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-5414-3

© 1984 by the University of New Mexico Press

Revised edition first published in 2003.

All rights reserved.

17    16    15    14    13       2    3    4    5    6

ISBN-13: 978-0-8263-2998-1

The Library of Congress cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Utley, Robert Marshall, 1929–

The Indian frontier, 1846–1890 / Robert M. Utley.— Rev. ed.

     p.      cm. — (Histories of the American frontier series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8263-2998-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Indians of North America—Wars.

2. Indians of North America—Government relations.

3. Frontier and pioneer life—West (U.S.)

4. West (U.S.)—History—1848–1860.

5. West (U.S.)—History—1860–1890.

I. Title. II. Histories of the American frontier.

E81 .U747 2003

978´.02—dc21

2003011707

FOR PAUL PRUCHA,

FROM WHOM WE ALL LEARNED SO MUCH.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

1. The Indian West at Midcentury

2. Foundations of a New Indian Policy, 1846–1860

3. When the White People Fought Each Other, 1861–1865

4. War and Peace: Indian Relations in Transition, 1865–1869

5. Grant's Peace Policy, 1869–1876

6. Wars of the Peace Policy, 1869–1886

7. The Vision of the Reformers, 1865–1890

8. The Reservation, 1880–1890

9. The Passing of the Frontier, 1890

Notes

Historiography & Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1 Yellow Wolf

2 Sun Dance

3 Buffalo

4 Horse-mounted Blackfeet woman pulls travois with family and belongings

5 Hunters down buffalo, 1873

6 Lawyer

7 Fort Union Trading Post

8 At Fort McKenzie Assinniboines fell on Blackfeet in a bloody surprise attack

9 Apaches

10 Washing for Gold

11 & 12

Covered wagons of emigrants bound for the Pacific crawled up the Great Platte Road

13 Thin lines of war houses through Indian country

14 Treaty council, 1855

15 & 16

Chief negotiators at the Laguna Negra council of 1855 Governor David Meriwether and Navajo Chief Manuelito

