Chapter 38 The Ruling Elite: Ethnic Cleansing in America Biological Warfare against the Indians by Deanna Spingola

 

Ethnic Cleansing in America Biological Warfare against the Indians

After the Spanish conquest, an Indian of Yucatan wrote about his people in happier days, before the Europeans arrived, “There was then no sickness; they had no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; they had then no burning chest; they had then no abdominal pain; they had then no consumption; they had then no headache. At that time, the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here.”[1710]

The conquistadors introduced smallpox into the New World as early as 1503, either from the slaves they

imported from Africa into the Caribbean or by the Spanish sailors who carried the Variola major. As the

Spaniards moved from one Caribbean island to another, suppressing and enslaving the indigenous

population, they brought with them the deadly disease that wiped out entire villages in its wake. In

December 1518 and January 1519, the natives on Hispaniola developed smallpox which soon spread to

the natives in Antigua, Barbados, Cuba, Jamaica, Martinique and Puerto Rico and ultimately Central and

North America. The Indians had no natural immunity to this deadly pestilence. The death rates were so

high, that often three out of every four Indians were afflicted. Thus, there was no one to care for the ill and

many, who might have recovered, starved to death because there was no one healthy enough to hunt and fish.[1711]

In May 1519, Diego Velázquez directed Pánfilo de Narváez to take his 600 soldiers, go arrest Hernán Cortéz, and take over his command in Mexico. They sailed from Cuba during a raging epidemic of smallpox. Narváez took a smallpox-infected African slave with him who was “unaware that he was to be the instrument that would bring about the Aztecs ‘near annihilation.” He infected numerous natives with whom he interacted.[1712]

African-born Onesimus, a slave belonging to Cotton Mather, told his master about the

inoculation practices used in Africa against smallpox, a highly contagious disease that had broken out in epidemic proportions in Boston in 1721. Onesimus explained the inoculation procedure to Dr. Zabdiel Boylston who then proceeded to use the method on patients in Boston and the surrounding area. In the 1721 smallpox epidemic, at least 6,000 people became infected. Dr. Boylston inoculated over 240 people including his son and two slaves despite the fact that people considered the process extremely dangerous and controversial. The doctor would extract material from the pustule of the infected person; place the material on a thorn, then scratch the skin of the unaffected person with the thorn. Allegedly, this provided immunity to the unaffected person.[1713]

People opposed this process politically, medically and religiously. Religious practitioners viewed it as unnatural and perceived it as undermining God’s will. Public records indicate that the inoculation itself killed at least two percent of the people who requested it as opposed to fifteen percent of the people who died from the disease who did not avail themselves to this procedure. Purportedly, Onesimus’ report of this traditional African medical practice prevented numerous deaths while it introduced the practice of smallpox inoculation in America.[1714]

Henry Dobyns estimated that there were between one million and eighteen million natives in what is now the United States. Further, he claimed that ninety-three pandemics and epidemics from European pathogens were the main cause of the decline of the indigenous population. Dobyns stated that in the nineteenth century there were at least twenty-seven epidemic outbreaks, including thirteen deadly smallpox epidemics, the worst two in 1801-1802 and 1836-1840. In 1801-1802, the plains Indians suffered a loss of more than half of their population.[1715]

Sherburne Cook claims that only 8.64 percent of California’s Indian population perished because of U.S. military action. Further, he states that disease killed the remainder of the Indians who perished. Cook also concluded that white settlers killed approximately 6,750 Indians living in New England from 1634 to 1676 despite the fact that there was many times that number living in the area. Russell Thornton concluded that whites killed about 45,000 American Indians during formal warfare between 1775 and 1890 in addition to individual conflicts, which brings the total to between 53,000 and 106,000 deaths during a period of 115 years. Yet, during those same years the population declined by over 1.5 million.[1716] The apologists contend that unintended disease caused the Indian’s earliest decline despite starvation, forced relocations, enforced labor, rape, military slaughter, psychological trauma, and destruction of the food supply.

It was not too long before the dreaded smallpox had spread throughout the tribes living along the Ohio River such as the Mingo, the Delaware and the Shawnee. The British, many of whom may have been carriers, brought smallpox to the tribes in the South, which caused four epidemics in the Carolinas, 1711- 1712, 1738, 1759, and the late 1700s. In the mid-1700s, the Cherokees lost approximately half of the tribes. Other tribes in the Southeast lost similar numbers. On December 15, 1759, the South Carolina Gazette reported, “It is pretty certain that the Smallpox has lately raged with great Violence among the Catawba Indians, and that it was carried off near one-half of that nation, by throwing themselves into the River, as soon as they found themselves ill – This Distemper has since appeared amongst the Inhabitants of the Charraws and Waterees, where Many Families are down; so that unless special care I taken, it must soon (spread) thro’ the whole country.”[1717]

In an early experimentation of biological warfare, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief and a Freemason, willfully introduced blankets laden with smallpox to Pontiac’s Confederacy, a loose confederation of Native American tribes from the Great Lakes region, the Illinois Country, and Ohio Country during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Colonel Henry Bouquet received a letter from General Amherst in which he said, “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.” Bouquet responded, “I will try to inoculate them with some blankets that may fall into their hands and take care not to get the disease myself.”[1718]

William Trent, commander of Pittsburgh’s local militia, wrote in his records on May 24, 1763 “we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” Small pox erupted among Chief Pontiac’s confederate tribe killing men, women, and children. General Amherst made biological warfare official policy in the war against the Indians. In another letter to Colonel Bouquet, dated July 16, 1763, he ordered the distribution of small pox infected blankets to “inoculate the Indians” and directed Bouquet to “try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.” Bouquet confirmed Amherst’s directive in a letter dated July 26, 1763, “all your directions will be observed”[1719]

The U.S. Army repeated this deadly tactic by introducing blankets laden with the same disease to the Missouri River Mandans during the 1830s. The Smithsonian Institution acknowledged Amherst’s use of biological warfare, “During the bitter fighting in 1763-1764 General Jeffrey Amherst ordered that the Indians around Fort Pitt be infected with gifts of smallpox (laden) blankets. The Indian uprising failed, and Fort Pitt was easily relieved after a smallpox epidemic broke out among the warriors besieging the fort.”[1720] Amherst, who brought military Freemasonry to the colonies, wrote to Sir William Johnson in London, “When Men of What race soever, behave ill they must be punished.”[1721] Amherst, an arrogant aristocrat who despised all Indians, withheld gunpowder from France’s former allies, fully recognizing that the tribes depended on their muskets for hunting and would starve without ammunition.[1722] Amherst

College, in Massachusetts was name after Lord Jeffrey.[1723]

Amherst’s tactics created an epidemic among the Cherokees (allied with the British) in 1783, which helped George Washington’s forces and ended the Cherokee’s resistance. The U.S. Army repeated Amherst’s biological warfare tactics by distributing smallpox-infected blankets to the Mandans at Fort Clark in present day South Dakota. This led to the smallpox epidemic of 1836-40. The Mandan, out of about 2,400 there were only thirty-one survivors.[1724] By conservative calculations the number of Indians among the various tribes who perished total are – Blackfoot, Piegans, and Bloods 6,000 to 8,000; Pawnee, 2,000; Arikara and Minitaree, about half of the total tribe 4,500; Osage 1,000; Crow and Yanktonai Dakota, 400; Assiniboin over half of their tribe of 8,000; and three-fifths of the north-central California Indians. In the south between 400 and 500 Choctaw perished. There are no numbers for the other southern tribes like the Chickasaw Kiowa, the Apache, the Gros Ventre, the Winnebago, Comanche, Cayuse, and other New Mexico, Canada, and Alaska Indians.[1725]

Officials elected Dr. Edward Jenner (1749-1823) as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1788 and he discovered the vaccination process against smallpox in 1789. In 1790, Edward Jenner purchased a medical degree from St. Andrews University for £15. In 1791, Edward Jenner vaccinated his 18-month- old son with swinepox. In 1796, people in Gloucestershire, England credited Jenner with the concept of vaccination. He vaccinated an 8-year-old boy with smallpox pus. He ultimately vaccinated the boy at least twenty times. The boy died from tuberculosis at the age of twenty. In 1798, he vaccinated his son with cowpox. His son died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-one. In 1802, the British government gave Jenner £10,000 for continued experimentation with the smallpox vaccine. Experts abandoned the paradigm that vaccines provide lifetime immunity and sanctioned the concept of revaccination. A Freemason, Jenner was the Worshipful Master of the Faith and Friendship Lodge #270 in Berkeley, England. In 1822, the British government advanced him another £20,000 for smallpox vaccine experimentation. Jenner suppressed reports that indicated his concept was causing numerous deaths rather than saving lives.