17 Kamiakin

18 Isaac I. Stevens

19 Comanches

20 Apaches lived in brush wickiups well adapted to their harsh desert homeland

21 St. John's Day at Ácoma Pueblo in 1883

22 Navajo man beside his rock-and-timber Hogan

23 Officers of the Eleventh Ohio Cavalry, 1864

24 John Ross

25 Little Crow

26 Minnesota farmers fell by the score as angry Sioux swept through the settlements in 1862

27 Henry H. Sibley

28 James H. Carleton

29 Kit Carson

30 Bosque Redondo

31 John M. Chivington

32 Edward W. Wynkoop

33 Camp Weld conference in September 1864

34 John Pope

35 Red Cloud

36 James R. Doolittle

37 Fetterman Massacre

38 William Tecumseh Sherman

39 Railroads slice through the Indian homeland

40 Sketches of scenes at the Medicine Lodge council

41 Commissioners meet with Sioux at Fort Laramie, 1868

42 Beecher's Island

43 Charles Schreyvogel's Early Dawn Attack

44 Ely S. Parker

45 Victorio

46 Loco

47 Oliver Otis Howard

48 Bald Head Agent Lawrie Tatum with a group of Mexican children freed from bondage

49 Lone Wolf

50 Kicking Bird

51a Big Tree

51b Satank

52 Spotted Tail

53 Fort Davis,Texas

54 Cavalry troops parade in front of officers’ row at Fort Custer, Montana

55 Frederic Remington's Cheyenne warrior

56 Cavalry trooper

57 General George Crook astride his mule Apache at Fort Bowie, Arizona, 1885

58 One of General Crook's Apache scout units

59 A Reconnaissance, by Frederic Remington

60 Captain Jack

61 Pickets watch for enemy movements

62 Remington's Protecting a Wagon Train

63 A Sharp Encounter by Charles Schreyvogel

64 Custer's wagon train in the Black Hills

65 Sitting Bull

66 Custer poses with officers and ladies of the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Abraham

67 Nelson A. Miles

68 Miles and staff pose in winter gear at Fort Keogh, Montana

69 Meeting Between the Lines, Frederic Remington

70 Chief Joseph

71 Surrender of Chief Joseph by Frederic Remington

72 Frederick Remington's A Study in Action

73 Nick Eggenhofer's rendition of the Battle of Rattlesnake Springs, Texas

74 Geronimo

75 Group picture (Geronimo at right) at the Canyon de los Embudos conference with General Crook

76 Thomas Jefferson Morgan

77 Henry L. Dawes

78 Henry M. Teller

79 Henry B. Whipple

80 Richard Henry Pratt

81 Sioux girls arrive at Carlisle as part of the first class, in October 1879

82 The first graduating class, 1889

83 Carl Schurz, President Hayes’ energetic Secretary of the Interior

84 Plenty Horses

85 The slaughter of the buffalo

86 Sitting Bull's camp on the Standing Rock Reservation in 1883 or 1884

87 Little Wound

88 Typical Sioux cabin on the Pine Ridge Reservation

89 Valentine T. McGillycuddy

90 Oglalas hold council against a backdrop of tipis, 1890

91 Brule women line up for beef handouts at Rosebud Agency

92 The Crook Commission at Standing Rock, 1889

93 Pine Ridge Agency, Dakota, about 1885

94 Indian police contingent at Rosebud Agency in South Dakota

95 Big Foot's Miniconjou Ghost Dancers, 1890

96 The field of Wounded Knee two days after the fight

97 Pine Ridge after the surrender, January 1891

98 Sioux delegation dressed as the reformers wanted them dressed

99 The great rush to the Cherokee Strip of Indian Territory, 1893

MAPS

1 Major Tribes in 1850

2 Blackfeet Country, 1780–1858

3 The Permanent Indian Frontier, 1817–circa 1848

4 The Southwest, 1848–1861

5 The Plains Wars, 1848–1861

6 The Southwest and the Southern Plains, 1862–1890

7 The Sioux Wars, 1862–1868

8 The Northern Plains, 1868–1890

9 The Mountain Wars, 1850–1880

10 Western Indian Reservations, 1890

11 The Teton Sioux Reservations, 1890

12 Indian Territory, 1866–1890

FOREWORD

WHEN Robert M. Utley's The Indian Frontier of the American West appeared in 1984, the key phrase Indian Frontier in its title signaled that here was a distinctive new approach to writing Western history. Scholars and lay readers realized at once that this book was an objective, balanced narrative about both Indians and whites. Utley presented his account in terms of how totally different cultures interacted with one another in ways that were often tragic and violent in the years between 1846 and 1890. Exhibiting a mastery of the available manuscript and printed materials, Utley produced such a clear, logical, and always lively account of the last Indian frontier, that it was soon recognized as a pioneering classic study in the history of Indian-white relations in the nineteenth century.

The enduring popularity of The Indian Frontier over two decades should come as no surprise, for by 1984 Robert Utley was already recognized as an outstanding National Park Service historian, and the author of the best selling The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963), as well as two major volumes on the history of the army on the Western frontier: Frontiersman in Blue (1967) and Frontier Regulars (1984).

Since then he has continued to write about subjects that expanded both his and our understanding of the last Indian frontier in three more recent books. In 1988 he published a biography, Cavalier in Buckskin: George A. Custer and the Western Military Frontier, and in 1993, a second biography, a powerful moving study, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull. Then in 2002 his majestic history of the Texas Rangers, Lone Star Justice, appeared. It is no wonder that he has been called one of the most popular and productive historians of the American West writing today.

When the editors of the Billington Histories of the American Frontier Series asked Utley if he wished to publish a revised edition of The Indian Frontier, he responded with enthusiasm, saying that he had continued to consult new sources and had always followed the publications of both older and more recent scholars writing about Indian-white relations. The impressive result is that the new edition reflects changes based on his use of works by scores of authors who have published studies between 1984 and 2002.

It is with great pleasure and pride that the editors announce the republication of one of the major classics in the series. The Indian Frontier, 1846–1890 represents a fine example of Ray Allen Billington's primary goal for the series he founded: a splendid narrative synthesis of a major period and topic in the ever-evolving and exciting history of the American West.

Howard Lamar, Yale University, for the editors

of the Histories of the American Frontier Series.

Co-editors:

William Cronon, University of Wisconsin

Martin Ridge, The Huntington Library

David J. Weber, Southern Methodist University

PREFACE

IN 1893 the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner propounded his sweeping frontier hypothesis. The existence of an area of free land, he declared, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. For Turner, Europeans moved westward in a series of frontiers—a trader's frontier, farmer's frontier, rancher's frontier, miner's frontier—all pushing westward at different paces and different times. In taming a formidable wilderness, they developed unique traits that transformed all Americans into a distinctive people, unlike any other on earth.