According to the apologists, disease caused the mass deaths among the indigenous population. They claim that depopulation occurred unintentionally and not by deceptive design despite all the evidence existing in government records and the acknowledged army policies that just happened to accommodate the white settlers and commercial interests of the imperialists. In his book, Rosenbaum notes that following the 1797 discovery of the smallpox vaccination, the U.S. government encouraged all Indians to accept vaccinations.[1726]

In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson initiated a vaccine program among the native population when a delegation of warriors visited the District of Columbia. When he sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their exploration, he instructed them to “vaccinate Indians whom they encountered during their travels.” Jefferson wrote them, “Carry with you some matter of kinepox. Inform those of them with whom you may be of its efficacy as a preservative from the smallpox; and instruct and encourage them in the use of it.” Kinepox (Variola vaccinia) is an alternate name for cowpox. Lewis and Clark apparently did not have sufficient quantities of the vaccine to carry out Jefferson’s directive. The vaccine, made from kinepox, was only available from England.[1727]

On May 5, 1832, under the Jackson Administration, Congress enacted the following legislation, “That it shall be the duty of the several Indian agents and sub-agents under the direction of the Secretary of War to take such measures as he shall deem most efficient to convene the Indian tribes in their respective towns, or in such other places and numbers and at such seasons as shall be most convenient to the Indian populations, for the purpose of arresting the progress of smallpox among the several tribes by vaccination.” The government appropriated $12,000 for the project, a sizeable sum at the time. The Plains

Indians viewed the white men’s “operation” as some “new mode or trick of the pale face by which they hope to gain some new advantage over them.” Another epidemic in 1861-1862, during the Lincoln Administration, prompted the U.S. government in another attempt to vaccinate the natives, especially those living in the West.[1728]

Quite possibly, smallpox, a highly contagious disease, had claimed the lives of more Northern Plains Indians, a “virgin population,” in one year, 1837-1838, than all the military expeditions sent against them. The Indians used a very descriptive name for smallpox – rotting face. Author Roland G. Robertson claims that people disseminated smallpox through the “tribal trading networks” thus destroying their “elaborate Indian trading system,” and eliminating indigenous intermediaries. The disease then quickly spread to the interior and killed thousands. Without the indigenous intermediaries, Indians became dependent on white traders. This allowed Europeans, notably John Jacob Astor, to monopolize the fur trade that the Indians previously managed.[1729] Astor owned the American Fur Company, one the first monopoly trusts in America.

The Cayuse, another tribe decimated by disease, formerly resided in parts of northeast Oregon and southeast Washington where they were associated with the Nez Percé and spoke a language belonging to the Sahaptin-Chinook branch of the Penutian linguistic stock. Marcus Whitman established a mission among this tribe in 1836 at Waiilatpu, the Place of the Rye Grass.[1730]

Biological warfare, now a U.S. government policy, adopted after they witnessed the success that the British had against France’s Indian allies in the French and Indian Wars (1754–63). Accordingly, during the nineteenth century, the U.S. Army disseminated contaminated blankets to the Indians for extermination purposes. Smallpox, now available in a dry state, and cholera were very effective. A smallpox epidemic erupted in 1847 among the Cayuse, which destroyed the majority of the tribe. The Cayuse thought the missionaries who were working among them had caused the deaths. Therefore, the surviving Indians attacked the mission on November 29, 1847, and killed Dr. Whitman and thirteen others who lived there. Perhaps, the Indians thought the mission was the distribution point for the blankets provided by the U.S. government.[1731] The settlers then declared war and defeated the Cayuse.[1732] In 1855, the U.S. military incarcerated the surviving Cayuse on the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon, along with the Wallawalla and Umatilla peoples. By 1990, there were only 126 Cayuse Indians still living.[1733]

Smallpox was not the only disease that the Indians feared. In the eighteenth century, there were at least six other epidemics afflicting the indigenous population – measles, three of influenza, one of plague, one of typhoid, two of typhus, two of diphtheria, and two epidemics of scarlet fever. Tuberculosis and syphilis, as well as other sexually transmitted diseases decimated the native population. The high incident of rape by the invading Europeans introduced and spread these obnoxious diseases among the native population. Tuberculosis was particularly deadly and could wipe out the majority of an Indian village. Epidemics of malaria, dysentery, cholera and bubonic plague produced high mortality rates among the Indians living in Texas during the eighteenth century.[1734]

With regard to tuberculosis, author Kevin Annett, with documented evidence, states that the Canadian government, by 1891, in collaboration with the church officials who were supervising the resident schools deliberately placed healthy children in the same rooms with children suffering from tuberculosis in order to perpetuate the disease and decimate the indigenous population in Canada. They used other devious depopulation methods, as their main objective was the seizure of native lands and natural resources. By, 1850, Canada’s native population in the east were afflicted by smallpox brought by the Europeans. The indigenous population in the east was barely ten percent of what it had been before the Europeans arrived.[1735]

Altogether, Indian deaths probably exceeded 100,000 and more than likely several times that figure. This

mass genocide facilitated the U.S. conquest of the land west of the Mississippi River. U.S. military strategy included the systematic destruction of the indigenous food production, both the agricultural crops and the decimation of the buffalo devised to inflict starvation conditions upon the Indian population, which severely limited their natural resistance to disease in the presence of deliberate epidemics. General Phil Sheridan’s policy, during the 1870s, led to the extermination of at least sixty million buffalo, the principal food supply for the Great Plains Indians, the Cheyenne and the Lakota.[1736]

In 1884, editors asked Dr. Charles Creighton to write an article for the Encyclopedia Britannica on vaccinations. After extensive international research, he concluded that vaccinations represented “a gross superstition.” Later, Creighton wrote two books, Cowpox and Vaccinal Syphilis and Jenner and Vaccination. In that same year, more than 1,700 children who they vaccinated for smallpox died of syphilis. In Japan, during a seven-year period of time beginning in 1886 there were 25,474,370 vaccinations and re-vaccinations, which represented sixty-six percent of the Japanese population. During that period, there were 165,774 cases of smallpox resulting in 28,979 deaths.

Westward Ho, Killing as They Go

The early settlers in Virginia, the starting place for European inhabitation, had set the precedent for the rest of the country. During the next two centuries, in the 1700s and 1800s, settlers in the west slaughtered between 95% and 98% of California’s Indian population. Mere percentages only, do not convey the enormity of the gruesome suffering hundreds of thousands of California native peoples suffered during the decimation of their population beginning as early as 1769, a population that earlier invaders had already savagely reduced through disease and violence. One can apply those same percentages to the rest of the country, to the point that, only one-third of one percent of America’s population, about 250,000 out of 76,000,000 people, was native. Up to that time, this slaughter constitutes the worst human genocide that had occurred. It cost the lives of countless tens of millions of indigenous people in the Americas. The brutality and slaughter finally ended when the elite ultimately ran out of people to kill.[1737]

The Cherokees were militarily dispossessed of their lands in Georgia during the 1829 Georgia Gold

Rush, beginning in Lumpkin County. In addition, in 1874, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills affected

the Indians living there. The Alaska Gold Rush resulted in territorial losses and mass deaths. In the first

two years of the California Gold Rush, which began on January 24, 1848, miners slaughtered thousands of

resident Indians. California’s Indians spoke more than 100 distinct dialects, belonged to small bands, and

lived in culturally autonomous villages. They had extensive trade networks with their neighbors and as far

away as Mexico, the Southwest, the Great Basin, the Northwest Coast, and the Northwest Plateau. If we

can trust oral traditions, they even interacted with the Hawaiians and other peoples of the Pacific Islands.