For Turner, the focus was white pioneers. Indians were mere impersonal foils, like the wild beasts and other fixtures of the wilderness. To be sure, he identified an Indian frontier and stressed its importance, but only as an influence in shaping the special American character. It was significant as a consolidating agent, he believed, calling forth united action against a common danger, providing a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.¹

As originally formulated and presented in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier concept has been assailed as rigid, oversimplified, exaggerated, unsophisticated, misleading, or entirely fallacious, and scholars still argue how much, if any, is valid. Some regard it as altogether irrelevant to modern scholarship, to be dismissed as a contemptible f-word. Others see it as offering a conceptual framework, however simplistic, within which to develop themes of western American history. This is the underlying rationale of the Histories of the American Frontier series. It is also my preference.

My Indian frontier, however, is not Turner's. Mine is not a single frontier line, white on one side and red on the other. Mine consists of groupings of frontier zones in which white and red mingled. They saw themselves as distinct peoples and usually on opposing sides in conflicts. These conflicts were sometimes violent and sometimes simply political, economic, and cultural competition. More often than generally appreciated, the contact was even friendly, or at least peaceful. The interaction almost always produced acculturation—changes in values, attitudes, institutions, and material culture. Nor was acculturation confined only to one side. Both peoples changed, often radically and in ways not perceived as attributable to the other. Even so, the worldview of each remained essentially incomprehensible to the other.

The cultural gulf is the key to understanding Indian-white relations within these frontier zones. The Zuni Indians of western New Mexico provide a compelling symbol for what happened. In their spiritual life, the kachina plays a significant role. The kachina is not merely a doll but the tangible representation of a spiritual being or god that objectifies particular truths or dynamics of life. One of the kachinas came out of the underworld fastened back to back with a person from an alien world. The deformity condemned the two to an eternity of physical union in which neither could ever see or understand the other.²

So it was with red and white. The frontier condemned them to physical union, while a great cultural chasm condemned them never really to see or understand each other. Their two distinct thoughtworlds accommodated only marginally to each other. As Calvin Martin has observed, Surely this is the most poignant message of Indian-White relations: 500 years of talking past each other, of mutual incomprehension.³ The truths captured by this Zuni kachina spawned forces that gave direction to the history of the continental Indian frontier.

It was truly continental, not just a process that occurred in the Trans-Mississippi West. Because earlier Indian frontiers are now treated in another volume of this series, the title of my revision has been recast. The companion volume is The Indian Frontier, 1763–1846, by R. Douglas Hurt. Mine is The Indian Frontier, 1846–1890.

For a work developed within Turner's conceptual framework, there needs to be a generally recognized time to consider the frontier period ended. Some have pointed out that acculturation continues indefinitely; that political, social, economic, and cultural interaction do not end so long as distinct peoples are in contact; that indeed the frontier has no meaning. For me, however, the most useful interpretation is to view the frontier period at an end when one side clearly established political domination over the other. For most Indian groups (though not all), this point was reached about 1890.⁴

This twentieth-anniversary reissue of Indian Frontier affords an opportunity to recall the context within which the first edition was conceived and shaped. It is also a time for noting how academic and popular perceptions of Indians and Indian-white history have evolved since then.

By the early 1980s, the Red Power movement had peaked. It had lost much of the stridency of the late 1960s and the 1970s. It no longer rang with shouts that Custer died for your sins. It no longer took such militant forms as the seizure and occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, the exchange of gunfire with FBI agents at Wounded Knee, or the creation of an explosive media event at the centennial of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Yet the movement did not die. It stabilized. Indians still demanded their due from government and society. They still strove to regain their special identity and pride of heritage. And they still portrayed their historic treatment by whites in the language of victimhood.

Dee Brown popularized this language in his 1971 bestseller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. This immensely well-received book furnished a text for new thinking about Indians, a text that endured year after year into the twenty-first century. More polemic than history, it nonetheless found its way into university classrooms and drew credibility from academic approval. Casting all whites as greedy aggressors and all Indians as saintly victims, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee gained wide popular acceptance of the polarized interpretation of the past promoted by the Indian activists. It also stoked a guilt for the action of their forebears already burdening the conscience of white Americans.

As a student of Indian-white history for more than twenty years, I wrote against the backdrop of this ferment. Some of it had touched me personally, such as the occupation of the BIA building and the confrontation with the American Indian Movement at the Little Bighorn Battlefield in 1976. Without foreseeing the enormous impact Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee would achieve as a polemic, I held it in contempt as history.

My career in history and in the National Park Service had begun at the Custer Battlefield, now the Little Bighorn Battlefield, National Monument. Since then my specialty, expressed in several books, had been the history of the U.S. army on the frontier. The Red Power movement, with its unhistorical characterization of the frontier soldiers, angered me but probably speeded thinking that would have unfolded anyway. In writing Indian Frontier, I strove to put aside my military bias but also to ignore the increasingly fashionable notions spawned by Dee Brown and the Indian militants.

Two peoples, two cultures, were the players. Each had to be treated with respect and understood on their own terms. Both whites and Indians acted according to their time and place, not ours today. Neither would have understood interpretations that held them accountable for failing to live up to the values, attitudes, institutions, and standards of behavior of a later generation, still less interpretations designed to promote modern political, economic, or social agendas. Historians label as presentism the imposition of today's standards on people of the past. Presentism is avoided by judging earlier generations on their own terms. An obligation still remains, however, to probe how what happened differs from what we believe today ought to have happened. Such was my objective in writing this book.

Since the publication of Indian Frontier in 1984, I have written further of soldiers and Indians, most notably a biography of General Custer, Cavalier in Buckskin (1988) and a biography of Sitting Bull, The Lance and the Shield (1993). I have also diverged into outlaws, frontier violence, mountain men, and Texas Rangers. The work on Sitting Bull in particular gave me new insights that have helped in this revision.

I wrote before the so-called New Western History burst on the academy and then on the nation. Patricia Nelson Limerick led the way in 1987 with Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. Her text discarded the notion of frontier altogether; disparaged Turner's concepts of conquest and process; centered on the experiences in particular parts of the West not only of white pioneers but of Indians, minorities, women, and the environment; and firmly established an uninterrupted continuity between the Old West and the New West. Limerick's emphatic break with earlier thinking stirred nearly as much controversy as had Turner's concept. But her fresh interpretations attracted a generation of young acolytes who made race, ethnicity, and gender rallying cries, sometimes proclaimed with unscholarly stridency.

In revising this book, I discovered few of my fundamental judgments of 1984 to change. I have not heeded Professor Limerick's admonition to discard the notions of frontier, conquest, and process. Although a few pedagogues still echo Dee Brown in the classroom, I have not yielded to the ugly distortions that he embedded in popular thinking. What I set forth in 1984 and in this revision rejects this popular view. Despite clinging to some Turnerian ideas and language, I am not, I believe, seriously at odds with prevailing scholarly thought. I have tried to degenderize the narrative and dispose of unneeded words. I have also in places broadened my horizons, especially in chapters 1 and 9, by both adding and deleting material. Finally, I have updated the bibliography and some of the endnotes.

Of the many people who helped, I want to give special recognition to the Reverend Francis Paul Prucha, S.J., of Marquette University. Anyone who deals with Indian-white relations in the nineteenth century must acknowledge a heavy debt to Prucha's writings on many facets of the subject. I have drawn deeply on virtually all his books and articles, which I admire greatly both in factual and interpretive content. In addition, I have profited immensely from his generous consent to review and criticize the entire manuscript in draft, although of course he cannot be held responsible for any of the final content.

Others deserve my heartfelt thanks. In particular, the late Wilbur Jacobs of the University of California at Santa Barbara made comments on early drafts of chapters 1 and 2 that led to extensive revisions. The late John C. Ewers of the Smithsonian Institution also importantly influenced these two chapters. And these and certain later chapters profited from review by Richard N. Ellis, then of the University of New Mexico, Harry Kelsey and Donald Chaput of the Los Angeles County Museum, and Robert A. Trennert of Arizona State University.

Special acknowledgment is due Ray Allen Billington. He asked me to take on this project—appropriately, beneath a canopy of towering redwoods during a historical group tour of Muir Woods in June 1977. Together with Martin Ridge, Ray arranged a six-week visit to the Huntington Library for me in the spring of 1981, and scarcely two days before his lamented death he completed a critical review of the first three chapters. Both at the Huntington and as an editor of the Histories of the American Frontier series, Martin Ridge merits thanks, as do the other editors, Howard Lamar of Yale University and David Weber of Southern Methodist University.