[1738]

In 1848, James Marshall hired several tribes to construct a sawmill on the American River for John Sutter. Marshall needed a millrace, a fast-moving stream of water that drives a mill wheel, at an Indian village at Coloma. On January 24, 1848, in their digging, the Indians found gold nuggets and showed them to the whites. The Indians had seen gold before but placed no inordinate value on it. However, white men viewed gold differently.[1739] On March 3, 1849, Washington officials transferred the Bureau of Indian Affairs (March 11, 1824) from the War Department to the new Interior Department. When gold was discovered in California in 1848, the House of Rothschild, because of its substantial involvement in bullion trading, quickly established a San Francisco agency and appointed Benjamin Davidson and John May as their representatives.

Some whites considered Indians as subhuman and called them “diggers,” an offensive word similar to “nigger.” White miners began raping and slaughtering Indians in March 1849.[1740] Anglos had interacted with the indigenous population for over 200 years and had developed prejudices, based on the

government’s egregious treatment of the Indians. By the time of the California gold discovery, most whites hated Indians, as they regarded them as godless, barbaric and savage with no “redeeming value.” Either the “diggers,” as they called them, had to be relocated or exterminated. Enlightened whites conceded to relocating Indians to “reservations where they could be civilized.”[1741]

As many as 4,000 Indians worked in the gold fields by 1850. This changed after miners from Oregon arrived and started killing the Indian miners. Soon, Indians stopped working in the gold fields.[1742] In 1852, Edward Beale, the state’s first superintendent of Indian Affairs, established the first reservation in California.[1743] There were four forts in California – at San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and San Diego. Each fort housed soldiers who protected the associate missions from attack. The soldiers regularly raped the Indian daughters, wives, mothers and grandmothers and slaughtered their male family members who opposed such assaults.[1744] The Chico Courant of July 28, 1866 reported, “It is a mercy to the red devilstoexterminatethem.”[1745] Whiteminers,throughoutCalifornia,murderedthousandsofIndians,raped hundreds of native women and children, and sold thousands of individuals into slavery while others died from disease and malnutrition associated with their subjugation. In 1846, there had been at least 120,000 or more Indians in California. By the 1860s, there were between 20,000 and 40,000. Most of the deaths occurred between 1848 and 1868.[1746]

Between the discovery of gold in 1848 and 1870, half of the native population in Humboldt County had perished. The population declined from 40,000 to 20,000 souls. They had been kidnapped, killed or they suffered from the diseases that spread from the gold fields to the reservations. The racist immigrants who poured into California from all over the world murdered or enslaved thousands of Indians. The whites thought the Indians warranted total extermination. Some of the California natives managed to survive the genocide, the racial discrimination, the forced relocations, the land seizures, the rapes, the health issues, and all of the other burdens associated with the arrival of the white man. For California’s natives, the Gold Rush constituted a holocaust.[1747]

By the beginning of Lincoln’s War, U.S. officials had deported most of the Indians from their lands east of

the Mississippi. The military summarily slaughtered the Indians west of the river or placed them in

isolated camps on infertile barren land that no one else wanted.[1748] Within a year of the Indian’s gold

discovery at Coloma, bands of whites methodically murdered men, women, and children to obliterate

every obstacle in the way of land, water, and mineral resources. Miners drove Indians from their lands

and stole their resources. These miners grew up during the 1820s and 1830s and witnessed the forced

removal of thousands of Indians throughout the eastern U.S. White miners simply followed the example of

their fathers and grandfathers towards the indigenous Californians, driven to the sea with nowhere to go.

[1749]

The elites controlling the federal government planned to seize the gold resources in the western territories and sought to impede any efforts by the Confederacy to take control of any resource-rich land. If the Union could bring the Confederacy to its proverbial knees and could bring them back into the Union, then that would restore the total control over raw materials, production, markets, and labor to the elite. Lincoln claimed that those lands and the “national resources” belonged to the nation, his nation. As noted by author David Williams, Lincoln claimed that the “national resources...are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.” Businessmen, the people Lincoln represented, had designs on all available resources. “If Indians stood in the way, they were by definition threats to national security and obstacles to ‘progress.’ As such, they were subject to extermination.”[1750]

Only 3.5 percent of the homesteaders seeking western lands were actually awarded land. However, their hunger for land and their arduous settlement efforts accomplished the drudgery of opening up the west for the elites. Most did not object to slaughtering the heathen and Christian Indians, heavily vilified by the

government and the military as savages, worthy of death. After all, they were fighting for their country! There were gold and silver strikes in Colorado, California, Nevada and the Pacific Northwest. The greed for other resources – timber and minerals obliterated any Christian values that got in the way. Many Indians were willing to share the vast resources with others but the white men did not view sharing as an option as they wanted it all. Indigenous peoples throughout the world have lost their lands and resources to invaders unwilling to share.[1751]

In California, armed militias and vigilantes waged a genocidal war against the Shasta, Wioyot, Yuki, Hoopa, Klamath and other tribes. Indians who refused to allow themselves to be herded into government- run reservations so people could steal their land were killed. Whites stole the Indian’s livestock, raped their women or took them as concubines. They kidnapped their children to sell as slaves. Survivors who did not starve were shot on sight. Local officials paid a bounty for their scalps. In February 1860, citizens chased Bret Harte, editor of the Northern Californian, out of Union, California for reporting the massacre of sixty Indian residents, many of whom were women and children, who the white residents had hacked to death with axes and hatchets near Humboldt Bay.[1752]

Gold discoveries in Idaho and Montana attracted thousands of prospectors. This led to the development of travel routes through the buffalo herds of Dakota Territory, which compelled the Indians to leave their traditional hunting grounds and affected their ability to hunt, essential to their survival. To secure the travel routes, Federal troops converged upon the Yanktonais Sioux and the Santee refugees from Minnesota and relocated them to the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota. Under the direction of General Sully, several thousand troops attacked the Western Sioux encampments. On July 28, 1864, at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, the outnumbered and outgunned Indians, retreating for their lives, abandoned 400,000 pounds of dried buffalo meat. Sully was not able to entirely exterminate the Western Sioux. He was instrumental in establishing forts that would serve as bases for unrelenting warfare against the indigenous residents who happened to be in the path of progress.[1753]

Governor Leland Stanford, a Freemason, was impatient with the slowness of the work of death and called out the state militia to wage a total war of extermination. He appointed Colonel Stephen G. Whipple and his men to sweep through northern California and kill every Indian they could find. They imprisoned those who escaped slaughter on Alcatraz Island and in unprotected reservations. Hostile whites were free to exterminate the residents.[1754] During the gold rush, Stanford grew wealthy selling supplies to the prospectors. On June 28, 1861, he co-founded the Central Pacific Railroad, the first transcontinental railway line over the Sierra Nevada, with Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Collis P. Huntington. The alliance acquired control of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1868. They received massive funding and land grants to build the railroad.

Settlers and prospectors overran the Paiute’s land in the Nevada Territory due to gold and silver discoveries between 1861 and 1863. This also occurred in the more fertile areas of Washington Territory, Idaho Territory, and the new state of Oregon. Miners invaded the lands of the native Spokan, Snake, Klamath, Modoc, Bannock, Cayuse and Nez Percé Indians. Local and territorial governments, run by whites, did not attempt to stop the illegalities and abuses against the indigenous peoples. The army killed Indians; they did not protect them from whites. The army protected the whites in their crimes against the Indians. The Indians had no protection except their own defenses.[1755] Isaac Stevens negotiated a series of treaties with tribes in Washington, which happened to coincide with the gold discovery at Colville. Oregon’s Governor George Curry wanted the military to exercise more harshness towards the Indians who were unwilling to vacate their land.[1756]

Some tribes were so desperate for peace that they allowed the government to build forts on their land thinking that the military would protect them against the whites. Instead, the constant military presence

posed an “implicit threat” used to extract treaty agreements. Thus, the Nez Percé lost 90% of their remaining lands. Some tribes, unable to acquire official protection, organized bands and successfully implemented guerrilla-style warfare against mining camps, small farming settlements, unprotected ranches and travelers. Failing to prevent or catch them, the army established more forts in northern Nevada, California, Oregon and Idaho as base camps for future warfare against the Indians.[1757] General George Crook, starting in 1866, maintained a two-year campaign that finally broke the Paiutes’ power over the southwestern Idaho gold fields, much to the delight of his superiors.[1758] Crook viewed the Indian-white relations in the area as, “the fable of the wolf and the lamb.” A white brute could shoot an Indian in cold blood or rape an Indian woman or child and escape any kind of punishment.[1759]

For generations, the Ute’s stretched from western Colorado into parts of Utah and Nevada, an area that had sufficient game to sustain life. The Utes repeatedly begged the government to expel the invading miners who were developing settlements and destroying the wild game. James Collins, the region’s Indian Superintendent made requests for compensation but Congress ignored them. Without food and little hope of official help, the Ute took things into their own hands and started fighting back by stealing livestock from the ranchers who had encroached on their land. This resulted in a bloodbath with the survivors forced onto a small reservation in the southwest corner of the territory.[1760]

Invading whites seized large portions of the Indian’s choicest land, habitually without any form of compensation. Inevitably, the whites destroyed the wild game that the Indians depended upon. Despite the Indian’s efforts to protect themselves, the results were always the same: starvation leading to desperation followed by stealing when they would be caught and slaughtered by the well-equipped U.S. military. The military typically relocated the traumatized survivors to isolated camps on unproductive land, where they were wholly dependent on government annuities in order to subsist.[1761]

Alphonse de Rothschild declared in 1870, “I am of the opinion that the more precious metals we have, be it gold, be it silver, the better it will be, because there will be more work. Bullion is not wealth, properly speaking, but it is the muscle and fuel of work. The best proof of this is the wonderful development of trade and industry that followed the finds in California. We owe the great works that are the glory of our day to those goldmines.”[1762]

Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan, commander of the Chicago-based Division of the Missouri, had jurisdiction over the Great Sioux Reservation. He was supposed to keep the whites out of Sioux territory and prevent Sioux aggression against the frontier settlements, which, to him, justified the need of a military post in the Black Hills. He said, “In this way, we could secure a strong foothold in the heart of the Sioux and thereby exercise a controlling influence over these war-like people.” He ordered Colonel George A. Custer to head a military reconnaissance to the Black Hills. On July 2, 1874, Custer, with his Seventh Calvary, about 1,000 men, left Fort Abraham Lincoln in the northern part of Dakota Territory. The expedition discovered a sizable amount of gold on French Creek, in western South Dakota. In mid-August, on the way home, Custer dispatched a message describing the various agricultural and mineral wealth of the area. Custer and his men soon forgot the original purpose of the trip in the excitement about the gold discovery.[1763]

Custer and his Seventh Calvary Regiment made it a practice to slaughter the Indian pony herds in order to diminish the native’s ability to combat the military but also as a way of eliminating their ability to hunt. General Phil Sheridan advocated the extermination of the bison (buffalo) herds in order to “destroy the commissary” of the Plains Indians.[1764] William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill) obtained a contract to supply the Kansas Pacific Railroad workers with bison meat. Cody slaughtered at least 4,280 bison in eight months (1867–1868) but left most of the bison to rot. The Plains Indians used the bison for meat, leather, sinew for bows, grease, dried dung for fires, and they even used the hooves, which they boiled for

glue. The U.S. Army promoted the wholesale slaughter of bison herds. The Federal government allowed ranchers to range their cattle without competition from the bison. The government wanted to decrease the native population by eliminating their food source in order to pressure them onto the reservation and dependency. The railroad industry also wanted to eliminate the bison herds.

The Sioux viewed Custer’s expedition as a violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868). General William T. Sherman helped negotiate that treaty and claimed, after the fact, that there were exceptions for government officers or others on special assignments, such as explorations. The Sioux later referred to Custer’s route into their territory as “the Thief’s Road” because that is the path the white prospectors took into the Black Hills. Custer’s expedition triggered a stampede of gold miners, a clear treaty violation. Sheridan grumbled about having “double duty,” protecting the white settlements from possible Indian raids in addition to keeping whites out of the Black Hills. He suggested a permanent solution for the Black Hills issue. President Grant appointed a negotiation committee to persuade the Sioux to forfeit their land in the Black Hills.[1765]

In the summer of 1875, the government ordered another expedition to thoroughly examine the region’s material resources. Two geologists, Henry Newton and Walter P. Jenney, conducted it, along with a sizeable military escort. After five months of extensive examination, they confirmed the presence of gold, which caused an immediate policy shift regarding the Sioux and the Black Hills. Grant’s committee was unsuccessful in their attempts to steal the Sioux’s land by negotiation so Grant decided to ignore the white intruders in the Sioux reservation. U.S. troops would no longer enforce the treaty provisions regarding keeping the marauding whites out. This new attitude significantly increased the number of gold seekers heading for the Black Hills. In addition, the U.S. military would no longer protect whites from Sioux raiding parties.[1766]

If the Sioux waged war over the treaty violations, Grant would withhold supplies from the tribe. The U.S. government had provided the Sioux with more than just basic essentials as part of the stipulations of the 1868 treaty. If the Sioux opposed white expansion into their territory, he would cut off supplies. He further withdrew all military troops from the Hills. That would guarantee conflict between the Sioux and the white interlopers. He also authorized the removal of the Sioux hunting bands that were in Wyoming and Montana. They had to return to the reservation by January 1, 1876 or be viewed as hostile. However, by then, it was winter and travel was difficult if not impossible. The Sioux Campaign of 1876-77 was the result of their failure to return to the Black Hills. This led to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25–26, 1876, in Montana and Custer’s last stand.[1767] On February 22, 1877, the U.S. government forced the Sioux to cede their land with the Black Hills Agreement.[1768]

Harvard-educated attorney, Theodore Roosevelt saw American history as a history of expansion. He

wrote a four-volume history, The Winning of the West, published between 1889 and 1897. Whether he

was speaking or writing, he frequently used negative racial epithets. He referred to Latin Americans as

Dagoes, Chinese as Chinks, Spanish as Dons, Japanese as Japs, and Indians as savages. Although he

strongly opposed slavery, he believed that blacks were stupid, backward and that their presence was a

tragic but irreparable mistake. He felt that the racially superior races could displace rather than allow the

“inferior races” to assimilate. His racial beliefs were apparent in his mistreatment of the Indians. He

wrote, “The settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to

the well-being of civilized mankind...whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or,

as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won.”[1769]

Roosevelt viewed Indians as inferior, “filthy, cruel, lecherous, and faithless.” To him, their life was “but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with which they held

joint ownership.” He consistently described them as ferocious, treacherous, bloodthirsty, duplicitous, and skulking. Unfortunately, his views were not unlike those of the other expansionists or the policies of each administration throughout the 19th or into the 20th century. He claimed that warfare against the indigenous population was virtuous, “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him.”[1770]

Minnesota Treaties and Land Seizures

Secretary of War John Bell (March to September 1841), chairman of the House Indian Affairs Committee,

concocted a scheme to create a northern Indian Territory. According to a provision in the Indian

Appropriations Act, March 3, 1841, the government managed to purchase thirty million acres of land for

$1,300,000, which encompassed all of modern day Minnesota. In exchange, the government created a

northern Indian territory for the tribes that they had deported from the Old Northwest, something they

concocted as the best solution to the “Indian Problem.” Government officials promised to provide the

Indians with agents, traders, schools and other beneficial amenities. Nine traders soon operated as

government appointees, engaging in price fixing and eventually all trade regulation, previously handled by

a comprehensive Indian trade network. Not surprisingly, the government reneged on most of the promises.