The National Park Service made available most of the maps. Drawn by Harry Scott for the Park Service publication Soldier and Brave: Historic Places Associated with Indian Affairs and the Indian Wars in the Trans-Mississippi West (and based on drafts I myself prepared many years ago), they seemed a good illustration for most of the matters dealt with in my book.

The revised text has profited greatly from the thoughtful and informed counsel of Elliott West of the University of Arkansas, Christian McMillan of Yale University, and Raymond DeMallie of Indiana University.

And I would be remiss indeed if I did not express the most sincere appreciation to my wife, Melody Webb, both for professional criticism and for personal support and encouragement.

GEORGETOWN, TEXAS

SEPTEMBER 2002

one

THE INDIAN WEST AT MIDCENTURY

ON AUGUST 29, 1846, a party of Cheyenne Indians pitched their conical skin tipis on the north bank of the Arkansas River near the bastioned adobe castle where the Bent brothers had traded since 1833. Among the party was Yellow Wolf. A hardened, wiry little man in his middle sixties, Yellow Wolf enjoyed an enviable record as a leader in warfare with the Kiowas, Comanches, Utes, and Pawnees, and as a chief of the prestigious Dog Soldier band he exerted great influence in his tribe. Few Cheyennes possessed his wisdom or intellect. It was Yellow Wolf who had persuaded Little White Man William Bent and his brothers not to locate their trading post farther up the river, beyond the buffalo range. Ever since, Yellow Wolf and his people had been the Bents’ staunchest supporters among the southern Plains tribes, an affinity cemented when William Bent took a Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman.

Yellow Wolf reached Bent's Fort in time to witness the closing scenes of a momentous summer. Beginning in late July, the valley around the fort had begun to fill with white men. The tents of seventeen hundred soldiers sprouted for miles along the river. Rank on rank of white-topped wagons drew up nearby. Twenty thousand horses, mules, and oxen covered the sandy plain. The soldiers were marching to fight the Mexicans, they told the Indians gathered at the fort to trade. In wonder, they declared over and over that they had never supposed there were so many white people.

Most of the army had moved on by the time Yellow Wolf arrived, but the spectacle of its passage may well have crystallized his thinking. He had noted year after year the growing presence of white people in the Indian country. Each year more wagons made their way across the plains with goods for trade with the Mexicans in Santa Fe. The signs were ominous, and they pointed to a conclusion no other Cheyenne leader was to acknowledge for years. He shared his thoughts with an army officer recuperating from an illness at Bent's Fort. Yellow Wolf, the officer wrote in his journal,

is a man of considerable influence, of enlarged views, and gifted with more foresight than any other man in his tribe. He frequently talks of the diminishing numbers of his people, and the decrease of the once abundant buffalo. He says that in a few years they will become extinct; and unless the Indians wish to pass away also, they will have to adopt the habits of the white people, using such measures to produce subsistence as will render them independent of the precarious reliance afforded by the game.¹

Yellow Wolf had a good reason for apprehension. The march of these soldiers held great portent for the Cheyennes. This year of 1846 was one of profound significance, a year of decision. The army the Indians watched marching on the Santa Fe Trail—General Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West—was an instrument of decision. In the Mexican War of 1846–48 the United States seized the Southwest and California. Already, in 1845, Texas had been annexed; and on the eve of the war the resolution of the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain added the Pacific Northwest. With breathtaking suddenness, the United States flung its western boundary to the Pacific and transformed itself into a continental nation. Then, as if to light a powder train laid down by these events, on January 24, 1848, only ten days before diplomats at Guadalupe Hidalgo signed the treaty ending the Mexican War, James Marshall spotted a golden glint in the millrace of a sawmill he was building on California's American River. Territorial expansion combined with the discovery of gold to place the Indian world of the Trans-Mississippi West on the threshold of enormous change.

For Yellow Wolf and his people, the march of Kearny's army marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. In his remaining eighteen years the old chief saw his fears realized. He continued to believe that the only hope for his people lay in learning the ways of the white people. In the frigid dawn of November 29, 1864, the crash of carbine fire awakened him. With others of Black Kettle's village, he sprang from his tipi to confront the charging soldiers. And there on Sand Creek, not far from the melting mud ruins of William Bent's long-abandoned trading post, Yellow Wolf died, cut down in his eighty-fifth year by a bullet fired by a white man.