[1771]

The U.S. government commissioned Wisconsin Territorial Governor, James Duane Doty to execute a treaty with the Sisseton, Wahpeton, Mdewakanton, and the Wahpekute bands, all part of the Sioux Nation, for all of their lands except small portions reserved for their homes. The Sisseton, Wahpeton and Wahpekute bands signed the treaty at the Traverse des Sioux, on the Minnesota, then part of the Iowa Territory, on July 31, 1841 and the Mdewakanton band signed the treaty on August 11, 1841. In exchange for their land, the Indians were to receive annuities, special instructions on how to be “civilized,” and sufficient land to cultivate in addition to their homes. The Indians never officially ratified the treaty but rather wholly rejected it on August 29, 1842 but they remained in Minnesota through most of the 1840s.[1772]

Michigan-born Henry Hastings Sibley, son of a Michigan Supreme Court Justice, began managing the Minnesota region for the American Fur Company, founded by John Jacob Astor on April 8, 1808 when he received a charter from the state of New York to establish a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River. Sibley began his employment with Astor’s company on October 28, 1834, and resided in Mendota, Minnesota for the next thirty years. He was a key figure in negotiations with the Sioux and Ojibwa, formalized in the treaty signed on September 29, 1837. The treaty stated, “The chiefs and braves representing the parties having an interest therein cede to the United States all their land, east of the Mississippi river, and all their islands in the said river.” The Indians, in exchange for their lands, the U.S. government would invest the sum of $300,000 in “safe and profitable State stocks as the President may direct,” from which the chiefs and braves would receive an annual income. The government would pay the relatives and friends of the chiefs and braves, $110,000, distributed by the proper authorities. However, the Indians had to apply the sum of $90,000 to the payment of just debts of the Indians. The Indian would receive an annuity of $10,000 for twenty years, in goods, purchased under the direction of the President. The Indians had to expend the sum of $8,250 annually for twenty years, for their benefit, for medicines, agricultural implements and stock, and for the support of a physician, farmers, and blacksmiths, and for other beneficial objects.[1773]

Further, according to the treaty, the United States would provide the agricultural implements, mechanics’ tools, cattle, and other articles, for an amount not to exceed $10,000. Further, the Indians would expend annually, for twenty years, the sum of $5,500 to purchase provisions.[1774] While the U.S. government offered to pay a paltry, pathetic sum to the Indians to seize thousands of acres of prime, fertile land, they

intended to recuperate every penny by promising to supply questionable-quality goods and services according to their own schedule – maybe. Given their history of warfare against the Indians and dozens of broken treaties, the Indians had no reason to trust the government.

Sibley bragged about his influence over the local Indians in a letter he wrote to the Pratte, Chouteau, and Company, dated November 3, 1850. He wrote, “The Indians are all prepared to make a treaty when we tell them to do so and such a one as I may dictate.”[1775] Pierre Chouteau, a member of a wealthy family, began trading with the Osage tribe at the age of fifteen. Later, he operated some lead mines near Dubuque, IowauntiltheWarof1812.[1776] ChouteauwasamemberofBernardPratteandCompany,theWesternagent for John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company beginning in 1827. Bernard Pratte, a wealthy merchant, married into the Chouteau family, had a store in St. Louis, was the trustee of the town, commissioner of rates and levies, militia captain, a member of the school board, and judge of the court of common pleas. In 1820, he was a member of the Constitutional Convention to write the first constitution for the state of Missouri. Pratte’s oldest son, Sylvestre, began trading on the Missouri River as early as 1816. Astor attempted to force them out of business but finally had to purchase them in 1827. When Astor retired in 1834, Bernard Pratte and Company bought his interest in the company and reorganized as Pratte, Chouteau, and Company. Sylvestre Pratte went to New Mexico in 1825 to establish their operations there but hostile Indians and rival trappers proved to be too much for the project.[1777]

Former Congressman Alexander Ramsey, the persuasive Territorial Governor of Minnesota (1849-1853),

alerted officials in Washington that the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute Bands, the two southernmost tribes,

might be willing to sell their lands. The government wanted all of the land north of the Iowa line but was

only willing to pay what the land was worth to the Indians, not what it might be worth to white settlers.

The government wanted to pay two or two and one half cents per acre or a bit higher, only if absolutely

necessary. The Sioux already had many grievances associated with the treaty of 1837 and wished to have

those addressed before they entered into any more agreements. However, Sibley and Ramsey conceived

of a scheme to obtain the land – they told the Sioux they could stay on northern lands, above the Little

Rapids, and allow them to hunt anywhere on the cession unoccupied by the whites if they would sell just a

tiny portion of their land – twenty to twenty-five million acres. Those negotiations failed in the fall of 1849.[1778]

In September 1850, Ramsey deliberately held the Indian leaders for forty days attempting to negotiate and meanwhile the Indians missed their annual hunt. President Zachary Taylor appointed a new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Luke Lea (1850-1853), a former Fort Leavenworth Indian Agent who believed that “civilizing” the Indians should be a high governmental priority.[1779] The government now authorized the payment of ten cents an acre and the Indians could remain on some portion of the land, as remote as possible from white settlements, only as long as the sitting President permitted their occupancy. The earlier treaty forbade isolated reservations.[1780]

On July 23, 1851, at Traverse des Sioux, the chiefs of the Wahpeton and Sisseton bands of the Upper Sioux relinquished their tribal lands in southern and western Minnesota for $1,665,000 in cash and a program of continuous annuity goods.[1781] The Wahpeton and Sisseton were composed of about 4,000 members. They were opposed to warfare, many had converted to Christianity, and they had adopted a very agrarian lifestyle. However, the United States Senate, during the ratification process, deleted Article 3 of each treaty. The majority of the compensation went unfulfilled, never arrived, was lost en route, or was effectively stolen because of the rampant collaborative corruption existing in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In addition, the guaranteed annuity payments went directly to the traders, allegedly to satisfy the financial obligations that the Indians had incurred with the traders.

Within two weeks, at Mendota, across from Fort Snelling, the Lower Sioux (Mdewakanton and Wahpekute) relinquished the southeastern quarter of Minnesota for $1,441,000. They promised the Sioux, in exchange for about 24,000,000 acres of rich land, regular annuities, and two reservations twenty miles wide stretching along both sides of the upper Minnesota River. Luke Lea, Commissioner of Indian affairs, and Ramsey negotiated the treaties, designed by profit-seeking fur traders like Sibley. Many of the Indians were heavily indebted to the fur traders due to pervasive, blatant dishonesty on the part of the traders who forged treaties that would supposedly provide money to the Indians. Then, the government’s cash payments would go straight into the trader’s pockets while the Indians got nothing.[1782]

Both Ramsey and Sibley used the Indian System as their personal “pathway to power.” The 1851 treaty promised the Santee Sioux $475,000 for a portion of their land. Sibley pocketed $175,000, claiming traders had underpaid him for some furs. The distrustful Indians objected but Ramsey approved the claim. [1783] [1784] Sibley was a member of Congress (1849-1853) and a member of the territorial legislature. (1855). He was the first Minnesota governor (1858-1860). Ramsey, a big Lincoln supporter, followed him as Governor of Minnesota after statehood (1860-1863).

Lea wrote in 1852, “The embarrassments, to which they (the Indians who resisted deportation and absorption) are subjected, in consequences of the onward pressure of the whites, are gradually teaching them the important lesson that they must ere long change their mode of life, or cease to exist at all. It is by industry or extinction that the problem of their destiny must be solved.” In one of his reports, Lea wrote, “When civilization and barbarism are brought in such relation that they cannot coexist together it is right that the superiority of the former should be asserted and the latter compelled to give way.”[1785] The once proud and independent people were now enslaved and dependent upon the unethical bureaucrats in Washington.

George W. Manypenny replaced Lea in March 1853. By this time the government was committed to a national reservation system “as a means of promoting the civilization” of the Indians.[1786]

Minnesota Spoils, a National Policy

Immediately after his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln, like every other past and present politician, engaged in the spoils system of rewarding political enablers, friends or family members, qualified or not, with jobs designed to enrich the recipients while advancing questionable policies. Accordingly, Lincoln appointed Boston-born Caleb Blood Smith, a Freemason and former Chairman of the Indiana Republican delegation as the Secretary of the Interior. Lincoln appointed William P. Dole as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to head the Office of Indian Affairs. He was a former Illinois Republican Delegate to the Republican National Convention and had played, along with numerous Socialists, a crucial role in Lincoln’s nomination.

Lincoln’s Administration rewarded those Republicans who had assisted the party during the 1860 election. Thomas Galbraith, who had no practical experience for the position, replaced Joseph R. Brown

as Indian Agent for the Lower Sioux Agency.[1787] Galbraith characterized the Indians as savages who embraced “theft, arson, rape and murder” contending that Indian children were raised “to regard killing as the highest of virtues.” He claimed that Indians were idle and “they are bigoted, barbarous and exceedingly superstitious.” Further, he claimed that they were ignorant, indolent, filthy, lustful, full of vice, bigoted, deluded and that they were degraded, wicked creatures in all of the habits and instincts. “This is the Sioux Indian as he is.”[1788]

Henry B. Whipple, Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota wrote to President Lincoln on March 6, 1862, calling attention to the “rapid deterioration” among the tribes since they relinquished their lands to the United States. He denounced the incompetent Indian Agents, who were supposed to represent the government with “honor and faith.” Congress rewards people with a $1,500 a year job for their “party work” and that person can, through theft and deceit, acquire enough money to retire within four years with a fortune. Whipple suggested that the government hire men who were honest, temperate, industrious, and with “unquestioned integrity” instead of “so many drudges fed at the public crib.” He wanted the government to treat the Indians as a ward of the government, teaching him how to build a house, manage a farm, and provide education for his children and equality before the law.[1789]

Author David A. Nichols describes Lincoln’s Indian System as institutionalized corruption, “a vehicle for economic gain,” and the continuation of a program of deception and fraud that was “integral to the System” since the establishment of the agency. The only benefactors were the government agents, officers, and traders who plundered Indian property and the government’s constant “flow of funds,” while pretending to serve Indian needs, a primary factor in the Indian’s disgruntlement and discouragement. During Lincoln’s Administration, the system increased with the addition of three dozen new agencies. The General Land Office, the Department of the Interior and the army were closely allied with the Indian System. The army resolved the inevitable clashes between settlers and the Indians and often “supervised” the indigenous populations during frequent relocations.[1790]

The government set aside annuity funds for the tribes, which white claimants continually exploited. Congressional representatives, aware of the amount in the government coffers, frequently filed claims, which their accommodating colleagues quickly passed. As long as available money existed, officials paid claims for substantial amounts without adequate investigation. Since Indians did not vote and had no representation other than government-appointed agents, misuse of resources and manipulation were rampant. Lincoln’s Administration gave Robert W. S. Stevens, a Kansas attorney, banker, businessman, land speculator and proponent of education modernization a contract to construct buildings at the Sac and Fox Indian reservations in Kansas. Commissioner Dole purchased some of the Sac and Fox trust lands in 1864 in partnership with Interior Secretary John P. Usher, Controller of the Currency Hugh McCulloch, and John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s personal secretary.[1791]

President Buchanan had previously rewarded Stevens’ political loyalty by appointing him as special U.S. Indian commissioner. His assignment included the orchestrated sale of Kaskaskia, Peoria, Piankashaw and Wea tribal lands, which they ceded to the U.S. in 1854. Stevens supervised the construction of what was to become the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad, incorporated May 23, 1870, and obtained an exclusive contract to build through Indian Territory (Oklahoma) with a final destination in Texas for the primary purpose of accessing that state’s numerous resources.[1792]

The government licensed white traders, which led to the development of profitable commercial monopolies. The traders, happy to take whatever money the tribes had, became the primary link between the Indian and the non-Indian world. Whoever controls the distribution of commodities and the flow of communication controls the people who wholly depend on those goods and services. The Indian Agents directed the dispersal of trading licenses, used as kickbacks or they gave them to relatives and friends.[1793]

Nothing has changed since then, whether we are discussing contemporary Chicago politics or the graft and corruption of 1860s officialdom.

Government officials awarded contracts of every description, including contracts for vaccinating the Indians against smallpox, the first vaccine to be developed. Given that certain people in the government “regarded the Indians as troublesome vermin,” these vaccines, perhaps polluted, could have been used as biological warfare. Earlier, government officials distributed among them “clothing known to be infected with smallpox, diphtheria, or other diseases to which Indians had little resistance.” As a result, there is a definitive absence of the indigenous populations throughout the Americas where they once thrived. Fiendish individuals who “thought the slaughter was justifiable, or even moral” deliberately exterminated these vulnerable, primitive peoples.[1794]

Senator Morton Wilkinson, a native New Yorker, lawyer and a Freemason,[1795] had moved to Minnesota in 1847. In addition to being a U.S. Senator, he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1869- 1871). He secured political appointments for specific people through his crony, Secretary of State William Henry Seward (1861-1869), a lawyer and former New York governor. Wilkinson got Clark W. Thompson, a Minnesota businessman, banker and railroad speculator, appointed to the Northern Superintendency in the Indian System. Thompson, who had minimal concern for the Indians, distributed the annuity payments to the Sioux and made recommendations for patronage jobs under his jurisdiction. He continued his normal business activities and kept in close contact with Cyrus Aldrich. The financial demands of Lincoln’s War influenced the federal government’s treaty obligations and the funding that Thompson depended on to pay private contractors, supposedly supplying services for the Sioux. These contractors were actually extracting natural resources, for financial benefit, for themselves and their friends and relatives.[1796]

Minnesota Congressman Cyrus Aldrich (1859-1863) was born in Rhode Island. He may have been related to another native Rhode Islander Nelson W. Aldrich, a devoted Freemason[1797] and author of the Federal Reserve Act. Their familial connections are uncertain but the obvious evidence of common characteristics of political corruption suggests a family relationship. The local Masonic Order attended Cyrus Aldrich’s funeral, a strong indication that he, like Nelson Aldrich, was also a Freemason.[1798] He chaired the Committee on Indian Affairs. Aldrich and Governor Ramsey had supported Lincoln’s presidential nomination.

On August 10, 1861, Cyrus Aldrich and Senator James Doolittle recommended George E. H. Day as a special commissioner to promote peace among the Indians while the Union was busy fighting a war. Unexpectedly, George Day, unfamiliar with the corrupt political network leading directly back to Washington, decided to expose the treachery in the Northern Superintendency. Certain compromised politicians would not cooperate with him. By October, he reported numerous and “outrageous frauds” perpetrated against the Indians with virtually no oversight. He was flabbergasted by this “perfect system of plunder” and actually thought that the “honest Republican Administration” with “Honest Abe” was above such dishonesty. He exposed the fact that over 100 Winnebago Indians had perished from treatable diseases while others were ill and still unattended. The government paid a Dr. Townsend an annual salary of $4,000 but the good doctor had never even visited the reservation.[1799] Doolittle later became a Chicago lawyer and was President of the University of Chicago for a year.

Money was tight but the Northern Superintendency always managed to get its share. Senator Henry Rice, in early 1861, claimed that he should be paid $24,000 for directing Indian removal. Galbraith, the Santee Sioux Agent, thought it was appropriate to defraud the Indian Office and claimed the Agency owed him $52,000 in January 1862. He assured Thompson that the other insiders would cooperate in the public plunder. Cyrus Aldrich also managed to get no-bid contracts for local Republicans who were “deserving

of and entitled to a share of the spoils.” There were people on the payroll who did not actually work. Apparently, all the politicians had cronies they wished to endow with government money meant to supply basic Indian needs, according to the various treaty obligations.[1800]

Corruption among political appointees in Minnesota matched the blatant dishonesty exhibited elsewhere.

Agents used their positions primarily to plunder public funds. Minnesota Congressmen funneled Indian

money to their favorite constituents. Under the guise of making improvements on the Winnebago

reservation, Wilkinson requested $50,000 from the Indian funds, which his acquiescent Congressional

cronies quickly approved. Local Indian agents used the funds to hire certain politically connected friends.