Fig. 1: Yellow Wolf. This prescient Cheyenne chief shared his fears for the future of his people with Lt. J. W. Abert at Bent's Fort in 1846, and Abert, impressed with the Indian's character and intellect, prepared this sketch for later inclusion in his official report. Puzzlingly, although already in his sixties, Abert gave him a decidedly youthful aspect. Without success, Yellow Wolf tried to persuade his people that their only hope of survival lay in adopting the ways of the white people. Whites repaid him with a bullet at Sand Creek in 1864.

The sudden leap of the nation's boundaries to the Pacific set off a process of confrontation and conflict between whites and the Indians of the Trans-Mississippi West. It was a process even then ending in catastrophe for the tribes of the eastern woodlands. Having destroyed one Indian barrier, an aggressively westering America now faced another. In less than half a century this barrier too would be destroyed, and white civilization would reign unchallenged over the plains, mountains, and deserts of the Trans-Mississippi West.

At midcentury the prospective victims numbered about 360,000.² Seventy-five thousand ranged the Great Plains from Texas to the British possessions in buffalo-hunting nomads that have produced today's befeathered stereotype of the American Indian: Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Shoshoni, Kiowa, and Comanche, to name the most powerful. The nomads of the southern Plains shared their domain uneasily with some 84,000 Indians uprooted from their eastern homes by the U.S. government and swept westward to new lands beyond the ninety-fifth meridian. Most gave allegiance to what the whites, with unconscious patronization, labeled the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole. Of the 200,000 Indians in the new U.S. territories, Texas claimed 25,000, most prominently Lipan, Apache, and Comanche. The Mexican Cession (California and New Mexico) contained 150,000, among them Ute, Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, Yavapai, Paiute, Yuma, Mojave, Modoc, and a host of tiny coastal groups that, whether or not wholly missionized, came to be known collectively as Mission Indians. The Oregon Country (later to give birth to the states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho) was home to 25,000 Indians, including Nez Perce, Flathead, Coeur d'Alene, Spokane, Pend d'Oreille, Yakima, Walla Walla, Cayuse, Umatilla, Palouse, Chinook, Squaxon, Nisqually, and Puyallup.

Opposed to these Indians, the United States at midcentury boasted a population of more than 20 million, a counting utterly beyond the comprehension of the western natives. By 1860, 1.4 million would live in the West; by 1890, 8.5 million.

Although a so-called Indian barrier influenced the speed and direction of the white people's westward movement, it was scarcely a monolithic barrier. For four and a half centuries Europeans had applied the label Indian to the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, but this arbitrary collectivization obscured a profound diversity. Despite cultural similarities, the native Americans were in fact many different peoples. Thus no group typifies the western Indians. The Nez Perce affords as useful a group as any for suggesting who these people were that unknowingly, or with the vague forebodings of a Yellow Wolf, stood on the threshold of catastrophe.³

The Nez Perces were a handsome people of three thousand or less in 1850. They occupied the eastern reaches of the recently disputed Oregon Country—from the rugged, forested mountains drained by the Clearwater and Salmon rivers to the high, open plateaus gashed by the Snake and Grande Ronde rivers and bounded on the west by the Great Bend of the Columbia. They formed a bridge between the powerful buffalo-hunting plainsmen to the east and the small, loosely organized fishing groups to the west. Not surprisingly, their culture partook of both. They lived in skin or brush lodges and dressed in finely tailored skin garments decorated with shells, elk teeth, beads, and other ornaments. Lofty eligantly formed active and durable horses, in Meriwether Lewis's words, furnished transportation and the origins of the distinctive Appaloosa breed.

A ceaseless quest for food ordered the life of the Nez Perces. They planted no crops but moved about to where food could be had. In early summer, hillal, the time of the first run of the salmon, the people appeared on the banks of the rivers to spear or net salmon from the hordes fighting their way upstream to spawn. They gorged on fresh fish while drying and smoking supplies for leaner times. As summer warmed the meadows and prairies, the bands came together at favorite camas grounds for festival-like gatherings in which fun and visiting alternated with digging the onionlike camas root,