[1801]

Commissioner Dole attempted to underhandedly sidetrack George Day’s investigation. No one anticipated his principled veracity. He refused to “go along to get along” with the politicians who wanted him to discontinue his investigation. He had discovered that Thompson’s predecessor had personally spent, through kickbacks, money under the table, collaboration with local merchants, between $100,000 and $200,000 during years where he had earned only $2,000 per year. Another man by the name of Morrison was cutting timber illegally on the reservation land. Dole had authorized it and was probably getting a cut of the profits. He threatened to suspend Day while other politicians, including Assistant Commissioner Charles Mix, vehemently denied his charges. Mix made a bargain with the government for which he received payment from the Indian’s annuity funds, to supply pork to the Indians. However, he knowingly delivered putrid spoiled meat.[1802]

In order to eliminate Day and silence his accusations, Dole directed Thompson to inspect Day’s expense accounts. Predictably, Thompson found irregularities suggesting that he was dishonest in his assessments about their activities. That is how most politicians typically operate – they accuse others of behavior and crimes they themselves invariably commit. Day then went over Dole’s head straight to Lincoln who completely disregarded his charges. Day resigned and began working for the Winnebago Indians in an attempt to recoup some of their stolen funds.[1803] Investigators, whistle-blowers and journalists typically realize that their efforts backfire only to create havoc in their own lives. Institutionalized corruption, not only in the Indian System but also in every bureaucratic agency and administration, continues to this day like a persistent filthy pestilence hanging over Washington.

Day was not the only whistle-blower. Others warned of the volatile situation in Minnesota. Widespread deception and discrimination against the Indians, aided by government officials, was bound to erupt in retaliatory violence. The Sioux were starving and unable to buy necessities from the local “disreputable traders” who regularly cheated them.

Kansas Spoils and the Politicians

The Moravian Delaware Indians lived in the village of Languntennenk located near Darlington, Beaver County, Pennsylvania and in Lawunkhannek, a village established in 1769, on the Allegheny River above Franklin, Venango County, Pennsylvania and in the village of Wechquetank located about eight miles beyond the Blue Ridge, northwest from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, probably near the present day Mauch Chunk. They also lived in the village of Lichtenau, on the east side of the Muskingum River, three miles below Coshocton, Ohio and in the village of Salem located on the west bank of Tuscarawas River 1.5 miles southwest of Port Washington, Tuscarawas County, Ohio.[1804]

The white conquerors demanded that the Moravian Delaware Indians convert to Christianity, either that or face death. The Indians complied. Then later, in 1781-1782, Colonel David Williamson, leading the U.S. troops, destroyed the Indian’s corn and other food crops to the point that they were starving to death. The Indians, desperate at that point, had no choice but to believe Colonel Williamson when he offered his

sympathy and promised to lead them to a secure area where there was plenty of food for them to eat. The Indians, now Christians, agreed to go with the whites after they had lengthy conversations among themselves. Additionally, they went to invite their neighbors in the Salem fields. The militia confiscated all of the Indian’s guns and knives, promising to return them later. After all, these Christian Indians had nothing to fear from the white Christian troops who were genuinely interested in the Indian’s welfare. However, as soon as the Indians were weaponless, the militia accused them of being murderers and thieves. The Indians sang hymns and prayed throughout the night. Before dawn, the militia attacked. Some of the Indians kneeled before their assailants and, in perfect English, begged for their lives. The militia brutally murdered twenty-nine men, twenty-seven women, and thirty- four children. Two people feigned death and then escaped while the members of the militia were busy scalping their victims.[1805]

The Trade and Intercourse Acts (1790-1834) were a series of statutes that legalized regulatory authority over U.S. citizens who interacted with the native population. Several other laws replaced the 1790 Act. Legislators initially designed the laws to punish individuals who were guilty of “non-commercial crimes in Indian Country.” However, people soon began interpreting these laws as “binding upon the conduct of the Indians as well as U.S. nationals.”[1806]

On June 30, 1834, the Jackson Administration enacted the Indian Intercourse Act, which authorized the establishment of a government network of licensed trading posts supposedly to “protect the tribes from unscrupulous private traders.” The legislators devised the advantageous law to exploit the Indians, and seize their land in exchange for essential supplies like food. The government maneuvered the Indians into a state of dependency and then withdrew those crucial benefits until the Indians forfeited their land in order to keep from starving to death. The Treaty of Fort Clark is an example of this kind of deception in which the Osage Nation exchanged most of Missouri in order to access Fort Clark. As a result, the native population moved west into the area now known as Kansas.

This area was supposed to be Indian Territory where any white settlement was totally prohibited; at least that is what the government told the Indians. On May 30, 1854, government officials organized the Kansas Territory and opened it for settlement. Individuals and land speculators inundated the territory, either to homestead or to exploit land and resources. They circumvented the federal Indian agents and ignored the 1834 law. Trespassers invaded and squatted on choice Indian lands, stole the timber and other natural resources. Hundreds of pro-slavery Missourians crossed into the adjacent territory shortly after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, May 30, 1854, which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. The law allowed the people in those territories to decide whether to allow slavery within their borders. The newly created Republican Party promoted the legislation in order to gain access to land to build the Transcontinental Railroad.

Sectional tensions escalated after Congress organized the Kansas Territory and placed the slavery issue into the hands of the citizens in that territory. Both the North and the South rushed voters to the area. Pro- slavery ruffians slipped over the Missouri border to cast a vote, which gave that side a victory. The territorial governor discredited the election results, which created massive unrest and bloodshed and further polarized the country.[1807] In 1857, to add more fuel to the proverbial fire, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision, declared, “No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The law considered slaves as property, rather than people. Accordingly, slaveholders could take their legitimate property anywhere they wanted within the country.[1808]

The Moravian Munsee, also called the Christian Indians, owned a 2,571-acre tract of land located two miles from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where the government stationed territorial and military officers. This land, never part of the public domain, was not subject to the federal land policies of preemption and homestead. However, squatters, land and railroad speculators lusted after this fertile land. If or when the

original owners, the Indians, ceded their land, the authorities transferred it directly to individuals, companies or to the U.S. who would then sell it on behalf of the Indians.[1809] On March 8, 1782, General William Irvine led a group of troops in the cold-blooded murder of ninety-six Moravian Delaware Indians at Gnadenhütten, Ohio. The Indians were unable to escape to the woods or to the fort.[1810]

The Munsee/Christian Indians repeatedly relocated to avoid the white infiltration and they ultimately settled on the Delaware reservation in Kansas, per an agreement with the Delaware Indians signed on May 6, 1854. The Christian Indians settled on adjacent lands, perfect for farming, while the more powerful Delawares moved to a more remote location. The government authorized the settlers to purchase, directly from the Delawares, four sections of land near Leavenworth. They literally surrounded the Christian Indian lands adjacent the rich Missouri River. On November 22, 1856, George W. Manypenny, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1853-1857), in his Annual Report said, regarding the Christian Indians, “They must meet their fate upon their present reservations in that Territory, and there be made a civilized people, or crushed and blotted out.”[1811]

Amherst College-educated Samuel C. Pomeroy, a financial agent for the New England Emigrant Aid Society, was an enthusiastic opponent of slavery in 1840. In August 1854, he left Boston for Kansas with a group of 200 people.[1812] The company he represented was actually a moneymaking organization created specifically to relocate free-soilers to Kansas. Three opportunists, Eli Thayer, Alexander H. Bullock and Edward Everett Hale organized it in 1854 and incorporated it on February 21, 1855. The company constantly interfered in territorial matters and was deeply involved in the bleeding Kansas struggle, which viciously targeted Lawrence, Kansas in the summer 1856.[1813]

In May 1855, the resident Indian Agent warned several squatters to move. There were at least fifteen families but they ignored the agent’s request. They remained and continued stripping the land of the commercially valuable timber, a vital source of income for the tribe. The administration would not allow troops to expel the intruders but merely noted that people were violating federal laws. By 1857, Samuel D. Lecompte, one of the many squatters, attempted to establish a claim in order to re-sell 160 acres for $1,900. Squatters assumed that preemption privileges existed on the Christian Indian lands, despite statements to the contrary from local government officials. Another trespasser illegally offered two other 160-acre tracts for sale at $1,500 and $1,000 respectively,[1814] despite the fifty-two treaties with various Indian tribes, just since March 4, 1853.[1815]

Dr. Charles Robinson, former agent for the New England Emigrant Aid Society and Samuel C. Pomeroy,

the current agent for the Society’s interests in Kansas attempted to privately purchase the Christian Indians

entire tract of land for $37,000. Governor Andrew Reeder, because of his authoritative position, had

already fraudulently bought some tracts of land. Benjamin F. Robinson, Delaware Indian Agent, objected

to these unlawful sales. Commissioner Manypenny rejected the governor’s purchase and sought to

prosecute the buyers. William H. Russell, of the firm of Russell, Waddell and Majors, offered $51,200 for

the Christian Indians entire tract. Russell was crony-close to Luke Lea, former Commissioner of Indian

Affairs (1850-1853). Despite his friendship with the ex-commissioner, officials rejected Russell’s offer.

[1816]

President Franklin Pierce appointed Andrew Jackson Isaacs as the Attorney General for the Kansas Territory (1854-1857). Isaacs intended to buy the entire tract directly from the Indians. He had already illegally purchased 2,300 acres of “half-breed” land. With his connections to an influential group of Kansas capitalists – William H. Russell, Alexander Majors, Amos Rees and Hugh Boyle Ewing, he devised a moneymaking scheme. They organized the Leavenworth Fire and Marine Insurance Co., capitalized by the Kansas Valley Bank with $50,000. They also organized the Leavenworth, Pawnee and Western Railroad, a possible transcontinental railroad hub, which they hoped would receive subsidies

from Congress. The railroad, later known as the Union Pacific, Eastern division, and then as the Kansas

Pacific, received government funds from 1860 to 1865. Isaacs wanted the Christian Indian land for the

railroad. Robinson and Pomeroy wanted the land for the Missouri River and Rocky Mountain Railroad.

[1817]

Isaacs resigned as the Kansas Territory Attorney General in March 1857 and then attempted to buy the land by manipulating the laws. Isaacs and his congressional friends altered the 1854 treaty on April 7, 1858, which cleared Isaacs for the sale. As long as the tribe had actual title, they could dispose of the land as they decided or if scheming investors convinced them with promises that they never fulfilled. Gottlieb Oehler, a Moravian missionary to the tribe, revealed that Isaacs got the three tribal leaders drunk and induced them to sell the land. However, Congress still had to consent to any purchase. Eight days after Congress issued the patent, Isaacs purchased 2,571 acres for $43,400. He also made deals with the General Land Office and the Indian Office to get confirmation of the sale. He even managed to get the price reduced to $40,960.[1818]

On April 17, 1857, President Buchanan appointed General James W. Denver as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, but he resigned on June 17, 1857. Buchanan then appointed him as the Kansas Territorial Governor in December 1857. According to Oehler, Isaacs misrepresented the sale details to the Interior Secretary. Oehler later revealed, on November 23, 1862, that Denver actually owned a share in that land and had assisted Isaacs. Indian Agents, missionaries and Christian Indians protested the sale to officials at the Department of the Interior. Isaacs claimed that “selfish grasping people” were behind the criticism of the sale.[1819]

On January 29, 1861, lame duck President Buchanan signed the bill to admit Kansas into the Union, which immediately brought out the radicals and extremists who had caused the ongoing bitter abolitionist controversy. James H. Lane was one of the most radical. On April 15, 1861, when Lincoln called for volunteers, Lane, within three days, assembled a group of warriors who people later referred to as the Jayhawks. Lane, a skilled agitator, and his warriors were impatient to start their violent marauding. On a visit to Washington, Lane, referring to the Confederates, told Carl Schurz, “We have got to whip these scoundrels like hell. They did a good thing...shooting away the flag at Sumter. It has set the great North a- howling for blood, and they’ll have it.” Schurz’s influence may have helped Lane obtain the senatorial appointment in the new state of Kansas. The first state legislature convened on March 26, 1861. After the promise of future spoils and a lot of verbal arm-twisting pressure, the legislature elected Lane and Pomeroy as U.S. Senators.[1820]

Senator Lane (1861-1866) of Lawrence, Kansas regularly visited Lincoln and provided Jayhawk bodyguards following the Fort Sumter assault. On the night of April 18, 1861, Lincoln was grateful for the fifty Kansas warriors who had come to Washington to seek office but who Lane posted in the White House to guard him. Lane had arranged for this special sentry service as a favor. From then on, Lincoln viewed Lane, an opportunistic demagogue, as one of his favorite followers.[1821]

The very people who were supposed to administer the program exploited the Indian System, designed to assist and protect the Indians from mistreatment. Lincoln was more concerned about where the Kansas Indians stood on the issue of the impending conflict. In 1861, Lincoln sent Henry C. Whitney, Thomas C. Slaughter, also the Assessor of Internal Revenue and Augustus Wattles, a virulent abolitionist, to the Kansas Indian tribes to determine their loyalty to the Union. Given the condition of the Indians, after smallpox epidemics, starvation and exposure, Union loyalty was probably not a priority. The agent’s reports indicated that the Sac and Fox Indians were “squalid and miserable” and “the most destitute.” Corrupt traders had repeatedly cheated them and they were without basic provisions, including shelter. The women and children were particularly thin, hungry and literally starving on one meager meal a day.

[1822] [1823]

Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy finagled 90,000 thousand acres of Pottawatomie land after helping to negotiate a treaty with them. He got 50,000 acres of Kickapoo land using the same tactics. In July 1862, he concocted a plan to seize Indian funds. The government granted an exclusive license to J. K. Tappan of New York, perhaps related to the wealthy New York merchants, to sell commodities to the Pottawatomies. The merchant would charge those commodity orders against the Indian’s annuities. Pomeroy and William Wallace Ross, appointed as government agent to the Pottawatomie on April 29, 1861, would skim off a quarter of the profits with each payment. Indian Commissioner, William P. Dole went along with this nefarious scheme.[1824] [1825] The first governor of Kansas was Amherst College- educated Charles Lawrence Robinson, who like Pomeroy had been an agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Society in Kansas.

The minority Republican elite in New York City, like the Tappan brothers, viewed Lincoln’s War as a great opportunity for “consolidating its power and expanding its influence.”[1826] The Tappan brothers had established the first credit-rating system in the country, the Mercantile Agency in 1841 in New York, the precursor to Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), a NYSE listed company that is still in existence today, and the modern credit reporting services.[1827]

Senator Lane wanted to organize and lead a Kansas Brigade on a military expedition against the South in

Texas and Arkansas, allegedly to shorten the war. He apparently exercised more control over military

actions in Kansas than Governor Charles Robinson did. Lane, known to be unprincipled and volatile, had

the support of William G. Coffin, head of the Southern Superintendency. In June 1861, his constant

badgering finally won him authorization to organize the Kansas Brigade, a combination of drifters, blacks

and Indians. Lane wanted an officer’s commission but was intent on retaining his seat in the U.S. Senate.

[1828]

On September 12, 1861, to suppress any kind of secessionist sentiment and provide an intimidating demonstration, Lane and 1500 radical Jayhawk abolitionists, known as the Kansas Brigade, crossed into Missouri, a neutral state. “Bloody Jim” Lane wanted to extricate the citizens of the Osage Valley and assault and plunder the towns of Butler, Harrisonville, Clinton and Osceola. After crossing the border, Lane’s men, with his urging, began to loot, burn, murder and rape the hapless citizens. Several chaplains enthusiastically participated in Lane’s terrorist activities and apparently saw nothing wrong with plundering and acquiring the “spoils of ungodly altars.” On September 23, 1861, they entered the town of Osceola. After murdering nine residents, they robbed the bank, pillaged several stores and private homes and then nearly burned the entire town, allegedly a military necessity. Lane’s booty included a piano and numerous silk dresses. The brigade’s three-week rampage ended on September 29, 1861 and then disbanded.[1829]

Lane and his terrorists rationalized the plundering and arson of Osceola as retaliation for a recent Confederate raid on Humboldt, Kansas. A newspaper journalist who accompanied the rampage said that when the question arose about burning the town, the officers all agreed it should be done as (1) Osceola was “traitorous to the cause; (2) that the enemy intended to make the town a military post; (3) and that it was a strong position” (4) since it could not be permanently occupied, it should be made uninhabitable. The marauders attempted to convince others that every house in Osceola warehoused gunpowder. They were simply a self-righteous, murderous, looting mob that wantonly burned Osceola because wartime, then and now, provides opportunities for people to commit despicable, contemptible crimes that they would be reluctant to perpetrate under ordinary circumstances.[1830]

The Indian Massacre and Removal in Colorado